[EM] Election-Methods Digest, Vol 234, Issue 13

[Michael Ossipoff]

Some people want every advantage they can take, & couldn’t care less about
honesty.

People have a way of finding out how to abuse a system, especially one in
which everything is at stake.

Honesty in politics, right?  Where is that to be found? Republicans?
Democrats? The media?

But it will suddenly appear in the elections?

We don’t have the worst conceivable voting system because of honesty. Was
Clinton being honest when he said that he fired Lani Guinier because
proportional-representation is antidemocratic?

Or maybe the North Dakota legislators were being honest when they said that
they banned rank-balloting & Approval to protect the people’s rights.

Systems are routinely gamed for advantage. Plurality is being consistently
gamed with the constant media-propaganda telling you that the Democrat &
Republican are your 2 choices.

…&, disregarding the fact that opponents will use whatever they can find— a
main criticism of Condorcet is it’s vulnerability to offensive strategy.
That argument would be effectively used against a vulnerable Condorcet
proposal or implementation.

I commend your trustingness about election-matters.

There are already, & there have been for about 35 years, Condorcet versions
that thwart & penalize offensive strategy. There are now beginning to be
versions that automatically probabilistically deter it.

Some of those methods are more briefly stated than Copeland’ s 2-stage
Condorcet-completion rule.

e.g. MinMax(wv) is a familiar, established proposal with the abovementioned
strategy properties. It’s definition?:

Elect the candidate whose greatest vote against hir in a defeat is the
least.

CW,Implicit-Approval’s completion rule is:

Elect the candidate ranked on the most ballots.

Vermont’s Condorcet completion rule is:

Elect the candidate topping the most rankings.

Usually top-cycles will have 3 candidates.  …all of whom beat everyone
outside their Smith-set. So normally the Smith set will all beat the same
number of candidates.

So Copeland is widely-criticized for its indecisiveness.

To publicly-propose Copeland is to ask for criticism & lead with your chin.

…& even if there might somehow not be indecisiveness, the winner of the
completion rule would be a random outcome with little relation to merit, &
with no strategy-deterrence or thwarting.

Merit? Beating more candidates sounds meritorious? So do the other
completion rules I described.  …& they’re decisive & most have good
strategy-properties.

Voting systems usually aren’t as they initially seem. I realize that EVC
isn’t going to propose a Condorcet method soon, but I hope that, when & if
you do, it will be based on a long period of thorough examination &
discussion.

I’m not trying to make trouble. I’m trying to help. So I’ve made these
suggestions, & I hope that EVC won’t be hasty about sticking with what
initially seemed like the best Condorcet proposal.

Might there be a reason for its criticism & unpopularity. Might the
single-winner reform community be right?



On Fri, Jan 12, 2024 at 15:16 Sass <sass at equal.vote> wrote:

> I think you're overcomplicating it. The question to ask is about
> incentives. In public elections, voters (and candidates) will follow the
> incentives. For public elections under a Condorcet method, by far the
> strongest incentive is to vote honestly.
>
> On Fri, Jan 12, 2024 at 2:06 PM Kristofer Munsterhjelm <
> km_elmet at t-online.de> wrote:
>
>> On 2024-01-12 19:45, Sass wrote:
>> >  > as of now I don't think anyone has much evidence for what will
>> happen
>> > in practice.
>> >
>> > I think we do. We have the full ballot data on 448 RCV elections in the
>> > US from this century. Only one did not have a Condorcet Winner. Even if
>> > you reduce the set to elections with three competitive candidates
>> > (defined as elections where the candidate with the third most first
>> > choices has at least half as many as the candidate with the most), it's
>> > still only 1 in 88, which could easily become 1 in 880 over time. If
>> > elections with no Condorcet Winner are that unlikely, then by far the
>> > strongest incentive for voters is to vote honestly as a rule. And we
>> > know from RCV that voters are inclined to vote honestly under new
>> > systems until the system backfires on them.
>>
>> I think the problem is one of predicting how voters may alter their
>> behavior when the circumstances change. Consider these possible
>> descriptions:
>>
>> - Voters always vote in a way that there's a majority candidate. If so,
>> FPTP is sufficient.
>>
>> - Voters always vote in a way that there's a number of no-hope fringe
>> candidates as well as a mutual majority set containing clones of what
>> would otherwise be a majority candidate. If so, IRV is sufficient.
>>
>> - Voters always vote in a way that there's a Condorcet winner, possibly
>> with spurious cycles from noise. If so, any Condorcet method will
>> suffice, and Condorcet cycles can be handled like ordinary ties, by a
>> coin toss or whatnot.
>>
>> - Voters' honest distributions will always have a Condorcet winner but
>> they may strategize, or be told to strategize by the candidates. If so,
>> strategy resistance is more important.
>>
>> - Voters will vote for multiple viable candidates if the method doesn't
>> have too strong incentives to exit, and politics may evolve to be
>> multidimensional, in which case honest cycles would appear. Then just
>> how the Condorcet method deals with cycles would be important, as would
>> robust clone independence (i.e. clone independence that generalizes to
>> JGA's incentives to exit and entry).
>>
>> - Voters have an absolute utility scale and would use it if they can,
>> making distinctions beyond ranking. If so, we may need rated methods.
>> (Or if a relative scale, something that normalizes rated ballots and
>> treats
>>
>> etc.
>>
>> It's difficult to say ahead of time which of these are right. An
>> argument to the extent that "we have n elections and none of these have
>> shown behavior beyond the kth of these descriptions" has a flaw in that
>> they are all under the context of the current method.
>>
>> But we at least know that the first two descriptions are false. It *is*
>> possible to say "ah, those two instances of center squeeze are just
>> flukes" and keep going for IRV, but that seems rather iffy.
>>
>> I suppose my position has been a combination of trying to get things
>> right the first time (hence advanced/cloneproof Condorcet methods) and
>> going by my own intuition (which finds the ambiguity of honest votes in
>> a non-normalized rated system a real problem that burdens even honest
>> voters with tactical decisions).
>>
>> But I can't prove that "minmax and be there" would fail.
>>
>> -km
>>
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