[EM] Graphics of simulations

[Richard Lung]

Voter Choice Massachusetts reported that over 200 academics in conjunction with The New York Times urged Congress to adopt personally (proportionally) representative multi-member constituencies. (Something like Cambridge) Singlemember constituencies can never be this. They are monopolistic and not competitive, as generally required of an allegedly democratic society. That is to say, single members cannot meet more than a minimal measure of democracy, which is what a single member majority is.
A real obstacle to progress is the tunnel vision with regard to the "majority" concept, which is always confined to single majority. Whereas proportional counts, like the Hare quota, or the Droop quota, or my averaging of them, the Harmonic Mean quota, generalise the concept of the majority from single member majority to multi-member majority, or from minimally representative to maximally representative or democratic.

A distinction might be made between a democratic election method and a rational election method. Single members single member majorities cannot be more than minimally democratic, for above reason given. The use of Binomial STV offers a rational procedure for single members, because it has a rational exclusion count, as well as a rational election count, but that does not make it, like any other system, more than minimally democratic for single member elections.

Regards,
Richard Lung.





On 28 Feb 2023, at 12:35 am, Richard, the VoteFair guy <electionmethods at votefair.org> wrote:

On 2/26/2023 9:47 PM, Forest Simmons wrote:
> Here's my question: do simulations carry any weight
> with the public? Or do they just care about choice
> of buzz words and phrases like democracy; majority
> rule, etc?

I have not seen hardly anyone in the "public" realm who initially seems to care about simulations.

Mostly they care about "who will win?" "which party does it favor?" "does it empower minorities?" and most of all: "Can I understand it? And does it make sense?"

For the latter, the FairVote organization has popularized the notion of eliminating one candidate at a time.  It's easier to comprehend. Especially compared to something like the Smith set.  Even the Condorcet winner concept is difficult for many, many voters to understand.

Aside: I've had success educating "the public" about the idea that a "pairwise losing candidate" -- which is a simpler variation of "Condorcet loser" -- deserves to be eliminated.  A soccer analogy helps: if a soccer team loses against every other team then it shouldn't be possible for that team to win.  (This is one of the two refinements over IRV that the RCIPE method, mentioned below, offers.  The other refinement is to count ballots that the FairVote folks wants to discard as an "overvote.")

Yet simulations can be useful _IF_ the results are presented as a _GRAPHIC_ that compares "your" methods with familiar methods.

I created a graphic (at the following link) that shows failure rates for RCIPE (ranked choice including pairwise elimination) and IPE (instant pairwise elimination) plotted along with IRV, plurality, Borda, and Kemeny.  That graphic has been helpful to some people who already understand IRV and have heard about Condorcet methods.

 http://votefair.org/clone_iia_success_rates.png

In this sense such a graphic is like a Yee diagram.  Most people intuitively recognize that the Yee diagram for IRV reveals that method has serious flaws.  (However, trying to explain Yee diagrams is not fruitful.)

The fans of STAR voting have gotten lots of mileage from their graphs of VSE (voter satisfaction efficiency).  Alas most people don't realize that the "efficiency" is meaningful among a group of friends or cooperative people, but is not meaningful in governmental elections where strength of opinion violates the principle of "one person one vote."

In summary, graphics that show many thousands of simulations for multiple methods are useful among informed voters.

Such graphics are also useful for us, the experts.  It reveals the extent to which a method is better than other methods.

In other words, just looking at specific cases to identify failure possibilities is of limited use.  In contrast, quantitative graphics that allow failure rates to be compared with familiar methods are quite useful.

Not as "proofs" but as supporting evidence for claims about being "better."

And such graphics answer the question "Is this 'better' method worth the extra effort it takes to understand it and calculate it?"  If there is only a small gain, most people will say "no it's not worth the extra complication."

Forest, I've enjoyed your speculations about better methods.  It would be interesting to see graphics that show specific failure rates -- such as IIA, clone independence, burial resistance, chicken resistance, etc. Such graphic comparisons will reveal whether your improvements are big improvements or tiny improvements, and which methods excel at which characteristics.

Then it will become easier to find a balance between mathematically ideal and "good enough" for use in real elections.

Richard Fobes
The VoteFair guy
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