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One problem I see is the issue of score granularity. If few scores were available — say, 0-5 — then you'd have to give up a significant amount of first-round power in order to get second-round expressivity.
For me personally, I'd be happy with a compromise where the available scores were (say) 0,1,25,50,75,98,99,100. But I'm pretty sure that idea would be a non-starter with your average voter ("Huh?"). Perhaps if you phrased it in terms of letter grades - ABCDF are worth 50,40,30,20,0, then '+' or '-' are worth 1 point up or down.
Falls into all the usual paradoxes that runoff schemes usually get zapped by.
(Nonmonotonicity, fails to elect Condorcet winner, failure of participation, failure of district partitionability.)
More complicated than plain range voting and probably performs worse, too.
A non-instant-runoff 2nd round would at least encourage voter honesty.
--aha, but that is for a separate runoff round, not combined "instantly."
Which makes no difference for honest voters, but likely quite a bit for strategic ones.
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--But mostly I would expect voters to dishonestly score the Dem maximum and
the Republican minimum (or vice versa) to try to increase impact of
their vote.
This kind of NES (naive exaggeration strategy)
is very common for Australian rank-order voters (observed fact, not
just hypothesis;
about 80-90% of Australian ballots are in this style),
and it causes distortion which
causes worse winner on average than if all voters had been 100% honest.
(Which is confirmed by computer sims, not just a hypothesis.)
The point of adding a top-2 genuine runoff 2nd round is that voters
will always be honest in that 2nd round, thus hopefully correcting for
this distortion in the 1st round (which involves much dishonest
voting). Hopefully, this correction
effect would give us more gains than losses.
But if you instead add a fake 2nd round (really just regurgitating the
votes from round #1 "instantly") then the distortion is just re-used
with no corrective effect! Pointless!
Now: for the proposed "instant score off"
system IF we permit continuum scores,
it might not be this bad, because Nader voters who understood all that could
vote in round #1 like this:
NADER=9
GORE=8.99999
BUSH=0
A different way to view the "instant" 2nd round which sounds a lot worse
to me than Clay Shentrup's view is:
"Find the top two A & B.
If A beats B on scores, but B is preferred over A by majority, then B wins."
So we are artificially replacing the right winner with the wrong
winner in this circumstance.
Old-style score voting had the benefit that in a "tyranny of majority
situation" such as a vote on whether to "enslave blacks," the minority
(with honest voting) could still win.
Almost no voting system besides score enjoys this benefit.
With the instant 2nd round added, that unique benefit is sacrificed.
Let me give concrete example. Let's say with an 0-9 scale, that
NADER is the best winner with honest average score 6. Meanwhile all
voters honestly regard GORE
and BUSH as 2 to 8, but exaggerate them to 0 and 9. Meanwhile assume NADER is
left honestly scored. If neither GORE or BUSH is
preferred over the other by a 2:1 margin or more, then
the (good) result with plain score voting is:
NADER wins with 6, while BUSH and GORE both have below 6, as mean scores.
With instant score-off, say NADER & BUSH are the 2 finalists, then
BUSH automatically
wins the final thanks to the exaggerating of BUSH scores by a voter majority.
E.g. here are 3 fully explicit examples of this or related stuff
...
In all these examples NADER was the "best" winner using honest score
voting, also with dishonest-exagg votes despite the distortion NADER still wins
with plain score; but Nader is denied by score+instant.
In the last of these 3 elections, N would win with score+instant if
the voters in the 2nd line exaggerated BUSH to only 8.9999.
If you do not love NADER, just realize this same pathology would
happen with *any*
2 major parties plus one (overall better) 3rd party candidate
appealing to all sides.
So we might very justifiably worry that the score+instant system would
yield 2-party domination. And I think this scenario is not artificial,
it is quite realistic.
Pretty damning in my view.
In case you are wondering, 2-party domination is pretty nearly a death
blow for democracy, removing the "market of choices," making big money
domination and corruption much easier, and removing entire classes of
ideas from even being able to be
discussed at all in the legislature -- and renders improved voting
systems largely irrelevant.
--A fine fantasy. Reality is the Australian ballot behavior, however
which shows that
Australian voters, 80-90% of the time, vote one of the two major
parties top and the other bottom or 2nd bottom out of about 7 parties
on ballot each time. Despite
their "knowledge" that this will yiel 2-party domination, they do it anyway,
Similarly, despite in the USA, voter's "knowledge" that by refusing to
vote 3rd party, they will et 2-party domination, they do so anyway.
Wake up: some systems react badly to common strategies, and I refuse
to accept some pollyanna fantasy that voters will realize those
strategies lead to bad effects hence not use them. That is a fantasy
which has
been disproven over and over in 100+ years of real world experience.
That is the major reason we NEED better voting systems!
>> NADER=9
>> GORE=8.99999
>> BUSH=0
>>
>
> If we're trying to remove distortion, less resolution would actually be
> favorable.
--huh?
> Once scoring is in place politically, it's pretty easy to change the
> computation formula if it looks like it would be preferable.
--I do not know what that meant. But I think if you have a system
whose rules keep getting tweaked by the politicians to make sure they
keep getting elected, that is a disaster just like gerrymandering. If
you or anybody therefore are actually RECOMMENDING that as the right
course of action (?!), BEWARE!
I personally would be EXTREMELY wary of any voting "reformer" who
advocated such tweakage.
--Plain score voting is simpler than instant+score. It works better.
Plain score also is simpler than top2runoff+score (genuine 2nd round).
However in
the latter case, which one is better is not so clear; it depends on
the fractions of voters who are honest & strategic. Adding a
top2runoff can yield better Bayesian Regret than
plain score voting, if there are enough exaggerators in the voter
population, but the
fraction of exaggerators needed is fairly high and the gains are fairly small.
The ballot looks exactly the same as a normal score ballot. How would people confuse that as a ranking?
The problem I have with this is that I think the ballot will confuse a significant portion of the people. Too many people misunderstand a simple regular ranking.
--
The problem I have with this is that I think the ballot will confuse a significant portion of the people. Too many people misunderstand a simple regular ranking.
> Depends on your definition of working better. Failing to elect the
> candidate a majority prefer has been a huge criticism of score voting.
> This should basically fix that criticism.
--It isn't a "criticism." It is an "advantage." It improves Bayesian regret with honest voters, and leave it the same with strategic voters.
But in any case it is quite rare in real life that range voting elects A while
a majority prefers B. This "thwarted majority" phenomenon seems to
happen considerably more often with IRV than with score voting.
In view of that fact, I find it quite odd that the IRV propagandists
at "FairVote" have the balls to consider this a "criticism" of score
voting.
In my attempts to find a real life example of score voting thwarted
majority, the closest
I ever came was the following election: 2009 Los Angeles Mayor race, see
http://www.rangevoting.org/LAmayors.html
I didn't read it carefully. I assumed there was a ranking and a rating.
--you're wrong according to the poll data here
http://rangevoting.org/WhatVotersWant.html ;
despite the "disadvantage" that score can go against a majority
preference (which actually is an advantage) the fact is, people want
score and would enact it, and it seems more enactible based on this
data than any rival voting system. If you disagree, find poll data
saying the contrary, not just your barefaced assertion. Your
barefaced assertion conceivably still correct even though it goes
against my poll data because as far as I have been able to tell, the
ultimate poll study on this crucial question has not been done; the
polls that were done all are subject to criticism to some extent.
Still, based on the data I've got, plain score voting is highly
enactible and your worries are wrong.
--they exaggerated Nader also to max. The result of both
exaggerations was to pretend Nader=Bush=max.
Now despite your saying "not a very smart strategy" what seems to have
difficulty penetrating is the fact that real voters in Australia use
exactly this strategy 80-90% of the time. Are you interested in the
real world, or in a fantasy world in which voters act like you claim
to act? I mean, this Australian fact is massive, overwhelming
evidence
for the commonness and importance of naive exaggeration strategy,
which in their case is not merely pretending Nader=Bush, but actually
pretending Bush>Nader since rank-equalities for them are forbidden.
Similarly in the USA, actual real polls of actual real voters found
that 90% of those who honestly thought Nader was the best, voted for
one of his rivals. Again, this was not merely pretending that
Nader=Bush, but pretending Bush>Nader.
I repeat. 90%. This is one of the most massive findings in all of
political science.
At some point, massive overwhelming evidence from the real world has
to overwhelm
fantasies about how one wishes things were.
> I'd be very interested to see how it simulates across many election
> permutations vs. other systems you've simulated.
--sigh, well, maybe I'll put it into my simulator, which is available
public source if anybody else wanted to do it:
http://rangevoting.org/IEVS/IEVS.c
and 2-party domination is a huge disaster, we should try to play it
safe. There are systems which seem more and less likely to yield 2PD.
Why choose one of the "more"s
when you get no benefits in return, except for a currently completely
unsupported fantasy about enactibility?
> Again, plurality voting punishes honest support of a favorite candidate so
> yields two party domination. How does this apply to score+instant?
--it applies, but to a lesser extent, due to desires to "maximize impact"
via exaggeration in round #1. If your honest view is Dem=5, Repub=4
on an 0-9 scale, then you are a total idiot if you honestly vote 5 &
4, because your impact is reduced
by a factor 9.
Do you want to be that stupid and ineffectual about the only sub-race
that matters? For a lot of people, their answer will be "no." This
is the case no matter how much you or I or anybody tells them they are
taking a dangerous strategy. (And your advice to them would in any
case be swamped by huge-money loud-blaring advice from the Dem & Repub
parties to "pay no attention to Mark about this.") And then with
score+instant this distortion is re-used and thus amplified by the
pseudo-2nd-round, whereas with plain score it occurs without re-use,
and with score+genuine runoff this distortion actually is reduced.
I do not know if score+instant would yield 2PD, it just seems a
greater risk than with
plain score voting or score+genuine runoff.
>> > If we're trying to remove distortion, less resolution would actually be
>> > favorable.
>>
>> --huh?
>
> The voter has an incentive to express favoritism as well as score. In IRV
> if I rank Nader 1st, my second choice scores zero in the first round and
> may get knocked out before I can help him with my vote. In score+runoff, I
> want to differentiate between my favorite and my second favorite, so I'll
> rate my favorite as the highest score, and my second choice as highest
> score - 1. A lower resolution score yields a greater delta between favorite
> and second favorite.
--no, you do not terribly want "to differentiate between my favorite
and my second favorite"; you want more to differentiate between
SOCIETY's 1st & 2nd favorite's.
That's the place where the impact is. You want to maximize your vote's
impact on what matters. Hence you vote (say) Bush=9, Gore=0, even if
you honestly feel Nader=9, Bush=5, Gore=4. Now Score+Instant with
continuum scores would allow you to
do Nader=9, Bush=8.9999, Gore=0 getting almost-maximal impact on Bush
vs Gore, while still preferring Nader in round #2. So in principle
Score+instant WITH CONTINUUM SCORES would enable voters to
almost-overcome my whole naive-exagg/2PD objection
to score+instant.
On Oct 20, 2014 7:40 PM, "William Waugh" <google_wil...@spamgourmet.com> wrote:
>
> What if the ballot contained a score section for the first phase of the tallying, and below it, a ranking section for the top-two phase? I guess most voters would say, "why do you need all that complexity", and they'd dismiss the idea, and go back to saying "Voter ID".
Yes William. The advantage of using scores is that the ranks can be trivially derived from the scores. This idea actually came out of a conversation with Rob Richie at the equal vote conference ... He suggested that approval plus top two could be done on one ballot (for overseas voters and the like) if there was an approval part and a rank order. By using score you get rid of the need for two separate ways of describing your vote.
>
> As for the point that advocates of Score-off could be accused of "lying", maybe they could forestall that by saying "we believe plain Score is slightly better, but we want to compromise with another faction with whom we are not in full agreement, so as to achieve unity around a system we think will work much better than Plurality to deliver nearly equal political power to each citizen."
Well partly it's for consensus, but also I believe the system would discourage strategic score voting because the voter has to sacrifice his ability to express second round preference if he either fully naively exaggerated or fully bullet votes.
Under what conditions that would beat out pure score is a question for the mighty oracles of election simulation (whether or not they think voters will actually vote in that less strategic way).
>
> On Sunday, October 12, 2014 2:32:38 AM UTC-4, Clay Shentrup wrote https://groups.google.com/d/msg/electionscience/JK82EFn7nrs/Lble3V2CW4UJ and there were lots of comments following up.
>
On Oct 20, 2014 7:40 PM, "William Waugh" <google_wil...@spamgourmet.com> wrote:
>
> What if the ballot contained a score section for the first phase of the tallying, and below it, a ranking section for the top-two phase? I guess most voters would say, "why do you need all that complexity", and they'd dismiss the idea, and go back to saying "Voter ID".Yes William. The advantage of using scores is that the ranks can be trivially derived from the scores.
--
> Yes William. The advantage of using scores is that the ranks can be
> trivially derived from the scores.
--except if equal...
> This idea actually came out of a
> conversation with Rob Richie at the equal vote conference ... He suggested
> that approval plus top two could be done on one ballot (for overseas voters
> and the like) if there was an approval part and a rank order. By using
> score you get rid of the need for two separate ways of describing your
> vote.
--Oh great, it figures a bad idea like this would come from Rob Richie...
>> As for the point that advocates of Score-off could be accused of "lying",
> maybe they could forestall that by saying "we believe plain Score is
> slightly better, but we want to compromise with another faction with whom
> we are not in full agreement, so as to achieve unity around a system we
> think will work much better than Plurality to deliver nearly equal
> political power to each citizen."
>
> Well partly it's for consensus,
--failed at that...
> but also I believe the system would
> discourage strategic score voting because the voter has to sacrifice his
> ability to express second round preference if he either fully naively
> exaggerated or fully bullet votes.
--groan. "I know, let's intentionally make a system that reacts
badly to strategic voting,
because that'll discourage strategic voting!" That plan never worked
in the history of the universe, far as I can tell...
> Under what conditions that would beat out pure score is a question for the
> mighty oracles of election simulation (whether or not they think voters
> will actually vote in that less strategic way).
--arghh. This all is a fix of a non-problem. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
To understand one reason it was a non-problem, consider
http://rangevoting.org/AppCW.html
(very simple argument offered).
But the fake second round idea, is just stupid. It does not correct
for strategic distortions. It does not correct for anything. It in
fact takes valuable score data you'd painstakingly gathered, and
intentionally throws it in the garbage just at the crux
point of deciding the winner, intentionally using worse/less data for
that crux decision.
It also cavalierly sacrifices just about every logical property plain
score enjoys (simplicity, monotonicity, voting is better than not
voting, subdistrict consistency).
So:
* Richie often does not know what a "problem" with a voting method is.
* Richie does not know which problems are common & which not.
He's often promulgated huge lies on that.
* Richie does not know which things voters want and which they do not.
He often announces he does, though.
* Richie often simply flat out lies.
Sorry to be a downer about Rob Richie, but that's how he's been for
many years. Decades. His only published article was incorrect and
indeed flat out
contradicted one of the most important theorems (the most?) in voting theory.
That was enough to ruin the career of any academic voting theorist,
but just his starting point.
You tried to get something mildly like it on a ballot, and you failed.
Did you fail because
of fracture with Rob Richie? I don't think that was the cause, do you?
Polls indicate, if Score Voting is put on a ballot referendum, it will
probably pass.
At the first approximation, it is that simple.
It is just that there are considerable financial / labor obstacles to
getting it on a referendum ballot, that is all. Rob Richie conned and
lied his way to getting a lot of money, hence was able to get IRV on
some referenda, and sometimes it passed, unfortunately.
There also is indication, that voting systems should NOT be made complicated.
Here, yet another web page you can ignore, is some stuff about comprehension in
the real world of voting systems. You will observe that even a small amount
of complexity poses a problem in the real world with the substantial
fraction of voters who speak other languages, etc:
http://www.rangevoting.org/Comprehension.html
--huh? Actually, I suspect naive exaggeration strategy is highly
popular with voters in essentially ANY rank-order voting system,
REGARDLESS OF THE RULES, contrary to your final sentence here, and
know of no evidence contradicting that.
--you can keep on ignoring all the arguments I find (did you even read
it?), and common sense itself... and to some extent, as I keep
pointing out but you keep ignoring, I already have simulated various
aspects of this, such as the fact that range voting is superior to
plurality voting even in 2-candidate elections, so therefore, your
"+instant" "improvement" is clearly a worsening, no further sim needed, QED.
>> But the fake second round idea, is just stupid. It does not correct
>> for strategic distortions. It does not correct for anything. It in
>> fact takes valuable score data you'd painstakingly gathered, and
>> intentionally throws it in the garbage just at the crux
>> point of deciding the winner, intentionally using worse/less data for
>> that crux decision.
>>
>
> Again, you're missing the point. It corrects strategic distortions by
> making the ideal strategic vote more honest.
--you do not know what the "ideal strategic vote" is.
In fact, nobody knows it. In fact game theory indicates there is no such thing
as optimal strategy in essentially all N-player games with N>2.
And if you do have some idea about strategy, the problem is, my sims
tend to have embedded in them, naive strategies. Not optimal
strategies, since they are not known and do not exist, in most cases.
So then if I ran a sim, you'd complain.
>> It also cavalierly sacrifices just about every logical property plain
>> score enjoys (simplicity, monotonicity, voting is better than not
>> voting, subdistrict consistency).
>>
>
> I thought you all were in favor of tossing logical properties in favor of
> Bayesian simulation.
--no, I'm not. Logical properties are a good guide. Especially for voting
system designers. BR simulations can be better, and to the extent we
can believe in the assumptions underlying the sim, they are indeed
more important since tell us
the thing we truly want to know. But they don't necessarily provide
you with much (sometimes not even any) understanding.
--arghh. This all is a fix of a non-problem. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
To understand one reason it was a non-problem, consider
http://rangevoting.org/AppCW.html
(very simple argument offered).
To "fix" a non-problem raised by a fool with zero evidence?
There are always idiots who make stupid criticisms of stuff. The
correct response
is to explain why they are wrong.
* Richie often does not know what a "problem" with a voting method is.
* Richie does not know which problems are common & which not.
He's often promulgated huge lies on that.
* Richie does not know which things voters want and which they do not.
He often announces he does, though.
* Richie often simply flat out lies.
Sorry to be a downer about Rob Richie, but that's how he's been for
many years. Decades. His only published article was incorrect and
indeed flat out
contradicted one of the most important theorems (the most?) in voting theory.
That was enough to ruin the career of any academic voting theorist,
but just his starting point.
range voting is superior to plurality voting even in 2-candidate elections
Clay, I recognize that academic debates and winning referenda are not
necessarily the same thing, but the closest approximation we have to
the latter, is actual evidence from polls about what voting methods
voters prefer.
Over and over, self-appointed experts with no evidence, proclaim they
know from the Power Of Their MInds, what people want
Therefore, they want to overturn 20 years of voting research to get nothing.
All because of the Awesome Power Of Their Self-Declared Internal
Confidence About What People Want.
And if Mark F. is concerned about fracture among voting reformers, I
point out, it is somewhat odd that almost his first move was to try to
create a new such fracture...
> I'm still quite passionate about Score Voting. I'm just expressing that
> R-IRV may actually fair better in the political/activist meme universe. And
> it's worth more investigation.
--fine.. investigate.
> I don't know that it's a fracture. After all, wouldn't you support R-IRV
> over IRV, TTR, or Plurality? Possibly even Approval Voting?
--I'm not sure. I think it ought to be better than Plurality, and probably IRV.
Not necessarily TTR or approval.
...There is also some sense in which it motivates a certain level of sincerity, given that your effect on the head-to-head matchup component is comparable in significance to your effect on picking the top two....
Negative votes load to confusion and have other problems. There is lots of psychological research here to draw from. Be empirical.
--
Negative votes load to confusion and have other problems. There is lots of psychological research here to draw from. Be empirical.
probably makes a good point. The general public is not very comfortable with negative numbers and actually using them in a ballot might confuse some; there likely would be serious problems reading and interpreting ballots if they actually had to write + and - signs on the ballot.
The other mention,
1. Minimum possible number of options before it reverts back to approval voting, making it the easiest range voting system to implement using existing voting machines.
2. Values can be expressly mapped to words like "Reject", "Neutral", and "Approve" to get rid of the negative value problem, as voters would be hard pressed to mistakenly mark "Reject" where they mean "Approve."
3. Third parties get all the benefits of normal approval voting, and because of the "Neutral" value, third party candidates will likely be less "Reject"ed than the less liked major party. This is especially true in gerrymandered districts where a large number of voters are going to default vote for one major party, against the other, and likely be in the middle about third party candidates. As such this should still allow for the nursery effect.
I admit {-1, 0, +1} doesn't have the same discriminatory power of larger ranges, but
it feels easier to implement, with less change from our existing voting
system. It achieves many of the goals desired in Range Voting, even if it
doesn't have quite the same power.
makes clear it is quite easy to avoid that conceptual problem as well as the penmanship issue.
I don't have any actual psychological studies or even any epidemiological studies to quote but, like me, you have probably heard popular calls for having "none of the above" as an option on the ballot. I would note that any balanced system (a system that allows an equal opportunity for casting a vote against a candidate as to vote for a candidate) actually does provide such an option. Such a system is not at all confusing and the ballot can be quite simple.
A contrary argument for {-1, 0, +1} score-set (Professor Brian W. Goldman)
makes clear it is quite easy to avoid that conceptual problem as well as the penmanship issue.
Clay, you should read the full link you just posted. It contradicts you regarding -1,0,1.
Well that's all well and good. Just saying that link doesn't support your claim.
--
Well that's all well and good. Just saying that link doesn't support your claim.
Contradicted later: "French voters in an exit poll study (see this) preferred both 3-point scales {-1, 0, +1} and {0, 1, 2} (about equally) over {0, 1} (approval voting)"
Contradicted later: "French voters in an exit poll study (see this) preferred both 3-point scales {-1, 0, +1} and {0, 1, 2} (about equally) over {0, 1} (approval voting)"
But sure, handwave away what people actually say they like, because they're dumb laypeople and not experts. Or we could accept that the voters are the users and that their opinions on usability matter.
That's one test, sure. Whether they like it is another test, and whether they understand the mechanics is yet another.
Anyway you're giving zero evidence that range3 (-1,0,1) suffers from an "erroneous vote" problem of any kind. And hey, the Venetians used it for 500 years so it can't be all that bad. http://www.rangevoting.org/VenHist.html
--