[EM] STAR Voting Variations

[Susan Simmons]

STAR is a great gateway method because there are so many different directions to tweak/elaborate/improve/generalize it to transform it into other simple methods based on similar ideas.

For example, Majority Judgement Top Two Runoff, that uses the exact same score ballots, voted exactly the same.

 While STAR pits against each other the two candidates with the greatest average ("mean") scores, MJTTR compairs the two with the greatest median scores.

Why median instead of mean? Because use of the median gives less strategic incentive for voting closer to the extremes, and the un-exagerated ratings of MJ voters makes the pairwise comparisons more accurate due to fewer strategy induced tied ballot ratings.

Majority Judgement is a score based version of Bucklin that has an ingenious way of breaking the median ties that are extremely likely, as anyone used to dealing with medians will understand.

Why do medians discourage exageration? Suppose the median score for candidate X is three, then changing any ballot rating above three to another one above three would make no difference ... same for ratings below three: the median is less rewarding to exagerating manipulators.

Experiments by the MJ inventors seem to support the idea that voters under MJ experience little to no temptation for exagerating their best honest estimates for the deserved ratings of the candidates.

That said, there is another metric called "chiastic approval" that is a very nice compromise between mean and median ballot ratings ... which we will come back to in the future, after considering more of the low hanging fruit in another direction ... (to be continued)




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-------- Original message --------
From: Susan Simmons <suzerainsimmons at outlook.com>
Date: 7/8/21 9:04 PM (GMT-08:00)
To: Daniel Carrera <dcarrera at gmail.com>
Cc: election-methods at lists.electorama.com
Subject: Re: [EM] STAR Voting

BTW its not just the clone thing that makes me think that STAR is strategically equivalent to Approval, rather it is the combination of these two facts:

(1) Score Voting is strategically equivalent to Approval ... optimal strategy entails voting at the extremes (mostly if not exclusively).

(2) If voters vote only at the extremes, the Score winner will be the pairwise winner of every head-to-head contest.

So in the case of sophisticated voters the top two runoff is redundant.

For naive voters it is harmless and may serve some valuable psychological purpose.



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-------- Original message --------
From: Daniel Carrera <dcarrera at gmail.com>
Date: 7/8/21 7:49 PM (GMT-08:00)
To: Susan Simmons <suzerainsimmons at outlook.com>
Cc: election-methods at lists.electorama.com
Subject: Re: [EM] STAR Voting



On Thu, Jul 8, 2021 at 6:49 PM Susan Simmons <suzerainsimmons at outlook.com<mailto:suzerainsimmons at outlook.com>> wrote:
Also the STAR camp may not be as hardened against suggestions as the leading IRV proponents are ... including the suggestion of a Condorcet check on the front end.

Certainly. I get good vibes from the STAR team. If you look at their website, they don't have any unfair attacks against other methods. What they say about Condorcet and Approval Voting is fair, reasonable, and honest, and they readily admit that those are good voting methods too. I mentioned this on Reddit a few days ago and I got a positive response. You could imagine making a rule like this:

1) If there is a candidate with a majority of first-place votes, elect them.
2) Otherwise, elect the candidate that wins every one-on-one pairwise contest against every other candidate, if there is one.
3) Otherwise, ... [ STAR ]

Rule (1) is redundant but practically I think it would be easier to convince someone with it.


They might even be open to incorporating the use of VPR (Voting for a Published Rating)... facilitated replication of the ballot recommendations of your favorite candidate, party, or other institution.

No matter what method is adopted, it should be implemented in a Replicate a Published Recommendation Option shell, to simplify the voting process as much as possible for Joe Q Public (remember Joe the Plumber?) or Charles L. Dodgson' s English Plough Boy.

I have no idea what "Voting for a Published Rating" or "Replicate a Published Recommendation Option shell" mean.


Anybody have connections to STAR?

Not really, but one of their members is active on Reddit and seems like a nice person.

Cheers,
Daniel
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