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

Sun May 26 22:11:48 PDT 2024

…& of course multiply that 18090 by the number of ballots, to get an idea
of what’s involved in the 18090 order-determinations to be done on each
ballot, & recorded, &  then summed, to obtain each of the 18090 pairwise
vote-totals.

…each of which then must be carried or transmitted to where the central
count is done.

On Sun, May 26, 2024 at 22:03 Michael Ossipoff <email9648742 at gmail.com>
wrote:

>
>
> 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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