[EM] Hare (aka IRV) versus STAR

Wed Apr 10 18:04:41 PDT 2024

Michael wrote:

> But STAR is better than Hare because:
>
> It retains some amount Score’s merit.

No it doesn't.   Score meets Favorite Betrayal and Participation. STAR 
trashes those just for Condorcet Loser.

I could even make up a new criterion just to encapsulate the horror of STAR.

The Favourite Ultra-Betrayal Criterion:

*Voters should never have any strategic incentive to vote their sincere 
favourite as low as possible*.

Hare should be much easier to sell to anyone with any intelligence or 
common sense because STAR is obviously
so silly and arbitrary.

Where as Hare just seeks to replace the Single Non-Transferable Vote 
with the Single Transferable Vote, keeping compliance
with Plurality, Dominant Candidate, Clone-Loser, Later-no-Harm and 
Later-no-Help but losing Participation and Mono-Raise to gain
Dominant Coalition (and therefore Majority for Solid Coalitions) and 
Dominant Mutual Third and Clone-Winner.

It has what Woodall referred to as a "maximal set of properties". It's 
ok not to like it if you are a fundamentalist about some criterion
compliance it doesn't have (like Condorcet or FBC) but not to suggest 
that complete garbage like STAR is in some way preferable.

Chris Benham

On 11/04/2024 5:04 am, Michael Ossipoff 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 theEqual 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 orEquality Criterion
>>     <https://www.equal.vote/theequalvote>is avoting 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
>>     exhibitvote-splitting
>>     <https://electowiki.org/wiki/Vote-splitting>or the "Spoiler
>>     Effect," ensuring that every vote can cast anequally 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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