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> when you construct a measure designed around their shared features dragonwriter thinks the metric being used in the article linked here was cherry-picked bec

by gjm11 5y ago

> when you construct a measure designed around their shared features dragonwriter thinks the metric being used in the article linked here was cherry-picked because it favours particular voting systems that the author likes for other reasons. (I do not believe this, nor do I believe the similar allegation made by vintermann in a top-level comment that's currently the highest rated. Neither offered any actual evidence, and the metric used here seems obviously reasonable to me. What I could believe is if someone thinks that VSE / Bayesian regret captures the essence of what matters in a voting system, then they are likely to prefer systems like approval voting or range voting or STAR. I don't see anything wrong with that.) > while ignoring the cultural variation in honest ballot marking for these methods dragonwriter thinks that different voting systems, implemented in different cultures, will exhibit strategic ("dishonest") voting to different extents and in different ways, and thinks this is a problem not addressed in the OP. (The linked article does consider strategic voting, of various different kinds, but it's certainly possible that it isn't realistic enough about what real voters might do. It would be easier to tell whether dragonwriter has found a real problem here, if dragonwriter had given some examples of variation in strategic voting that are important but neglected in the OP.) > resulting from the fact that the ballots for them ask a question that doesn't have an objective relationship to preferences. dragonwriter thinks that what voters primarily have is preferences: candidate A is better than candidate B who is better than candidate C. This is what an IRV ballot asks for. STAR or approval-voting ballots ask different questions (please give a score for how much you like each candidate / please say for each candidate whether you would find them acceptable); dragonwriter finds that unsatisfactory on the basis that voters will have to translate their preferences into answers to those questions, and there is no One True Way to do that. (I disagree with dragonwriter about what's in voters' brains. At any rate, looking within myself, it is very common that I have a better idea of some candidates' acceptability to me than I do of their relative ranking. E.g., maybe there's the Nice Party, which I like a lot, the Mean Party, which I don't like much but concede has some competence, the Evil Party, which I really don't like but again concede has some competence, and a bunch of Crazy Fringe Parties, none of which I know enough about to rate them relative to one another, but all of which I consider obviously unfit to rule. With a range/STAR system, I might rate Nice at 100, Mean at 30, Evil at 10, and the Crazies at 0. Or I might rate Nice at 100, Mean at 70, Evil at 10, and the Crazies at 0. These are importantly different opinions I might have. A preference-ordering system like IRV doesn't let me express the difference between those, but would really like me to say exactly what my order of preference between the Crazies is. For me, range/STAR does the best job of matching the actual kinds of opinions I have about candidates; 3-2-1 is also pretty good; approval and preference-ordering are similar to one another and distinctly worse than those two; and of course plurality/first-past-the-post is hopeless.)

dragonwriter 5y ago
> dragonwriter thinks that different voting systems, implemented in different cultures, will exhibit strategic ("dishonest") voting to different extents No, that's not it at all. I mean, now that you mention it, that sounds like something I would agree with, but its not either what I was saying here or particulary relevant to this discussion. What I said here is about honest not dishonest votes. For ballots that do not ask a question with an objective mapping to preferences, honest ballots for the same preferences are a cultural variable. (This article implictly recognizes that honest ballots have no consistent meaning for approval, when testing it with two different consistent mathematical models, though that doesn’t really address the issue and it ignores the same issue for other methods to which it applies.) For typical public elections, this problem occurs mostly with: ballots that ask the user to assign a score or rating to each candidate which is either more detailed than an unforced ranked preference ballot (a ranked preference ballot allowing ties) or less detailed than a forced preference ballot (a ranked preference ballot not allowing ties). Phrased another way, it applies to ballots that ask the user to assign scores or categories to candidates, where either the maximum number of distinct scores or categories is either more or less than the number of candidates. There's fairly extensive literature on scoring systems (mostly outside of voting research, because they aren't widely implemented as voting systems), whether with a wide number (e.g., 0-100) or narrow range (5 stars) showing that without an objective touchstone, these are highly variable between individuals, in a way which strongly correlates with culture, in how they relate to what people actually think, on an absolute or relative scale, about the things rated, with the only consistent thing being that they tend to be consistent with ordered preferences, but the additional information (for score systems) or compression (for limited-categories) is inconsistent. For that reason, approval/score/etc. ballots are, at best (that is, considering only personal variation and discounting any significance of the cultural correlations) just ranked preference ballots with either randomized noise or randomized compression, into which the associated tallying methods read false signficance. EDIT: MORE that this applies to the use of these ballots in typical public elections of candidates. For other types of voting scenarios, the ballot markings involved may have concrete meanings that make these methods better, even ideal in some cases. For instance, when planning a group activity for which you want maximum participation from the voter pool, approval where an “approve” mark is a binding commitment to participate if that option wins is an ideal method. Similarly, score voting where the assigned score is a binding commitment of that many units some scarce resource to the common project in the event of victory for the chosen option makes perfect sense.

by gjm11 5y ago

dragonwriter 5y ago

> dragonwriter thinks that different voting systems, implemented in different cultures, will exhibit strategic ("dishonest") voting to different extents No, that's not it at all. I mean, now that you mention it, that sounds like something I would agree with, but its not either what I was saying here or particulary relevant to this discussion. What I said here is about honest not dishonest votes. For ballots that do not ask a question with an objective mapping to preferences, honest ballots for the same preferences are a cultural variable. (This article implictly recognizes that honest ballots have no consistent meaning for approval, when testing it with two different consistent mathematical models, though that doesn’t really address the issue and it ignores the same issue for other methods to which it applies.) For typical public elections, this problem occurs mostly with: ballots that ask the user to assign a score or rating to each candidate which is either more detailed than an unforced ranked preference ballot (a ranked preference ballot allowing ties) or less detailed than a forced preference ballot (a ranked preference ballot not allowing ties). Phrased another way, it applies to ballots that ask the user to assign scores or categories to candidates, where either the maximum number of distinct scores or categories is either more or less than the number of candidates. There's fairly extensive literature on scoring systems (mostly outside of voting research, because they aren't widely implemented as voting systems), whether with a wide number (e.g., 0-100) or narrow range (5 stars) showing that without an objective touchstone, these are highly variable between individuals, in a way which strongly correlates with culture, in how they relate to what people actually think, on an absolute or relative scale, about the things rated, with the only consistent thing being that they tend to be consistent with ordered preferences, but the additional information (for score systems) or compression (for limited-categories) is inconsistent. For that reason, approval/score/etc. ballots are, at best (that is, considering only personal variation and discounting any significance of the cultural correlations) just ranked preference ballots with either randomized noise or randomized compression, into which the associated tallying methods read false signficance. EDIT: MORE that this applies to the use of these ballots in typical public elections of candidates. For other types of voting scenarios, the ballot markings involved may have concrete meanings that make these methods better, even ideal in some cases. For instance, when planning a group activity for which you want maximum participation from the voter pool, approval where an “approve” mark is a binding commitment to participate if that option wins is an ideal method. Similarly, score voting where the assigned score is a binding commitment of that many units some scarce resource to the common project in the event of victory for the chosen option makes perfect sense.