[EM] Definite Approval/Disapproval

Thu May 5 21:19:59 PDT 2022

There were several 3-slot methods I was considering when I started this
thread, but the main one was a version of median judgment first proposed by
Andy Jennings in his dissertstion more than a decade ago. A few years ago
Adrien Fabre  independently published the method as "Usual Judgment." And
last month I discovered the method independently in the case of three
judgment categories.

As soon as I made a graphic available showing the helical ramp
interpolation that characterizes the method, the versions of Jennings and
Fabre were brought to my attention. Both of them contemplated more than
three categories.

A Wikipedia article (Highest Median Voting Rules) comparing various median
judgment methods (rightly) affirms that among the known median judgment
methods, Usual Judgment dominates the others in criteria compliances  ...
resolving nagging imperfections (lack of Reverse Symmetry and Participation
compliances) of Majority Judgment, for example.

However, the article pointed out that the perfection of Usual Judgment,
especially in the intricacies of its general case tie breaking procedure,
might put too high a demand on the attention span of the average voter.

This kind of "problem" is a public relations problem only for methods whose
proponents make too big a deal of the elegance of the arcane intricacies
that do not concern the lay citizen.

When someone picks up a proposal like MAM, for example, from this EM list
and tries to sell it to the public without filtering out the technical
discussions designed to persuade the other EM experts ... Big Mistake!

In the case of Usual Judgment restricted to the case of three judgment
categories (the 3-slot case that I am proposing), it would be hard to
complicate the tie breaking process ... though somebody with unusual talent
for confusing things might mess it up.

The following is a bare bones introduction. Somebody else can decide on the
names of the three categories and their definitions.

For now let's call them generically Top, Between, & Bottom.

Usual Judgment is designed to output a finish order for the candidates.
Someday we can get into that, but for now even mentioning that,
gratuitously and prematurely pushes to the limit valuable attention span
(slash) willpower (slash) compassion fatigue

So here we go ...

If some candidate is judged Top on more than half of the ballots, elect the
candidate judged Top on the greatest majority of ballots.

Else-If every candidate is judged Bottom on more than half of the ballots,
elect the one judged bottom on the fewest ballots.

Otherwise, elect (from among the candidates with neither a Top nor Bottom
majority) the one with the largest score obtained by dividing the
difference of its Top and Bottom counts by its Between level count.

That's it for the lay person description other than some examples and
heuristic explanations to show how it works ... don't complicate it by
trying to forestall all possible questions ... that's a software engineer
reflex that we have to hold in check.

While explaining the method, you may point out how it respects majority
rule: if some candidate is judged Top level on more than half of the
ballots, then she will be elected except when (as may happen) there is
another candidate with a greater majority of Top level judgments ... which
should be good news for the electorate!

If somebody asks how truncations (abstentions) are counted, you can answer
that they are treated the same way that truncations are treated in other
popular methods like IRV, Ranked Pairs, Range, Borda, etc... and for the
same reason ... to dodge the Dark Horse dilemma ... an abstention is
treated as a Bottom judgment, just as an abstention is treated as below any
ranked candidate on ranked choice ballots. Why would Borda, for example
give it a rank half way between first and last?

If somebody asks ...  "Why the division by the Between level count?"... It
serves to accentuate the difference between Top and Bottom counts to make
ties less likely.

Beyond that (for extremely persistent, curious questioners) this division
is required for continuity of results at the boundaries of the three cases
[which is necessary for Participation Criterion compliance, one of those
compliances whose lack has given other median judgment methods like
Majority Judgment some mild public relations grief].

At this juncture a graphic from Andy's dissertation would be worth a
thousand words.

Who else has a suggestion to share?

-Forest

El lun., 2 de may. de 2022 12:47 p. m., Forest Simmons <
forest.simmons21 at gmail.com> escribió:

> While people are playing with election methods based on three level
> ballots, I would like to suggest another way to generate these three level
> ballots to reinforce my main contention... that three levels are easier to
> generate than two.
>
> This method transforms standard sets of Universal Domain style, ranked
> preference, ordinal ballots into 3 level ballots, which you may consider as
> cardinal, grade, or judgment category ballots as you so desire. A creative,
> accepting, brainstorming environment is what this thread is all about!
>
> First generate a table of pairwise defeats and ties to consult  while
> making a second (final) pass through the input ballots.
>
> Then for each candidate k and each ballot B, decided whether B increments
> the Top, Bottom, or Mid level count of candidate k as follows:
>
> If on ballot B candidate k outranks some candidate j that is not defeated
> by any candidate ranked above k, then increment the Top level count of
> candidate k.
>
> ElseIf some candidate j ranked above k is not defeated by any candidate
> that is outranked by k, then increment the Bottom level count of candidate
> k.
>
> Else increment the Mid level count of candidate k.
>
> Isn't that much simpler than any (two level) approval DSV method that
> you've ever heard of?
>
> Of course, for three levels, Implicit Three Level would be even simpler:
> just count the ranked ballot Tops, Bottoms, and Middles without the
> possibility of dipping down or reaching up into the middle ranks for
> additional approvals or disapprovals. But where's the fun in that?
>
> Now keep grokking a good  election method (besides simple Score and
> "Explicit Approval" ... the low hanging fruit already grabbed up my Rob
> Lanphier) based on three level ballots.
>
> Thanks.
>
> -Forest
>
>
>
>
> El dom., 1 de may. de 2022 8:00 p. m., Forest Simmons <
> forest.simmons21 at gmail.com> escribió:
>
>>
>>
>> El sáb., 30 de abr. de 2022 8:58 p. m., Rob Lanphier <roblan at gmail.com>
>> escribió:
>>
>>> Hi Forest,
>>>
>>> Thanks for the food for thought (really.... I took a long time
>>> composing this email).  My hunch is that you're proposing something
>>> awfully similar to "explicit approval" as devised by the folks in the
>>> Wikimedia community, but more inline below:
>>>
>>> On Sat, Apr 30, 2022 at 12:42 PM Forest Simmons
>>> <forest.simmons21 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> > On paper Approval has the best standard criteria compliances of any
>>> > method. On top of that it has all around simplicity going for it. Yet
>>> > nobody likes it,
>>>
>>> That's a peculiar definition of "nobody":
>>>
>>> https://electionscience.org/commentary-analysis/approval-voting-americas-favorite-voting-reform/
>>>
>>> > and the most common complaint from experts and lay
>>> > citizens alike is that the definition of "approval" is so vague that
>>> > it could drive an indecisive person to distraction: There is no clear
>>> > guideline for partitioning the candidates into two distinct categories
>>> > with a crisp boundary between them.
>>>
>>> I agree with this complaint, and stated it as my objection for many
>>> years, but I've gotten over it.  I'll restate a couple heuristics that
>>> I posted in a reddit comment recently:
>>>
>>> https://www.reddit.com/r/EndFPTP/comments/u1qguy/recordsetting_15_candidates_vie_for_fargo_city/i4eb3sw/
>>>
>>> HEURISTIC A:
>>> 1. Find the candidate which seems likely to get elected, and that the
>>> voter is afraid will win. That's the "fear anchor" candidate.
>>> 2.  For each candidate on the ballot, decide:
>>> 2a. if the candidate is better than the "fear anchor", then vote for them
>>> 2b. if the candidate is NOT better than the "fear anchor", then DO NOT
>>> vote for them
>>>
>>> HEURISTIC B:
>>> If the "frontrunner" is a good candidate, then vote for them. If not,
>>> then don't. Then decide on whether to vote for a candidate based on
>>> how they compare to the frontrunner (if better, then "YES"; if not
>>> better, then "NO").
>>>
>>
>> Michael Ossipoff had a couple of other good ones: 1. Approve whomever you
>> would vote for in a FPTP Plurality election election as well as everyone
>> you like better. 2. Approve every candidate that you prefer over another
>> trip to the polls.
>>
>> Joe Weinstein: approve or disapprove X depending on whether you the
>> winner is more likely to be worse than X or better than X.
>>
>> Rob Legrand: Approve down to the most likely winner ... inclusive only if
>> the runner-up is worse.
>>
>> I don't to tip my hand yet ... I want people to grapple with it
>> themselves.
>>
>>
>>> > In close second is the related complaint about lack of expressive power
>>> > ... in particular the inability to distinguish favorite, compromise,
>>> > and anti-favorite with three separate levels of ballot support.
>>>
>>> I think this is what the appeal of STAR voting is.  But it's also what
>>> I liked about the form of explicit approval that Wikimedia Foundation
>>> used to use for many of its elections:
>>> https://electowiki.org/wiki/Explicit_approval_voting
>>>
>>> My hunch is that the Wikimedia folks got it right with their
>>> tabulation method.  They had three levels for each candidate (Support
>>> / Abstain / Oppose) and then used the formula below to tabulate:
>>>
>>> Support / (Support + Oppose)
>>>
>>> ...and then relying on a per-candidate.  Default was "abstain", and
>>> the quota was recalculated for each candidate.  The system was biased
>>> against candidates that didn't elicit either strong support or strong
>>> opposition (since those candidates would have a difficult time meeting
>>> quota, since abstentions didn't count), but it seemed like a
>>> reasonable level of work to place on voters (to research candidates)
>>> and on candidates (to campaign, and increase their name recognition)
>>>
>>> Weirdly, English Wikipedia doesn't have an article for "Explicit
>>> approval voting", but it has "Combined approval voting":
>>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined_approval_voting
>>>
>>> ...which appears to select equivalent winners to Score voting with +0,
>>> +1, and +2 (integers) as the only options..
>>>
>>> Regardless, are you proposing a fourth tabulation method?
>>>
>>> > "Definite Dis/Approval" (DD/A) addresses head on the basis for
>>> > these complaints with judgment style ballot instructions... "mark as
>>> > definitely approved (DA) only the candidates that you are absolutely
>>> > sure that you want to support" ... "mark as definitely disapproved
>>> > (DD) only the candidates that you very strongly feel to be unsuitable
>>> > for the position."  Otherwise, mark the remaining candidates as
>>> > either ... "somewhere in the middle (Mid) between strongly suitable
>>> > and strongly unsuitable" or "No basis (NB) for an opinion." A blank
>>> > (i.e.abstemtion/undecided) is counted with the NB's.
>>> >
>>> > What if I'm not sure? Then most definitely it would be dishonest to
>>> > mark DA or DD. If you cannot decide between NB and Mid, then leave it
>>> > blank ... the ultimate expression of "Undecided".
>>> >
>>> > Now suppose that for each candidate k, you have the total counts DA(k),
>>> > DD(k), Mid(k), and NB(k), and no other information.
>>> >
>>> > 1. How would you use those totals to decide the single winner?
>>> >
>>> > 2. How would you construct a finish order if need be?
>>> >
>>> > 3. How would you resolve ties?
>>>
>>> Why come up with a new name and a new set of complicated jargon if you
>>> haven't answered these questions yet (especially since "Mid(k)" and
>>> "NB(k)" seem to be equivalent, and "NB" in my mind means "nota bene")?
>>>  Explicit Approval, Combined Approval, and STAR voting answer your
>>> questions in three different ways, and all three of them have worthy
>>> cases for them (and against them).  Perhaps a good starting point is
>>> to come up with your own answers to each of those questions, and then
>>> express your case using the language already used to describe one (or
>>> more) of those election methods.
>>>
>>> Sorry if the tone of my email seems negative.  It just seems to me
>>> that much of the discussion on this mailing list is between people who
>>> want to invent their own jargon and their own election methods.  I've
>>> been guilty of it myself (e.g. when several of us devised MATT and MAF
>>> in discussions on this mailing list back in 2018)[1][2][3].  Back in
>>> 2018 (after having spent many weekends the prior summer in California
>>> knocking on doors outside my district), and then one weekend tabling
>>> for the Center for Election Science, I came to realize that approval
>>> voting could solve problems in the California primaries, and tried to
>>> come up with a system that was simple enough, and didn't have the
>>> appearance of a difficult algebra problem photocopied from a linear
>>> algebra textbook.  Can you (or someone on this list) come up with a
>>> system that's suitable for replacing the "blanket primary"[4] we have
>>> here in California?
>>>
>>> Rob
>>> [1]:
>>> http://lists.electorama.com/pipermail/election-methods-electorama.com//2018-November/thread.html
>>> [2]:
>>> http://lists.electorama.com/pipermail/election-methods-electorama.com//2018-December/thread.html
>>> [3]: https://electowiki.org/wiki/Approval-based_primary_election_methods
>>> [4]: https://electowiki.org/wiki/Blanket_primary
>>>
>>
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