kevin_standlee | 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.

Current Mood: amused

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

thebrokenladder.livejournal.com

Sure, but the fact that Range Voting makes voters enormously happier than other methods is pretty significant.

From:

kalimac.livejournal.com

Who are your voters who claim to be "enormously happier" with range voting? Where is the independent opinion poll that states this?

From:

thebrokenladder.livejournal.com

This is based on social utility efficiency calculations.

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

From:

kevin-standlee.livejournal.com

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. Your models appear to assume that everyone understands what's going on and has confidence in the system.

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.)

From:

thebrokenladder.livejournal.com

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

From:

kalimac.livejournal.com

Ah. So your argument of voter preference for this system is entirely specious. Thank you, that tells me all I need to know.

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.)

From:

thebrokenladder.livejournal.com

Ah. So your argument of voter preference for this system is entirely specious. Thank you, that tells me all I need to know.

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.