kevin_standlee | Range Voting

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Range Voting

The folks advocating Range Voting contacted WSFS (actually, the WSFS webmaster,

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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Actually I don't see where we, the fans and people who would end up doing the work, would stand to benefit. I doubt it would add to the comprehensibleness of the system, the results, or acceptance of them. It also would add considerably to the complexity of trying to tally the votes and I think it will suppress turn out because people won't want to use the new system.

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.

> Actually I don't see where we, the fans and people who would end up doing the work, would stand to benefit.

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

Yes, yes, repeating your same arguments without actually addressing any of my points will totally convince me and other fans to support you. You can keep on insisting that your computer simulation shows that bumblebees shouldn't be able to fly. Meanwhile the evidence of our eyes tells us they most certainly can fly and do so quite well.

I addressed every "point" you made. If you feel that I missed one, or if you have any specific "counter arguments" to make, I'd love to hear them.

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

No you didn't address my concerns. You just talked down to me and threw out a whole bunch of talking points.

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.

No you didn't address my concerns. You just talked down to me and threw out a whole bunch of talking points.

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?

I'll attempt to respond to a few of the ridiculous arguments in Clay's post, because I've been a Hugo administrator and am therefore a masochist.

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.

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

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).

Really? Can it be adopted for Site Selection? Or would data entry be the bottleneck?

Yes and yes. If I'd thought it would have sped things up, I would have put you in contact with the programmer, since we used it for Hugo ballot counting.

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.

Acknowledging that site selection is counted under different circumstances than Hugos, I find it interesting to note that when I was doing it, we generally validated the ballots before counting them. The exception came at the very end, when late-arriving ballots were trickling in. This was very exciting in 1993, when we had three nail-biting finishers. I added the ballots to the database to see what would happen, but we did have a certain amount of "if these ballots are valid, we have this winner, but if they aren't, we have that winner."

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.

...when I was doing it, we generally validated the ballots before counting them.

So does anyone else who has any sense. The 1991 Worldcon in Chicago (selecting the 1994 Worldcon, race between Louisville and Winnipeg) managed a "critical failure" by failing to validate votes as they were cast. The administrator rather naively thought that validation would be a trivial task "Because we'll use a computer." Most of us in the counting room, especially those of us who program computer databases for a living, were horrified when we heard this.

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.

Oh, for God's sake. "Every time"?

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.

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Range Voting

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