[EM] Election-Methods Digest, Vol 235, Issue 30

[Michael Ossipoff]

Addenda:

1.

Another way to judge if someone is above expectation is to ask if, given
the choice, you’d appoint hir instead of holding the election.

2.

Another nice thing about Approval:

Unlike Condorcet or Hare, it passes Participation, & never has a
nonsensical result.

Therefore, unlike Condorcet & Hare, Approval isn’t unconstitutional in
Germany.

3.

I regard our political elections as dichotomous, with completely
unacceptable alternatives, so that any merit differences among the
Acceptables or among the Unacceptables are negligible compared to the merit
difference between the acceptables & unacceptables.

So, Approval is particularly perfect for my 2-valued valuations of the
candidates.

On Wed, Feb 28, 2024 at 13:27 Michael Ossipoff <email9648742 at gmail.com>
wrote:

>
>
> On Tue, Feb 20, 2024 at 00:10 robert bristow-johnson <
> rbj at audioimagination.com> wrote:
>
>> The unavoidable question is how much should a voter is how much should I
>> score or approve my sec ond-choice candidate?  If I score them too high (or
>> Approve them), I reduce or lose my vote for my favorite.
>>
>> What if it turns out that the race was most competitive between my top
>> two choices?  Then I'll regret Approving (or high scoring) my second-choice
>> candidate. Especially if my less-preferred candidate wins
>>
>> But then what if it's a competitive race between my second-choice and the
>> candidate I hate?  Then I'll regret *not* Approving (or low scoring) my
>> second-choice candidate. Especially if my less-preferred candidate wins.
>>
>> […]
>>
> But then we have to at least think about whether to Approve our
>> second-choice. We don't wanna waste our vote approving our second-choice
>> candidate and hurting our first choice.  But we also don't wanna harm our
>> second-choice to defeat the candidate we loathe.
>>
> So the problem is that you don’t know whether your objectively-optimal
> vote (the one that would maximize your utility over many similar elections)
> would be to approve or not approve your 2nd choice.
>
> No problem. Neither do the other voters, so don’t worry about it.
>
> A rank-balloting method is an automatic-machine that receives your
> preference-ordering as input, & then outputs an answer.
>
> It does everything for you.
>
> Fine, but, as Arrow showed, & likewise does the incompatibility between
> Participation & the Condorcet Criterion, every rank method is a rather
> imperfect contraption.
>
> Additionally, every method other than Approval can be criticized as
> arbitrary.
>
> “Why this one instead of some other one?”
>
> Approval is the absolute minimal method that allows & counts
> multicandidate merit-comparison-expression (y/n ratings, in this absolute
> minimal method) for a multicandidate election. …an obvious requirement for
> democracy.
>
> …& being absolute-minimal makes Approval the unique completely unarbitrary
> method.
>
> … in addition to conferring an elegance possessed by no other method.
>
> Approval is the simple, reliable handtool (as opposed to an automatic
> machine). Yes, it’s  a different kind of voting, different from rankings.
>
> You might want an automatic-machine to do it all for you, but that comes
> at a price (in addition to the already mentioned ones):
>
> Harder to define, describe, explain, propose, enact, implement,
> administer, & audit against error & count-fraud.
>
> I claim that those big disadvantages, those big losses of Approval’s
> advantages, are much too high a price to pay for having it all done for you
> by an automatic-machine.
>
> Much better to just trust voters to be able to use Approval well.
>
> …& that’s even before mentioning that Approval’s Myerson-Weber equilibrium
> is the voter-median, where the CW is.
>
> Achieving the objectively-optimal vote (defined above) with a cardinal
> method isn’t feasible. It would require guessing lots of
> difficultly-guessed probabilities, & estimating difficultly-estimated
> numerical utility-quantifications.
>
> Forget it. Forget objectively-optimal voting. That isn’t how Approval, or
> any cardinal method works.
>
> Other than speaking of maximization of overall utility over many
> hypothetical repetitions of similar elections—objectively-optimal
> voting—probability & expectation are subjective.
>
> They’re based on what information you have & use.
>
> A shuffled & cut deck of cards is on the table. I take the top card, look
> at it, without showing it to you, & put it in my pocket.
>
> I ask you the probability that the new top card is the ace of spades.
>
> For you it’s 1/52. For me, it’s either zero or 1/51.
>
> There are many ways to vote, & many ways of choosing how to vote in
> Approval.
>
> …& any one of them maximizes your expectation based on the information you
> have & use.
>
> This post is already too long, so I won’t go over all of them. But I
> listed lots of them in a recent post to the Voting Science Forum.
>
> But one is to just approve everyone you like. You thereby maximize your
> probability of the election of someone you like.
>
> Approve whom you feel like approving, what feels like the best vote. Based
> on what you know & feel, it is.
>
> You get the idea.
>
> Which feels like a worse risk: that your 2nd choice will take the win from
> your 1st choice, or that your last choice will take the win from your 2nd
> choice m. Go with your feeling, if that’s your best information.
>
> Maybe you have a feel for who the 2 frontrunners are. Fine. If that
> feeling your best
> Information then go with it & approve down to the better frontrunner.
> (…but don’t let the mass-media convince you that the 2 frontrunners are a
> greater evil & a lesser evil.)
>
> Better than expectation: Maybe you perceive an expected merit for the
> outcome. …a feel for which candidates would be a pleasant surprise if
> elected.Then you can approve those  above-expectation candidates, which
> will raise your expectation based on the information consisting of that
> feeling.
>
> If you have information about the likely CW, & that’s your best
> information, then approve down to hir.
>
> I don’t claim to have listed here all the ways to choose how to vote in
> Approval, but you get the idea.
>
> Approval is a completely different kind of voting from ranking, inputting
> your pairwise preference feelings into an automatic-machine that will do it
> all for you.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> ----
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