[EM] Poll, preliminary ballots

[Chris Benham]

Richard,

> I regard HOW OFTEN failures occur to be much more important than a
> checkbox that says "yes" or "no" failures of this kind NEVER occur.
Given that voting methods are mostly simple and cut-and-dried and so 
plenty of 100% guarantees that criterion failures NEVER occur are 
available, I find the approach "Near enough is good enough! I am an 
expert. I've done a computer simulation" to be suspicious and flaky. 
That attitude can lead to people switching off their brains and 
swallowing BS propaganda from say STAR advocates.

> It's easy to overlook the many failures that do not fit within NAMED
> failure types.  Those unnamed kinds of failures are being ignored

If there are "failure types" in need of names, what's stopping you from 
giving them names?  Several of the voting methods criteria I uphold and 
promote are ones I coined myself.

> Avoiding any failures in REAL elections is what I'm "buying" by
> advocating RCIPE instead of IRV.
I'm still baffled as to why, if you don't like Condorcet failures, you 
don't simply advocate a Condorcet method. How is the argument "Let's 
lose strict compliance with several criteria met by IRV so that we can 
somewhat more often elect the Condorcet winner" better than
"Let's lose strict compliance with several criteria met by IRV so that 
we can ALWAYS elect the Condorcet winner"??

> Another difference from IRV is about what FairVote calls "overvotes."
> RCIPE counts them correctly.  That could become a huge deal in the
> upcoming Portland election for mayor -- where two or more marks in the
> same "choice" column will be ignored as if those marks were not on the
> ballot.
I think it is reasonable to treat ballots that (against the ballot 
rules) equal-rank above bottom as though they truncated at that point. 
Doing otherwise (as I think you advocate) without a quite complex 
procedure I suggest makes the method a bit more vulnerable to Push-over 
strategy.

> I recognize that IRV's flaw is that the candidate with the fewest
> transferred votes is not always the least popular -- as demonstrated in
> Burlington and Alaska.
IRV (properly implemented, with unrestricted strict ranking from the 
top) doesn't have any "flaws". It simply fails some criteria that some 
people like so that it can meet other criteria that some people like. As 
Woodall put it, it has a "maximal set of properties".
It is not garbage like STAR.

>   Approval voting requires tactical voting.  There's no way to avoid it.
The strategic burden on the voter is certainly no greater than with 
FPP.  With FPP the best strategy is to vote for your favourite among the 
candidates you think have a realistic chance of winning. With Approval 
you just do the same thing and then also approve every candidate you 
like as much or better. An alternative is the simple "surprise" 
strategy: approve any given candidate X if you would be pleasantly 
surprised if X won or unpleasantly surprised if X lost.

It's a huge "bang-for-buck" improvement on FPP.  But I'm not a big fan 
either.

> * STAR ballots are a dead-end ballot type.  (Always six columns, even
> when there are three or four candidates.  And always with the star icon,
> no thanks!)

I find this objection to be  superficial and just about style.  A lot of 
ok methods can be happily used with 6-slot ratings ballots, such as say 
ABCDEF grading ballots. STAR is a horrible method that is very highly 
vulnerable to both Compromise and Pushover.

I welcome any comments you may have have about my poll favourite, 
Approval Sorted Margins.  Or anything else related to my most recent ballot.

Chris

>
>
> *Richard, the VoteFair guy*electionmethods at votefair.org 
> <mailto:election-methods%40lists.electorama.com?Subject=Re%3A%20%5BEM%5D%20Poll%2C%20preliminary%20ballots&In-Reply-To=%3C0d892c56-6b62-4fb3-8b67-312a3963e670%40votefair.org%3E>
> /Thu Apr 18 11:43:19 PDT 2024/
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Chris B., thanks for your questions!  Here are my answers:
>
> On 4/17/2024 11:58 PM, Chris Benham wrote:
>   > I have trouble understanding the motivation behind "RCIPE". ...
>
> RCIPE -- Ranked Choice Including Pairwise Elimination -- is a compromise
> method.
>
> It inherits lots of the cloneproofness of IRV because that's the backup
> elimination process when an elimination round does not have a pairwise
> losing candidate.
>
> The elimination of pairwise losing candidates causes RCIPE to seldom
> fail the Condorcet criterion and other "majority" criteria.  It took
> some head scratching to discover a case in which RCIPE fails the
> Condorcet criterion.  (As I recall Kristofer gets credit for finding
> such a case.)
>
> Chris B., all of your concerns seem to be about the "pass" or "fail"
> categorization of methods.
>
> I regard HOW OFTEN failures occur to be much more important than a
> checkbox that says "yes" or "no" failures of this kind NEVER occur.
>
> Visually this perspective is conveyed by measuring failure rates:
>
> http://www.votefair.org/clone_iia_success_rates.png
>
> About this graph: Under the simulation conditions of these measurements
> the RCIPE method has zero clone failures.  In real elections there can
> be a few clone failures compared to IRV.  Those few failures don't
> concern me.
>
> It's easy to overlook the many failures that do not fit within NAMED
> failure types.  Those unnamed kinds of failures are being ignored!
>
> For example, clone failures and Local IIA failures are just two
> categories within the broad category of IIA failures.
>
> This is why I presume the Schulze method fails the various unnamed IIA
> criteria in order to have zero clone failures.
>
> Just because those increased kinds of failures don't have names doesn't
> mean they should be ignored!
>
>   > I find this all very odd, and I'm not sure what you are "buying" in
> comparison with plain Hare (aka IRV).
>
> The payoff is that RCIPE would not have failed in Burlington and Alaska!
>    That's huge.
>
> Avoiding any failures in REAL elections is what I'm "buying" by
> advocating RCIPE instead of IRV.
>
> Another difference from IRV is about what FairVote calls "overvotes."
> RCIPE counts them correctly.  That could become a huge deal in the
> upcoming Portland election for mayor -- where two or more marks in the
> same "choice" column will be ignored as if those marks were not on the
> ballot.  If the race is close, that counting error could cause the wrong
> candidate to win.  (This counting error is less likely to affect STV
> election results for Portland city council members because winning the
> second seat instead of the first seat is not a big deal.)
>
> Clarification: I regard IRV as a steppingstone to RCIPE, so I have
> supported adopting IRV here in Oregon.  I dislike the misrepresentations
> that come from the FairVote organization, but I'm not using that
> organization's flaws as reasons to fully reject IRV.  (We have to crawl
> and walk before we can run.)
>
>   > Why do you think that RP(wv) and Schulze are significantly different
> from each other?
>
> Schulze is much more difficult to understand.  That's important in this
> poll which is supposed to be about what can be adopted for use in real,
> governmental elections.
>
>   > And why do you think that MinMax(wv) is better than either?  Doesn't
> it fail Smith and Clone Independence?
>
> See above about my lack of concern about the difference between "never"
> and "almost never."
>
>   > Why do you think Woodall is better than Benham?
>   > What is the (or your) definition of "Schwartz-Woodall"?
>   > And what do you think is the positive point of it compared with plain
> Woodall?
>
> I don't recall what I was thinking during every detail of my ranking
> process.
>
> Broadly my thinking is:
>
> * I'm a big fan of pairwise vote counting.
>
> * I recognize that IRV's flaw is that the candidate with the fewest
> transferred votes is not always the least popular -- as demonstrated in
> Burlington and Alaska.
>
> * I dislike Borda being any part of a method because it requires honest
> voting to yield fair results.  (Honestly, honesty doesn't happen in
> elections.)
>
> * Approval voting requires tactical voting.  There's no way to avoid it.
>    I know that Approval fans disagree.  Yet I assure them that when I
> have to make a decision between approval and disapproval I have to do
> the equivalent of mentally flipping a coin.
>
> * I strongly dislike score/rating ballots for single-winner methods
> because they are vulnerable to tactical voting.  Specifically, it's
> impossible to know whether a ballot is from a person with strong
> religious beliefs or a person who is acting like a "drama queen" (or
> whatever the modern name is for this concept).  This tactical
> vulnerability is important in single-winner elections.
>
> * I do agree that score/rating ballots could be useful in multi-winner
> elections where strength of preference is worthy of being considered
> when there are interactions between who wins each seat.  But this poll
> isn't about multi-winner elections.  And governmental elections need to
> adopt single-winner methods first.  Only later will voters and
> legislators be ready to begin learning subtle concepts such as
> interactions between seat winners.
>
> * STAR ballots are a dead-end ballot type.  (Always six columns, even
> when there are three or four candidates.  And always with the star icon,
> no thanks!)
>
> Again, thank you Chris for your questions.
>
> Richard Fobes
> The VoteFair guy
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