[EM] Poll on voting-systems, to inform voters in upcoming enactment-elections

[Michael Ossipoff]

On Sat, Apr 6, 2024 at 17:02 Kristofer Munsterhjelm <km_elmet at t-online.de>
wrote:

> On 2024-04-06 18:55, robert bristow-johnson wrote:
> > Well I nominate Kristofer to administer the poll.  Michael, if you are
> > plonking people or vise versa, it might not be as good for you to
> > administer the poll.
> >
>
> Since Michael Garman also said MO shouldn't be running this poll, if
> there are no other suggestions, I'd like to administer it.


Not sure what KM means by “administer”. Make rules & decisions by decree?
Or maybe just be chairperson or facilitator.

This is a poll, not an organization. It neither has nor needs a charter or
officers, including chairperson.

I proposed a poll because there wasn’t one. I suggested a voting method &
nomination & voting periods because those are needed for a poll. But those
were suggestions, & were obviously open to discussion.

I didn’t perceive myself as “administering” the poll, because it didn’t
occur to me that any participant should be special, or have unique right to
make suggestions or ask questions.

KM evidently believes otherwise.

“unless someone has another suggestion”?

Yes, I do: There’s no need or reason for one participant to have unique
authority or privilege to make decisions or rules, or even have a
chairperson’s procedural authority. …or the unique privilege of making
suggestions/motions or asking questions, or any amount or degree of such
privilege.

I don’t care who posts nomination-updates.

With the understanding that it’s unclear what “run” & “administer” mean, &
that I don’t believe in any degree of unequal authority or privilege in
poll-decisions (which should always be made collectively, with identical
equal voice for everyone):

KM said that he’d like to “administer” the poll because two people said
that I shouldn’t.

What they said was that I shouldn’t administer *if I had people blocked*.
Not the same thing. KM changed the meaning of what they said, by
conveniently leaving out a clause in both utterances.

Yes I’d blocked people, as had KM. Because of the poll, I unblocked, as did
KM. I’d been posting nomination-lists, & then KM posted one.

BTW, I was reading the poll-related posts of blocked members, in the
spam-folder. My latest list, which I hadn’t posted yet, had the same 23
nominations as KM’s posted list.

Incidentally, the two people KM quoted saying that I shouldn’t “run” or
“administer” the poll were two people I’d recently blocked for continuing
repetition of some quite nonsensical claims including the most contorted &
silly defenses of FairVote’s lying, & an attempt to use the argument,
familiar from IRVists, that one-person-one-vote means Plurality-Voting or
IRV (With Robert’s convenient unexplained exception for Condorcet).

Pretty much no one here agrees with those claims. I blocked those two
because, given what they’d just said, I was
no longer interested in what they say, & had a right to not display their
posts or emails.

Given those circumstances & background I’d hardly recognize those two as
impartial evaluators of me.

There remains the matter of the poll’s voting-method. There’s obviously a
very strong collective preference for rank-methods, & a near-unanimous
preference for Condorcet-complying methods. …suggesting a choice among only
such methods.

Of course those methods only rarely choose differently.

In fact, is it even necessary to specify a rank-count for the poll, which
anyone can count & report as they choose, according to what they consider
best tells how people feel?

But I initially wanted to report EM’s method-finishing-order, & felt that
it would have stronger meaning if it as counted as EM preferred.

I suggested Schulze as the primary method because of its great long
popularity, & because of the abundance of count-software, including at
CIVS, which I suggested as the most natural count process.

There were a suggestions for other methods, & so, given that collective
choice should take precedence over one person’s initial suggestion, I
brought up the matter of voting on the method.

Only 3 possibilities, unless someone can suggest another:

1. The initial Schulze suggestion
2. Collectively-choose a voting-method
3. Voter’s choice

I invited people to express any wish for a vote on the method, bro only if
there’s desire to do so instead of just using the popular Schulze.

Evidently there’s no sentiment that we should find a substitute for
Schulze, as the nominal EM choice (to whatever extent one is even
needed)That’s good, because it simplifies things.

BTW, of course, because not all nominees are Condorcet, & because even
Condorcet methods *can* choose differently, then, with so very many
preferred methods, many methods might have to be counted in Voter’s choice.
Maybe Voter’s Choice isn’t extremely practical for such a big field.

Then, if it were necessary to choose a new method, it would be necessary to
first choose how to vote in *that* choice.

If that were necessary, I’d suggest Voter’s Choice, among *a few* nominees.

But I agree with you that a new choice isn’t necessary.




>
> I've unblocked the two people I got plonked. But someone should probably
> tell MO about the change because I think he's got me plonked, since the
> lists I've seen since I unblocked him don't contain my suggestions.
>
> I would also suggest merging the Condorcet-IRV hybrids into a Smith-IRV
> category. While Condorcet methods can handle lots of alternatives, it's
> easier to fill out a poll with fewer alternatives. But if you'd prefer
> having the full unabridged list, that's okay by me too. Alternatively we
> could remove just Schwartz-Woodall.
>
> If anybody else has merge ideas, just lemme know. The most obvious
> candidates would be combining Copeland//Borda and Black.
>
> And of course, if MO also wants to count the votes too (based on what
> posts he get), I'm not going to stop him - the mailing list posts are
> public, after all.
>
> The current methods are:
>
> Approval
> RP(wv)
> Schulze
> IRV
> Plurality
> Majority Judgement (as a category; includes usual judgement etc.)
> Approval with manual runoff
> Copeland//Borda (also called Ranked Robin)
> MinMax(wv)
> Black
> STAR
> Smith//Score
> Baldwin
> Benham
> Woodall
> Schwartz-Woodall
> Smith//Approval (implicit - of all ranked)
> Smith//Approval (explicit - specified approval cutoff)
> Margins-Sorted Approval
> Smith//DAC
> Margins-Sorted Minimum Losing Votes (equal-rated whole)
>
>
> The nomination deadline is 2024-04-11 05:14:59 UTC, inclusive. (Not like
> we're going to need to be accurate down to the second, but there we go.)
>
> -km
> ----
> Election-Methods mailing list - see https://electorama.com/em for list
> info
>
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