[EM] Did someone not hear what I said about Approval vs Condorcet?

[Chris Benham]

Kristofer,

> I think your question assumes something that won't hold. If you have a 
> 25-candidate presidential election, you've already lost, because 
> nobody is going to rank 25 candidates, irrespective of whether the 
> method is Condorcet, IRV, or Borda.

So what?  Truncation should be allowed and so the voters will probably 
just do that to a lot of the candidates.  How is that a problem?

I should say that 25 candidates on the presidential ballot is more 
likely to be a success than some sort of "failure" because it might mean 
that ballot access has granted to serious candidates representing a wide 
range of opinions.

Alternatively they could all be ego-tripping corporate clones and/or 
unserious stooge candidates that are only running to help one of the 
major candidates by attracting voters who might otherwise stay home and 
then funnelling their preferences to that major candidate.

In 2003  there was California  gubernatorial election with 135 candidates.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_California_gubernatorial_recall_election#Results

Chris B.

On 26/05/2024 9:29 pm, Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote:
> On 2024-05-26 07:28, Michael Ossipoff wrote:
>> Someone keeps repeating that the voters shouldn’t have to vote 
>> strategically. He wants the method to do it all for us, after we 
>> merely state our sincere-rankings.
>>
>> That’s of course a common attitude:
>>
>> …wanting a high-tech, computation-intensive,computer-dependent system 
>> to do it all for us, taking all the actual choosing responsibility 
>> off of us.…sheltering & isolating us from the choice.
>
> I would prefer that you do not attribute opinions that the proponents 
> have not expressed. Nowhere have I said that Condorcet "[isolates] us 
> from the choice" we make.
>
> What you call "sheltering" and "isolating", I see as the method taking 
> proper responsibility - proper responsibility to turn the voters' 
> unambiguous honest opinions into an outcome without dumping the 
> algorithmic calculation upon te voter themselves. See my "kick the can 
> down the road" post for more info.
>
> Now, I could make a caricature of Approval itself. Perhaps something 
> about a calculator that just says "IDK, do the base conversion 
> yourself, I only accept input numbers in factoradic". But caricatures 
> only make people angry. Let's not stoop to them, shall we?
>
>> I’ll ask this for the 3^rd time:
>>
>> …
>>
>> How would like you to handount-audit a Condorcet count for a 
>> many-candidate national presidential election?
>
> I think your question assumes something that won't hold. If you have a 
> 25-candidate presidential election, you've already lost, because 
> nobody is going to rank 25 candidates, irrespective of whether the 
> method is Condorcet, IRV, or Borda.
>
> I'm not familiar with minor parties in the US. Has there ever been a 
> 25-candidate presidential election?
>
> I don't think I can comment beyond that: I don't know enough about 
> poll workers. I'll leave that to someone with experience. (Although 
> roughly calculating: suppose 6 candidates like in Burlington. That's 
> 30 pairs. Five times the work if counting a particular preference is 
> as before. So you'd either need 5x the workers, or five times the 
> time, or some combination of the two.)
>
> On an aside, though, I would say that I generally wouldn't want to get 
> computers anywhere near election counting. However, if you absolutely 
> have to have them, there are ways of making sure they don't cheat: 
> formal verification. You could also create special-purpose tools that 
> say, only turn ranks into matrices and nothing else: there's no reason 
> (apart from programmer convenience) why an election tool should be a 
> general purpose computer that you could hide all sorts of shenanigans in.
>
>> I’ve discussed that at length in previous posts, & it probably isn’t 
>> necessary to again post about ways of choosing how to vote in Approval.
>>
>> But, just summarize:It’s easy.Whichever of the various ways you 
>> prefer to use, for choosing whom to approve, it’s easy.…& no, it 
>> doesn’t require knowing your objectively-optimal vote.
>
>>
>> I’ve many times pointed out that Approval’s Myerson-Weber equilibrium 
>> is the voter-median.
>>
>> i.e. Approval soon homes in on where the Condorcet-Winner is.
>
> Not necessarily. See the following paper: 
> https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.04216v2
>
> According to the authors, under their model, if every voter follows a 
> particular thresholding rule, then iterative approval generally 
> arrives at the Condorcet winner (but not always). However, if voters 
> are left to choose any thresholding rule they want (as you propose), 
> then anything is possible. The arrangement might even elect a 
> Condorcet loser, and the outcome may be slow to converge or who wins 
> may depend on how many polls you hold.
>
> I'm reminded of a quote about distributed algorithms that I read 
> somewhere: "It's really easy to design distributed algorithms that 
> suffer from deadlock, network floods or widely unpredictable and 
> bizarre oscillations". That's in the context of computer science - 
> deadlocks might not be applicable to election methods. But it does 
> justify a starting position of skepticisim when considering schemes 
> that offload more of the work to the voters by turning a one-shot 
> method into a dynamical system.
>
>> It seems to me that, in every one of EM’s polls, including the recent 
>> one, Approval chose the CW.
>>
>> Have we forgotten that?
>
> I haven't, nor have I forgotten that Approval wasn't actually the poll 
> winner.
>
> But let's take this reasoning at face value. I don't have the other 
> polls' ballot data available at the moment, so let's consider the 
> latest one and pick... say, Borda.
>
> As one can see by going to 
> https://munsterhjelm.no/km/rbvote/calc.html, pasting in the data, and 
> clicking Borda, Ranked Pairs is also the Borda winner.
>
> But I don't think I'm going to start advocating for Borda.
>
>
> To not be accused of tu quoque, let me clarify the point. As 
> Burlington shows, an election method needs to handle the hard cases, 
> not just the easy ones, or there may be a considerable uproar when the 
> method is faced with a hard case and then stumbles. (In addition, 
> people trying to make sure a stumble doesn't happen may start to do 
> mass compromising, further entrenching two-party rule.)
>
> So it's quite possible that our polls are easy cases. But like 
> FairVote claiming that IRV gets the Condorcet winner more than 90% of 
> the time, that doesn't by itself tell us much, because the failures 
> have such a strong impact.
>
> I illustrate the example above by picking a method we know to be bad 
> (Borda being so extremely easy to fool with cloning and burial), and 
> showing that the poll result comes out right. If a bad method can get 
> a good result, then "getting a good result" is less useful than it 
> might appear at first glance.
>
> -km
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