Range Voting
Jan. 4th, 2007 12:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kevin_standleeThe folks advocating Range Voting contacted WSFS (actually, the WSFS webmaster, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sfrose) lobbying WSFS to change its voting system from the Instant Runoff Voting system we currently use for site selection and the Hugo Awards. Sharon told them how our rules work and suggested that if they want to change them, they come to WSFS business meetings and propose and debate the changes there, like all other rule changes. The advocate's response, in my opinion, amounted to, "Our proposal is so obviously Right that we shouldn't have to do all that hard, expensive work. You should change your rules because we tell you to do so."
I often tell people who come to me with rules-change proposals, "If you think it's worthwhile, come and submit it yourself. I'll help you with all of the technicalities to the best of my ability, but you have to make your own case, lobby people yourself, and get the votes by convincing people." Most of the time, this discourages them -- democracy is hard work! But sometimes we get people who are willing to work and debate, and sometimes we even get workable changes and improvements.
WSFS rules are intentionally designed to be resistant to change; however, they can be changed if people work hard enough at it. But it's not enough to just lobby a Board of Directors or subvert the Chairman; you have to convince the members.
sfrose) lobbying WSFS to change its voting system from the Instant Runoff Voting system we currently use for site selection and the Hugo Awards. Sharon told them how our rules work and suggested that if they want to change them, they come to WSFS business meetings and propose and debate the changes there, like all other rule changes. The advocate's response, in my opinion, amounted to, "Our proposal is so obviously Right that we shouldn't have to do all that hard, expensive work. You should change your rules because we tell you to do so."I often tell people who come to me with rules-change proposals, "If you think it's worthwhile, come and submit it yourself. I'll help you with all of the technicalities to the best of my ability, but you have to make your own case, lobby people yourself, and get the votes by convincing people." Most of the time, this discourages them -- democracy is hard work! But sometimes we get people who are willing to work and debate, and sometimes we even get workable changes and improvements.
WSFS rules are intentionally designed to be resistant to change; however, they can be changed if people work hard enough at it. But it's not enough to just lobby a Board of Directors or subvert the Chairman; you have to convince the members.
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no subject
Date: 2007-01-04 08:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-01-05 01:10 am (UTC)Disaster?
Date: 2007-01-23 02:20 am (UTC)Clay Shentrup
The Center for Range Voting
http://RangeVoting.org/
Re: Disaster?
Date: 2007-01-23 03:25 am (UTC)With two candidates, honest range voting gets the best possible result. Strategic range voting is the same as single preference.
With multiple candidates, it's impossible to say what strategic range voting will do, because it depends on everybody's guesses about how everybody else will vote. It isn't hard to construct examples where the winner is clearly not preferred.
Re: Disaster?
Date: 2007-01-23 03:50 am (UTC)Re: Disaster?
Date: 2007-01-23 04:20 am (UTC)http://math.temple.edu/~wds/homepage/voFdata
> With two candidates, honest range voting gets the best possible result.
Honest range voting gets the best possible result for SOCIETY under _every_ model, no matter how many candidates you have. In fact, the more you have, the more of a benefit you get by using Range Voting, as methods like plurality and IRV crash and burn with lots of candidates.
Still, from an individual's point of view, it's always better to be strategic (duh!, by definition).
> Strategic range voting is the same as single preference.
Nope. The ideal way to vote strategically with Range Voting can be quite complex, but generally has to do with maximizing or minimizing every candidate according to a general rule that I won't go into detail about here. The first four steps are as follows:
1) Maximize your favorite candidate. (Not always your best strategy with a lot of other methods, so if Nader is your favorite, you might lie and say Bush is, but NEVER the case with Range Voting.)
2) Minimize your LEAST favorite.
3) Polarize the two perceived front-runners, maximizing the one that you like more, and minimizing the other one, if if you love them both, or hate them both.
4) Go from there, maximizing and minimizing such that the sum of the pairwise differences in utility between candidates opposing each other (where one is max and the other is min) is maximized (taking revers polarity into account).
Got all that?
> With multiple candidates, it's impossible to say what strategic range voting will do, because it depends on everybody's guesses about how everybody else will vote.
But you can simulate that, for instance simulating the effect of pre-election polls, that give voters a pretty good indication of who the front runners will be. You can also use what is considered to be an EXCEPTIONALLY good and simple strategy, where you take a good guess of about how satisfied you expect to be with the winner of the election, and then you maximize all candidates whom you perceive to be better for you than that, and minimize the rest. That's the most sure-fire strategy, because it's both very good, and very reliable, and easy to calculate. It's the strategy that the simulations use.
And note that it's a good thing that Range Voting makes strategy unintuitive and kind of difficult - that helps to diminish the negative effects of strategy.
> It isn't hard to construct examples where the winner is clearly not preferred.
If by "preferred" you mean, is not the majority or Condorcet winner, then you are quite correct. So what? The winner who produces the greatest social utility is not necessarily the Condorcet winner.
CLAY
Re: Disaster?
Date: 2007-01-23 05:06 am (UTC)With multiple candidates, the "ideal way" to vote strategically depends, as I've said before, on your estimate of how everyone else will vote. Consider: if you know exactly what all the other votes are, you know if the vote is close enough for you to affect it, and if so, how. This might mean voting 10 for your second-favorite candidate and 0 for your third-favorite, even though your actual preference between those two is extremely weak (your actual preferences being, say, 10, 8.1, 8.09, 5, 3, 2, 1, 0.5, 0).
It's easy to show that voting 10 for your favorites, and 0 for the rest, is optimal for some value of . But you don't know which value.
So the simulations used a strategy that depended on voters knowing in advance the approximate results; what happens when those assumptions are erroneous?
The simulation results also didn't describe the distribution of preferences; if they were independent random variables, they don't resemble real preferences well enough to be useful.
As for bad examples, I can construct some (based on voters guessing wrong about other voters) where the winner is not the majority or Condorcet winner, nor produces the greatest social utility. In fact, he can be in the bottom half of the pack.
Re: Disaster?
Date: 2007-02-10 07:55 am (UTC)This is called Approval Voting (http://rangevoting.org/rangeVapp.html), and it's a great voting method - vastly better than IRV. But since a lot of people vote honestly with Range Voting, it produces greater satisfaction and better representation of minor parties.
Also consider that with multi-winner Range Voting (called 'Reweighted Range Voting (http://RangeVoting.org/RRV.html)') there is a huge incentive to be honest with your scores, because in each round, your ballot is weighted based on the total of the scores you have given to already-elected candidates. Using a full range for single-winner elections as well, achieves continuity if nothing else.
With multiple candidates, the "ideal way" to vote strategically depends, as I've said before, on your estimate of how everyone else will vote...It's easy to show that voting 10 for your favorites, and 0 for the rest, is optimal for some value of .
Not necessarily, but usually.
But you don't know which value.
Which is a good thing - it prevents the problematic "bullet vote" strategy. But even if all voters knew the exact preferences of all other voters, and bullet-voted, this would just be to a Condorcet method. Range Voting at its worst is as good or better than Condorcet at its best.
So the simulations used a strategy that depended on voters knowing in advance the approximate results; what happens when those assumptions are erroneous?
Then Range Voting does even better, because the zero-info strategy is to guess your expected satisfaction with the outcome, and minimize your score for everyone who would make you less satisfied than that, and maximize your score for the rest. This removes the strategy to polarize your scores for two front-runners, both of whom you like. This is effectively honest Approval Voting.
The simulation results also didn't describe the distribution of preferences; if they were independent random variables, they don't resemble real preferences well enough to be useful.
At least two of the methods are described here (http://RangeVoting.org/vsr.html):
Here's the paper (http://math.temple.edu/~wds/homepage/rangevote.pdf). Utilities are generally based on a random Gaussian distribution of voters and candidates within n-dimensional issue space. A 2-issue space would be like a Nolan chart (http://is3.okcupid.com/graphics/politics/chart_political.gif). Each voter's utility is a function of his ideological distance from the candidates.
Ironically, the more issues we add, the closer the utilities comes toward matching a random distribution! Even more unintuitive, the results obtained from a simple 2-issue utility generator are negligibly different than those obtained by a straight random distribution. So it turns out, your intuition that random utilities would not sufficiently model real preferences turns out not to be correct. In other news, massive objects bend light, contrary to intuition.
As for bad examples, I can construct some (based on voters guessing wrong about other voters) where the winner is not the majority or Condorcet winner, nor produces the greatest social utility. In fact, he can be in the bottom half of the pack.
Expected value is value times probability, which is why Smith's calculations used hundreds of millions of simulated elections. For every situation where Range Voting performs poorly, there are more scenarios where IRV performs more poorly.
I also thought I also might mention this shout out (http://davidbrin.blogspot.com/2007/02/dark-light-scenarios-swinging-from.html) to Range Voting recently, from Hugo Award recipient David Brin.
Re: Disaster?
Date: 2007-01-23 04:22 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-01-04 09:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-01-04 09:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-01-24 04:28 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-01-05 07:23 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-01-05 06:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-01-05 06:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-01-05 06:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-01-23 03:49 pm (UTC)So I was glad when the term "instant runoff voting" arrived, because it was a lot clearer and caused less confusion. It is now the term of choice to describe this system.
no subject
Date: 2007-01-24 03:33 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-01-24 04:14 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-01-24 04:27 am (UTC)The same is true of Range Voting and Reweighted Range Voting. If you use RRV to elect 1 winner, it's just the same as Range Voting. One could just dispense with the distinction, except that you might pick, say, a school board by holding six regional single-winner RV elections, or you might do it by having ONE multi-winner RRV election. But IRV _IS_ STV, make no mistake about it.
no subject
Date: 2007-01-24 05:03 am (UTC)I didn't say it was. I said that the IRV rules, not the STV rules, are a subset of the STV rules. They are different methods of counting, one intended for single winners, one for multiple winners, and I refer you to such standard textbooks as Geography of Elections by P.J. Taylor and R.J. Johnston for an explanation of the difference.
You pride yourself on being scientific; now you're being totally irrational.
no subject
Date: 2007-01-24 06:41 am (UTC)When the single transferable vote (STV) system using the Droop quota is applied to a single-winner election it becomes the same as IRV.
The rules are no different. You use the same rules, but you just use them on a single winner instead of on multiple winners. That's my understanding based on everything I've read. I'm happy to consent to being wrong if you can show me otherwise.
no subject
Date: 2007-01-24 07:19 am (UTC)If STV with only one winner is the same as IRV, so is a list system with only one candidate per list. That doesn't make a list system the proper term to describe IRV.
You do not use the same rules for the two. The act of intending it for single winners instead of multiple winners changes the rules. The Droop quota threshold calculation, for instance, which is the key feature of STV, has no place in IRV whatsoever, where you just skip it and go to simple majority. Neither does the surplus vote allocation, a concept totally alien to anything in IRV.
The original point was that IRV is the term for what Hugo voting uses, STV isn't. If you say you're using STV, you mean you're using the full panoply of STV rules to elect multiple winners. We don't. So it's not STV. Period.
Your knowledge of the systems you're criticizing is as poor as your knowledge of how science fiction conventions work, so there's no point in listening to you on anything.
no subject
Date: 2007-01-24 10:39 am (UTC)On the contrary, I have shown you otherwise. IRV is the concept of applying STV to a single-winner election.
Here's the formula for STV.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_transferable_vote#Counting_the_votes
Now, take that and apply it where the number of seats = 1.
You get IRV.
Check the textbook I already referred you to, which treats them as separate systems.
Well, it's wrong, unless you claim that formula for STV is incorrect. I invite you to submit the corrected formula so that we can correct that Wiki page.
The book might treat them as "effectively" different methods, because for example in the Australian senate and house, the senate uses STV, whereas the house uses IRV. That is, the senate uses the results from a series of multi-winner elections, whereas the house is comprised of the winners of a bunch of single-winner elections.
I consider standard textbooks a little more reliable for such classifications than wiki-fricking-pedia. You could have put that sentence in Wikipedia yourself.
If you read a text book about STV, then feel free to describe STV, and show us how it does not reduce to IRV in a single-winner election. Show us an example.
If STV with only one winner is the same as IRV, so is a list system with only one candidate per list. That doesn't make a list system the proper term to describe IRV.
I don't know what you're trying to say here, but my intuition is that your response here doesn't make sense. ANY voting system is going to pick the same winner in an election with only one candidate. That has nothing to do with how the systems actually operate.
You do not use the same rules for the two. The act of intending it for single winners instead of multiple winners changes the rules.
The number of winners with STV can be set to whatever you like. If you pick 78 winners, it's STV. If you pick 2, it's STV. So changing the number of winners doesn't change whether it's STV.
The Droop quota threshold calculation, for instance, which is the key feature of STV, has no place in IRV whatsoever, where you just skip it and go to simple majority.
The Wiki on "Droop quota" says:
But I know, you probably think I edited this myself as well. I promise you, I didn't.
Neither does the surplus vote allocation, a concept totally alien to anything in IRV.
That's a fallacy. In a two-winner STV election, for instance, after you pick the first winner, any surplus vote goes to the second winner. After you pick that last winner, you don't do anything with the surplus vote..you just halt the election, because you have no more candidates to select as winners. With IRV, you just do that same halting process, just one candidate sooner. Single-winner STV is to two-winner STV what two-winner STV is to three-winner STV.
The original point was that IRV is the term for what Hugo voting uses, STV isn't.
That's like saying, "ape" is the proper term for what you and I are, "mammal" isn't. We are both mammals and apes, just as single-winner STV is both STV and IRV.
Stop being so stubborn, and accept that the Wiki entries are correct, and you are just misunderstanding what your text book says.
no subject
Date: 2007-01-24 03:43 pm (UTC)The question is whether they are classified and terminologically described in political science as the same system. They are not, and I offered proof in the form of a poli sci citation. You offered Wikipedia, and the fact that you could say something like "proven wrong by Wikipedia" shows your ignorance and poor hold on both reality and argumentation. Wikipedia has a lot of useful and accurate information, but it is completely unreliable as proof of anything whatsoever. You'd be thrown out of class for using it as a citation of anything.
So if you "apply" STV to a one-seat election, you get IRV. AND YOU SHOULD CALL IT IRV, NOT STV. That was my original point in this thread. My original comment was not addressed to you, but to a curious bystander who was clearly uninterested in polisci trivia. And I'm sorry the fact that I didn't bother to mention to that person the complex relationship between the STV rules and IRV rules has confused your - again - poor overtaxed mind.
In the name "Single Transferable Vote," the word "transferable" refers to the surplus majority transfer. This has no place in IRV and consequently the name STV is totally inapplicable to IRV, despite the fact that all the rules of IRV do have a place in STV.
I dropped the discussion of the comparative virtues of systems not out of lack of counterarguments, but because you are completely impervious to the significance of the points that make you mistaken. See
I thought I could continue to clarify this simple matter of terminological classification, but even there it turns out that your bewilderment is too great to overcome. Sorry.
no subject
Date: 2007-02-10 09:37 pm (UTC)Yes, they are. They ARE THE SAME SYSTEM.
no subject
Date: 2007-02-10 09:40 pm (UTC)So there should be a different name for every different number of winners that you can use STV for? So if we're picking a council of 10 winners, that should have its own name, and if 20 winners, then that should have its own name too. You disagree? Then why arbitrarily decide that STV applied to a single winner race is somehow qualitatively different from one with two or three winners? It isn't.
Furthermore, this has nothing to do with the fact that IRV IS STV.
no subject
Date: 2007-02-10 09:46 pm (UTC)Name a single point that you believe makes me mistaken. Chances are I've already heard it and refuted it. There is not a single point where you could say that IRV is better than Range Voting. Not one, at least that's ever been presented yet.
And indeed, I see you've gone on to claim that I am mistaken in my own personal preferences, so you've gone beyond all previous benchmarks of arrogance.
Well, it's the truth. You'll derive significantly greater satisfaction if you use Range Voting. So to say you think IRV will make you more satisfied is wrong - unless you (bizarrely) feel that using IRV would be so much "fun" that it would make up for your dissatisfaction with the election results.
I thought I could continue to clarify this simple matter of terminological classification, but even there it turns out that your bewilderment is too great to overcome. Sorry.
IRV is STV. If I started calling it "Instant Duo Voting" whenever STV was used for two-seat elections, that wouldn't change the fact that we were still using STV, even if it was also called IDV. I'll keep calling myself a chordate, even though I'm a mammal, and a human. I hope that doesn't bewilder you too much.
no subject
Date: 2007-01-24 03:54 pm (UTC)1. The Plurality System
(i) The plurality system in single-member constituencies
(ii) Multi-member plurality sytems
(iii) Weighted plurality systems
2. Preferential systems
(i) Single-member preferential systems
(a) The alternative vote [i.e. IRV, which did not yet have that name]
(b) The double-ballot
(ii) Multi-member preferential systems
(a) The single transferable vote
3. List systems
(i) The simultaneous list
(ii) The local list
(iii) The party list
4. Mixed systems [which it doesn't enumerate in a list]
In the description of STV, page 59 of the Penguin edition, it says, "If, as with our hypothetical example, no candidate exceeds the quota of 651 and there are still seats to be filled, the procedure used in the alternative vote [that is, IRV] is operated."
So it acknowledges the relationship between the two, but you see that it depicts STV as borrowing the procedure for IRV - which, in fact, it does not always need to do in actual cases - not as IRV being a special case of STV.
You can look at them that way if you want, but it is not inaccurate to say that they are different systems and that a single-winner election using it should say it is using IRV, not STV.
no subject
Date: 2007-02-10 10:14 pm (UTC)IRV is a subset of STV, so it's totally applicable.
..it depicts STV as borrowing the procedure for IRV - which, in fact, it does not always need to do in actual cases - not as IRV being a special case of STV.
STV doesn't "borrow" from IRV - IRV is just STV applied to a single-winner election.
From FairVote.org, the ring leaders of the IRV movement:
The only point being made in your quote is that situations can apparently arise in multi-winner STV that have to be accounted for, but that they don't arise in single-winner STV. That doesn't mean these systems are different.
Let me make this perfectly empirical. You show me any set of rank-order ballots you can devise, where IRV picks a different winner than STV.
Clay
no subject
Date: 2007-01-24 09:42 pm (UTC)You quote the Wiki on Droop quota to counter my statement that Droop quota threshold calculation has no place in IRV. But in fact the Wiki on Droop quota calculation says just what I said: that you don't calculate it in IRV, you just go straight to simple majority.
Same thing is true with surplus vote allocation. The concept of a relative percentage calculation is essential to STV. It has no place in IRV, and your own argument says so.
A counting system designed to produce a single winner is not the same thing as a counting system designed to produce multiple winners, even if the number of multiple winners varies. That is a standard concept which you are fruitlessly trying to deny.
no subject
Date: 2007-02-10 10:31 pm (UTC)The Droop quota is (votes/(seats+1)) + 1. For a single seat, this equals "half the votes, plus 1". That is the definition of a "simple majority".
You could use a different quota, where all a candidate would need is 40% of the vote to win, so in the following scenario:
40% Bush > Gore > Nader
29% Nader > Gore > Bush
31% Gore > Nader > Bush
Bush would simply win in the first round, whereas with the Droop quota (IRV) he would lose to Gore after Nader was dropped.
This isn't just speculation. There is at least one country that uses top-two runoff (hold a second election between the top-two finishers if no one gets a quota) where the the quota is not 50%, but 40%.
So let me repeat - IRV IS STV, with a Droop quota. The math is identical.
But again, I welcome you to try to present me with a hypothetical election scenario where STV with a Droop quota would pick a different winner than IRV (or do anything different at all).
no subject
Date: 2007-01-24 07:25 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-01-24 11:35 am (UTC)I'm a geek
Date: 2007-01-23 02:31 am (UTC)Regards,
Clay
Re: I'm a geek
Date: 2007-01-23 12:46 pm (UTC)That means showing up at WSFS business meetings, proposing changes and convincing people to vote for your proposed changes.
Re: I'm a geek
Date: 2007-01-24 03:39 am (UTC)Regards,
Clay
Re: I'm a geek
Date: 2007-01-24 03:53 am (UTC)When I wanted things to change in WSFS, I got out there and did the work necessary to make it happen. If I'd just sat back and complained that "I know better than you do, my proposals are obviously right, and you're stupid for not adopting them," then nothing would have happened and I would have been consigned to irrelevancy. Personally, I find that dissatisfying.
True, but it appears to me that it rests on a circular argument. You've defined the success conditions in a way that guarantees that your preferred alternative will always win.
Re: I'm a geek
Date: 2007-01-24 04:01 am (UTC)Because the WSFS rules are made at (surprise!) the WSFS meetings. By real people who show up and do the work.
I don't see why this is so difficult for you to understand.
But the argument from incredulity grows tiresome.
The argument of, "I can't be bothered to show up in person to try and convince the people who do," alas, does not grow tiresome. It's been that way for years.
Re: I'm a geek
Date: 2007-01-24 04:32 am (UTC)I don't see why this is so difficult for you to understand.
I wish I had time to promote Range Voting, be a musician, and keep my full-time job, AND manage my relationship with my girlfriend. But clearly I can only have so many hobbies. The point I'm trying to make, as I keep explaining again and again, is that there's good reason for YOU to want to show up at those meetings and get this system, because YOU will be the one benefiting. WE would benefit a little, by having another organization we could point to and say, "Hey, these cool people who do the Hugo awards use Range Voting!" But YOU would be the ones benefiting a lot more.
The argument of, "I can't be bothered to show up in person to try and convince the people who do," alas, does not grow tiresome. It's been that way for years.
I can give you more than sufficient evidence of RV's benefits right here. Then YOU can show up and DEMAND Range Voting, because YOU will see better results with it. Do it out of pure selfishness. Do it for yourself.
Re: I'm a geek
Date: 2007-01-24 04:44 am (UTC)I don't care about Range Voting and really, I can't be bothered to make your arguments for you, because I have my own life, and my own interests and they don't coincide with your Pure And Holy Vision Of How Things Ought To Be.
If you want to make it happen, show up and do the work. I'm not going to do it for you.
Re: I'm a geek
Date: 2007-02-10 07:59 am (UTC)Re: I'm a geek
Date: 2007-02-10 12:33 pm (UTC)As an aside, what you think that I should want and what I think I should want are not necessarily intersecting sets. (For that matter, who on Earth are you to say what I "should" want?)
Re: I'm a geek
Date: 2007-02-10 10:35 pm (UTC)If you don't want to get Range Voting, then clearly you don't care that much who wins, so you shouldn't even vote anyway. Or you should just vote by picking a candidate's name out of a hat. That's effectively what you are getting by using IRV instead of Range Voting - a huge amount of random deviation from ideal utility.
Re: I'm a geek
Date: 2007-02-11 12:23 am (UTC)I don't give a rats ass for range voting, really. I make my Hugo choices. Sometimes they win, sometimes they lose. The underwhelming outcry against the winners from the people at the convention shows that A) the system is not, in the eyes of fandom, broken and B) generally produces results along the lines of what people want.
f you don't want to get Range Voting, then clearly you don't care that much who wins, so you shouldn't even vote anyway.
You know, I was willing to give you the benefit of the doubt and believe that you might, just MIGHT, have some socially redeeming characteristics somewhere in your psyche.
You don't.
You have ceased to be entertainly or informing and have moved into the actively insulting. As such, you are not worth time, electrons or oxygen. Go thou and find a life somewhere. You sorely need one.
No go away or I shall taunt you a second time.
Re: I'm a geek
Date: 2007-01-24 04:45 am (UTC)Re: I'm a geek
Date: 2007-02-10 09:35 pm (UTC)I can't think of any reason you and others here would be so hostile about a great improvement. I feel like Darwin or Einstein, being told, "This evolution stuff is crap" or "This time dilation stuff is crap". Well, the evidence says otherwise. Do you want to be a creationist? Do you just enjoy having a bad election system? In that case I don't understand why you don't just pick the winner out of a hat.
no subject
Date: 2007-01-04 10:04 pm (UTC)As are any sensible body's rules. Making standing rules *easy* to change would be like trying to play the World Series of Poker using the entropic rulebook of Fizzbin.
It might be fun to watch, but getting anywhere would be a nightmare.
no subject
Date: 2007-01-04 10:42 pm (UTC)Supermajority vote?
Date: 2007-01-23 02:35 am (UTC)Utility measurements: Group A: 5 candidates, 20 voters, random utilities; Each entry averages the results from 4,000,000 simulated elections. Group B: 5 candidates, 50 voters, utilities based on 2 issues, each entry averages the results from 2,222,222 simulated elections.
Voting system VSR A VSR B
Magically elect optimum winner 100.00% 100.00%
Range (honest voters) 96.71% 94.66%
Borda (honest voters) 91.31% 89.97%
Approval (honest voters) 86.30% 83.53%
Condorcet-LR (honest voters) 85.19% 85.43%
Range & Approval (strategic exaggerating voters) 78.99% 77.01%
IRV (honest voters) 78.49% 76.32%
Plurality (honest voters) 67.63% 62.29%
Borda (strategic exaggerating voters) 53.26% 51.78%
Condorcet-LR (strategic exaggerating voters) 42.56% 41.31%
IRV (strategic exaggerating voters) 39.07% 39.21%
Plurality (strategic voters) 39.07% 39.21%
Elect random winner 0.00% 0.00%
Re: Supermajority vote?
Date: 2007-01-23 03:10 am (UTC)My second point is that if it actually works then we'll shortly have evidence of it working for other groups. Then we can decide based upon real world evidence rather than theoretical simulations.
Re: Supermajority vote?
Date: 2007-01-23 03:45 am (UTC)And if I trusted electronic voting machines. (Diebold common stock does not have a niche in my portfolio.)
Re: Supermajority vote?
Date: 2007-01-23 04:58 am (UTC)It can be easily applied to Range Voting, and even to plurality voting with a little work, but NOT to IRV.
See: http://rangevoting.org/Rivest3B.html
In a nutshell, suppose the range of your Range Voting ballot is from -5 to +5. You get three ballots, and the sum of your scores for any one candidate is your score for that candidate (so obviously the scores can't sum to be higher than 5 or lower than -5, and a dumb machine verfies that). Then you get a certified copy of ONE of those ballots, and drop your ballots into a bin. Later, the results of EVERY ballot are publicly posted. You check that your ballot (the one you got to keep) matches what is publicly posted. Just having 1/3 of your full ballot means you can't prove how you voted, so you can't sell your vote. But if fraudsters try to cheat the system, and edit a ballot, there's a 1/3 chance they edit a ballot-third that someone took home a copy of, meaning they get caught. If they alter TWO ballots, there's a 5/9 chance the fraud is detectable. After a certain point, say 10 ballots, the odds of fraud being detectable, and with PROOF in hand (Hello, Mr. Dan Rather? I have a ballot here which doesn't match the publicly posted result) approach the mid 90's. Go up to a more significant number, and forget it. Fraudsters can't get away with it.
This is what people who are obsessed with voting methods cook up for fun.
CLAY
Re: Supermajority vote?
Date: 2007-01-23 05:09 am (UTC)Re: Supermajority vote?
Date: 2007-01-23 05:40 am (UTC)Interestingly, 3ballot turns out to work most naturally, securely, and simply, for approval voting and range voting. It still works – but less naturally, securely, and simply for plurality voting (the kind of voting currently most common throughout the USA and world) – and it essentially does not work at all for voting methods based on rank-order ballots such as instant runoff voting.
So, let's see you refute him please. Prove that it's possible. I'm pretty sure he's proven that it's not.
Re: Supermajority vote?
Date: 2007-01-23 03:21 pm (UTC)Re: Supermajority vote?
Date: 2007-01-23 05:16 pm (UTC)Maybe he could solve some of our unsolved puzzles http://www.rangevoting.org/PuzzlePage.html
Re: Supermajority vote?
Date: 2007-01-23 04:47 am (UTC)The computer simulations model real human behavior. 720 parameterized models were used, in which voters ranged from 100% strategic to 100% honest, and from 100% ignorant to 100% informed. Somewhere within that Range must be the same percentage of real people who vote strategically vs. honestly. Somewhere within that Range must be a level of ignorance that is approximately equal to the real amount of ignorance in society. Range Voting bested the other methods in ALL of the models.
Let's take a sample scenario. 3 voters, with the following utility values for candidates A, B, and C.
A, B, C
V1 -4, 1, 2
V2 -3, 3, 4
V3 -2, 5, -6
AVE: -3, 3, 0
Now in a real-life scenario, we KNOW what these voters would choose using plurality voting. V1 and V2 would choose candidate C, and V3 would choose candidate B. Candidate C would win. This would produce a utility score of 0, which when rescaled to a random-winner=0, ideal-winner=1 scale, would produce 0 / (3-0) = 0%. That's the social utility from this one simulation. Now do MILLIONS of them, and you start getting meaningful numbers. Calculating the values under honesty is a piece of cake. It's devising realistic strategies that gets complicated. That's why lots of strategies have been tried, in the effort to use strategies that model what humans would really do. In a plurality election, the best strategy is to vote for the person you like more among the two perceived front-runners. You can model that effect in digital elections pretty easily. In general, the same strategy applies to IRV as well, which is why IRV degrades to being as bad as plurality the more strategic voters get.
Now, if you aren't happy with the strategies we've employed, and think that the ENORMOUS disparity between Range Voting and IRV can be overcome by simply correcting some of our methodological errors, then please be my guest and cite our errors, and even get the credit you deserve for improving our simulation. But until you find methodological flaws, your objection amounts to nothing but incredulity. "I don't believe your simulations could model reality very well, therefore your results are wrong." Well PROVE it. Engage in science, not superstition.
And read this: http://rangevoting.org/WhyNoHumans.html
> Figuring out how to express my opinions through voting is hard enough without adding additional unnecessary complexity. Especially since (correct me if I'm wrong here Kev) we use paper ballots. It will be impossible to tally by hand if we use Range Voting.
Range Voting is orders of magnitude easier to count, since you just sum up the votes in a single round, where precinct totals can be sent up. It is also consistent, meaning that if two precincts both elect A the winner, A will still be the winner when you merge their ballots. No the case with IRV. With IRV, A can win in two states, yet when you sum the ballots together, A can lose. Sounds nuts, huh? Yeah, IRV _is_ nuts.
And with Range Voting, you can use ordinary dumb plurality voting machines, instead of having to get special multi-round IRV machines, or (ugh) do IRV's multiple rounds by HAND.
See: http://rangevoting.org/Complexity.html
Get this nonsense that Range Voting is complicated out of your head. It's way simpler than IRV.
>My second point is that if it actually works then we'll shortly have evidence of it working for other groups. Then we can decide based upon real world evidence rather than theoretical simulations.
The theoretical simulations prove it VASTLY better than any real world simulations, since you can't read people's minds, but you CAN read the minds of digital voters. There will NEVER be a real world test of voting systems that can compare to the quality of computer simulations, at least for calculating social utility efficiency. As for judging the easy of implementing them, and having real world voters use them, that does require real world tests. Millions of people score things online all the time. That's a great science experiment that proves our point. Not to mention my exit polling in Texas. http://RangeVoting.org/Beaumont.html
Re: Supermajority vote?
Date: 2007-01-23 05:11 am (UTC)Re: Supermajority vote?
Date: 2007-01-23 05:46 am (UTC)Also, understand that utilities in these simulations were based both on randomness, AND on random positions on ISSUES. That is, take a plane (two-dimensional issue space) and put some dots on it to represent candidates, as well as lots of dots to represent voters of various stripes (one axis can be stance on abortion, and perhaps another can be position on taxes...the possibilities are endless, and you can use as many dimensions as you want). Now assign the utilities based on ideological difference (or "distance" in the graphical sense). What we find is that the results from using extremely realistic distributions of ideology, even based on real results of large-scale politics quizzes (with tens of thousands of participants) don't vary much from just picking random utilities. Hence your point has been fairly soundly refuted. But just to be on the safe side, these utility calculations were done with both random utilities, and utilities based on positions on various issues.
So your comment doesn't really make any sense upon closer inspection.
But I welcome any more articulate criticism you may have.
Re: Supermajority vote?
Date: 2007-01-23 04:59 am (UTC)#voters their vote
9 B>C>A
8 A>B>C
7 C>A>B
In this 24-voter IRV election, A wins after C is dropped. But now suppose every voter reverses his preference order (i.e. they are now attempting to choose the worst candidate rather than the best). In that case A still wins after B is eliminated. I.e. IRV contradicts itself; IRV's unambiguously "best" candidate A is here the same as its "worst"! (Such embarrassing winner=loser reversal failures are, however, never exhibited in range, approval, Borda, plurality, Tideman Ranked Pairs, or Schulze beatpath voting, all of which are logically self-consistent in this respect.)
This failure is really just a mere symptom of the flawed logic underlying IRV.
This example also illustrates a bizarre kind of strategic voting. Suppose 3 of the B>C>A voters reverse their votes to A>C>B. In that case B is eliminated whereupon C wins 13-to-11 over A. The reversal's raising of A from bottom-to-top in their vote caused A to lose – and voting maximally dishonestly as though they were suicidally trying to elect the worst candidate, was actually optimal strategy that caused the election result to improve from their point of view.
Finally, this election also illustrates a "no show paradox": If those three B>C>A voters had simply refused to vote, then C would have won, an improvement in their view. Different way of saying the same thing: these three voters' decision to cast an honest A-last vote caused A to win.
Re: Supermajority vote?
Date: 2007-01-23 04:05 pm (UTC)Re: Supermajority vote?
Date: 2007-01-23 05:38 pm (UTC)35 A > B > C
33 B > C > A
32 C > A > B
Who wins this election? Perhaps your Condorcet method of choice picks A. Now, if B drops out of the race, but not a single voter's preferences change, C beats A by a huge 65-35 margin. Hence the utter broken-ness of the "majoritarian" idea. We propose something better, the _utilitarian_ idea. The most good for the most people. And if you know even the most basic economics, you want the highest expected value. Range Voting gives that to you. Condorcet, with such paradoxical behaviors, often doesn't. And under strategy, it falls apart, whereas Range Voting degrades, under total strategy, approximately to Condorcet. That is, Range Voting at its WORST is about the same as Condorcet at its best.
See the DH3 pathology: http://www.rangevoting.org/DH3.html
Why Range Voting is better than Condorcet:
http://www.rangevoting.org/CondorcetExec.html
Range Voting kind of IS a Condorcet method
http://rangevoting.org/AppCW.html
I began my trip into the election methods debate as a Condorcet enthusiast. It didn't take long before I saw the light. I encourage you to study the facts objectively, and make the same move.
Clay
Re: Supermajority vote?
Date: 2007-01-23 07:14 pm (UTC)You acknowledge that both Condorcet and range voting solve the particular problem you described earlier. Therefore your criticism of IRV is an argument for Condorcet for the reason I stated: that it solves the problem without introducing new variables which might create new problems. And the uncontrolled point system of range voting emphatically does.
Re: Supermajority vote?
Date: 2007-01-24 03:08 am (UTC)Re: Supermajority vote?
Date: 2007-01-23 07:20 pm (UTC)By the way: you write,
I began my trip into the election methods debate as a Condorcet enthusiast. It didn't take long before I saw the light.
Do you have any idea how much that makes you sound like a Scientologist? We in science fiction fandom have good and long reason to be wary of that kind of starry-eyed insistence that perfection has been found, and that accounts for a lot of the immediate bristling your posts have been generating. (Have you ever heard of a fellow named Claude Degler?)
Re: Supermajority vote?
Date: 2007-01-24 03:28 am (UTC)Well, you actually do not prefer Condorcet. You'll be less happy with the results of elections if you use Condorcet. There is of course the off chance that you'll say, "Man, I loved voting with Condorcet so much more than voting with Range Voting, that it's worth getting a crappy president", but then you'd be pretty abnormal. If you just want a voting method to be fun, regardless of its quality, then I assure you, I can think of some fun ways to vote. Throwing darts at balloons on a wall, with the names of candidates inside is fun. You should vote like that.
> Do you have any idea how much that makes you sound like a Scientologist?
How ironic, considering how much time I've spent heckling Scientologists, and going into their little tents and causing a scene. I actually included Xenu in my Range Voting poll for the 2008 US Presidential election, and he's coming in last place. http://zohopolls.com/us/pres
> We in science fiction fandom have good and long reason to be wary of that kind of starry-eyed insistence that perfection has been found
I specifically showed an example scenario of an election where Range Voting would produce a very poor winner. So clearly I know it's not perfect. It's just a huge improvement over IRV. You are making a straw man argument here.
I suggest you read a book by Carl Sagan called "Demon-Haunted World: Using Science as a Candle in the Dark", if you like science as much as science fiction. I take Sagan's view (that seems to sort of be shared by my personal hero, Richard Dawkins) that irrational beliefs aren't just sort of mildly annoying, but dangerous...pernicious. I therefore care less about whether you actually USE Range Voting, and more about whether you are educated about it, such that you make the correct conclusion, that it is the best common voting method (I say "common" because we are excluding insanely complicated methods like CTT voting, that some genius economists created).
It's like when I was in 6th grade, and my teacher taught us there was an "Antarctic Ocean" in addition the four "real" oceans. Now, of course the concept of distinct oceans is arbitrary, since they have no physical boundaries. But I knew that the mainstream consensus was, Actic, Pacific, Atlantic, Indian. FOUR oceans. I told my teacher he was wrong. Everyone mocked me. I could have avoided that reaction by just not correcting him. But no way was I going to let that go, because then he'd just go around believing that, carrying around that false meme in his head. So I came the next day with the encyclopedia and proved him wrong. I fixed the broken-ness. It's the same reason I'm trying to get all my friends to use vorbis instead of mp3, and the same reason I use dvorak, and the same reason I'm trying to get you to use a better voting method. To fix things that are incorrect. Maybe you're not neurotic enough to relate. Shrug.
Re: Supermajority vote?
Date: 2007-01-24 04:24 am (UTC)Nor has making the voting method "fun" have anything to do with the matter. Making it comprehensible and gaining the trust of the voters does. If we have nothing better than your arguments to offer, we will never gain the trust of these particular set of voters with range voting.
You seem to be mistaking science fiction fans for the kinds of soulless automatons who would apply scientific principles to every area of their lives. Convention running is not a science, but a combination of science and art. We must often balance what is theoretically most preferable with what is practically feasible to do, with what people want, and what they find easiest to do and to understand. That was the first lesson taught me when I went to work for a political campaign, and it applies just as well here. The theoretical, and if present the quite marginal, greater utility of range voting does not overcome these other factors, and it most emphatically does not overcome practical concerns about its utility.
This is especially true if, as you are saying, range voting is not perfect. And my point that you are calling "straw man" is not that you literally said it was perfect, it's that you are talking as if you think it is perfect.
Re: Supermajority vote?
Date: 2007-01-24 05:42 am (UTC)Say I offered you a 1 in 50 chance of getting 200 dollars, or a 1/500 chance of getting 4000$...which would you take? With the former, your expected value is 4$. With the latter it's 8$. Either way, that's barely enough to buy you a jumbo soda for lunch. Both options are crappy. But one is LESS crappy.
Nor has making the voting method "fun" have anything to do with the matter. Making it comprehensible and gaining the trust of the voters does.
Whether voters trust it or not has nothing to do with whether it is actually the best voting method. You might try to explain to someone with Down's syndrome that his expected value with one game at the casino was much higher than with another. He might not understand your proof of that, but you'd still be right. He'd still be better off playing the game with the higher expected value, whether he had confidence in that or not.
If we have nothing better than your arguments to offer, we will never gain the trust of these particular set of voters with range voting.
My arguments are substantial. RV is monotonic; IRV is not. RV passes the independence of irrelevant alternatives; IRV does not. RV passes the favorite-betrayal-lesser-evil criterion (an honest vote for Nader is NEVER a vote for Bush); NO ordinal system passes this. I'm at a loss for what you mean when you say, "If that's all you have to offer".
You seem to be mistaking science fiction fans for the kinds of soulless automatons who would apply scientific principles to every area of their lives.
Why do you have to be soul-less in order to be rational in every aspect of your life? I pour my soul into my music, yet I always adhere to rationalism. Why must we ever substitute superstition for science in any endeavor?
Convention running is not a science, but a combination of science and art.
If your goal is to please the attendees, then all the art really is science. It's the application of your data about what pleases humans, in order to accomplish the goal of creating the greatest utility for them and/or for yourselves.
We must often balance what is theoretically most preferable with what is practically feasible to do, with what people want, and what they find easiest to do and to understand.
I absolutely agree. A great reason to switch to RV would be the greater simplicity. Voters can even abstain from casting votes for unknown options, diminishing the harm done by ignorance, and making the voting process shorter and simpler on a per-voter basis.
That was the first lesson taught me when I went to work for a political campaign, and it applies just as well here. The theoretical, and if present the quite marginal, greater utility of range voting does not overcome these other factors, and it most emphatically does not overcome practical concerns about its utility.
You say "theoretical" as if our calculations are loose guesses. On the contrary, they were derived using quite rigorous modeling. Before discounting them, I'd look over the code, and tell us what methodological errors you find. Hand waving is not a scientific argument. And the utility differences are NOT marginal; they are huge. The benefit you get by going from IRV to Range Voting is almost as much as you'd get by going from RANDOM SELECTION to IRV in the first place. If I suggested you pick the winners by drawing names out of a hat, you'd think I was crazy, right? Well, just a bit crazier than one would be to use IRV instead of switching to Range Voting. It's also nice that RV is simpler than IRV to use and tabulate. It's a win-win-win..
This is especially true if, as you are saying, range voting is not perfect.
Your case is refuted by RV's being much better. It needn't be perfect.
And my point that you are calling "straw man" is not that you literally said it was perfect, it's that you are talking as if you think it is perfect.
No, I'm talking about it as though it is the best known voting system (that is practical to implement). It is.
Regards,
Clay
Clay
Re: Supermajority vote?
Date: 2007-01-24 05:53 am (UTC)Whether the voters have confidence in the election system has a huge amount to do whether something is best. Let us presume that for a moment you were suddenly the King of WSFS and you imposed your voting system upon us. I expect that voter turnout -- already less than I would like to see -- would drop precipitously, and the SF community would almost certainly lose faith in the legitimacy of the results.
WSFS currently has a moderately-complicated election system, but it's been around long enough with few enough changes, and enough people in the field whose opinions matter agree with using it, that the results are widely perceived as legitimate. (Yes, anyone who thinks a system is Evil if it doesn't return his/her first preference isn't going to be convinced. I'm mainly interested in reasonable objections, not sour grapes.)
They can do that already. Indeed, we encourage people not to vote lower preferences if they have no preference. (This isn't the Australian parliament. On principle I object to any system that requires you to vote, because IMO the right to vote includes the right to abstain).
On the Site Selection ballot (not the Hugos), there is even an explicit "No Preference" selection, and any choices numbered after No Preference are ignored.
Re: Supermajority vote?
Date: 2007-01-24 06:32 am (UTC)And I say that you do not get it. I'm not arguing that people will necessarily understand why Range Voting is better. Clearly, even a lot of smart people here are taking their sweet time to come to understand it (it took me WEEKS of non-stop argument to get there, so I can relate). The case I'm arguing is that it's better. So your responses are mostly invalid.
Whether the voters have confidence in the election system has a huge amount to do whether something is best.
Nope. The point of a choice is to derive the maximum utility. When you buy a car, for instance, you consider which choice gives you the greatest net happiness, considering cost, performance, fuel economy, etc. You want the maximum utility possible. An election is just a group choice, so the best election method (so long as it is not so complex that the negative utility of using it over-rides the utility benefit of its results) is the one that gives people the greatest utility. Even if people don't have confidence that a system will work, it can still work. For instance, even if I have no confidence in the competence of aircraft engineers and technicians (thus I get scared to death when I fly), I always arrive safely and quickly. I get greater utility from flying than from driving, even if I don't feel confident that I'll make it there alive. The issue isn't whether I believe I will, but whether I will. Utility isn't a measure of how happy you think you'll be, but how happy you really end up.
They can do that already. Indeed, we encourage people not to vote lower preferences if they have no preference.
Wrong. That's impossible with IRV. If they leave preferences completely off their ballots, that is mathematically identical to ranking those options DEAD LAST. It is NOT the same as simply not affecting them one way or the other. With Range Voting, abstention truly is abstention - it doesn't affect that candidate's average at all. This option, while not really very strategic from an individual's point of view, reduces the harm done to society by voter ignorance, when voters decide to be honest and use it. And a lot of them DO.
On the Site Selection ballot (not the Hugos), there is even an explicit "No Preference" selection, and any choices numbered after No Preference are ignored.
Nope. There's no way you could possibly "ignore" them with IRV.
This page explains the harm caused by leaving candidates off an IRV ballot:
http://rangevoting.org/IRV3.html
Re: Supermajority vote?
Date: 2007-01-24 06:51 am (UTC)Unless you don't think that voter confidence in the system has any relevance, which is a patently absurd on its face.
Re: Supermajority vote?
Date: 2007-01-24 10:41 am (UTC)Unless you don't think that voter confidence in the system has any relevance, which is a patently absurd on its face.
Every time I fly, I feel a lack of confidence in the planes. Call it paranoia, because I know better, but I just feel scared someone will have done something wrong, and I'm going to die. Yet the planes still deliver me safely each time.
I could find an infinite number of examples like this, which completely disprove your assertion that confidence in the quality of something affects the quality of that thing.
Re: Supermajority vote?
Date: 2007-01-24 05:26 pm (UTC)You seem to be assuming a totally objective measurement of quality applicable to something that has a subjective element. What I'm saying is that it doesn't matter to me if your contrived "quality" system says something it utter perfection if my perceived quality of that thing is zero. It's like telling a kid to eat his vegetables because they are good for him. We know they're good for him. He may even agree that they are good for him. But he hates the taste, and therefore won't eat them, even though by "objective" standards, he should be doing so.
Re: Supermajority vote?
Date: 2007-02-10 10:50 pm (UTC)No, I'm saying that whether I'm terrified of dying in a plane crash does not affect the probability that I will.
You seem to be assuming a totally objective measurement of quality applicable to something that has a subjective element. What I'm saying is that it doesn't matter to me if your contrived "quality" system says something it utter perfection if my perceived quality of that thing is zero.
Social utility efficiency is about how good a voting method is at satisfying your subjective tastes. For instance, if that kid were at the school lunch room, and the teachers announced that they would list some options for the next day's lunch, and let the kids vote which one to have, that kid would want them to use Range Voting - not IRV or plurality. That would make him (and all the other students) more likely to be more satisfied with whatever lunch was chosen.
As another analogy, say I'm holding you captive in your home, and I have a 12-sided die and a 6-sided die (just imagine you're playing D&D). I tell you that in order to leave, you must pick one die, guess a number on it, and roll it - and if you guess the number correctly, you can go. Otherwise I hold you hostage another day, and we play again tomorrow.
Now, any idiot can tell you, you should pick the d6. Maybe when you leave, you'll go bowling, or maybe you'll go eat a steak at a nice restaurant, or maybe you'll go for a walk on the beach. Who am I to judge the value of what you do with your freedom? But no matter what you want to do, you'll be more likely to be more happy by picking the d6.
Range Voting is the d6 - IRV is the d12. Any questions?
Re: Supermajority vote?
Date: 2007-01-24 06:54 am (UTC)Re: Supermajority vote?
Date: 2007-01-24 10:45 am (UTC)Exactly! So if you don't know anything about the candidates, ideally your ballot shouldn't affect those candidates at all, for better or for worse. With Range Voting, that's exactly what happens if someone chooses "no opinion". But with IRV, it's not the same as saying "no opinion", it's the same as if you HATED that candidate and ranked him last.
So in summary, with Range Voting, "no opinion" really means no opinion, and diminishes the harm caused by ignorance.
With IRV "no opinion" means "like that candidate least", which has a negative impact on utility efficiency.
Re: Supermajority vote?
Date: 2007-01-24 07:00 am (UTC)I'm skeptical of your analogy here, by the way. You're assuming people to be far more rational than I think they are.
(Personally, I'd rather take the train if I could, but I rarely have enough time to do so. My wife detests flying so much that she'll only do it unless there is no other practical possibility. She even researched taking a ship to this year's Worldcon in Japan, but gave it up as too expensive. But I digress.)
Re: Supermajority vote?
Date: 2007-01-24 10:57 am (UTC)Oh yeah, because that's sooooo likely to happen. EVERYONE would fail to show up. I think not. And if even a small number show up, they are going to form a pretty good statistical aproximation of the electorate, which is why it's a bit silly for people to worry too much about voter turn out. The more important issue is that voter turn-out is ideologically proportional to the electorate as a whole.
This would be roughly equivalent to everyone being so scared of flying that they all stay home and hide under the bed.
I will hand it to you, that's a very funny analogy, but doesn't correlate well to reality. Say even half the normal amount of voters showed up (which would be a big impact), but they used a much better voting system - the electorate as a whole would be very likely to be more pleased. Heck, even if 1/100th of the electorate showed up, that would happen, statistically speaking. Polls can get a 95% confidence interval with just a few thousand respondents. It's been so long since stats I don't remember the exact equation as a function of margin of error but, I know it doesn't take that many voters to get very high levels of accuracy.
And we actually have found evidence that Range Voting will increase voter turnout. This is because, by looking at historical election patterns, we've found patterns such as, people tend to show up in much greater numbers when there is a very large difference in how much they like the options. If they hate them both, or love them both, they don't turn out in large numbers. But man, if the candidates are more polarized, the numbers go up by a lot. Because Range Voting gives more candidates a realistic chance of winning (makes it contentious between lots of candidates, rather than between just a couple) we have reason to believe it would have a large effect on voter turnout, based on that psychology. That's a little off topic for your uses, but interesting nontheless.
I'm skeptical of your analogy here, by the way. You're assuming people to be far more rational than I think they are.
Oh no, believe me, I don't think people are very rational at all! My point isn't that they'll understand that Range Voting is better, but that it is better.
Personally, I'd rather take the train if I could, but I rarely have enough time to do so.
Yeah, I see your Amtrack logo. I live in Seattle and I want to take it down to Portland some time for the heck of it.
My wife detests flying so much that she'll only do it unless there is no other practical possibility.
Hah! She's like me. Irrational paranoia of flying. It's my one irrational vice.
She even researched taking a ship to this year's Worldcon in Japan, but gave it up as too expensive. But I digress.
She should ship herself as cargo in a big wooden box. That's the economical way to go.
CLAY
Re: Supermajority vote?
Date: 2007-01-24 06:11 am (UTC)Re: Supermajority vote?
Date: 2007-01-24 11:41 am (UTC)So, talking about my "deeply rooted misapprehensions" is just hand-waving, instead of offering counter-evidence.
But of course you probably have a life, so I don't expect you to spend hours going back and forth about this. All I would encourage you to do is face the very probably fact that those wikipedia entries are correct, and you were just confused before. No reason to feel bad about that. Mistakes happen.
Re: Supermajority vote?
Date: 2007-01-23 04:09 pm (UTC)Re: Supermajority vote?
Date: 2007-01-24 04:15 am (UTC)http://RangeVoting.org/vsr.html
Here's a quick example to explain it to you in a nutshell. We have voters V1 - V6, and candidates C1 - C5. Below is a table of the utility values from each voter for each candidate. Think of utility as "desire" or "happiness/satisfaction one would get by having that thing". These values are in "happiness units" of arbitrary magnitude. Don't worry that we can't objectively quantify that unit, because later we divide, which drops the terms out and leaves us with a unitless value - just a ratio.
C1 C2 C3 C4 C5
V1 2 30 -16 52 56
V2 24 30 10 60 30
V3 40 -8 -30 12 -18
V4 37 36 8 -28 -37
V5 -26 -28 -11 -28 8
V6 45 58 22 -4 55
UTILITY AVG. (U) 20.33 19.67 -2.83 10.67 15.67
BAYSIAN REGRET 0.00 0.67 23.17 9.67 4.67
VSR 100.00% 91.27% -203.49% -26.64% 38.86%
VSR = (U - average(U)) / (max(U) - average(U))
In this example, C1 produces the greatest happiness for the greatest number, with an average utility of 20.33. C3, on the other hand, produces a an average utility of -2.83, the lowest. But these numbers are like cubits, only comparable to each other, but not to numbers from other scenarios. To resolve that, we rescale the utilities, such that the voter satisfaction ratio of picking the ideal winner is a 100%, and the VSR of picking a random winner (just the average of all the candidates' utilities) is 0%. The formula is mentioned below the table. For the highest utility value, U = max(U) so we get 100% social utility efficiency.
If we test honest plurality voting here, C1 and C5 tie, 2-2. But say we use strategic plurality, where each voter strategically votes for his favorite between the two front-runners. Then C5 wins 4-2.
Now say we try range voting, using the standard definition of "honest" range voting, where each voter simply rescales his utilies to the specified range (0-10, 0-99, whatever). Then we get:
C1 C2 C3 C4 C5
2.50 6.39 0.00 9.44 10.00
2.80 4.00 0.00 10.00 4.00
10.00 3.14 0.00 6.00 1.71
10.00 9.86 6.08 1.22 0.00
0.56 0.00 4.72 0.00 10.00
7.90 10.00 4.19 0.00 9.52
5.63 5.57 2.50 4.44 5.87
C5 just barely beats C1, even though C1 produces a tremendously higher voter satisfaction ratio. Of course that's partly because I tweaked this example (starting with random values that I then tuned) to show examples where Range Voting can indeed pick a pretty poor winner. (note that some candidates have negative values, because they produce less satisfaction than what would be expected from picking a RANDOM candidate - a voting method that picked them regularly would be WORSE than drawing a name out of a hat, instead of better, defeating the purpose of democracy).
Now say I go in and randomly plug a bunch of numbers in for the honest utility values again.
C1 C2 C3 C4 C5
V1 25 55 7 20 45
V2 12 25 1 18 19
V3 16 16 8 17 6
V4 35 40 0 34 41
V5 2 21 11 19 35
V6 8 12 15 5 7
UTILITY SUM (U) 16.33 28.17 7.00 18.83 25.50
BAYSIAN REGRET 11.83 0.00 21.17 9.33 2.67
VSR -31.48% 100.00% -135.19% -3.70% 70.37%
I dispensed with negatives this time, just because it's easier to type a bunch of random positive numbers in quickly without putting thought into it.
Now let's see which winner HONEST plurality would pick.
C2 and C5 tie, 2-2. So if voters were strategic with plurality (voting their favorite between just those TWO) they'd get C2, by a 4-2 vote. Producing a VSR of 100%! What about "honest" (normalized) Range Voting?
C1 C2 C3 C4 C5
3.75 10.00 0.00 2.71 7.92
4.58 10.00 0.00 7.08 7.50
9.09 9.09 1.82 10.00 0.00
8.54 9.76 0.00 8.29 10.00
0.00 5.76 2.73 5.15 10.00
3.00 7.00 10.00 0.00 2.00
4.83 8.60 2.42 5.54 6.24 <-- Averages
It would also pick C2, by a hefty margin. And if C2 dropped out, it would elect C5. So, here strategic plurality has actually worked pretty well, and so has Range Voting. Now imagine taking these simplified spreadsheet examples, and using something like 20 different voting methods, and MILLIONS of elections, with 720 different combinations of election parameters (strategic vs. honest, ignorant vs. informed voters). That's how we got the results I present to you.
Clay
Re: Supermajority vote?
Date: 2007-01-24 04:28 am (UTC)Re: Supermajority vote?
Date: 2007-01-24 05:43 am (UTC)http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pXPf6D8HwIWncwYJKKb4CcQ
no subject
Date: 2007-01-04 11:09 pm (UTC)Personally, I like range voting. I've even used it in various situations very impressively, including at the museum. I like the weight method, but I have issues with the difficulty it can present to voters who are using it for the first few times. It also takes longer to vote, but I really think it makes things much clearer.
Chris
no subject
Date: 2007-01-04 11:14 pm (UTC)And movements need to be, as you say, "significant," not "Me and a couple of my friends want to talk really loud and you should do what we say because we said so." One of the rights of a super-majority is the right to not have their time wasted.
no subject
Date: 2007-01-05 01:10 am (UTC)This RV web page erroneously compares range voting to Olympic scoring. If we discount the irrelevant (but amusing) fact that in Olympic scoring the highest and lowest scores are tossed (to prevent a single judge from skewing the average), we're still talking the difference between trained Olympic judges and the average voter.
A 10-point liker-scale is subject to a lot of pitfalls.
Olympic sports have complicated evaluation systems that judges use to select their scores. Elections don't. Most folks can't discriminate to a 10-point scale, much less the fractional-point system that Olympic judges use. They'll usually fall to using 9/5/0. Now that's not a big deal if everybody does that. But not everybody does.
With a large population, it's practically impossible to ensure that all participants use the liker scale in the same way. Voters have to not only be instructed in how range voting works, but also how they should select numbers. If some of the voters trend towards low numbers (i.e. they vote mostly 1, 2, 3 for their preferred candidates) and some trend towards high numbers (they vote mostly 9,8,7 for their preferred candidates) this will skew the results and the impact of their votes. Droping to a 4-point scale (0-3) loses a bit of granularity, but it's easier to get people using the numbers the same way.
The educational effort needed to make the range voting scheme advocated at rangevoting.org produce meaningful results would be enormous.
IRV has its pitfalls, but I think the range voting advocates are digging deep into the FUD to scare people about the possibility of vote manipulation.
no subject
Date: 2007-01-23 03:29 am (UTC)Erroneously?
Date: 2007-01-23 03:41 am (UTC)http://docs.google.com/View?docid=dgj28wdr_59hcq47c
Regards,
Clay
Re: Erroneously?
Date: 2007-01-23 05:16 am (UTC)Case 2: Joe adds 6 to each vote in Case 1. That raises every candidate's average by the same amount, hence has no effect on the choice of winner.
Case 3: Jane votes 1, 5, and 9. Now Jane has exactly 4 times as much effect as Joe.
The other thing I'm wondering about is how you define the "magical optimum winner" and why Honest Range doesn't select it. If it's defined as "maximum total utility" then Honest Range would.
Re: Erroneously?
Date: 2007-01-23 06:29 am (UTC)In any case, it could be that Jane really does HATE the first candidate, hence the 1, and Joe might give a 7, 8, and 9, meaning he'd be fairly pleased with ANY of those candidates. It's good for voters to be honest, because then we have a better chance of electing a candidate who gives the most happiness to the most people.
As for magical optimum winner, that is the winner based on the highest UTILITY average (or total, depending on how you want to look at it - same thing).
Here's an example spreadsheet where I have the table on the right automatically set to act as a rescaled version of the actual utility values.
http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pXPf6D8HwIWncwYJKKb4CcQ
Notice that the range voting winner here is Candidate 5, even though C1 produces a much greater average happiness. As we see, even Range Voting isn't perfect.
Now let's see who wins if we use honest plurality - everyone casts a vote for his sincere favorite. C5 ties with C1, each getting 2 votes. So what if voters had used the normal plurality strategy of casting their vote for their favorite just between the two front-runners (we'll pretend there are no insanely idealistic Nader spoiler people). C5 beats C1 4-2! So strategic plurality also elects C5. C5 produces a social utility of 38.86% here. If we try a bunch of different voting methods, we might find one that, in just this particular case, DOES elect C1, producing 100% social utility efficiency. But to make that mean something, we have to do hundreds, thousands, or even millions of different scenarios, to approximate the random feelings that voters have based on the random ways they were brought up, or the random books or experiences that might have just affected their beliefs, or the random candidates who might have happened to run that year, or the random smear ads that the voters might have happened to see. So many random things affect those utilities.
But hopefully this example helps demonstrate how the magical winner is not always the same as the Range Voting winner. RV just does a much better job than other methods at maximizing the utility.
Regards,
Clay
Re: Erroneously?
Date: 2007-01-23 06:32 am (UTC)CLAY
Re: Erroneously?
Date: 2007-01-23 07:04 am (UTC)Re: Erroneously?
Date: 2007-01-23 07:30 am (UTC)Re: Erroneously?
Date: 2007-01-23 04:13 pm (UTC)Re: Erroneously?
Date: 2007-01-23 06:33 pm (UTC)See: http://RangeVoting.org/BayRegDum.html
and http://RangeVoting.org/vsr.html
You can't use real world polls to calculate this, because you can't read people's minds, and you can't run hundreds of millions of elections and poll every single voter anyway. Instead what social utility calculations do is take scenarios of the utilities candidates have for a range of choices, and then determine how voters would vote based on those levels of preference for the options. We then look at the average utility produced by the selection of the winner, scaled as a ratio of "distance" covered from the utility produced by a random winner, to the utility produced by the ideal winner. You do millions of simulations, using hundreds of different models of voter behavior, from strategic, to honest (honest is trivial, strategy is more complicated), and from totally ignorant to totally informed, with 2 candidates, with 3, with 4, with 5, etc. You then see the average satisfaction produced by the various voting systems. Range Voting dominates the other methods, in every combination of 5 fundamental parameters we tried.
You can run our software for yourself, and try to find bugs if you like.
http://RangeVoting.org/IEVS/
Also, we often get asked "Why are you using a computer simulation instead of real humans?" So, http://rangevoting.org/WhyNoHumans.html
CLAY
Re: Erroneously?
Date: 2007-01-23 06:41 pm (UTC)Any system in which the electorate does not have a high degree of confidence is doomed because the results will not be seen as a legitimate reflection of the common will. (Just look at American politics; the election mechanics are simple, but voter confidence is low.)
Re: Erroneously?
Date: 2007-01-24 11:11 am (UTC)Well, totalling votes with Range Voting can be done just like plurality voting, both of which are easier and less error prone than IRV. And IRV being so complicated gives an incentive to use electronic voting machines for it, which as we know is just asking for trouble. Some facts:
Range voting works on every voting machine in the USA, including noncomputerized ones, right now, without modification and without reprogramming. But IRV cannot be made to work on many kinds of voting machines. When San Francisco adopted IRV it screwed up and was unable to announce all nontrivial election results, supposedly for weeks.
Adopting IRV will cause voter errors ("spoiled" ballots) to become 7 times more frequent (based on San Francisco numbers). But adopting range voting appears to decrease errors.
IRV makes ties and other nightmare-scenarios much more likely; Range voting makes them much less likely. http://rangevoting.org/TieRisk.html
IRV will (in plausible scenarios) elect candidate X in preference to candidate Y, even though based on the IRV votes, Y is pairwise-preferred over X (and over everybody else too) by an arbitrarily-huge supermajority of the voters. This appears to have happened in both the Peru 2006 election (but less dramatically; merely a "55% majority" rather than a "huge supermajority" was thwarted) and the Chile 1970 election (this time with about a 2:1 ratio supermajority being thwarted).
Raising a candidate in your IRV vote from bottom to top-ranked can actually cause him to lose!
Contrary to pro-IRV-propaganda, pathological IRV elections seem unpleasantly common in practice. Two of the last five Debian elections would have exhibited pathologies had they been held using IRV. (Note: The Debian elections are LARGE, and ostensibly contentious, and are perfectly RECORDED - they are a great source of election data).
Your models appear to assume that everyone understands what's going on and has confidence in the system.
Not at all. I did a Range Voting exit poll in Beaumont, TX, and voter behavior seemed reasonably consistent with various simulation parameters from our social utility efficiency calculations. I just asked voters to score the candidates as they would in a real election, and most of them didn't even appear to read the directions, and still had no problems just quickly scoring them and sauntering off to their...steer roping, or whatever Texans do (I'm from Kansas, so I have the liberty to talk like that about the midwest).
Any system in which the electorate does not have a high degree of confidence is doomed because the results will not be seen as a legitimate reflection of the common will. (Just look at American politics; the election mechanics are simple, but voter confidence is low.)
I agree with you there. We have to educate people about this in order to get them to use it. But consider that most people don't even understand how IRV works, or WHY it works, yet it just passed in four U.S. municipalities, including Pierce County, Washington, just south of Seattle. I ask people from Pierce county what they think about IRV, and they never seem to really understand it. They just feel happy that it was a piece of "reform". Pfft..silly voters.
CLAY
Re: Erroneously?
Date: 2007-01-23 07:18 pm (UTC)It's not bugs in your software, it's the assumptions made when writing the software and creating the data. Social utility/cost benefit/"economic man" arguments are always liable to drift away from reality, unless cross-checked against real-life preferences. (See the staggeringly inane "Everyday Economist" columns on Slate magazine for an example.)
Re: Erroneously?
Date: 2007-01-24 11:58 am (UTC)Being disproven by Wikipedia has really upset you apparently, so much so that you are now responding to me with completely random nonsense comments. Oh, kayyy.
It's not bugs in your software, it's the assumptions made when writing the software and creating the data.
Our assumptions range from one extreme to another, and everywhere in between. Range Voting beat the other systems by a huge margin, no matter WHICH assumptions we used. You guys seem to be having a really hard time following that part. If we assume voters are stupid, Range Voting wins. If we assume they are educated, Range Voting wins. If we assume they are strategic, Range Voting wins. If we assume they are honest, Range Voting wins.
If the software has some kind of flaws that you'd care to point out, we'd welcome your specific analysis and suggestions for improvement.
Social utility/cost benefit/"economic man" arguments are always liable to drift away from reality
The simulations used hundreds of millions of different randomized distributions of voters and candidates, and yet Range Voting consistently won out, by a large margin. No matter what placement you think is realistic, with that many simulations, some of them should have come close to modeling real world distributions, yet Range Voting consistently won, and by a lot. If this effect was purely coincidence, we should have expected to see many scenarios where Range Voting just randomly happened to do worse than other systems. Yet that didn't happen. Clearly then, it's not just a random coincidence. The odds of that are infinitesimally low. We can be extremely confident that this really is an effect of the properties of Range Voting, and not just some random fluke. If it was just a random fluke, we wouldn't expect it to hold true over hundreds of millions of trials.
no subject
Date: 2007-01-04 11:10 pm (UTC)And I poked around on their site for about 5 minutes before my eyes started to bleed and my brains began to leak out of my ears.
Clearly, RV is their claw hammer and all elections are basic HDG nails. Urgh.
no subject
Date: 2007-01-04 11:36 pm (UTC)RV is easier
Date: 2007-01-23 03:51 am (UTC)CLAY
no subject
Date: 2007-01-04 11:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-01-23 03:53 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-01-05 07:21 am (UTC)"Thank you for your opinion."
no subject
Date: 2007-01-05 10:19 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-01-05 06:13 pm (UTC)I still think the funniest is when people write to the webmaster address touting what a good webmaster they would be. The webpages need flash and scripting, and other bells and whistles that the current webmaster obviously isn't capable of doing. Just who do they think is reading the webmaster email?
no subject
Date: 2007-01-23 03:16 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-01-24 05:44 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-01-24 08:28 am (UTC)You: Procrustean evangelist who does not do work necessary to put on Worldcon or any other science fiction convention.
Us: The volunteers who actually put up our labor and money to put on science fiction conventions.
Now who's opinion of what needs to be our highest priority do you think will carry more weight? Particularly since you're unwilling to even work up a proposal, you just want us to study your tracts and then work at coming up with a way to implement Range Voting at Worldcon.
no subject
Date: 2007-02-10 08:41 am (UTC)Us: The volunteers who actually put up our labor and money to put on science fiction conventions.
You: People who are supposedly rational enough to do something that is in your own best interest.
Am I wrong?
since you're unwilling to even work up a proposal, you just want us to study your tracts and then work at coming up with a way to implement Range Voting at Worldcon.
The point isn't what I want you to do. The point is, you should want you to do this. I would be happy to help you draft a proposal, if you would decide to push for this. I would offer any academic resources possible.
no subject
Date: 2007-02-10 09:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-02-10 11:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-01-23 03:56 am (UTC)See: http://rangevoting.org/IrvExec.html
Here is an example of how "dumb" IRV is:
Voting honestly in IRV can be worse for you than not voting at all
#voters their vote
7 B>G>N
6 G>B>N
5 N>G>B
3 N>G>B
In this 21-voter IRV election, B wins (by 15-to-8 after G is eliminated). But if the 3 voters in the last line had not voted, then G would have won (which those voters would have preferred). (Because N is eliminated then G beats B by 11-to-7.).
no subject
Date: 2007-01-23 06:37 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-01-23 03:56 pm (UTC)"Which do you want, four or five?" they asked me. "I don't care if it's four or five, I want the same number of lines on each [so that the I/O matches up]."
no subject
Date: 2007-01-23 03:49 am (UTC)Range Voting is arguably simpler than preferential ballot systems. You can, for instance, use a simplified range of -2, -1, 0, 1, 2, which can be roughly abstracted as hate, dislike, neutral, like, love.
Why did your brains start to leak out of your ears? Because our site looks like a college math text book? Well, sorry. The science of election methods is super complex, even if USING the election method is simple. It's like with your iPod. Just because it uses incredibly complex technology under the hood, doesn't mean my mom can't easily use hers when she goes jogging.
Let's not imply that a voting method is complex because the science it takes to prove it's the best is complex.
Clay
no subject
Date: 2007-01-23 08:10 am (UTC)I have a math degree (in fact, we're both in the same general field, aren't we?), and I'm mopping my brains off the floor too. ;)
Not to mention, this "social utility efficiency" catchphrase they keep bandying about in their comments here strikes me as so much Boardroom Bingo.
I even took a look at their example (http://www.rangevoting.org/RExample.html), and all I see is that a hypothetical candidate who was left off of three ballots and named last on two others ends up winning. I hardly think a system where a candidate wins whom more than half of the voters absolutely don't want is an effective system.
no subject
Date: 2007-01-24 06:18 am (UTC)In what respect? You mean to say that the material is too complicated? Too boring? What exactly is your complaint?
Not to mention, this "social utility efficiency" catchphrase they keep bandying about in their comments here strikes me as so much Boardroom Bingo.
No, it's a measure of your expected value, in the "currency" of satisfaction, with each voting method. A higher social utility efficiency means YOU, Joe Voter, will tend to be happier with the results of elections using Range Voting. Compared to IRV, the effect is enormous. Going from IRV to Range Voting gives you almost as big an increase in your expected satisfaction, as going from random selection to IRV in the first place.
I even took a look at their example, and all I see is that a hypothetical candidate who was left off of three ballots and named last on two others ends up winning. I hardly think a system where a candidate wins whom more than half of the voters absolutely don't want is an effective system.
Leaving someone off the ballot means that you aren't affecting his average, and is generally only done by voters when they don't know enough about that candidate to make an informed decision. In this example, Amy and Bob were extremely disliked by 3 people, whereas Cal was only strongly disliked by two people, and got an almost perfect score from three others, and a very high score from the other. So the most people are the most happy with Cal. The X voters chose to trust the opinions of more informed voters about a candidate they knew little about; but that's their choice, they could have strategically chosen to give Cal a 0 if they wanted.
Contrary to your intuition, this actually is the most effective system, because the paradoxes that arise using other methods tend to be MUCH worse. Look at this IRV election for example (IRV is the method you currently use), where the four voting blocs sit on a left-to-right axis as follows:
Leftist Centrist Rightist
Dean Gore Bush
1
2
3
4
21 Bush > Gore > Dean
10 Gore > Bush > Dean
10 Gore > Dean > Bush
20 Dean > Gore > Bush
With IRV, Gore is eliminated, and Bush beats Dean 31-30. But wait! Gore is preferred to Bush 40-21 - a bigger percentage than any landslide election in our history. IRV picks the wrong winner in this scenario. As a result, the utility efficiency of IRV is significantly lower than that produced by Range Voting.
You can do simulations for yourself if you like, and see which methods tend to leave voters most satisfied. What you'll find is that Range Voting is a very large improvement over IRV, even if we can find special scenarios where Range Voting doesn't seem to pick the winner that you intuitively feel should win the election. On the whole Range Voting picks better winners. As a result, YOU will be happier with the results of elections if you use Range Voting. Choosing NOT to use it is just shooting yourself in the foot. It's like choosing to pick the winner at random instead of holding elections.
Look at this: http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pXPf6D8HwIWncwYJKKb4CcQ
You can easily set up a spreadsheet like that, and plug in lots of random utility values, and calculate the utility efficiency of plurality, strategic plurality, honest/scaled Range Voting, IRV, strategic IRV (same general strategy as with plurality), etc. etc. You can see the results for yourself. There will be cases when Range Voting picks a worse winner than plurality, but more often than not, it will be vice versa. Range Voting will simply decimate the other methods. Again, I encourage you to test this for yourself. Don't take my word for it. Practice the scientific method.
Clay
no subject
Date: 2007-01-24 06:45 am (UTC)Leftist Centrist Rightist Dean Gore Bush 1 2 3 4no subject
Date: 2007-01-25 09:38 am (UTC)21 Bush > Gore > Dean
10 Gore > Bush > Dean
10 Gore > Dean > Bush
20 Dean > Gore > Bush
With IRV, Gore is eliminated, and Bush beats Dean 31-30. But wait! Gore is preferred to Bush 40-21 - a bigger percentage than any landslide election in our history. IRV picks the wrong winner in this scenario. As a result, the utility efficiency of IRV is significantly lower than that produced by Range Voting.
Actually, under our Constitution, if those were the results than both Gore and Dean would be eliminated after the first ballot, and Bush would be declared the winner 21-20-20:
"Votes shall first be tallied by the voter's first choices. If no majority is then obtained, the candidate who places last in the initial tallying shall be eliminated and the ballots listing it as first choice shall be redistributed on the basis of those ballots' second choices. This process shall be repeated until a majority-vote winner is obtained. If two or more candidates are tied for elimination during this process, the candidate that received fewer first-place votes shall be eliminated. If they are still tied, all the tied candidates shall be eliminated together."
Can I have another example?
no subject
Date: 2007-02-10 08:04 am (UTC)34
17
15
34
And then you should get the point.
no subject
Date: 2007-01-25 09:29 am (UTC)Poorly presented, perhaps. Upon a second reading, it looks like a fairly simple system, but you're making it sound much more complex than it needs to be.
I still have a major problem with it: the points you award to a given candidate can be all over the map. A voter who votes "candidate A=9, B=5, C=1" has more weight given to his vote than a voter who opts for "A=3, B=2, C=1" when they've ranked the candidates in the exact same order. This may be a good way of rating a book or a movie for the purpose of telling someone how much you enjoyed it, but it's not good for choosing a convention site or giving out awards when you're comparing two or more candidates directly against each other.
This isn't Olympic figure skating, where every candidate starts out with a score of 6.0 and points are deducted for turning a triple Axel into a double.
Oh, and I also take issue with your example of bees. Simply screaming the loudest is no way to make a democratic decision.
no subject
Date: 2007-02-10 08:27 am (UTC)I presented it as "Score all the candidates and elect the one who has the highest average." How does that make it sound complicated?
It is important to differentiate between the complexity of the actual voting method, and the complexity of understanding why the voting method is good. In other words, explaining to people what monotonicity and independence of irrelevant alternatives are. Explaining social utility efficiency...that can be frustrating and difficult. But that has nothing to do with how complicated the voting method itself is. When people say that Range Voting would fail under strategic voting, I have to pull out social utility efficiency calculations to prove to them, "No, you're wrong, it wouldn't" and "stop expecting your intuition to have any place in such a deeply mathematical discussion".
A voter who votes "candidate A=9, B=5, C=1" has more weight given to his vote than a voter who opts for "A=3, B=2, C=1" when they've ranked the candidates in the exact same order.
This is a benefit of Range Voting. Say a third voter came in and scored A=0, B=6. B would be the logical winner, even though A is the first choice of two voters. That is, a switch from B to A would only affect voter 2 a tiny amount, and take voter 1 from being moderately happy to being very happy. But voter 3 would go from relative happiness to misery. I don't think that's a good situation. But if voters don't agree, they are free to maximize their scores. In fact, I suggest they do - because what meaning do any scores have if you do not first give your least and most favorite a minimum and maximum score respectively? Without a frame of reference, what do the numbers even mean?
So, in short, don't blame the voting system when voters do silly things. This reminds me of the 97,488 Floridians who voted for Nader in 2000, only to help secure the victory for Bush. Should we have taken Nader off the ballot, to protect them from their own silliness?
This may be a good way of rating a book or a movie for the purpose of telling someone how much you enjoyed it, but it's not good for choosing a convention site or giving out awards when you're comparing two or more candidates directly against each other.
On the contrary, it's the best of the common single-winner voting methods, based on extensive calculations of social utility efficiency (http://RangeVoting.org/vsr.html). That is, by using Range Voting, you will be greatly more satsified with election results than you would be with IRV. The effect is almost as large as the one caused by going from random selection, to IRV elections like you have now.
This isn't Olympic figure skating, where every candidate starts out with a score of 6.0 and points are deducted for turning a triple Axel into a double.
I don't recall ever saying that it was. It has been compared more to gymnastics scoring, but even then that's just to give people the concept in a simple recognizable scenario. Maybe "like rating books on Amazon" would be better for certain audiences.
no subject
Date: 2007-02-10 08:33 am (UTC)17% Gore > McCain > Edwards
15% Gore > Edwards > McCain
34% Edwards > Gore > McCain
McCain wins with IRV, even though 66% of voters prefer Gore to both McCain and Edwards. IRV picks the wrong winner. Any election method can exhibit this kind of phenomenon, but with IRV, it's negative impact on social utility is significantly worse.
Range Voting
Date: 2007-01-05 01:11 am (UTC)What's their interest in what we do? Just intellectual argument (hah!) or are they trying to sell something? What difference does it make to them how we do OUR voting? Conidering how corrupt the Olympics voting has been in the past, I'll stick to our system, than you.
Linda
Re: Range Voting
Date: 2007-01-23 04:02 am (UTC)How you can possibly think that Range Voting is "harder to understand" than IRV is completely beyond me. THOUSANDS of web sites use ratings systems, like 1-5 stars, and present the average. But how many systems use IRV? Range Voting is more than just leaps and bounds better, it's simpler.
And what does corruption in the Olympics have to do with Range Voting? Guilt by association? Considering that Range Voting produces greater social utility efficiency even when EVERY SINGLE VOTER is 100% DISHONESTLY STRATEGIC than IRV produces if EVERY SINGL EVOTER is 100% HONEST, we'd make the obvious case that Range Voting PREVENTS the bad effects of corruption.
And I'd encourage you to research this a little better, before you discount a process which would give you vastly better results.
Re: Range Voting
Date: 2007-01-23 03:58 pm (UTC)I detest the term...
Re: Range Voting
Date: 2007-01-23 04:05 pm (UTC)Re: Range Voting
Date: 2007-01-24 02:44 am (UTC)Of course, Forry was already an established and well-connected member of the community at the time. Forry survived the fights and the arguments with his reputation intact, but his name for the genre still carries a taint even though the origin of that taint has been almost forgotten.
Re: Range Voting
Date: 2007-01-24 06:19 am (UTC)Re: Range Voting
Date: 2007-01-24 06:26 am (UTC)In a democratically-run society, particularly one run on "Town Meeting" democratic principles, reputation may have nothing to do with "scientific analysis" of a proposition but it has a lot to do with whether said proposition will ever be adopted.
Politics is messy that way.
Re: Range Voting
Date: 2007-01-24 07:12 am (UTC)Re: Range Voting
Date: 2007-01-24 07:16 am (UTC)Re: Range Voting
Date: 2007-01-24 02:08 pm (UTC)For example, humans might even behave irrationally and feel, y'know, insulted by your comment.
Re: Range Voting
Date: 2007-02-10 11:02 pm (UTC)Re: Range Voting
Date: 2007-02-10 11:41 pm (UTC)This is truer than you probably realize.
Re: Range Voting
Date: 2007-02-11 12:15 am (UTC)Re: Range Voting
Date: 2007-02-11 12:24 am (UTC)Re: Range Voting
Date: 2007-02-12 06:35 am (UTC)Old broken-record there actually is very fannish. He's intense, dedicated, and incapable of realizing how obnoxious he's being.
Re: Range Voting
Date: 2007-01-24 10:07 am (UTC)Looking at the range voting pages you refer to, I see the same word all over the place: "assumption". I see no actual studies of the use of range voting, only computer simulations based on assumptions.
Assumptions are not scientific evidence.
Re: Range Voting
Date: 2007-01-24 11:26 am (UTC)When doing social utility efficiency calculations, we have to make assumptions about what percentage of voters are strategic vs. honest, and informed vs. ignorant, and how many candidates will run in the election, etc. etc. The point is that we varied these assumptions from 100% strategic, over a range to 100% honest, and the same with the other variables. In all of the combinations of parameters, Range Voting beat out the other systems. So don't take the word "assumption" the wrong way. The point is that Range Voting hugely outperforms other methods, no matter what we assume. If we assume that voters will be 100% informed about the candidates but also 100% strategic instead of honest, Range Voting kills the other methods. If we assume 50% of voters will be strategic and 50% will be honest, Range Voting kills the other methods. What Warren Smith expected, when he started out doing these simulations, is that in some models, Range Voting would win, but in other models it would lose, and then it would be a process of trying to find out which of those assumptions was the most like reality, so that we could determine which voting methods really were best. But quite to his surprise, Range Voting won in all of them, like I said. That's why he became such a zealous promoter of this method, and why I think quite highly of it also. Then the more you learn about it, the more wonderful properties it exhibits. It can be done on standard voting machines, IRV can't. Things like that. They just all add up, and then it becomes overwhelming.
And mind you, our real world exit polls show that Range Voting is easy to use - yes, even for voters in a small town in southeast Texas - and that it produces more fair representation of minor parties and independents.
Check out recent results from our online poll, with 1500 people: http://RangeVoting.org/2008.html and see how much better minor party candidates do, because there's not a significant incentive not to give them sincere ratings.
no subject
Date: 2007-01-05 03:43 am (UTC)But uncontrolled range voting in a large, open, secret ballot election is nutty. A controlled point system would be better, but still a bad idea. Range voting should be limited to small judge systems where it belongs.
no subject
Date: 2007-01-23 01:21 pm (UTC)Amen to that.
no subject
Date: 2007-02-10 11:10 pm (UTC)Social Utility Efficiencies
Range (honest voters) 96.71% 94.66%
Condorcet-LR (honest voters) 85.19% 85.43%
Range & Approval (strategic voters) 78.99% 77.01%
Condorcet-LR (strategic voters) 42.56% 41.31%
Range Voting kicks the pants off Condorcet.
no subject
Date: 2007-01-05 07:24 am (UTC)We can sit here and argue all day about which system is just a teeny bit simpler and easier than the other, but that's completely missing the point. If you had an ear infection, would you rather take a tiny easy-to-swallow placebo, or a slightly larger REAL ANTIBIOTIC? Hopefully you're sane, and you chose option B. In that case, you should be supporting
range voting!
no subject
Date: 2007-01-23 05:06 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-01-23 05:37 am (UTC)In fact any percieved "campaigning" is likely to backfire of the subject of the campaign.
Site-selection votes, which also use IRV, does have bid committees and a different sort of campaign, but there is no reason to believe that the process we have not is now satisfactory to the voters.
Trying to change our system and opinuion becuase you say something else isn't better without actual proof that it is better. Voting simulations aren't going to do it. Neither are made up examples formed to prove a point. It's just as easy to make up examples that will cause Range Voting to produce unwanted results.
no subject
Date: 2007-01-24 12:09 pm (UTC)So presumably the effect of strategic voting is small. Well, Range Voting beats IRV by a huge amount, when voters aren't strategic (or if they are), so it would still be benifical to you.
Trying to change our system and opinuion becuase you say something else isn't better without actual proof that it is better. Voting simulations aren't going to do it.
On the contrary, they do "do it". They show that the social utility efficiency of Range Voting is substantially better than with IRV.
Neither are made up examples formed to prove a point.
But they do prove the point. For instance, the scenario where IRV picks the wrong winner is mathematically proven to happen around 19.7% of the time. That's a fact that you can't escape by just waving your hands and saying, "No, you can't fool me with your silly math."
It's just as easy to make up examples that will cause Range Voting to produce unwanted results.
Sure, you can create such examples, as I did myself in a spreadsheet which I linked people to in some of my other posts. The issue is how frequently these various scenarios actually come up, which we can objecively calculate. That's what social utility efficiency calculations are all about.
Rather than refuting this, all I've heard anyone here do is express sheer incredulity: "Your simulations don't prove anything."
Well, sure they don't, if you clearly don't understand how they work, how they are derived, etc. But in order for someone to explain that to you, you have to actually present your argument so that your mistakes can be exposed. By not making any argument, but hand-waving, you're not even enjoying the opportunity to learn from your mistakes and misunderstanding. That's truly sad.
Clay
no subject
Date: 2007-01-23 04:21 pm (UTC)Good lord.
IRV: 1) pick your favorite.
2) Now, imagine that it's vanished from the ballot (which is exactly what will happen in the counting if we get this far). Pick your favorite from the remaining.
3) Repeat.
Range voting: Decide how much you like each candidate vis a vis all the other ones. Niggle over exact numbers of points. Worry about the balancing effect of other people's votes. (This doesn't come up in IRV, since second preferences have no effect unless your first preference has been eliminated, so there's no need for strategic voting.)
no subject
Date: 2007-01-24 12:26 pm (UTC)You have it completely backward. People rate items like faces or movies all the time, without relating them directly to other options. A movie is thought of as a "five" if it was about average, or a 10 if it was just absolutely superb and classic, or an 8 if it was really good, etc.
But now in order to "pick your favorite" you, BY DEFINITION, have to compare every single option with every single other one. Sure, IRV sounds simpler when you completely distort reality.
Worry about the balancing effect of other people's votes.
You have to do the same thing with IRV, so that's a poor argument. And with IRV, using strategy effectively equates to the same strategy as with plurality voting, causing much worse results. Range Voting, on the other hand, handles strategy gracefully. It produces greater social utility efficiency under completely strategic electorates than IRV often produces under completely honest electorates.
This doesn't come up in IRV, since second preferences have no effect unless your first preference has been eliminated, so there's no need for strategic voting.
False. This has to be the biggest single myth (I would probably say "lie", since we've corrected them on it, but they still say it) perpetuated by IRV advocates like FairVote.org. See this example:
#voters their vote
20 McCain > Gore > Dean
10 Gore > McCain > Dean
29 Dean > Gore > McCain
With IRV, Gore is eliminated, and McCain beats Dean, 30-29. But what if 10 people in the third group strategically "betray" their sincere favorite, Dean, andmove him to last place:
#voters their vote
20 McCain > Gore > Dean
20 Gore > McCain > Dean
19 Dean > Gore > McCain
Now Gore wins, which is better for those strategic betrayers.
With Range Voting, there is never an incentive not to give a maximum score to your favorite candidate however. The strategies in Range Voting are much less problematic.
And no, this isn't a contrived example - this type of scenario happens around 20% of the time.
no subject
Date: 2007-01-24 04:12 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-01-24 04:42 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-01-24 08:32 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-01-24 12:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-01-05 04:54 pm (UTC)Good for you. Stick to your position and make them provide their own case. I've never believed in "talking" for someone else. If it is a good idea, then the person advocating it should be the one to push it. If the person with the idea wants someone else to front it, I suspect there is something else going on.
I see this as an extension of the new fans vs. old fans debate.
no subject
Date: 2007-02-10 11:15 pm (UTC)Instead of rushing out the door and calling up your insurance company to start the appeal process, you tell the doctor, "Look buddy...if you think this is such a great idea for me, you spend an hour on the phone each day, and call my congressman until this is resolved. It ain't my job. Later, I gotta go watch my favorite televangelist."
no subject
Date: 2007-02-12 06:31 am (UTC)In the real world, you have to persuade people in ways that are more effective than insulting them.
If you can figure out a way of presenting your argument that doesn't make you sound like you're treating your audience like they are idiots, you might get somewhere. However, what you're doing is being perceived as saying, "Here are the 'victory conditions' I established. I've invented a system that meets my victory conditions much better than yours does. Here, you need to throw away everything you've ever known because I made up some rules and my system works better than yours does."
You are so convinced of the rightness of your cause that you've blinded yourself to how ineffectively you're presenting your arguments. In fact, you're doing such a poor job of it that I'd be hard-pressed to support anything you advocate.
The portion of SF fandom that participates in the rule-making process had a regular participant named Robert Sacks. Robert was notoriously obnoxious and disliked. Consequently, any proposal he advocated was operating at a severe disadvantage no matter how good it was. Things that he sponsored passed in spite of his endorsement, not because of it. You're in the same position now.
Missing the point
Date: 2007-01-23 02:26 am (UTC)I spend hours every week working on getting the message out to Libertarians, Greens, and voting reformers in general. For instance, I just wrote this: http://reformthelp.org/issues/voting/range.php
I really wish I had time to go to Japan or where ever the next event is, but I don't. I was just hoping you'd get a sense of my passion for this issue, and investigate it, and realize it's to your own advantage to use it.
The Libertarian Reform Caucus, for example, has already come on board, and now uses Range Voting internally, for planks and rating essays and such. AND the advocate it for use in political elections.
So anyway, please understand why I take the perspective I do. I have limited resources.
Re: Missing the point
Date: 2007-01-23 02:39 am (UTC)I don't see WSFS changing their rules without a significant number of their own regular attendees being convinced of the need for such a change. And that's not going to happen from an outside source. Either convince some of the regular Business Meeting attendees or join Worldcon and come push the changes in person. WSFS isn't run by remote elected representatives or some far-off cabal; it's more like a Town Meeting.
And I'm Chairman of the next such Town Meeting. I'll help you frame your proposal and point you to the people you really have to convince to have any hope of getting a fair hearing. But either you or someone you convince is going to have to do the actual legislative work.
Re: Missing the point
Date: 2007-01-23 03:43 am (UTC)And just maybe doing a drive-by that, worse, says "what you're doing is wrong; trust us and all will be solved" is supercilious and patronizing. It is unlikely to give us a warm, fuzzy feeling.
Perhaps the two people who have built this system have something useful to offer...but evangelizing at us when they are not a part of our community is irritating as all get-out.
I'm really glad they've seen the light and all. But if they knock at the door, they probably won't be nearly as entertaining as the Mormons.
Re: Missing the point
Date: 2007-01-23 05:15 am (UTC)And no, it's not more complex than IRV, it's much simpler. It's simpler to use, and VASTLY easier to total.
Voters in San Francisco decided to use a modified form of IRV, because it was marketed well to them, and because they were so desperate for reform that they latched on to what was out there. FairVote beat us to the punch, and told a LOT of lies. They still tell lies all the time. They say that IRV only elects majority winners, and prevents strategy incentives, and prevents spoilers. All lies, and we've pointed it out to them numerous times, but they still do it over and over again.
http://rangevoting.org/Irvtalk.html
You might care to note that Oakland also recently voted to change from traditional runoffs to _instant_ runoff. This move was largely pushed by Greens and independents. Interestingly, IRV has led to two-party duopoly in EVERY country where it has been used on any scale: Ireland, Australia, Malta, Fiji. Yet 21-23 of the 27 countries that use traditional runoffs have broken free of two-party domination, and have healthy third parties that actually WIN. So Oakland's Greens were apparently suicidal. Well, they didn't mean to be, but they swallowed the IRV propaganda. I was living in San Francisco at the time, and tried to get the word out, but it was me against an army of progaganda and myth. We're like the round-earthers trying to get the message out, and no one wants to hear it. It's rather frustrating.
The voter satisfaction ratios of the various voting methods should more than suffice to prove to you that you will see ENORMOUS benefit by switching to Range Voting. Let me phrase it like this. Imagine if you picked the winner by just drawing a name out of a hat. Okay, sounds dumb right? Now imagine you go from that to IRV. Now you are getting more satisfaction with the winner. Now switch to Range Voting from IRV, and you get that same amount of satisfaction, all over again! Range Voting is about as big an improvement over IRV as IRV is over plurality.
Do you not like having an election method that picks the right winner?
Re: Missing the point
Date: 2007-01-23 06:17 am (UTC)I think we'd get better representation than the current system by adopting this method.
Re: Missing the point
Date: 2007-01-23 06:56 am (UTC)http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pXPf6D8HwIWncwYJKKb4CcQ
The plurality winner, under honesty, would be a tie between C1 and C5. Under strategy it would be C5. That's still better than electing a random winner. The VSR of random winner would be 0%, by definition.
Now set up sheet like this for yourself, and go in there punching in random values based on the rolls of dice or something. And see what the expected utility return is for plurality as compared to random selection (i.e. just averaging the utilities of all candidates).
Enjoy.
CLAY
Re: Missing the point
Date: 2007-01-23 04:03 pm (UTC)Re: Missing the point
Date: 2007-01-23 06:18 am (UTC)Re: Missing the point
Date: 2007-01-23 07:01 am (UTC)The Dáil uses proportional representation, I believe, probably STV (IRV is just STV applied to single-winner races).
If you like proportional representation, then you should love Range Voting, because Reweighted Range Voting is better than STV in every conceivable way.
http://RangeVoting.org/RRV.html
Also, with IRV, which leads to two-party domination, we'll never EVER get to proportional representation in this country, aside from a few local elections - nothing that will effect big time politics. But with Range Voting, we'll break out of two-party domination, and have an actual chance of getting proportional representation.
See, if you had just done a little research before hastily trying to prove me wrong, this dialog could have gone a lot better for you.
Thanks,
Clay
Re: Missing the point
Date: 2007-01-23 11:51 am (UTC)Re: Missing the point
Date: 2007-01-24 12:38 pm (UTC)All of my examples were IRV. Ireland uses IRV in their presidential post, and it is two-party dominated (or more like ONE party dominated, except for a single exceptional fluke, when Mary Robinson won). This is especially significant, because Ireland's legislature has multiple viable parties, which should help there be more competetive parties for the post.
The same is true of Australia's house of representatives, since its Senate uses STV, and had something like 6 greens last I checked. But it's house of reps, which uses IRV, is a two party body. Australianpolitics.com says IRV "promotes a two-party system to the detriment of minor parties and independents." In Australian politics, this isn't even questioned, it's just accepted as a fact.
Re: Missing the point
Date: 2007-01-23 07:48 am (UTC)Heck, IRV is more "fair" than first-past-the-post as far as I'm concerned, but I know it confuses a lot of people, particularly when the candidate that gets the most first-preference votes doesn't win the election. When that happens, you get people complaining about how "unfair" it is that the first-preference leader didn't win, even though a majority favored some other candidate.
Re: Missing the point
Date: 2007-01-23 04:25 pm (UTC)That is not true. Don't you know anything about Irish or Australian politics, or do you just look at a list of the party affiliations of the prime ministers?
Re: Missing the point
Date: 2007-01-23 03:26 am (UTC)Meanwhile you get us to be yet another on your list of groups that use your spiffy system while you lobby groups and governments to adopt it. You're not unlike the consultants who come around trying to sell companies on nifty new systems for getting work done like sigma six. You won't actually care about any problems or expenses we incur in implementing your suggestion. And likely you'd dismiss them as well worth it, after all it won't be like you actually had to DO anything.
I'd be only slightly less skeptical if you were a tiny white dog trying to sell me on your latest business strategy using all the power buzzwords most popular with middle managers.
Re: Missing the point
Date: 2007-01-23 05:36 am (UTC)Okay, imagine you are in a deli for lunch, and there are exactly three sandwiches you can get (assume all cost the same). Say you like sandwich B a lot more than sandwich A, and you like sandwich C as much over B as you like B over A. Got it? Now, imagine that the shop keeper was so bad with English, that every time you tried to tell him you wanted sandwich C, you got sandwich B. Not bad, but certainly less satisfactory. THIS is EXACTLY what you are doing by using IRV instead of Range Voting. So just like you'd want to get a better communication method with the deli guy, so you could get a LOT more additional satisfaction, you WANT Range Voting, because that's what it will do for you. It will pick more satisfying results, by a LOT. It is almost as big an improvement over IRV as IRV is over RANDOM SELECTION. Read that again. Process. Make sure you get it. You are missing out enormously by refusing to chose a superior selection method, just like you'd miss out horribly by refusing to choose a better sandwich selection method (like say, pointing to the menu, instead of speaking).
> I doubt it would add to the comprehensibleness of the system, the results, or acceptance of them.
Then I encourage you to study voting methods further, and read http://RangeVoting.org/vsr.html and http://RangeVoting.org/BayRegDum.html and http://RangeVoting.org/UniqBest.html
> It also would add considerably to the complexity of trying to tally the vote
NO! WRONG! Have you never seen how IRV works? You total all the votes, over and over again, in rounds, until there's either a majority, or at least a plurality winner (depending on whether voters are required to list every single candidate on their ballots). So you effectively have to total the entire election multiple times, depending on how long it takes to get to a "majority" winner (which may not actually be the Condorcet winner at all).
With Range Voting, you just do ONE tally. ONE, and you are done. You can do it on ordinary plurality voting machines. See: http://zohopolls.com/us/pres for instance. Try that poll with IRV! It would be NUTS.
> Meanwhile you get us to be yet another on your list of groups that use your spiffy system while you lobby groups and governments to adopt it.
Obviously you won't be on our list of endorsers if you don't have good experiences with the system, don't you think?
> You're not unlike the consultants who come around trying to sell companies on nifty new systems for getting work done like sigma six. You won't actually care about any problems or expenses we incur in implementing your suggestion.
You're being too cynical. Range Voting is simpler and cheaper to use than IRV, which is a benefit to you, not a detriment.
> And likely you'd dismiss them as well worth it, after all it won't be like you actually had to DO anything.
If you guys studied this issue enough to see the obvious superiority of Range Voting, I can promise you that we'd help you however we could. I mean, I don't have THAT much to give...I'm an aspiring musician in Seattle, certainly not wealthy. But we could try to help you with any questions or logistics issues.
> I'd be only slightly less skeptical if you were a tiny white dog trying to sell me on your latest business strategy using all the power buzzwords most popular with middle managers.
You can be as skeptical as you want. But being skeptical means making up your mind on the basis of the facts, not dogmatically disbelieving. Look at the social utility efficiencies of the various voting methods. You can even do your own crude simulations using a spreadsheet and some simple formulas -- I've done it for quick test results to satisfy my own curiosity. Our utility calculations are arguably the most rigorous that have been done by ANY election systems researchers EVER.
And the bottom line is this, you tell me ANY way in which you think IRV is better than Range Voting, and I'll prove you wrong. You name it. You want science, I'll give you science. I say the world is round.
CLAY
Re: Missing the point
Date: 2007-01-23 06:08 am (UTC)Re: Missing the point
Date: 2007-01-23 06:40 am (UTC)The computer simulations don't say that bumblebee's can't fly away. They say that range voting has the greatest social utility efficiency.
Clay
Re: Missing the point
Date: 2007-01-23 12:11 pm (UTC)For example you used examples that are not anything like the elections we run. We don't get 40 candidates. We are often faced with a soviet ballot where there is exactly one eligible group bidding to host Worldcon in a particular year. Three is about the maximum and two is more typical. You don't know anything about our group or how it works, you've just parachuted in without doing research about us and demand that we research your system.
But hey, life wouldn't be fun if we didn't regularly get wingnuts telling us that everything we're doing is wrong. It is a pretty regular thing to get one or two people telling us how to change our conventions for the better, but when it comes to stepping up to do the work instead of just directing us from afar... well they fall rather short.
Re: Missing the point
Date: 2007-01-24 11:49 am (UTC)If by "talking points" you mean, facts that support my claims, then sure, I did. I proved Range Voting is a better voting method than IRV.
For example you used examples that are not anything like the elections we run. We don't get 40 candidates.
Most of our discussions of IRV, as well as our social utility simulations, deal with anywhere from 3 to 6 candidates. I was just making the point that, with more, IRV falls apart even worse.
You don't know anything about our group or how it works, you've just parachuted in without doing research about us and demand that we research your system.
I'm not debating about your group, I'm debating about IRV, something which I know apparently more than any of you about. Consider that a lot of you here didn't even know what the name of your voting method was. Consider that I wrote this page: http://RangeVoting.org/IRV.html Consider that I have conducted phone conversations with Australian minor parties to ask them about their experiences using IRV. Have any of you done any kind of actual research about IRV? I'm guessing not, or at least very little.
I'm not "demanding" you use Range Voting, I'm just pointing out the advantages of it, which for some reason has been met with irrational hostility by several.
Again, it's not my job to do your work for you. I'm telling you how you can do something that is better for YOU and helps YOU. If you choose not to do it, that's your loss. Why I'm even still here debating with you is anyone's guess. Basically because I just love a good debate. It's 3:30am and I have to get up at 6:30. I'm up arguing still because, hell, I just love to debate I guess. Why be so hostile to someone who is only trying to help you help yourself?
Re: Missing the point
Date: 2007-01-23 04:45 pm (UTC)every time you tried to tell him you wanted sandwich C, you got sandwich B. ... THIS is EXACTLY what you are doing by using IRV instead of Range Voting.
Oh, for God's sake. "Every time"? This is actually a distorted version of a rare paradox that forms a tiny technical argument against IRV but is not therefore an argument for range voting. And the bad-with-English storekeeper analogy is so inane and a bad analogy that it's hardly worth commenting on.
Have you never seen how IRV works? You total all the votes, over and over again, in rounds,
Have you never seen how IRV works? We have a computer program that, once you get all the raw data in it, counts the entire Hugo ballot and spews out the whole result, first second third &c &c places, in the complete iterations, plus checking for a special rule we have for balancing winner preferences against No Award preferences - everything you could possibly want to know - in less than 20 seconds. I've used it personally. It's such a good program that Hugo voting results are usually published in the form of its immediate output. This is not in the slightest way more difficult than counting up range voting points.
You tell me ANY way in which you think IRV is better than Range Voting, and I'll prove you wrong.
Since you elsewhere define things like 1-5 star movie ratings as a form of range voting (which I think is wrong, because in those you're not trying to advocate a winner), then I can tell you this: I've voted both ways, and I personally find casting range votes much harder than casting IRV with a limited number of candidates. Much harder.
Now, you can talk about voters prefering range voting, though I want to see your proof that they do. Has Gallup done a survey, and how did they count it? And I'm only one voter (though the other Hugo voters who've responded here sound as if they'd say the same thing). But you said you'd dispute "ANY way" in which IRV claims to be superior. And one voter's preference for it is a claimed superiority.
So come on. Tell me that I'm mistaking my own personal preference.
Re: Missing the point
Date: 2007-01-24 01:11 am (UTC)Really? Can it be adopted for Site Selection? Or would data entry be the bottleneck? When I ran Site Selection we used hand counting. It was un-contested but we did set the record for number of write-in ballots (28 candidates).
Counting IRV Ballots
Date: 2007-01-24 02:53 am (UTC)For a single race with <5 candidates where you only need to know the winner (that is, you don't want or need 2nd, 3rd, etc.), you can count 2000 IRV ballots by hand faster than you could key the information into the counting program. The Hugos need the program because there are 15 categories, at least six candidates (usually) for each category, and we want to know each placement. Oh, and the administrator has a couple of weeks between close of balloting and when s/he has to get the plaques engraved, which gives him/her time to do the data entry.
Even in the notorious 14-hour ballot count of 1991, it only actually took us two hours to count the 2,107 ballots -- the other twelve hours were spent validating them.
I was NASFiC site selection administrator in 1992 when we had the four-way race for the 1995 NASFiC and had to go to the third round to determine the winner. Even then, I think it might have taken us maybe 90 minutes or so (I forget the exact time) to do the counting, and I was able to announce the results during the Masquerade half-time.
Re: Counting IRV Ballots
Date: 2007-01-24 04:34 am (UTC)I found data entry very fast. What took longer was checking it for typos. These were pleasingly rare. Having two people do entry for the same set of ballots was a good first check for this.
Re: Counting IRV Ballots
Date: 2007-01-24 04:54 am (UTC)Even at one minute/ballot, it would have taken nearly a day and a half to actually validate 2,107 ballots. Our initial experience of using the computer for validation suggested that it was going to take even longer than one minute per ballot. We ended up begging the Registrar for the master paper copy of the database by number and splitting the validation job up into three teams. (I just realized that as it took three teams twelve hours, that one ballot/minute figure is about right, since it thus took 36 team-hours to do the validation.)
At the following day's Business Meeting, at the urging of the Committee of Tellers, the Business Meeting passed standing resolution BM-1991-1: "Resolved, That the Business Meeting recommends that all future Worldcons adopt the practice of validating site-selection ballots as they are received, rather than after site-selection balloting closes."
So far, every other Worldcon has managed to avoid this particular failure.
Re: Missing the point
Date: 2007-02-11 12:13 am (UTC)Yes, this was a poor choice of words. There could be elections where IRV chose a better winner than Range Voting would have. They are just extremely rare. So I should have said "most of the time".
But no, this analogy is not "inane and bad". You are using a system which is poor at giving voters what they want, just like using a bad communication system is bad at giving a consumer what he wants.
We have a computer program that, once you get all the raw data in it, counts the entire Hugo ballot and spews out the whole result...This is not in the slightest way more difficult than counting up range voting points.
I never said it was. My point is that if people want to call Range Voting "complicated", they should know that IRV is drastically more complicated.
Since you elsewhere define things like 1-5 star movie ratings as a form of range voting (which I think is wrong, because in those you're not trying to advocate a winner)
Yes you are - that's exactly what you're doing. The only point you could be making is that people will be more honest in those systems, instead of strategically doing things like exaggerating to a minimum or maximum. We calculated the utility efficiency that would be produced by a 100% strategic electorate, and they still kick the pants off the other common methods. Range Voting with 100% strategic voters perferms about as well (often better) than IRV using 100% honest voters.
I personally find casting range votes much harder than casting IRV with a limited number of candidates. Much harder.
Much harder? Could you be exaggerating just a touch? The local yokels I polled in Texas showed zero signs of having any problem going down a list and rating people. If you want to make it simple for yourself, just give the options you like a 10, and the others a 0. Your preferences will be better represented by this method than by IRV, statistically speaking...by a LOT.
If difficulty/work required to vote is more important to you than picking the right winner, why not completely get rid of the elections, and just use a random name out of a hat? That would save you far more time than the difference between using Range Voting and using IRV.
Now, you can talk about voters prefer[r]ing range voting, though I want to see your proof that they do.
I claim that they prefer it when the utility of the election result is combined with the utility of the voting process. For instance, say you told people they could cast up to 10 ballots, in our current political elections. As annoying and time-consuming as that would be, you'd better bet your life that a lot of people would do it - and that would show that, clearly, they care more about being satisfied with the election outcome than they do about how hard it is to completely cast 10 ballots.
Re: Missing the point
Date: 2007-01-23 07:08 am (UTC)Re: Missing the point
Date: 2007-01-24 12:43 pm (UTC)Re: Missing the point
Date: 2007-01-23 04:12 pm (UTC)There are costs associated with administering preference polls, running elections, etc. The cost of even looking at the range stuff is time and effort.
Years ago I was involved with neural network and expert systems systems development and implementation, and vaguely recall some of the math / logic behind them involved in decision-making. Neural net systems had to be "trained" with various cases of different conditions. The training took quite a while, but then when conditions were input to the neural net system, the system analyzed in the input and generated responses based on similarity to the cases it had been trained with.
The range stuff sort of reminds me of that--sort of. One thing I notice is that there appears to be -no- calibration involved, no normalization, and that tends to create garbage for both an analysis and results of analysis....
Re: Missing the point
Date: 2007-01-23 10:00 pm (UTC)I could see a "-2/+2" scale dealing with the calibration issue well. It wouldn't be too difficult to say "-2=hate, -1=dislike, 0=neutral, +1=like, +2=love" but that doesn't mean that I think it's worth replacing Hugo and site-selection voting scheme in the first place.
Re: Missing the point
Date: 2007-02-10 11:20 pm (UTC)http://rangevoting.org/Why99.html
that doesn't mean that I think it's worth replacing Hugo and site-selection voting scheme in the first place.
Then you might as well just use a random name drawing out of a hat, since that's about the same difference in quality you're getting by using IRV instead of Range Voting.
Social Utility Efficiencies
Range (honest voters) 96.71% 94.66%
Range & Approval (strategic voters) 78.99% 77.01%
IRV (honest voters) 78.49% 76.32%
IRV (strategic exaggerating voters) 39.07% 39.21%
Re: Missing the point
Date: 2007-01-24 12:48 pm (UTC)And since Range Voting can be done in just one round, always, whereas IRV can take multiple rounds, IRV is "cheaper"/easier. Another great reason to dump the wreck that is IRV for Range Voting.
The range stuff sort of reminds me of that--sort of. One thing I notice is that there appears to be -no- calibration involved, no normalization, and that tends to create garbage for both an analysis and results of analysis..
Some have suggested that we automatically normalize the Range Voting ballots, but there's no hard evidence that actually produces greater social utility efficiency. On the contrary, I have a pretty well founded intuition that people's inherent tendency to convert their honest utilities to range ballots using a sort of logarithmic process (sort of like treating increasing utility with diminishing returns) actually increases social utility efficiency. We could test that by adding some new strategy generators to the utility calculation software, but I'm too lazy, and I want to rewrite the software in D before I further modify it.
Re: Missing the point
Date: 2007-01-24 05:55 pm (UTC)Clue 1: it takes time and effort to read through and try to follow the descriptions that the proponents of range voting give, and time to try to follow the analysis. That is time and effort that the person is giving up from doing things that might be more interesting and rewarding to them, than reading ideological ranting about how wonderful range voting is and everyone should go to it....
From thebroken/r/e/c/o/r/d/ladder:
And since Range Voting can be done in just one round, always, whereas IRV can take multiple rounds..
Clue #2: there is software in place if I am not mistaken, for tallying results of voting for Worldscon site selection and the Hugos. Changing the voting system would require writing -new- software, testing it, etc. etc. etc. The existing methods have "sunk costs." Changing to something else, would entail a lot of time and effort. Is it worthwhile as expenditure of volunteer time and labor, particularly, are there people trusted within the community competent to implement range voting who would actually go to the effort and time and personal expense to do so? Even were there any substantiative interest by the Business Meeting to make a change, unless there is the wherewithal to do so--someone competent and willing to go to the effort of developing and implementing etc. the software, it would be moot.
...I have a pretty well founded intuition that people's inherent tendency to convert their honest utilities to range ballots using a sort of logarithmic process (sort of like treating increasing utility with diminishing returns) actually increases social utility efficiency.
Why should I value you intuition? I have seen no evidence of what I consider considered reasonable competence and ability to do competent analysis, conclusion generation, recommendation generation, and presentation of results in a reasonable fashion. That is, what I am seeing presented by you, does not come off as something done by someone who has made an adequate investigation and analysis of what, who, how, and who has not bothered to tune the presentation to the audience and has failed to consider audience response and interaction with the audience and audience opinions, values, interests, etc.
You showed up with an agenda to push, and have with vast amounts of temerity and energy, proceeded to push it....
You keep referring to "social efficiency." Just what is "social efficiency and why should I or anyone else here care about it? It looks like some arbitrary definition of some value you have, it may not be seen as a viable or reasonable or desirable or rational metric by others.
Generation of Hugo and site selection results, does NOT get done by the entire convention. A small number of people are involved directly, the other thousands of people, don't get involved in handling any ballot than the individual one they submit. In terms of "efficiency" then it is immaterial to 99.99 percent of the Worldcon members what the specific software, etc., that gets used is, or methods, so long as the method used follows the will of the membership for type of voting, that the results are honest outcomes based on the submitted valid ethically-submitted ballots, and that the results get announced in a timely fashion. It doesn't particularly affect MY life if it takes Keven, John, Rick, or whoever five minutes, or hours, or days, to deal with ballots and the data crunching, I'm not someone who has done ballot counting and data entry and software running to generate the results! It does affect my life if I hear them complaining about it, but otherwise...
We could test that by adding some new strategy generators to the utility calculation software, but I'm too lazy, and I want to rewrite the software in D before I further modify it.
Who're these "we"?
You are apparently someone who enjoys writing software code... however, "all code has bugs." Who do you propose to e.g. do code reviews? What are the independent validation and verification requirements? Why should anyone believe that your code is accurate... where are the system spec, requirements, etc.?
no subject
Date: 2007-01-23 05:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-01-23 06:33 pm (UTC)I've been the target of that sentiment myself, and I haven't always won my arguments. Remember that there are probably large swaths of the WSFS Constitution that would not bear up well under the examination they would receive as new proposals.
no subject
Date: 2007-01-23 07:16 pm (UTC)And then there were those lyrics by Barry Gold (I think they were his).
"The song of fandom's a sad song...
"No cons... for the next ten weeks!"...
These days there can be more than six just on the same weekend, forget about gaps of months!
no subject
Date: 2007-01-23 06:25 pm (UTC)This all makes sense to me. Indeed, it partially explains why any system other than "first past the post" is a hard sell -- if the people using the system don't have sufficient confidence in it, the system is a failure. To have sufficient confidence, they have to be able to understand it. It doesn't matter if you're mathematically perfect; if you can't explain it in terms that Joe Six-Pack understands, you're doomed.
____________
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no subject
Date: 2007-01-24 07:10 am (UTC)You want a voting method that people can understand, right? So here I describe two methods.
A) You give each candidate a score on a 0-10 scale, and the candidate with the highest average wins.
B) You rate each candidate in order of preference. We check to see whether any candidate got a majority of first-place votes. If not, then we find the candidate who got the least first place votes, and remove him from all the ballots, and check again for a majority winner. If we get down to only one candidate, he is elected, even if he doesn't have a majority (this can happen if you let people leave some candidates off their ballots).
Hmmm...call me crazy, but IRV sounds a heck of a lot more complicated. Maybe that's why you don't see it used to rate products/books/faces/etc. online, but you DO see range voting used all over the place.
But say that's still not simple enough. Say you're a person who thinks both IRV and Range Voting are too complicated. Behold, Approval Voting, a simplified form of Range Voting that is exactly like plurality, except that you can vote for as many candidates as you want. Even that simplified method bests plurality, IRV, Condorcet, and Borda, coming second only to Range. And it's just a tiny bit more involved than plurality. So why not just switch to Approval voting, and get 90% of the quality improvement of Range Voting, and way more simplicity than IRV or Range voting?
no subject
Date: 2007-01-24 12:54 pm (UTC)BUT...voting method researchers could benefit immensely if you would publish your ballots using numbers instead of names (to totally preserve anonymity). There are advocates of Condorcet and Approval voting as well, and I'm sure they'd also enjoy access to this information. It would be cool to contribute to science by making it available, if it wouldn't be any real investment of resources on your part (which I would hope it wouldn't be).
If you have any interest in that, please email me at thebrokenladder@gmail.com.
Best wishes to everyone, and again thank you for the lively debate.
Clay
no subject
Date: 2007-01-24 05:20 pm (UTC)Worldcons publish detailed Hugo voting counts. Sometimes, they even put those counts online, like Noreascon Four did. I don't know if that gives you enough detail to be useful or not.
no subject
Date: 2007-02-11 12:21 am (UTC)