[EM] Strategy-free criterion

[robert bristow-johnson]

Some additional thoughts.

On 06/13/2024 9:16 PM EDT Closed Limelike Curves <closed.limelike.curves at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> On Thu, Jun 13, 2024 at 12:15 PM robert bristow-johnson <rbj at audioimagination.com> wrote:
> ...
> > I am grateful for your work and I still think about how to encode the Schulze method into concise legislative language. I can do it for MinMax, sorta do it for Ranked Pairs, but decently concise legislative language in English for Schulze is elusive. If the language appears impenetrable to policy makers, it ain't gonna get anywhere in legislation. That's one reason I decided that "straight-ahead Condorcet" with a "completion method" is the most likely sell.
> 
> Schulze generalizes Condorcet very simply by allowing indirect beats to be counted as well as direct ones. The definition is actually very intuitive and easy to describe in words:
> 1. A candidate has a direct win over another candidate if the first candidate is ranked higher than the second by a majority of voters.
> 2. An indirect win or chain is a series of direct wins going from one candidate to another.
> 3. The strength of a direct win is equal to the number of votes for the candidate preferred by a majority of voters.
> 4. The strength of an indirect is equal to the strength of the weakest link in that chain (c.f. a chain is only as strong as its weakest link).
> 5. One candidate defeats another if the first candidate has a stronger chain going to the second candidate than vice-versa.
> 
> However, there's some real problems here. The biggest is that legislators and voters are not competent or intelligent enough to follow simple instructions. I give a 30% chance that, even if you hand them a prewritten bill, the legislators will muck around with it and accidentally implement Schulze(margins), i.e. turkey-winning Schulze; or Schulze(pairwise opposition), i.e. Schulze with plurality failure.
> 

So I can see in the special election in Alaska that a burial strategy could be employed by the Peltola campaign to tell Peltola voters that they have to bury Begich and rank him lower than their sincere preference, essentially bullet vote for Peltola, which, if enough of them do it, would push the election into a cycle of which Peltola would win in the contingency method: plurality of first-choice votes.  Also I know that Bottom-Two Runoff IRV would also elect Peltola for the same basic reason.

Now, if RP wv were used, it seems to me that the candidate elected, in this 3-candidate case, would have the greatest sum of first and second choices, like Bucklin.  Or Approval where "approved" means top two rankings.  The reason is that sum is equal to the winning votes in the head-to-head runoff against the candidate not included in the sum.

So now, if I have to sell this to civilians and to policy makers (but not people like on this mailing list) I have to make a case why the this Condorcet-Bucklin method (some might call it "Condorcet-Approval") is a better choice than Condorcet-Plurality or Condorcet-TTR.

How do I sell this (say Ranked-Pairs wv) to a pedestrian voter or to a policy maker that is not as sophisticated as people on this mailing list?

> Second, even if they didn't, I don't trust them enough to expect whatever software lets them calculate the results will be thoroughly tested. "But there's plenty of free, open-source, off-the-shelf implementations of Schulze! It can't be that hard to just pick one and—" is exactly what I used to say about IRV.
> 

Again, I have no worry about writing software to implement a method.  I don't think legislators want to have the software that someone else wrote to dictate to them what method to enact into law.  I think they want to dictate to the software implemented in voting systems the rules they think are correct.

> Finally, even if the legislators get it got it right, I don't really trust voters to use it correctly. In particular, I'm starting to doubt that voters have the intelligence or understanding needed to play good strategies that elect the Condorcet winner in Schulze or RP, because they're not immediately obvious. Maybe they can work it out if you make the strategy blatantly obvious with implicit approval, but I doubt they could otherwise. I'll send an email with more details soon.
> 

I touched on this before.  Just wanna add that we should simply expect voters to vote in a manner that they *perceive* to be in their best political interest.  It might not *be* in their best political interest, but they think it is.  Then we don't wanna be like Borda and say "My system is only intended for honest men."  We should *not* bet on voters voting sincerely, if they are convinced that their insincere vote is a better bet.  This is why Duverger's law works in FPTP.  Voters are discouraged from voting for their favorite candidate if they think their 2nd-favorite candidate has a far better chance of defeating their least-favorite candidate.   This is why voters "waste" their vote.  Is wasting one's vote the only "sincere" vote?

But if a voter does not comprehend how some tactic or strategy other than sincerity would better promote their political interests, then that leaves sincerity in representing one's preference as the only motivation.  And the meaning of the ballot is the same in Condorcet as in IRV (which is why we can use the same cast vote records to compare how the two methods would do in a particular election).  Then the voting tactic is simply:  Who's your favorite candidate?  Mark them #1.  Now, imagine that your favorite candidate was not running at all, from the group of remaining candidates, then who would be your choice?  Rank them #2.  etc.

--

r b-j . _ . _ . _ . _ rbj at audioimagination.com

"Imagination is more important than knowledge."

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