4 ms·

>Voters don't know which candidates they prefer? They know which candidates they prefer, they don't have a score for it. One voter may prefer A over B and B ov

by yyyk 4y ago

>Voters don't know which candidates they prefer? They know which candidates they prefer, they don't have a score for it. One voter may prefer A over B and B over C. There's an argument to give A 10.0 and C 0.0 (it's not the only way to allocate, but I'll grant it for the sake of argument). What is B's score however? Most voters do not have an answer. The only people who will have an answer are ultra-ideological voters who are willing to grade every legislative vote. Not sure this is what we want to encourage. >This is a feature, not a bug. Cardinal systems can capture ordinal preference This isn't entirely true. Let's give an American example. Say the candidates in 2024 are Biden, Romney and Trump. For the sake of argument, your preference is Biden > Romney > Trump. So you give Biden 10.0, Trump 0.0, and for Romney, say 1.0. It's possible your 1.0 vote gives Romney the election. Now, if only Biden and Romney ran, you'd have given 10.0 and 0.0 respectively. So Romney gains by having Trump run despite no change in the ordinal preference.

godelski 4y ago
> So you give Biden 10.0, Trump 0.0, and for Romney, say 1.0. It's possible your 1.0 vote gives Romney the election. Now, if only Biden and Romney ran, you'd have given 10.0 and 0.0 respectively. So Romney gains by having Trump run despite no change in the ordinal preference. In an ordinal perspective Romney would have a larger edge because you've given a higher weight to him. You have to think about the embedding process and how much information is lost through that embedding. You're also only looking from the democratic viewpoint. Flipping this matters too because you have a potential favorite betrayer (Romney v Trump). Something Ordinal systems aren't good at handling. In a plurality voting those three could make an advantage for Biden because Romeny takes votes from Trump (and vise versa). In ordinal we have a similar but less severe problem because people will be placing their order strategically rather than preferentially. Even preferentially you are still embedding a decently high preference for Biden despite the fact you'd give him a 0 in Cardinal. See it this way. You could vote Trump 10, Romney 9, Biden 0. (or any variation). This indicates a strong preference of republicans over democrats. In an ordinal system you'd have to preference Trump > Romney > Biden for the same ballot. This does not express this large preferential difference. You've lost a lot of information through this embedding process. You maintain the order but you lost the degree of preference. There's no reason to drop this information.
- yyyk 4y ago
  >In an ordinal perspective Romney would have a larger edge because you've given a higher weight to him. Perhaps. Is that a necessity of ordinal voting? I'm not so sure. Trump could have been dropped in the initial round, and then you'd have gotten a straight Biden > Romney vote. >You maintain the order but you lost the degree of preference. There's no reason to drop this information. The reason to drop this information is because it's often garbage (there's no real score, at most an hidden ordinal preference), and its very existence gets voters to create even more garbage in order to get their actual preferences. In our example, the strongly Republican voter probably actually wants something like this: Trump 10.0 > Romney 0.0, Trump 10.0 > Biden 0.0, Romney 10.0 > Biden 0.0. However, Romney has to get only 9.0 because our Republican voter can only give a global score and wants Trump > Romney. Now Biden may win because Romney got 1.0 less. By forcing a global preference score, you got garbage info. Another point is that we shouldn't conceive of candidates as passive observers. They can also create tactical manipulations, and that's much much worse than when voters 'lie'. Say in 2024 the country has more Republican voters than Democrats. Biden now gets Warren and Sanders to run. Most Republicans have Biden > Sanders > Warren (or Biden > Warren > Sanders, it doesn't matter). So they may wish to give Biden 2, Sanders 1. Or Biden 2, Warren 1. Biden gains the more radical Democrats run, since Republicans have to give him a higher score to express their ordinal preference! (They could vote Biden 1 and give 0 to the others, but then their ordinal preference between the other democrats disappears).
  - yyyk 4y ago
    Another thing to note is that in cardinal voting systems the candidates have a big interest in strong negative advertising against the opposition. If the Republican candidates want to avoid Biden getting 2 or 1 from Republicans expressing their ordinal preference between Democratic candidates, they need to loudly proclaim to Republican voters that Biden is equivalent to Sanders/Warren. You'll get an even more extremely polarized country that way. In general, the effects on _candidates_ are hugely underlooked in the voting system discussion which tends to look only at the effects on voters.
    - godelski 4y ago

by yyyk 4y ago

godelski 4y ago

> So you give Biden 10.0, Trump 0.0, and for Romney, say 1.0. It's possible your 1.0 vote gives Romney the election. Now, if only Biden and Romney ran, you'd have given 10.0 and 0.0 respectively. So Romney gains by having Trump run despite no change in the ordinal preference. In an ordinal perspective Romney would have a larger edge because you've given a higher weight to him. You have to think about the embedding process and how much information is lost through that embedding. You're also only looking from the democratic viewpoint. Flipping this matters too because you have a potential favorite betrayer (Romney v Trump). Something Ordinal systems aren't good at handling. In a plurality voting those three could make an advantage for Biden because Romeny takes votes from Trump (and vise versa). In ordinal we have a similar but less severe problem because people will be placing their order strategically rather than preferentially. Even preferentially you are still embedding a decently high preference for Biden despite the fact you'd give him a 0 in Cardinal. See it this way. You could vote Trump 10, Romney 9, Biden 0. (or any variation). This indicates a strong preference of republicans over democrats. In an ordinal system you'd have to preference Trump > Romney > Biden for the same ballot. This does not express this large preferential difference. You've lost a lot of information through this embedding process. You maintain the order but you lost the degree of preference. There's no reason to drop this information.

yyyk 4y ago
>In an ordinal perspective Romney would have a larger edge because you've given a higher weight to him. Perhaps. Is that a necessity of ordinal voting? I'm not so sure. Trump could have been dropped in the initial round, and then you'd have gotten a straight Biden > Romney vote. >You maintain the order but you lost the degree of preference. There's no reason to drop this information. The reason to drop this information is because it's often garbage (there's no real score, at most an hidden ordinal preference), and its very existence gets voters to create even more garbage in order to get their actual preferences. In our example, the strongly Republican voter probably actually wants something like this: Trump 10.0 > Romney 0.0, Trump 10.0 > Biden 0.0, Romney 10.0 > Biden 0.0. However, Romney has to get only 9.0 because our Republican voter can only give a global score and wants Trump > Romney. Now Biden may win because Romney got 1.0 less. By forcing a global preference score, you got garbage info. Another point is that we shouldn't conceive of candidates as passive observers. They can also create tactical manipulations, and that's much much worse than when voters 'lie'. Say in 2024 the country has more Republican voters than Democrats. Biden now gets Warren and Sanders to run. Most Republicans have Biden > Sanders > Warren (or Biden > Warren > Sanders, it doesn't matter). So they may wish to give Biden 2, Sanders 1. Or Biden 2, Warren 1. Biden gains the more radical Democrats run, since Republicans have to give him a higher score to express their ordinal preference! (They could vote Biden 1 and give 0 to the others, but then their ordinal preference between the other democrats disappears).
- yyyk 4y ago
  Another thing to note is that in cardinal voting systems the candidates have a big interest in strong negative advertising against the opposition. If the Republican candidates want to avoid Biden getting 2 or 1 from Republicans expressing their ordinal preference between Democratic candidates, they need to loudly proclaim to Republican voters that Biden is equivalent to Sanders/Warren. You'll get an even more extremely polarized country that way. In general, the effects on _candidates_ are hugely underlooked in the voting system discussion which tends to look only at the effects on voters.
  - godelski 4y ago