kevin_standlee | Range Voting

I'm not asking you to do something selfless. You can adopt Range Voting for purely selfish reasons.

Whether voters trust it or not has nothing to do with whether it is actually the best voting method.

The fact that you say that with a straight face shows that You Don't Get It.

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.)

Voters can even abstain from casting votes for unknown options...

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.

It is clear from this that you so thoroughly don't get it that there is not any point in continuing. Cost-benefit analysis says I have other things to do with my life than further attempts to dig out your deeply rooted misapprehensions. Sorry.

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. ;)

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

A person's reputation is irrelevant to the scientific analysis of his proposition. To judge Range Voting on how much you like my personality is to practice an ad hominem logical fallacy. That's irrational. That's not science. Can't we all agree that a rational, scientific analysis is the best kind?

A person's reputation is irrelevant to the scientific analysis of his proposition.

This isn't a technocracy.

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.

The fact that you say that with a straight face shows that You Don't Get It.

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

From Wikipedia:

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.

Ugh...now I see why I have to use the pre element:

Leftist               Centrist                 Rightist
Dean                  Gore                                  Bush
                                                 1
                                         2
                        3
    4

Nope. The point of a choice is to derive the maximum utility.

To put it in technocratic terms (that being all you appear to understand): if the electorate has no confidence in the system, one of terms in your utility equation is zero.

Unless you don't think that voter confidence in the system has any relevance, which is a patently absurd on its face.

If they leave preferences completely off their ballots, that is mathematically identical to ranking those options DEAD LAST.

For sake of argument, I'll agree with this. So what? If you've eliminated all of the candidates about whom I care, by definition I don't care how the rest of the candidates fare. My ballot no longer should count toward the total cast for the purposes of determining a majority anyway. Only those voters who still care about the remaining candidates should have a voice in making the decision.

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.

And if the entire electorate decides the system is so flawed that they don't vote, then no decision is made, which I would classify as a failure of the process. This would be roughly equivalent to everyone being so scared of flying that they all stay home and hide under the bed.

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.)

...The issue with selecting the "best" voting system is not selecting the one which results in the best reflection of people's desires, but one that achieves the best balance between that aim and people having confidence in the voting system. If a voting system is sufficiently hard to understand then people will not have confidence in it and will keep assuming that the result is flawed.

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?

Because humans choose to behave irrationally instead of scientifically. Sigh.

Yes! Exactly! You Got It! Congratulations!

I have shown you otherwise. Check the textbook I already referred you to, which treats them as separate systems. 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 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.

"A preferential list system", I should say. Lest I confuse your overtaxed brain further.

Let me break this down for you since you didn't understand what you replied to.

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.

FTW.

You keep talking about science.

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.

I have shown you otherwise.

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:

The brackets denote the operation of rounding down. This gives the Droop quota the special property that it is the smallest integral quota which guarantees that the number of candidates able to reach this quota cannot exceed the number of seats. In a single winner election, in which STV becomes the same as Instant Run-off Voting, the Droop quota becomes a simple integral majority quota–that is, it will be equal to an absolute majority of votes.

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.

To put it in technocratic terms (that being all you appear to understand): if the electorate has no confidence in the system, one of terms in your utility equation is zero.

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.

For sake of argument, I'll agree with this. So what? If you've eliminated all of the candidates about whom I care, by definition I don't care how the rest of the candidates fare. My ballot no longer should count toward the total cast for the purposes of determining a majority anyway. Only those voters who still care about the remaining candidates should have a voice in making the decision.

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.

And if the entire electorate decides the system is so flawed that they don't vote, then no decision is made, which I would classify as a failure of the process.

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

I suggest that the social utility of RV is actually very low because the counting process is too opaque for most of society to have any confidence in its accuracy or fairness.

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

Range Voting

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