[EM] Bucklin

Fri Nov 3 08:11:40 PDT 2023

The Nanson inspired methods including SubMidwayApproval Elimination that
became (ever so briefly) my favorite ratings based method ... is still my
favorite method  .... for finding the BFF Burier Faction Favorite ... which
it does even more reliably than Ranked Pairs wv or ordinary Nanson.

But once you have a reliable way of detecting the BFF ... all you have to
do is elect the Smith candidate with the most losing votes against it ...
or what is the same ... the candidate with the most wv against the
candidate with the most wv against the BFF.

So that is the simplest burial proof method.

But now, another method arises as a powerful and simpler rival public
proposal:

Elect the SP winner based on the Universal Tie Breaking Order agenda.

The catch is that the UTBO is ratings based: if a set of candidates is
tied, the winner of that set is the candidate that remains after
successively eliminating the candidates (among the tied) that are not tied
for the most ballots on which they are rated above level R ... as R
progresses from zero to a level that leaves only one candidate uneliminated.

Here's my best attempt at adapting this Universal Tie Breaking method to
ordinal ballots:

Decide the winner of a tied set of candidates by eliminating all of the
candidates not tied for most implicit approval repeatedly until there
remains only one candidate ... being sure to update the IA counts between
elimination rounds.

This is messier than the ratings based version ... and may fail
monotonicity ... I'm not sure ... but the vote transfers between rounds
that are responsible for IRV's monotonicity failure probably have a similar
effect here.

If a deterministic  clone independent monotonic decisive ordinal tie
breaking method is ever found, then the simplest such method should be used
to set the agenda for Sequential Pairwise Elimination.

If that method turns out to be susceptible to burial ... keep looking!

Or start using cardinal ballots for their ordinal information ... don't be
such Universal Domain purists. Join forces with the STAR camp ... help them
exploit the potential in their ballots with the simple decisive Universal
Tie Breaking Order by using it not only for the most non manipulable
deterministic conclusive clone independent monotonic tie breaking order
ever ... but (since you already have it as the tie breaking arm of your
method) also as the most logical ready made agenda order for Sequential
Pairwise Elimination ... or for your favorite Sorted pairwise finish order.

fws

On Thu, Nov 2, 2023, 9:41 PM Forest Simmons <forest.simmons21 at gmail.com>
wrote:

> You could do this with RCV ballots ... but it's much easier with score
> ballots.
>
> With RCV ballots the approval at each stage would be the implicit approval
> relative to the other uneliminated candidates ... the number of ballots on
> which you outrank at least one of the remaining candidates.
>
> The only problem with this is that like IRV it requires massive vote
> transfers between rounds.
>
> How about a strictly pairwise version?
>
> Here's the best .... and it turns out to be a decloned version of Nansonb
> that I recently called "Poor Man's Nanson" ....
>
> While more than one candidate remains, eliminate every candidate whose Max
> Pairwise Support is less than halfway between the lowest MaxPS and the
> greatest MaxPSof any remaining candidate.EndWhile.
>
> Better yet is this overtly Condorcet version .... better because it uses
> more familiar language;
>
> While more than one candidate remains ... let minWV and maxWV be the
> respective least and greatest winning votes defeat strengths among all of
> the pairwise contests among the previously uneliminated candidates.
> And let Midway be the number halfway between these two extremes.
> Eliminate every candidate whose strongest wv victory (among the remaining
> candidates) turns out to be strictly less than MidWay. EndWhile.
>
> As near as I can tell, this version is as good as any extant version of
> Condorcet ... but like all of the extant versions including Ranked Pairs
> and CSSD, it needs some kind of "burial proofing" finisher in order to be
> an acceptable public proposal.
>
> That's what Michael Ossipoff and I are thoroughly investigating currently.
>
> That's what got us onto Bucklin and repeated approval Elimination methods.
>
> fws
>
> On Thu, Nov 2, 2023, 8:32 PM Forest Simmons <forest.simmons21 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> It seems to me that we need a version of Bucklin that simulates the
>> following Nanson like manual approval runoff:
>>
>> After each approval round eliminate every candidate whose total approval
>> count in the current round has come out to be less than halfway between the
>> lowest and the highest approval count of the current round.
>>
>> If you had 1000 candidates, you could expect about ten rounds to get down
>> to the Lone Ranger.
>>
>> So a range of zero to ten should be more than adequate for the following
>> "instant" version of "Midrange Approval Runoff":
>>
>> Lacking a ballot  CW ... then implement the following "tie breaker" ....
>>
>> For R from zero to nine ...
>> ... for each candidate X, let  X's Tie Breaking Approval TBA(X) be the
>> number of ballots on which X is rated strictly above R.
>> Then eliminate every candidate X such that TBA(X) is strictly less than
>> halfway between the min and max values of TBA for the current round R.
>> Next R.
>>
>> This instant version of approval runoff has now become my favorite use of
>> score/range/grade/judgment ballots.
>>
>> For comparison, Traditional Nanson eliminates below mean Borda Count
>> candidates.  Use of median instead of mean, and level of approval instead
>> of Borda, improves on Nanson in two ways ...
>> 1. It makes the method much easier to hand count.
>> 2. It confers clone independence on the method.
>>
>> Nanson is known to be Condorcet Efficient ... which leads me to suspect
>> that this method's Condorcet Completion to be a seamless patch ... as
>> seamless as possible while preserving the Favorite Betrayal Criterion (if
>> it is indeed preserved in the stand alone version ... in other words,
>> without the fiat compliance with the Condorcet Criterion).
>>
>> In comparison with other median based methods like Majority Judgment and
>> Bucklin ... well judge for yourselves ... but I think its simpler to
>> understand and to execute.
>>
>> Everybody loves "Usual Judgment" until they try to wrap their mind around
>> its exhaustive (and exhausting) tie breaking procedure.
>>
>> This method is as conclusive as any extant Condorcet method.
>>
>> fws
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Thu, Nov 2, 2023, 8:49 AM C.Benham <cbenham at adam.com.au> wrote:
>>
>>> There has been more than one version of Bucklin that has been used or
>>> proposed.
>>>
>>> I think it is now generally agreed that least bad is to use some sort of
>>> limited-slot grading/rating ballot,
>>> with voters free to give as many or as few candidates as they like the
>>> same grade and to skip grades if
>>> they want.  (So it is just a version of Average Ratings)
>>>
>>> If ratings ballots are used then above-bottom equal ranking should get
>>> the whole (not fractional) votes
>>> interpretation, but if say a ballot equal top-ranks 3 candidates that
>>> ballot gives a whole vote to each in
>>> the first "round" but then "sits out" rounds 2 and 3.
>>>
>>> (Not doing that was shown to make the method fail mono-raise).
>>>
>>> If we are talking about one of these versions then we are talking about
>>> a method that meets Favorite Betrayal
>>> and Majority for Solid Coalitions and Later-no-Help.
>>>
>>> But there is a very strong incentive for voters to just submit approval
>>> ballots, and in a competitive election with
>>> informed voters the extra complexity versus simple Approval doesn't seem
>>> to buy much.
>>>
>>> 40 A>B
>>> 30 B
>>> 09 C
>>> 02 X
>>>
>>> 81 ballots.
>>>
>>> This example highlights the method's disadvantages compared with IRV/RCV.
>>>
>>> I don't consider meeting Majority for Solid Coalitions to be an adequate
>>> standard of majoritarian representative goodness.
>>>
>>> I propose the "Dominant Coalition" criterion:
>>>
>>> *If a the number of ballots on which a set S of candidates is
>>> ranked/voted all below no outside-S candidate is greater than the maximum
>>> pairwise opposition that any inside-S candidate gets from any outside-S
>>> candidate, then the winner must come from set S.*
>>>
>>> The single-candidate version (that could be relevant for a method that
>>> fails Clone-Winner) is "Dominant Candidate".
>>>
>>> *If the number of ballots on which candidate X is ranked/voted below no
>>> other candidate is greater than X's maximum pairwise opposition,
>>> then X must win.*
>>>
>>> Another criterion I like (and I think I coined) is Irrelevant Ballots
>>> Independence: adding or removing ballots that contain no information
>>> relevant to any of the remotely competitive candidates should not change
>>> the result.
>>>
>>> Another criterion met by IRV/RCV but not Bucklin is Mutual Dominant
>>> Third : "if a set S of candidates that pairwise beat all the outside-S
>>> candidates are voted above all the outside-S candidates on at least one
>>> third of the ballots then the winner must come from S."
>>>
>>> In the example A is the Dominant Candidate and the Mutual Dominant Third
>>> candidate (and so of course the CW) but the Bucklin winner
>>> is B.
>>> (A lot of people like IRV's compliance with Later-no-Harm. Of course
>>> here if the A>B voters had truncated then A would have won.)
>>>
>>> But if we remove the 2 X ballots the winner changes from B to A,
>>> (because the majority threshold lowers from 41 to 40, so now there is no
>>> second round) a failure of Irrelevant Ballots independence.
>>>
>>> Chris B.
>>>
>>>
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