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

[Michael Ossipoff]

On Sun, May 26, 2024 at 12:56 Chris Benham <cbenhamau at yahoo.com.au> wrote:

>
> In 2003  there was California  gubernatorial election with 135 candidates.


That’s 18090 pairwise vote-totals to determine at each precinct from the
rankings, by examining each ranking to determine which member of each
possible candidate-pair is ranked over the other on that ballot.

…& 18080 pairwise vote-totals for the precincts to sum, store, & transmit
or carry to the central count location.

…& verify in an audit.



>
>
> 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
> > ----
> > Election-Methods mailing list - see https://electorama.com/em for list
> > info
>
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