<div dir="auto"><div><br><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Mon, Feb 27, 2023, 4:35 PM Richard, the VoteFair guy <<a href="mailto:electionmethods@votefair.org" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer">electionmethods@votefair.org</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">On 2/26/2023 9:47 PM, Forest Simmons wrote:<br>
> Here's my question: do simulations carry any weight<br>
> with the public? Or do they just care about choice<br>
> of buzz words and phrases like democracy; majority<br>
> rule, etc?<br>
<br>
I have not seen hardly anyone in the "public" realm who initially seems <br>
to care about simulations.<br>
<br>
Mostly they care about "who will win?" "which party does it favor?" <br>
"does it empower minorities?" and most of all: "Can I understand it? And <br>
does it make sense?"<br></blockquote></div></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">These two questions should be important to everyone ... especially method designers.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">Another important question is efficiency and transparency of tally... a big weakness of IRV.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">Also ... is sincere strategy optimal? Or do voters have to reverse their ballot preferences to protect their sincere preferences.</div><div dir="auto"><div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
<br>
For the latter, the FairVote organization has popularized the notion of <br>
eliminating one candidate at a time. It's easier to comprehend. <br>
Especially compared to something like the Smith set. Even the Condorcet <br>
winner concept is difficult for many, many voters to understand.<br>
<br>
Aside: I've had success educating "the public" about the idea that a <br>
"pairwise losing candidate" -- which is a simpler variation of <br>
"Condorcet loser" -- deserves to be eliminated. A soccer analogy helps: <br>
if a soccer team loses against every other team then it shouldn't be <br>
possible for that team to win. (This is one of the two refinements over <br>
IRV that the RCIPE method, mentioned below, offers. The other <br>
refinement is to count ballots that the FairVote folks wants to discard <br>
as an "overvote.")<br></blockquote></div></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">Great work!</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">What did you think about the Martin Harper solution to the "over vote" problem?</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto"><div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
<br>
Yet simulations can be useful _IF_ the results are presented as a <br>
_GRAPHIC_ that compares "your" methods with familiar methods.<br>
<br>
I created a graphic (at the following link) that shows failure rates</blockquote></div></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">What constitutes "failure"? If we have notions of success and failure that appeal to voters we can design our methods around them. Which criteria of success and failure measures by your graphics appeal the most to them?</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto"><div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"> for <br>
RCIPE (ranked choice including pairwise elimination) and IPE (instant <br>
pairwise elimination)</blockquote></div></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">How is IPE received? That is the focus of my recent efforts ... nominal elimination criteria backed up with pairwise confirmation when possible ... else pairwise over-ridden ... in a way that makes burial, chicken defection, and other insincere manipulations likely to backfire.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">Does the public care about that?</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">I ask because that is the main focus of our simulations.</div><div dir="auto"> </div><div dir="auto"><div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"> plotted along with IRV, plurality, Borda, and <br>
Kemeny. That graphic has been helpful to some people who already <br>
understand IRV and have heard about Condorcet methods.<br>
<br>
<a href="http://votefair.org/clone_iia_success_rates.png" rel="noreferrer noreferrer noreferrer" target="_blank">http://votefair.org/clone_iia_success_rates.png</a><br>
<br>
In this sense such a graphic is like a Yee diagram. Most people <br>
intuitively recognize that the Yee diagram for IRV reveals that method <br>
has serious flaws. (However, trying to explain Yee diagrams is not <br>
fruitful.)<br></blockquote></div></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">Too bad ... it's pretty simple as far as graphics go ... the color of each pixel is the color that identifies the candidate who would win if the voters were distributed symmetrically about that pixel.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">It's a huge mistake to introduce two dimensional Yee diagrams without first getting students comfortable with one dimensional Yee diagrams. </div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">If you do a good job in the one dimensional case, the two dimensional case is pretty much optional ... Galileo didn't need the Hubble telescope to get the basic picture ... nor did Van Leeuwenhoek need an electron scanning microscope.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto"><div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
<br>
The fans of STAR voting have gotten lots of mileage from their graphs of <br>
VSE (voter satisfaction efficiency). Alas most people don't realize <br>
that the "efficiency" is meaningful among a group of friends or <br>
cooperative people, but is not meaningful in governmental elections <br>
where strength of opinion violates the principle of "one person one vote."<br></blockquote></div></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">But STAR is a runoff like IRV in which the winner is determined by which candidate gets a majority preference in the final pairwise contest. Each participating voter has one vote in that contest ... all of the previous stages are clumsy jockeying to see who the two finalists are for the actual one-person-one-vote contest.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">But, you say, "Every stage of IRV serves to shuttle the voter's 'vote' from the first stage to the final stage."</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">But those stages form a very lossy channel for the "vote" signal.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">Those stages are plagued by vote splitting, center squeeze, etc.... Without the pairwise check of RCIPE they have very little democratic validity ... just superficial correlation with suitability for continued participation versus elimination.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto"><span style="font-family:sans-serif">[Martin Harper invented his method to disentangle the ultimate over-vote ..</span></div><div dir="auto"><span style="font-family:sans-serif">approval itself, to find the logical destination of the "one vote" of the "one person" who voted a given approval ballot. His solution was to add it to the total of the ballot approved candidate with the most support from the other voters. Your one vote goes to the candidate you approve with the best chance of winning. The generalized Martin Harper rule accomplishes the same disentanglement for score ballots ... to give them "one ballot, one vote" compliance ... a way of deducing who "got the vote" of the person who submitted the ballot.]</span><br></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">As far as unequal vote strength goes ...</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">Just as score gives more strength to high ratings .. so IRV gives more strength to high rankings ... which (in both cases) is a big incentive for insincerely ranking compromise over favorite ... the important urgency of first place rankings and ratings (and their role in subverting sincere voting) cannot be ignored.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">That urgency wouldn't be there if the IRV big lie were true ..."go ahead and rank your favorite first ... if it doesn't win, your vote will transfer to your second choice."</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">RCIPE is an important corrective ... but other, more streamlined IPE variants are much more efficient, transparent, and practical... if only the public could understand that reality.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto"><span style="font-family:sans-serif">In score voting that compromise urgency makes score strategically equivalent to Approval ... strategically it would be just as good to do STAR with RCV ballots and approval cutoffs ... and have the runoff between the top two approval candidates.</span></div><div dir="auto"><span style="font-family:sans-serif"><br></span></div><div dir="auto"><font face="sans-serif">In that case there would be zero incentive for insincere rankings.</font></div><div dir="auto"><font face="sans-serif"><br></font></div><div dir="auto"><font face="sans-serif">In fact, any runoff method that picks the two finalists with a provisional set of ballots (approval, score, grade, judgment, RCV, whatever) and reserves a fresh set of RCV ballots for choosing between the two finalists ... gives zero incentive for insincere rankings on the final ballots.</font></div><div dir="auto"><font face="sans-serif"><br></font></div><div dir="auto"><font face="sans-serif">Any voters that want to abstain from that messy, provisional, strategical ballot should be able to do so, imho.</font></div><div dir="auto"><font face="sans-serif"><br></font></div><div dir="auto"><font face="sans-serif">What do you think about the VPB Vote for a Published Ballot option? </font></div><div dir="auto"><font face="sans-serif"><br></font></div><div dir="auto"><font face="sans-serif">It might get more participation from voters put off by the inconvenience of copying those recommendations onto a ballot in the voting booth.</font></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto"><div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
<br>
In summary, graphics that show many thousands of simulations for <br>
multiple methods are useful among informed voters.<br>
<br>
Such graphics are also useful for us, the experts. It reveals the <br>
extent to which a method is better than other methods.<br>
<br>
In other words, just looking at specific cases to identify failure <br>
possibilities is of limited use. In contrast, quantitative graphics <br>
that allow failure rates to be compared with familiar methods are quite <br>
useful.<br>
<br>
Not as "proofs" but as supporting evidence for claims about being "better."<br>
<br>
And such graphics answer the question "Is this 'better' method worth the <br>
extra effort it takes to understand it and calculate it?" If there is <br>
only a small gain, most people will say "no it's not worth the extra <br>
complication."<br>
<br>
Forest, I've enjoyed your speculations about better methods. It would <br>
be interesting to see graphics that show specific failure rates -- such <br>
as IIA, clone independence, burial resistance, chicken resistance, etc.</blockquote></div></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">That's exactly what we need. Kevin and Kristofer have created some top notch graphics along those lines to satisfy our curiosities ... but somebody needs to digest them and adapt them for public consumption.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto"><div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
Such graphic comparisons will reveal whether your improvements are big <br>
improvements or tiny improvements, and which methods excel at which <br>
characteristics.<br>
<br>
Then it will become easier to find a balance between mathematically <br>
ideal and "good enough" for use in real elections.<br>
<br>
Richard Fobes<br>
The VoteFair guy<br>
----<br>
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</blockquote></div></div></div>