[EM] Question to the Condorcetists

[Michael Ossipoff]

Yes, just a matter of, for each voter, decrementing the population-total of
every pairwise-preference s/he voted.  …& applying RP(wv) to that modified
population preference-totals set. But, other than looking at that voter’s
ballot, no new votecounting is needed.

The entire Participation-check only takes half as long as the original
exhaustive pairwise-count used by Condorcet.



> Couldn't this new procedure still violate participation?
>

Not if it’s Implicit-Approval (ranked = approved).


What if adding ballots[i] with A>B would cause B>A, but B also happens to
> win under implicit approval voting?
>

That occurred to me too. Well I’d say that the important thing is that
after the illegal Participation-failure result is discarded, then even if
IA gives the same winner, this time it didn’t happen as a
Participation-violation.

The discarding makes the election innocent.

But Steve is right: For any one of us, the minuscule chance of a preference
of ours being negatively responded-to doesn’t even come close to
outweighing the strategy-freeness for which RP(wv) is being used.

>
>
> On Thu, Feb 29, 2024 at 4:02 PM Michael Ossipoff <email9648742 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> Yes, I too feel that though Consistency-failure is an embarrassment, it’s
>> Participation-failure—where a particular voter should have stayed home—that
>> is the rights-violation.
>>
>> Yes, maybe there’s some big subset of the voters, say 37%, such that, if
>> they’d stayed home the result of applying the method to the other 63%
>> (which would then have been the actual election-result) would have been the
>> same as the result of applying it to them separately…but, because they
>> voted, a different result happened.
>>
>> That doesn’t sound as bad as Participation-failure.
>>
>> 1. That 37%’s hypothetical collective-choice by the method isn’t as
>> definite & stark as a person’s expressed-preference.
>>
>> 2. A *different outcome* from the hypothetical result of applying the
>> method to the 37% isn’t as concretely clearly wrong as outright
>> negative-response to someone’s expressed preference.
>>
>> …& that’s a good thing, because checking for Consistency-failure is what
>> DOES sound computationally infeasible due to the many ways of dividing a
>> large electorate into 2 par.
>>
>> Checking for Participation-failure would just be a matter of, for each
>> voter, doing the count without hir ballot & determining whether that
>> changes the winner to someone s/he ranked above the actual winner.
>>
>> With 300,000,000 voters that isn’t infeasible with today’s computers is
>> it?
>>
>> I should have asked:
>>
>> In Germany, is Consistency-failure unconstitutional? That might be a
>> problem for Condorcet. If only Participation-failure is unconstitutional,
>> then wouldn’t Kobe computationally-feasible to check for that?
>>
>> When a Participation-failure is found, then elect the winner by
>> Implicit-Approval.
>>
>> In wv, not ranking candidates you don’t like is good defensive-strategy
>> anyway. If it’s known that many people vote that way, wv’s already good
>> burial-deterrence is further enhanced.
>>
>>
>>
>> On Thu, Feb 29, 2024 at 10:06 Closed Limelike Curves <
>> closed.limelike.curves at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> That seems to exclude participation failures except in the case
>>> of near-ties; I think adding a batch of ballots, all of which rank A>B,
>>> shouldn't cause B to defeat A.
>>>
>>> I don't think we need perfect consistency, just participation.
>>> Consistency failures are paradoxical, but consistency is a very
>>> strong criterion and isn't needed for the weaker case of participation
>>> (which limits consistency to the ). It's also strong enough that it
>>> could lock you into Kemeny-Young (the unique order-consistent Condorcet
>>> method).
>>>
>>> Checking for participation naively definitely isn't feasible, so we'd
>>> need a more elegant approach.
>>>
>>> Alternatively, we could try finding a Condorcet system that violates
>>> participation "as little as possible," in the sense that any participation
>>> failures are forced by Condorcet-compliance. A judge might be willing
>>> to sign off on that, since it's a tradeoff between two similarly-important
>>> values (equal protection and majority rule).
>>>
>>> On Wed, Feb 28, 2024 at 10:30 PM Michael Ossipoff <
>>> email9648742 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Maybe it might be good enough to just require that there must not be a
>>>> Participation-violation with respect to any one of the voters, had s/he
>>>> voted last?
>>>>
>>>> On Wed, Feb 28, 2024 at 22:17 Michael Ossipoff <email9648742 at gmail.com>
>>>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Well I don’t know if the Consistency-check would be
>>>>> Computationally-feasible, because of course there are a lot of ways to
>>>>> divide a large electorate into 2 parts.
>>>>>
>>>>> That might be one more good reason to use Approval instead, for those
>>>>> single-winner elections.
>>>>>
>>>>> On Wed, Feb 28, 2024 at 22:07 Michael Ossipoff <email9648742 at gmail.com>
>>>>> wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>> I call RP(wv) with that modification “Nonsense-Free RP(wv)”, &
>>>>>> propose it for Germany’s single-winner elections, including the single
>>>>>> member district elections in their Additional-Member proportional
>>>>>> topping-up Parliamentary elections.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> On Wed, Feb 28, 2024 at 21:47 Michael Ossipoff <
>>>>>> email9648742 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> On Wed, Feb 28, 2024 at 21:07 Closed Limelike Curves <
>>>>>>> closed.limelike.curves at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> . Some alternative criterion that gets us "99% of the way to
>>>>>>>>> Condorcet," so it behaves like Condorcet except in the rare cases where it
>>>>>>>>> conflicts with participation (or maybe just mono-add-top/remove-bottom).
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> There might be better ways, but there’s always the lexicographical
>>>>>>> way. The criterion could require that Participation (& other
>>>>>>> non-opposite-response criteria) & Consistency be met.  …& that the voted
>>>>>>> CW, when there is one must be elected when that doesn’t conflict with the
>>>>>>> above requirements.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> A complying method could just repeat that wording, along with a
>>>>>>> specification about what to do if there’s no voted CW, & what to do if the
>>>>>>> ballot-configuration is such that additional of a new ballot could violate
>>>>>>> Participation, or if some division of the electorate into 2 parts could
>>>>>>> show a Consistency violation.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Maybe apply Implicit-Approval to the ballots then. (Ranked =
>>>>>>> approved)
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> On Wed, Feb 28, 2024 at 8:57 PM Closed Limelike Curves <
>>>>>>>> closed.limelike.curves at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>> It’s surprising that participation-violation is unconstitutional
>>>>>>>>>> in Germany, because, here, even Hare’s greater nonmonotonicity is okay.
>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>> I'm actually not sure it is--the Supreme Court has never ruled on
>>>>>>>>> , and courts also haven't ruled on the constitutionality of non-monotone
>>>>>>>>> voting rules. STV has been upheld as constitutional in the past, but the
>>>>>>>>> challenges were never brought over monotonicity failures. It's entirely
>>>>>>>>> possible a new challenge could overturn it; there's a strong argument that
>>>>>>>>> monotonicity failures violate due process and the equal protection clause.
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>> The ideal case to bring to the Supreme Court would have been for
>>>>>>>>> Begich's campaign to sue after the 2022 Alaska election. A moderate
>>>>>>>>> Republican plaintiff is appealing to the mostly-Republican Supreme
>>>>>>>>> Court, without being too controversial. Being the Condorcet winner makes
>>>>>>>>> his case look even stronger.
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>> On the other hand, if someone says the word "monotonicity" in
>>>>>>>>> front of a judge, their eyes will glaze over and they'll immediately stop
>>>>>>>>> caring about all this weird, complicated nerd math. The way to explain
>>>>>>>>> participation failures is to run a ton of ads explaining to Alaska
>>>>>>>>> Republicans that Begich lost because *he got* *too many votes. *
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>> One suggestion: why not rename monotonicity to "helpfulness?"
>>>>>>>>> (Voting should help your candidate, not hurt them). We can call
>>>>>>>>> monotonicity failures "spitefulness" (because the system is going out of
>>>>>>>>> its way to do the opposite of what you ask it to).
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>> On Wed, Feb 28, 2024 at 11:32 AM Michael Ossipoff <
>>>>>>>>> email9648742 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>> 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.
>>>>>>>>>>> ----
>>>>>>>>>>> Election-Methods mailing list - see https://electorama.com/em
>>>>>>>>>>> for list info
>>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>
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