[EM] Poll, preliminary ballots

[Chris Benham]

Richard,

> Horrible, yes.  Garbage, no, because STAR a clever way to improve
> single-winner score voting.
It trashes Score voting's compliance with Favorite Betrayal and 
Participation to gain merely Condorcet Loser. Pure genius. If it is an 
attempt to "improve" Score voting (which I have great difficulty 
believing) then I don't agree that it qualifies as "clever".

> > If there are "failure types" in need of names, what's stopping you from
>   > giving them names? ...
>
> Time and money.
I wasn't talking about for the purpose of discussions in the mass media 
or to get text books or dictionaries changed.  I was just talking about 
just for the purpose of (hopefully somewhat rigorous) discussion here.

> Our goal is to rise way above plurality.  Accepting limitations of
> plurality is unnecessary.
>
> Why impose any extra strategic burden on the voter?

I agree that that should be avoided. As you would know if you read my 
previous posts here about STAR, the strategic burden it places on the 
voter is vastly greater than the one imposed by plurality (aka FPP).

Both have Compromise incentive while STAR also has very strong Push-over 
incentive.

> > 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 and most voters want to be able to rank an evil candidate -- Gollum,
> Voldemoron, etc. -- below all other candidates.  Truncation means the
> evil candidate is as acceptable as other "bad" candidates.
>
For IRV (aka Hare) I am strongly in favour of allowing unlimited strict 
ranking from the top. I was talking about a reasonable relatively benign 
way of dealing with equal-ranking in defiance of the ballot rules. In 
Australia I think the whole ballot is not counted, and binned as 
"informal".  Normally there should be nothing stopping you from ranking 
the most evil candidates strictly below all the others.

> I've written code that correctly counts so-called "overvotes."  It's not
> a "complex procedure":
>
> https://github.com/cpsolver/VoteFair-ranking-cpp/blob/master/rcipe_stv.cpp
>  When shared preference levels are encountered,
> //  the ballots are transfered in "whole" numbers,
> //  not by splitting a ballot into fractional or
> //  decimal portions.  For example, during a
> //  counting cycle, if there are two ballots that
> //  rank candidates numbered 1 and 2 at the same
> //  highest ranking level, one of the ballots will
> //  transfer to candidate 1 and the other ballot
> //  will transfer to candidate 2.
> //

Assuming you can pair up all the "over-voting" ballots in this way, this 
seems to be equivalent to dividing the votes up into equal fractions 
that sum to 1. But what if you can't pair them all off, or someone votes 
more than two candidates at the same ranking level?

I didn't express myself quite clearly enough. The "complex procedure" I 
referred is the one I, not you, suggest.  I didn't bother describing it.

I think that if we allow above-bottom equal-ranking in IRV or Benham, 
then if among remaining candidates some ballots rank more than one 
candidate equal-top then we make a provisional order of the candidates 
by counting those ballots as equal fractions summing to 1.
(A=B counts as half a vote to each of A and B, A=B=C counts as a third 
of a vote to each of A and B and C, and so on.  Now it would be fine for 
this to be the final order for deciding which candidate to next 
eliminate were it not for the fact that it makes Push-over strategising 
easier.)  Then we count the equal top (among remaining candidates) 
ballots again, this time they give a whole vote to whichever of the ones 
they equal rank to the one that was highest in the provisional order. 
(So an A=B ballot gives a whole vote to whichever of A and B was higher 
in the provisional order, and of course nothing to B.)

This is fully in the spirit of the Single Transferable Vote but I think 
you will agree that it is complex. I don't think allowing above-bottom 
equal-ranking in those methods is so important, nor do I think there 
would be any significant demand for that from voters, so I don't 
advocate allowing it for those methods.

> I'm bothered by the failures in Burlington and Alaska.  But those were
> not just Condorcet failures.  They also were IIA failures,
> center-squeeze failures, etc.
It is the most basic theory that all remotely reasonable methods fail  
IIA, so why are we even mentioning that?  And isn't "center-squeeze" 
just a vague concept used in anti-IRV propaganda? What is the precise 
definition of a "center-squeeze failure"?

Your approach is like that of a quite bad and sloppy designer of a car 
or a plane. Every time it crashes you just stick another kludge on it 
designed to only guard against another crash just like the most recent one.

Chris B.

*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=%3C632ea079-e977-441c-bf19-41522d2d8eee%40votefair.org%3E>
/Sat Apr 20 10:30:57 PDT 2024/


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On 4/19/2024 1:15 AM, Chris Benham wrote:

  > ... It is not garbage like STAR.
  > ...
  > ... STAR is a horrible method that is very highly
  > vulnerable to both Compromise and Pushover.

Horrible, yes.  Garbage, no, because it's a clever way to improve
single-winner score voting.  It's useful among friends when voting is
not anonymous.  Or when "dishonest" exaggeration cannot be hidden.

  > If there are "failure types" in need of names, what's stopping you from
  > giving them names? ...

Time and money.  Unlike two STAR promoters, the folks at FairVote, and
academic professors, I'm not getting paid to promote or advance
election-method reform.

  >>   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.  ...

Our goal is to rise way above plurality.  Accepting limitations of
plurality is unnecessary.

Why impose any extra strategic burden on the voter?

  >> Another difference from IRV is about what FairVote calls "overvotes."
  >> RCIPE counts them correctly.  ...
  > 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 and most voters want to be able to rank an evil candidate -- Gollum,
Voldemoron, etc. -- below all other candidates.  Truncation means the
evil candidate is as acceptable as other "bad" candidates.

I've written code that correctly counts so-called "overvotes."  It's not
a "complex procedure":

https://github.com/cpsolver/VoteFair-ranking-cpp/blob/master/rcipe_stv.cpp

  >> 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"??

I'm bothered by the failures in Burlington and Alaska.  But those were
not just Condorcet failures.  They also were IIA failures,
center-squeeze failures, etc.

I want fewer failures in real elections.  I don't care about convoluted
scenarios that would never occur in a real election.

Again, thank you for this useful discussion.  I appreciate that you
really want to understand why I rank some methods better than others.

Richard Fobes
The VoteFair guy
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