[EM] Rank Codes

[Juho Laatu]

I think I'm pretty much a pragmatist in your terms. In typical large elections it doesn't really matter if instead of voting A=B there would be a 50% chance that the vote will be read by computer as A>B, and 50% chance for A<B. In practical terms that is the same as voting A=B (comparable to flipping a coin). However from a pragmatic point of view it could be a problem if people would get irritated because of their inability to vote exactly A=B.

There might be ways to go around this "irritation", like drawing an X at one of the "smaller boxes" separetad by the light lines that I mentioned. That X would be interpreted as an exact value (unlike other marks). But this sounds already too complicated to be worth it. If people want to use exact ties, it might be better to split the long boxes into 100 small narrow (2 mm) boxes that would then correspond to some exact rankings/ratings. With these ballots you might at some point run out of ability to rank A>B, and be forced to rank A=B. So (from pragmatic point of view) there will be tradeoffs, of one or another kind.

My pragmatism gives also leeway in handling the various criteria (e.g. strategy related). Since I have learned that no method is strategy free, it doesn't make sense to me to meet some important criteria 100%, and then ignore some others that are not met 100%. I see all these criteria as pragmatic criteria in the sense that it is enough to eliminate each major risk in practice, but not necessarily 100% in theory. The best method might be one that intentionally does not meet any of the important criteria 100%. That could make it possible to meet as many important criteria as possible well enough, and thereby weaken the worst remaining vulnerability as much as possible.

BR, Juho


> On 14. Feb 2021, at 11.31, Kristofer Munsterhjelm <km_elmet at t-online.de> wrote:
> 
> On 14/02/2021 10.20, Juho Laatu wrote:
>> Just a thought.
>> 
>> One simple technique that allows voters to use almost infinite number
>> of different ranks would be to use one long box next to the name of
>> each candidate. Voters would draw a mark in the box (or leave it
>> unmarked). Marks towards the left side of the long box would be
>> considered "good", and marks towards the right side of the box "less
>> good". The ballots would be read by computers that would seek for a
>> mark in each box, and assign a numeric preference value depending on
>> the position of the mark in the box. There would be some additional
>> perpendicular light lines across the boxes to help making the order
>> of the candidates accurate.
> I've been thinking about such an interface for an Expensive Pencil too;
> it would make it very easy to gather rated information. It would be more
> noisy than a deliberate ratings system because it's hard to get a
> pixel-perfect line going, but if there are enough voters, then perhaps
> there's some rated analog of the Condorcet Jury theorem that would imply
> that the effect of that noise goes to zero as the number of voters
> approaches infinity.
> 
> However, there's one problem: the voters can't easily equal-rank under
> such a scheme. Therefore, no method passes FBC unless it also passes
> Strong FBC, which is an extremely hard criterion to pass. Pragmatists
> may not care (e.g. Schulze has very low favorite-betrayal rates under
> the impartial culture distribution anyway), but it's annoying if you'd
> like your method to unambiguously pass.
> 
> -km