[EM] VPR: Vote For a Public Ranking Revisited

Fri Feb 17 15:57:57 PST 2023

Charles L Dodgson, the 19th century mathematician best known for his
fantasy "Alice in Wonderland," penned under the nom-de-plume Lewis Carroll
... considered that "Dogdson's Method" a Ranked  Choice Voting method
similar to Kemeny-Young, had only one defect ... not the computational
intractabilityand clone dependence that it has in common with Kemeny-Young
.... but a defect it has in common with all Ranked Choice Methods ... it
requires the voter to rank the candidates.

He had a hard time imagining the common English ploughboy filling out that
kind of paper work.

As a retired public educator I have the same difficulty imagining the
common American plowboys and plowgirls thriving in the same environ.

Dodgson's solution was basically the same solution that Steve Eppley came
up with independently 150 years later in the days of automated answering
systems and multiple choice tests .... where the choices are pre-published
rankings or whom you would like to fill in those ballot rankings for you.

Neither Dodgson nor Eppley thought that Approval Voters would need that
kind of crutch ... since all they had to do was check the names of the
approved candidates, while leaving the others unchecked (on the ballot).

But they under-estimated the difficulty of deciding which candidates are
approval worthy. In fact, in the age of angst, many social scientists
consider filling out an approval ballot to be more difficult than ranking
those same candidates.

But why not adopt the perfectly good Eppley/Dodgson solution that works
equally well for any kind of ballot? ... (RCV, Approval, Other Score,
Grade/Judgment, hybrid combinations of these, etc.)

Simply call it VPB, Vote for a Public  Ballot.

In the case of Approval voting ... the published ballots can be easily
copied by hand into the actual ballot ... and if there are some approvals
that you disagree with, you can make your own alterations.

The publishers of the ballots will (of course) give their rationales for
their choices ... even including (in some cases) their Von
Neumann-Morgenstern utility computations, for those interested in that much
detail.

This VPB idea is an equalizer that puts Score based methods and Universal
Domain methods on an equal footing.

In particular, the Generized Harper Lottery probabilities are a valuable
tool for use (for example) in the Swap Cost metric and Friendly Voting,
that can only be poorly approximated in the UD environment.