[EM] Hare (aka IRV) versus STAR

Wed Apr 10 13:55:28 PDT 2024

Chris: by "more accurate" I meant higher Condorcet-efficiency (although
personally I prefer Score or utilitarian winners to Condorcet winners).

You're completely correct that STAR's criterion compliance is abysmal. All
of these would be huge problems if STAR were a traditional method and would
lead me to scrap it. But STAR's not supposed to be a traditional method;
the goal is just to add more choice to score. The reason STAR is better
than Hare in practice is because:
1. Cloning every candidate turns STAR into score.
2. The optimal strategy for STAR is to always nominate candidates in pairs
(to make sure both runoff slots are locked-up).

As an example, I'd much prefer a situation where Biden had a Democratic
opponent listed separately on the ballot that I could rate higher. Right
now, I'm not happy with any of the candidates in the race; on a simple
left-right scale I'm close to Biden, but I'm not exactly enthusiastic about
an 82-year old president. (Though I'm sure as hell not supporting any other
candidate in the race...) With STAR, every voter has at least two
candidates they consider tolerable.

I think of STAR as just reversing the primary-then-general order: we have a
general election to choose the best party (the score round), and then a
"primary" where we pick the best nominee by a simple majority.

On Wed, Apr 10, 2024 at 12:36 PM Michael Ossipoff <email9648742 at gmail.com>
wrote:

>
>
> On Tue, Apr 9, 2024 at 17:31 Chris Benham <cbenhamau at yahoo.com.au> wrote:
>
> [quote]
> Score is Approval with a  "I wish to weaken the effect of my vote for the
> sake of being more sincere/expressive" box/button.
> [/quote]
>
> If that’s how you want to vote in Score, then suit yourself.
>
> The right use of Score:
>
> Use only min & max ratings. i.e. Use Score as Approval.
>
> …with the difference that, when it’s uncertain whether or not a candidate
> deserves approval, you can give hir partial approval, by an intermediate
> point-rating.
>
> Nice, sometimes convenient, because, otherwise, the only way to give
> someone partial approval would be probabilistically.
>
> But Score loses Approval’s absolute minimalness, & unique unarbitrariness.
>
> Much better to let the voters deal with such things for themselves with
> the absolutely minimal handtool, than to use some arbitrary & (somewhat or
> greatly) complicated definition, rule & count. …with the consequent expense
> & count-fraud vulnerability.
>
> So it is strategically equivalent to Approval while being more complicated
>> and less fair.
>>
> More complicated, yes.
>
> I strongly oppose a runoff for Approval, but some jurisdictions might
> insist on one.
>
> …likewise Score.
>
> It’s true that it somewhat increases  Condorcet-efficiency &
> Social-Utility (SU), but it brings great strategy-complication, including
> the loss of FBC compliance.
>
> But STAR is better than Hare because:
>
> It retains some amount Score’s merit.
>
> It’s much, much simpler than Hare, resulting in much better count-fraud
> security.
>
> It’s much less expensive to administer & implement than Hare.
>
> It’s much simpler to describe its workings when proposing it.
>
>
>>
>> And Approval has a quite good reputation here because it meets Favorite
>> Betrayal  (aka FBC) and compared with FPP the winner
>> will strongly tend to have higher social utility and  be much more
>> likely  a sincere Condorcet winner.  Also, and not unrelatedly,
>> it has a bias toward centrists that some people think is wonderful.
>>
>> But some people seem to think that adding a Top-Two Runoff (automated in
>> the case of STAR) to Score (to make STAR) is just
>> a harmless little gimmick that just makes the method "a bit more
>> accurate", brings it into compliance with Condorcet Loser
>> and so must make it more "Condorcet efficient".   ("Sky-high" according
>> to CLC here).
>>
>> But actually it makes the method profoundly different and very bad. It
>> seems to me that the inventors of STAR must have been
>> motivated by three priorities:
>>
>> (1) the method isn't  Hare,
>>
>> (2) the method, in a purely technical and completely useless way,
>> apparently meets Mono-raise (aka Monotonicity).
>>
>> (3) subject to being saleable to and understood by  not-so-deep thinkers,
>> the method be as bad as possible.
>>
>> From the "equal-vote" website:    https://www.equal.vote/
>>
>> Ranked Choice Voting, where voters rank candidates in order of preference
>> has been lauded as a solution, but in elections where the third candidate
>> is actually competitive, vote-splitting remains a serious issue
>> <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhO6jfHPFQU&t=169s> and RCV only offers
>> a marginal improvement compared to a primary and  general election with
>> Choose-One Plurality voting.
>>
>> Luckily, many voting methods are can effectively prevent vote-splitting.
>> As it turns out, when voters can weigh in on each candidate individually,
>> when all ballot data is counted, and when voters are able to show equal
>> preference, vote-splitting can be eliminated. All voting methods which do
>> this pass the Equal Vote Criterion
>> <https://electowiki.org/wiki/Equal_Vote_Criterion>, including STAR Voting
>> <https://www.starvoting.us/star>,...
>>
>>
>> The "Equal Vote Criterion" is just  propaganda nonsense:
>> https://electowiki.org/wiki/Equal_Vote_Criterion
>>
>> The Equal Vote Criterion or Equality Criterion
>> <https://www.equal.vote/theequalvote> is a voting method criterion
>> <https://electowiki.org/wiki/Voting_system_criterion> which requires
>> that a voting method ensure that every voter may cast a vote which is as
>> powerful as a vote cast by any other voter. Voting methods which pass the
>> Equal Vote Criterion do not exhibit vote-splitting
>> <https://electowiki.org/wiki/Vote-splitting> or the "Spoiler Effect,"
>> ensuring that every vote can cast an equally weighted vote
>> <https://electowiki.org/wiki/Equally_Weighted_Vote>.
>>
>> Choose-One Plurality Voting (First Past the Post) and Instant Runoff
>> Voting (often referred to as Ranked Choice Voting) do not satisfy the Equal
>> Vote Criterion.
>>
>>
>> This is just dishonest blather. If anything meets this very vague and
>> confused "criterion" IRV (aka Hare) certainly does.
>>
>> The classic scenario that motivated some people get negative about Hare
>> (and also methods like Min-Max Margins):
>>
>> 49 Bush
>> 24 Gore
>> 27 Nader>Gore
>>
>> Gore>Bush 51-49,   Bush>Nader 49-27, Nader>Gore 27-24.
>>
>> Hare eliminates Gore and elects Bush, so the Nader voters whose Gore>
>> Bush preference was strong had incentive to use the Compromise
>> strategy and vote Gore>Nader ("betraying" their sincere favourite).  If
>> the method was Approval they could have approved both Nader and
>> Gore, preventing the election of Bush without having to vote their
>> sincere favorite below equal-top.
>>
>> But in this type of scenario STAR does no better than Hare. The Nader
>> voters would have incentive to give Nader zero points.
>>
>> "Traditionally" Hare's  vulnerability to Push-over strategy has said to
>> be a result of it's failure of Mono-raise.  But STAR is much more vulnerable
>> to Push-over.
>>
>> Say you are sure that your favourite will make the final two. In that
>> case then you have incentive to give every candidate that you are sure your
>> favourite can beat 4 or 5 stars.  If 5 stars then you are relying on you
>> favourite winning the runoff without your help, but if 4 stars then you
>> might
>> fail to get one of the predicted sure-loser turkeys into the final.
>>
>> In a Hare Push-over strategy scenario, the strategists rely on their
>> favourite winning the runoff against their own votes, i.e. with their votes
>> supporting
>> the turkey against their favourite. This makes it much more risky (more
>> likely to backfire) and difficult to coordinate than is the case with STAR.
>>
>> The equal-vote site has a link to a quite ok video on the Favorite
>> Betrayal Criterion.  I find that weird and misleading, because STAR badly
>> fails FBC.
>> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtKAScORevQ
>>
>> From https://www.starvoting.org/
>>
>> Why STAR Voting?
>>
>> Voting reform is the keystone. A single cause with the potential to
>> empower us to be more effective on every other issue we care about.
>>
>>    -
>>
>>    Honesty is the best strategy. Strategic voting is not incentivized.
>>    <https://www.starvoting.org/strategic_voting>
>>    -
>>
>>    Even if your favorite can’t win, your vote helps prevent your worst
>>    case scenario. <https://www.starvoting.org/how_to_vote>
>>    -
>>
>>    Highly accurate, no matter how many candidates/parties are in the
>>    race. <https://www.starvoting.org/accuracy>
>>
>>
>> I'm not sure exactly what "accurate" is supposed to mean, but I refute
>> the suggestion that these claims are more true of STAR than they are of
>> Hare.
>>
>> In the poll I will vote STAR below Hare and Approval and all the
>> Condorcet methods.
>>
>> Chris
>>
>>
>> ----
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