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I do like STAR after having read this article, and I agree that it's easier to explain, but I'll defend my saying that condorcet isn't that hard: Those virtual

I do like STAR after having read this article, and I agree that it's easier to explain, but I'll defend my saying that condorcet isn't that hard: Those virtual elections are not difficult to run (electronically) or explain though: "we use the ballots to work out for every person how they would do in a one on one election against each other person". And the process for running the elections is straightforward too - count the number of ballots where one person appears higher in the list than the other person. There's no room for argument here, unless you're arguing about the ballots, which is something you can do with any system. All of that stuff seems pretty straightforward to me. Now, it is the case that the various ways of resolving situations where you have cycles is somewhat complex. I think that's just because those situations are genuinely complex, but there are things that can be done here to choose a relatively explainable one and work out good ways to visualize and explain it. Finally, while cardinal systems can express the distance between preferences, there are ways an ordinal system can express things hard for a cardinal system. In an ordinal system you can allow a ballot not to include someone and have that mean 'no preference' between that person and all other candidates (perhaps because of lack of knowledge), while in an cardinal system an unscored person would have to be counted as having an actual score. There's also the question whether preferences really are consistent enough for a cardinal system to accurately reflect them - you might like X three times more than Y, and two times more than Z, but does that necessarily mean that you like Z one and a half times more than Y? Personally I also think there's a big difference between preferences between two candidates you'd be happy to win and candidates you actively don't want to win, and I don't think that difference can be captured by just making a scalar larger - not that ordinal approaches capture this either.

godelski 5y ago
For the most part, yeah, Condorcet methods aren't that hard. But also consider who you and I are. We're talking on a very niche form where there's an expectation that everyone here can program and do calculus. We are not the average people. But what I do want to stress is that cardinal systems are _easier_ than condorcet. I actually use approval frequently (it is also extremely natural). One case is how to solve where to eat as a group. It is infinitely scalable and you can just keep adding places as you think of them. If you reach a unanimous decision you stop, if you exhaust the list you take the maximal (baring strong preferences, which makes it kinda score but this works out naturally). I think from this example it should be pretty clear that it is much harder to do this sort of voting using any ranking system (nor is it scalable and is very computationally expensive to add new items). It is often missed, especially by nerds (I fall in this camp too, I used to prefer Condorcet over cardinal), how important the transparency aspect of the voting system is. Arizona nailed the lid shut for me. If we're looking at it we're really not losing much VSE by using STAR over RP, but we do also gain a lot on every other metric (including spoilage, ease, transparency, and resistance to strategy). VSE isn't the only metric that matters and we shouldn't make large sacrifices in other metrics to gain a minute optimization in it. > while in an cardinal system an unscored person would have to be counted as having an actual score. This isn't necessarily true. You can modify cardinal ballots just like you do ordinal (the exact example you gave is not the theoretically perfect ordinal so I'm not sure why you compare to theoretically perfect cardinal). In practice people don't rate every candidate. In ranking you could effectively say that unranked candidates have a minimal score (and you are able to reduce the number of rounds through this, but comes with added complexity). As to making the scale larger, yes this is correct that an infinitely large scale better encodes information. But there is a balance between that and simplicity. 10 is extremely effective. 5 is more than enough. But even 2 (approve/disapprove) seems to work out pretty well (aka "good enough").
clolege 5y ago
Key word (electronically) To me, any voting method dependent on software is a non-starter. A full paper trail is much easier to audit
- kybernetikos 5y ago
  The Condorcet methods do not require software to count up - you can easily replicate the results by hand on paper, it's just that there's such a lot to do it'll probably take you a while. In practice, you're going to want to count up electronically and then probably do a random sample by hand to check.
  - clolege 5y ago
    Right - you have to count up with software or it will take you a while. To me, it's a hard choice that cardinal systems don't force you to make.
    - kybernetikos 5y ago
      Maybe. In most of the US aren't they moving to computerised counting even of the simple ballots currently in use?

godelski 5y ago

For the most part, yeah, Condorcet methods aren't that hard. But also consider who you and I are. We're talking on a very niche form where there's an expectation that everyone here can program and do calculus. We are not the average people. But what I do want to stress is that cardinal systems are _easier_ than condorcet. I actually use approval frequently (it is also extremely natural). One case is how to solve where to eat as a group. It is infinitely scalable and you can just keep adding places as you think of them. If you reach a unanimous decision you stop, if you exhaust the list you take the maximal (baring strong preferences, which makes it kinda score but this works out naturally). I think from this example it should be pretty clear that it is much harder to do this sort of voting using any ranking system (nor is it scalable and is very computationally expensive to add new items). It is often missed, especially by nerds (I fall in this camp too, I used to prefer Condorcet over cardinal), how important the transparency aspect of the voting system is. Arizona nailed the lid shut for me. If we're looking at it we're really not losing much VSE by using STAR over RP, but we do also gain a lot on every other metric (including spoilage, ease, transparency, and resistance to strategy). VSE isn't the only metric that matters and we shouldn't make large sacrifices in other metrics to gain a minute optimization in it. > while in an cardinal system an unscored person would have to be counted as having an actual score. This isn't necessarily true. You can modify cardinal ballots just like you do ordinal (the exact example you gave is not the theoretically perfect ordinal so I'm not sure why you compare to theoretically perfect cardinal). In practice people don't rate every candidate. In ranking you could effectively say that unranked candidates have a minimal score (and you are able to reduce the number of rounds through this, but comes with added complexity). As to making the scale larger, yes this is correct that an infinitely large scale better encodes information. But there is a balance between that and simplicity. 10 is extremely effective. 5 is more than enough. But even 2 (approve/disapprove) seems to work out pretty well (aka "good enough").

clolege 5y ago

Key word (electronically) To me, any voting method dependent on software is a non-starter. A full paper trail is much easier to audit

kybernetikos 5y ago
The Condorcet methods do not require software to count up - you can easily replicate the results by hand on paper, it's just that there's such a lot to do it'll probably take you a while. In practice, you're going to want to count up electronically and then probably do a random sample by hand to check.
- clolege 5y ago
  Right - you have to count up with software or it will take you a while. To me, it's a hard choice that cardinal systems don't force you to make.
  - kybernetikos 5y ago
    Maybe. In most of the US aren't they moving to computerised counting even of the simple ballots currently in use?