[EM] Question to the Condorcetists

Thu Feb 29 21:07:53 PST 2024

It's not hard to figure out whether many pass/fail criteria apply to
certain scenarios. The results alone should always show whether it's
possible. From there, you can theory-craft the types of ballots that need
to be removed. Then you check if sufficiently many ballots exist in the
election to be changed/removed.

For example, I went through the results of the 2018 San Francisco Mayoral
election looking for a monotonicity failure in the frontrunners, so I made
a preference matrix and compared it to the RCV results. What I actually
found were signs of a monotonicity failure among middling candidates
because the CW of those middle three candidates was eliminated first. I
calculated how many voters needed to lower their preference for that
middling CW in order to help them. I then realized that it was more votes
than the number of top-choice votes that candidate received in their final
round, which means that there wasn't actually a monotonicity failure. Upon
more investigation into the ballots, I discovered that most of the
preferences for that candidate were actually second choices that were all
blocked by first choices for an ideologically-aligned frontrunner. (This
was a really cool result and realization that when monotonicity failures
occur in RCV, they will almost always be among the top candidates.)

The point is that I didn't need to analyze every individual ballot. I
started with the results and worked in the other direction. A similar
approach can be used with Participation.

On Thu, Feb 29, 2024 at 7:16 PM Michael Ossipoff <email9648742 at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Well, with each voter, one at a time,  individually-considered as not
> showing up, all that’s needed is to decrement the pairwise vote-totals that
> s/he’d added to.
>
> Much less votecounting than what would be needed if it were necessary to
> keep repeating the whole exhaustive pairwise count, as I’d previously
> assumed.
>
> So surely the Participation-check would be computationally-feasible.
>
> On Thu, Feb 29, 2024 at 18:09 Michael Ossipoff <email9648742 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> With V voters, the number of individual pairwiwe-preference-votes that
>> need to be counted in order to test for Participation-failure is
>> proportional to V^4.  I don't know how fast the fastest computers are, but
>> might that be computationally feasible?
>>
>> On Thu, Feb 29, 2024 at 2:43 PM Sass <sass at equal.vote> wrote:
>>
>>> I recently made a meme relevant to this topic:
>>>
>>> https://www.reddit.com/r/EndFPTP/comments/17y3fsb/pairwise_comparisonsequential_elimination/
>>>
>>> Just like IIA and Cloneproofness and so many other criteria failed by
>>> many Condorcet methods,  Participation only matters in elections when there
>>> is not a Condorcet Winner (CW), which means it only creates an actionable
>>> strategy when someone can predict that a given election will not have a CW.
>>>
>>> I tend to prefer cardinal methods because of the increased expressivity
>>> and reduced cognitive load on the voter, but the more I think about
>>> Condorcet methods, the more impenetrable they seem. It just comes down to
>>> explaining it to voters and legal viability. That's why I like "elect the
>>> candidate who is preferred over the most others" as a method (i.e. Ranked
>>> Robin (i.e. Copeland)).
>>>
>>>
>>> On Wed, Feb 28, 2024 at 1:03 PM <
>>> election-methods-request at lists.electorama.com> wrote:
>>>
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>>>>    1. Question to the Condorcetists (Closed Limelike Curves)
>>>>    2. Re: Question to the Condorcetists (Michael Ossipoff)
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>>>> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
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>>>> Message: 1
>>>> Date: Wed, 28 Feb 2024 10:36:40 -0800
>>>> From: Closed Limelike Curves <closed.limelike.curves at gmail.com>
>>>> To: election-methods at electorama.com
>>>> Subject: [EM] Question to the Condorcetists
>>>> Message-ID:
>>>>         <CA+euzPi2VRg_Z_4C32zCE+t=gu4OXAjoffs=_sch=
>>>> UXH6V3CYg at mail.gmail.com>
>>>> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
>>>>
>>>> Can Condorcet be weakened to comply with participation? Condorcet
>>>> methods
>>>> have plenty of advantages, but systems failing participation are
>>>> vulnerable
>>>> to court challenges or being struck down as unconstitutional, as seen in
>>>> Germany.
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>>>> Message: 2
>>>> Date: Wed, 28 Feb 2024 11:32:43 -0800
>>>> From: Michael Ossipoff <email9648742 at gmail.com>
>>>> To: Closed Limelike Curves <closed.limelike.curves at gmail.com>
>>>> Cc: election-methods at electorama.com
>>>> Subject: Re: [EM] Question to the Condorcetists
>>>> Message-ID:
>>>>         <CAOKDY5DX=s7TsxiX5ir1eM=PG2y1176YVEs_L0L=
>>>> pJ3+V_CDRQ at mail.gmail.com>
>>>> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
>>>>
>>>> It?s surprising that participation-violation is unconstitutional in
>>>> Germany, because, here, even Hare?s greater nonmonotonicity is okay.
>>>>
>>>> It?s disingenuous to say that Hare is nonmonotonic & Condorcet isn?t.
>>>> Nonmonotonicity is just defined to give Condorcet, with it?s
>>>> participation-failure, a pass.
>>>>
>>>> I?ve heard that Participation & the Condorcet Criterion are mutually
>>>> incompatible. I feel that participation-failure is an acceptable price
>>>> for
>>>> the Condorcet Criterion. Always electing the voted CW brings strategy
>>>> improvement, & the unpredictable & rare participation-failure is
>>>> probably
>>>> irrelevant to strategy.
>>>>
>>>> But that incompatibility, along with the ones Arrow pointed-out, shows
>>>> that
>>>> single-winner elections aren?t perfect.  ?making a good argument for
>>>> PR?*monotonic* PR, which excludes STV & Largest-Remainder.
>>>>
>>>> Maybe, as a PR country (like 2/3 of the world?s countries), Germany
>>>> feels
>>>> no need to compromise participation.
>>>>
>>>> We?re told that list-PR ?hasn?t been tried?. No, just in 2/3 of the
>>>> world?s
>>>> countries for about a century.
>>>>
>>>> But, with that counterfactual ?hasn?t been tried? excuse, we?re stuck in
>>>> the 18th century, & always will be, while most of the world has moved
>>>> on to
>>>> democracy.
>>>>
>>>> On Wed, Feb 28, 2024 at 10:36 Closed Limelike Curves <
>>>> closed.limelike.curves at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> > Can Condorcet be weakened to comply with participation? Condorcet
>>>> methods
>>>> > have plenty of advantages, but systems failing participation are
>>>> vulnerable
>>>> > to court challenges or being struck down as unconstitutional, as seen
>>>> in
>>>> > Germany.
>>>> > ----
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