[EM] Open letter to STAR voting promoters

[Richard, the VoteFair guy]

On 6/4/2024 8:19 PM, Closed Limelike Curves wrote:
< ...
 > So, I suppose my real question is: is there any voting system
 > that satisfies both properties? Sincere favorite and
 > later-no-help are enough for voters who follow good polls to
 > work out the Condorcet winner, by making min-maxing the
 > optimal strategy. On the other hand, I don't know
 > if they're necessary or if they're compatible with honesty in the
 > zero-information case.

Since you seem to have asked me this question, and no one else has 
answered it, I'll say ...

I believe that attempting to "satisfy both properties" is likely to 
increase the failure rates of yet other fairness criteria.

To me, a zero failure rate and a one-in-a-hundred-thousand failure rate 
are not significantly different.  Both are close enough to zero to not 
be a concern in elections.

 > The place where this is bad is the zero-information setting. True
 > zero-info almost never exists, but low-information settings crop up if
 > you have a sincere Condorcet cycle, several clones, or a nonpartisan
 > local election. In these settings, it would be very nice to have
 > voters be perfectly honest.

I believe we should expect that in the future there will be better 
opinion polls that provide more information for governmental elections. 
In other words, zero information elections will become rare -- if the 
outcome is important, as it is in governmental elections.

I think honesty would be very nice in every setting.  But getting 
honesty requires using rules that don't motivate voters to vote dishonestly.

In other words, if there's a way to cheat, cheating will occur.

Richard Fobes
the VoteFair guy


On 6/4/2024 8:19 PM, Closed Limelike Curves wrote:
>     * Every cardinal/rating method I know of is vulnerable to what used to
> 
>     be called a "drama queen" meaning someone who exaggerates importance.
>     Expressed another way ...
> 
> I'm very interested in fleshing this out a bit more. In some situations, 
> this is the main drawback of score voting; min-maxing means your ballot 
> expresses less information than a full ranking and produces worse 
> results than most Condorcet methods. But in other situations, this is a 
> huge strength of rated voting that I think we really need to keep.
> 
> The place where this is bad is the zero-information setting. True 
> zero-info almost never exists, but low-information settings crop up if 
> you have a sincere Condorcet cycle, several clones, or a nonpartisan 
> local election. In these settings, it would be very nice to have voters 
> be perfectly honest.
> 
> The place where this is good is in the high-information setting where 
> voters follow the polls, or know . Then, every "sensible" voting method 
> will encourage exaggeration: if you rank or rate the best frontrunner at 
> the top, this maximizes your support for them, and therefore your impact 
> on the election. Similarly, ranking or rating a candidate last minimizes 
> your support for them.
> 
> The only difference in the case of cardinal/rating methods is you can do 
> this without being forced to engage in order-reversal. This is a big 
> f*cking deal. Lots of voters will refuse to engage in decapitation 
> to protect a Condorcet winner (e.g. Begich in Alaska): it's 
> counterintuitive, makes voters feel icky, and reduces their favorite 
> candidate's shot at winning. Even if they /were/ willing, this kind of 
> dishonest order-reversal strategy can make it impossible to identify the 
> sincere Condorcet winner. ("Hmm, is RFK Jr. trailing because of 
> the brain worm or the major parties burying him?")
> 
> In high-information situations, this kind of approval-thresholding is 
> the least-damaging kind of strategy:
> 1. It's simple and obvious, so parties can't manipulate voters by lying.
> 2. It has a single stable equilibrium point, so you don't need money or 
> party endorsements to prove you're a viable candidate.
> 3. It's sincere, so it lets you identify the Condorcet-winner and the 
> Condorcet runner-up.
> 4. It guarantees that if voters follow the polls, they'll choose the 
> Condorcet winner.
> 
> So, I suppose my real question is: is there any voting system that 
> satisfies both properties? Sincere favorite and later-no-help are enough 
> for voters who follow good polls to work out the Condorcet winner, by 
> making min-maxing the optimal strategy. On the other hand, I don't know 
> if they're necessary or if they're compatible with honesty in the 
> zero-information case.