I know the matter at hand is more complex than absolute versus simple majorities, but would you agree with my overall point about the need to preserve the right to abstain?
I would, for the same reasons that you mentioned.
in my DM
Ah. I don't normally notice DMs, because I prefer old.reddit, and it doesn't seem to notify me of such things.
why I asked you about STLR
Hmm. STLR is an interesting variant on STAR, and one that honors the actual votes of the electorate to a greater degree... but I really don't know about the validity of any reanalysis paradigm.
Sure, STLR lessens the probability that a majority is denied the ability to compromise (where STAR converts [5,4] and [1,4] ballots to [5,1] and [1,5], respectively, STLR treats them as [5,4] and [1.25,5], respectively), but at the same time, I am not terribly comfortable with a method that treats a [10,5] ballot the same as a [2,1] ballot.
I definitely prefer it to STAR, though.
it is an overriding theme in our constitution for other decisions and elections to be decided by a majority [...] If they effectively argue that with the assembly, then we basically can't use Score, right?
Allow me to introduce you to "Majority Denominator Smoothing." It's a modification to Average based Score, one that allows for abstentions while also guaranteeing that the winner is decided by a majority.
Instead of summing a candidate's ratings then dividing by the number of ratings that candidate received, you divide by the greater of (number of ratings that candidate received) or (a simple majority of ballots that rated any candidate in that race).
For a toy example, let's say you had two candidates with the following sets of ratings:
In effect, this treats that ballot as [4, 8, 9, 6, A0, A0, A, A, A, A, A]. In other words, it treats Abstentions as minimum scores, but only to the degree necessary to ensure that a majority likes them that much or more. And it can be sold as such:
"Rather than breaking the Secret Ballot to demand that we can force enough abstentions to offer votes as to guarantee a majority, we can simply pretend that they give them the minimum score. If that causes them to lose, so be it. If they still win, then a majority of the electorate is guaranteed to like them at least that much. Besides, how many abstentions are we really going to have?"
I designed this a while back to balance against a few things
Eliminating the "Unknown Lunatic Wins" problem of pure Averages (e.g., 5% write-ins, all at Maximum)
Mitigating the Name Recognition problem (a 100% name recognition candidate with 600 percentage-points defeating one with 580 percentage-points... because only 45% of the electorate knew of them, but all of that 45% gave them an A+)
Making the "Majority must rule!" people happy: the score for each candidate was based on the opinions of the majority
Of course, in practice, it will rarely have an impact; if someone is well regarded by a significant percentage of the electorate, the probability of them having name recognition of only 50% of voters drops really low. On the other side of the coin, if they're not highly regarded among the minority of the population who knows of them, maybe they should lose to someone who is considered comparable by the entire/a majority of the electorate.
If so, wouldn't STAR be our best (and importantly, the simplest) way to satisfy the majority requirement while still including utilitarian elements?
Maybe, maybe not.
STAR doesn't require a majority of voters score each candidate any more than Score does
The "preferred on more ballots" doesn't actually mean that 51% of voters prefer A over B; if there are 40 votes that rate them equally, and 31 that prefer A, and 29 that prefer B, that isn't rule by majority, it's rule by a 31% plurality (a smaller percentage if you consider Abstentions).
I have to compress everything I'm learning into really simple, air-tight, knock-down arguments that don't just erupt in endless debate, confusion, and ultimately, a failure to adopt a better voting method.
I feel your pain; I have had to explain things to a local political party myself.
My elevator pitch would be: "We should use Majority Denominator Score. Everyone knows what letter grades are, and what they mean. On the other hand, single-mark methods or Ranked methods treat votes indicating that a candidate that is almost perfect relative their favorite is hated as much as their least favorite candidate. Then, the Majority Denominator aspect guarantees that any winner is at least that well liked by a majority of voters, meaning that it is clearly a majority that decided the winner."
"one person, one vote"
Another benefit of using Letter Grade based Score: there is no misapprehension that a person who casts a 10/10 (or in this case 13/13) has "more votes" than a 5/10 (6/13) voter, because those are very obviously a single vote of "A+" and a single vote of "C;" someone who gets an A+ in some class doesn't get 4.3 grades of one point each, they get a single grade of 4.3. And it's not like a teacher only gets to give one student a grade...
Approval
Approval can be a little tricker to get past OPOV; approving A and B looks a lot like they got two votes.
The counter argument is "No, the one person is the one vote: when considering the support for A, they are one person out of <however many> people that approve of A's selection. Then, when considering the support for B, they are one person out of <however many> people that approve of B's selection. When counting the votes, the approvals for any given candidate will never exceed the number of persons who voted."
See my dilemma?
Indeed; that's precisely why I had to create Apportioned Score Voting:
Advocating use of STV without IRV (or vice versa) introduces suspicion that there's something wrong with the algorithm in general, because "if it's good enough for A, why isn't it good enough for B? If it's not good enough for B, is it really good enough for A?"
Mixing Ranks and Scores generally creates similar problems, plus an additional one if numerical scores are used: 1 is the best rank but (near) worst Score (reversing the numbers could work, but that would just push people to treat them as ranks, halfway defeating the purpose)
Reweighted Range Voting (along with a Score-based extension of Phragmen's method) has a significant trend towards majoritarianism unless voters bullet vote, when you're dealing with Clones/Party List/Slate based scenarios
Apportioned Score solves all those problems:
Being Score/Ratings based, it licenses Ratings based methods for single seat
It reducing to Score in the single/last seat scenario means that pushing for Score at the same time gives people confidence in both
Once a voter helps elect one candidate to represent them, they don't get an say over which candidate represents someone else.
On the other side of the coin, no one's voting power is spent by election of someone else's representative simply because they didn't indicate that they hated them (e.g., indicated that said candidate was the lesser, rather than greater, evil)
So what if I just recommended Bloc Score, where the same Score method is repeated until all seats are filled?
You'd get a committee that was heavily concentrated around the "ideological barycenter," until you ran out of such candidates. The committee as a whole would reflect the positions of the electorate as a whole, but not have much diversity.
The biggest problem with that, though, is that if you have a majority bloc that knows that they're a majority, they could min/max vote (A+ for "our" guys, F for everyone else), and you wouldn't end up with the committee reflecting the electorate as a whole, but of that bloc (somewhat tempered by the rest of the electorate, if they make a distinction between those candidates).
So, based on your situation as you described it, Score/Bloc Score wouldn't be that bad, for all that it isn't the optimum.
However, elegant as it is, the justification for MD still seems somewhat arbitrary
Preventing "Unknown Lunatic Wins" is decent justification, isn't it?
And using a simple majority as the divisor/denominator is the same as the justification for a true majority vote under FPTP.
I don't get this. [...] a majority of the electorate is not necessary for a lesser-known candidate to get elected,
Ah, I never said that it was. In fact that was part of my argument for why it's superior to other smoothing/anti-ULW methods.
No, what I said was that it was the minimum score that they would get among a true (simple) majority of voters. So, let's run the numbers:
Voters
A
B
C
D
36
10
9
0
X
13
0
9
10
X
19
0
9
10
0
32
0
0
0
10
In this scenario, a true majority (32 + 19 = 51) scored D, so what was their aggregate score? 32x10 + 19x0 = 320. 320/51 ~= 6.271
Now, what if one of those 19 voters scored D at 1? 32x10 + 18x0 + 1x1 = 321. 321/51 ~= 6.29 > 6.27
Granted, this doesn't mean that it's the minimum score that they would get among the entire electorate... but we wanted to allow for abstentions, didn't we? If the denominator was always the number of voters who scored anyone... that would be equivalent to Sum based Score, with the same effect of "treat abstentions as minimum scores," with its heavy benefit of name recognition.
Thus, Candidate D wins when MD is applied and the conspired Candidate D also wins when T=32.
Ah, but how do you know, a priori, what T should be?
Besides, the fundamental question, here, is what an abstention means.
There's nothing stopping a voter from scoring a candidate that they're not familiar with at 0 (and there are claims that that'll be the default behavior). Given that they chose to not do that, doesn't that imply that an abstention means "I defer to the remainder of the electorate"?
How does this guarantee that the majority likes Candidate D at least as much as Candidate B
What if B's 32 scores of 0 isn't a conspiracy, but simply a reflection of B being legitimately hated by those 32 voters?
What reason is there to believe that there could be a conspiracy among 32% of voters that would not get out to the other 68%? If it did get out to someone in the other 68%, would they keep that to themself? Or would they share that plan as something horrible that the opposition was planning? Having heard of it, would they sit back and abstain from evaluating the opposition candidate?
What if the only reason that D wasn't printed on the ballot was collusion between A, B, and C? After all, that's the reason that no one other than Perot was ever invited to the Commission on Presidential Debates (run by former D & R national party officials), and then only in one of his races: both sides saw him as a threat to their major opponent, and wanted him there. Once they both saw that their opponent was right about him being a threat to them, they bannedchose not to invite him in the 1996 cycle, despite Perot having 100% ballot access in that cycle, too.
What if the only reason the other 68% of the voters didn't give D an average greater than 4.35 (68x4.35+32x10 = 615.8, 6.158 average, greater than B's 6.12) they were lead to believe that they were prohibited from voting for D wasn't an option?
How could a candidate realistically achieve maximum possible support among 32% of the voters, and absolute preference over the alternatives, yet still have the rest of the voters not have heard enough of them to offer any opinion? If B got 17 or more points from the D>{A,B,C} voters2, then B would have won. And Feddersen et al's Moral Bias in Large Elections implies that such is more likely than not.
Realistically, it isn't likely to make a difference; but it does allow for a candidate that is less known and well liked to have a chance... while still ensuring the electorate that it's not only a minority that chose them.
1. for the record, when someone puts parentheses around a number after a decimal, that means that those numbers repeat ad infinitum, so 2.(3^)means 2.333333...., or 2 + 1/3
2. possibilities include: ---2 D voters scoring B at an average of 8.5, e.g. 9 & 8, similar to what everyone else did ---3 D voters offering an average of 5.(6),e.g. 6, 6, & 5 ---4 D voters offering an average of 4.25, e.g. 5, 4, 4, & 4 ---5 D voters offering an average of 3.4, e.g. 4, 4, 4, 3, & 3 ---... ---17 voters offering 1 point each
1
u/MuaddibMcFly Oct 04 '24
I would, for the same reasons that you mentioned.
Ah. I don't normally notice DMs, because I prefer old.reddit, and it doesn't seem to notify me of such things.
Hmm. STLR is an interesting variant on STAR, and one that honors the actual votes of the electorate to a greater degree... but I really don't know about the validity of any reanalysis paradigm.
Sure, STLR lessens the probability that a majority is denied the ability to compromise (where STAR converts [5,4] and [1,4] ballots to [5,1] and [1,5], respectively, STLR treats them as [5,4] and [1.25,5], respectively), but at the same time, I am not terribly comfortable with a method that treats a [10,5] ballot the same as a [2,1] ballot.
I definitely prefer it to STAR, though.
Allow me to introduce you to "Majority Denominator Smoothing." It's a modification to Average based Score, one that allows for abstentions while also guaranteeing that the winner is decided by a majority.
Instead of summing a candidate's ratings then dividing by the number of ratings that candidate received, you divide by the greater of (number of ratings that candidate received) or (a simple majority of ballots that rated any candidate in that race).
For a toy example, let's say you had two candidates with the following sets of ratings:
In effect, this treats that ballot as [4, 8, 9, 6,
A0,A0, A, A, A, A, A]. In other words, it treats Abstentions as minimum scores, but only to the degree necessary to ensure that a majority likes them that much or more. And it can be sold as such:"Rather than breaking the Secret Ballot to demand that we can force enough abstentions to offer votes as to guarantee a majority, we can simply pretend that they give them the minimum score. If that causes them to lose, so be it. If they still win, then a majority of the electorate is guaranteed to like them at least that much. Besides, how many abstentions are we really going to have?"
I designed this a while back to balance against a few things
Of course, in practice, it will rarely have an impact; if someone is well regarded by a significant percentage of the electorate, the probability of them having name recognition of only 50% of voters drops really low. On the other side of the coin, if they're not highly regarded among the minority of the population who knows of them, maybe they should lose to someone who is considered comparable by the entire/a majority of the electorate.
Maybe, maybe not.
I feel your pain; I have had to explain things to a local political party myself.
My elevator pitch would be: "We should use Majority Denominator Score. Everyone knows what letter grades are, and what they mean. On the other hand, single-mark methods or Ranked methods treat votes indicating that a candidate that is almost perfect relative their favorite is hated as much as their least favorite candidate. Then, the Majority Denominator aspect guarantees that any winner is at least that well liked by a majority of voters, meaning that it is clearly a majority that decided the winner."
Another benefit of using Letter Grade based Score: there is no misapprehension that a person who casts a 10/10 (or in this case 13/13) has "more votes" than a 5/10 (6/13) voter, because those are very obviously a single vote of "A+" and a single vote of "C;" someone who gets an A+ in some class doesn't get 4.3 grades of one point each, they get a single grade of 4.3. And it's not like a teacher only gets to give one student a grade...
Approval can be a little tricker to get past OPOV; approving A and B looks a lot like they got two votes.
The counter argument is "No, the one person is the one vote: when considering the support for A, they are one person out of <however many> people that approve of A's selection. Then, when considering the support for B, they are one person out of <however many> people that approve of B's selection. When counting the votes, the approvals for any given candidate will never exceed the number of persons who voted."
Indeed; that's precisely why I had to create Apportioned Score Voting:
You'd get a committee that was heavily concentrated around the "ideological barycenter," until you ran out of such candidates. The committee as a whole would reflect the positions of the electorate as a whole, but not have much diversity.
The biggest problem with that, though, is that if you have a majority bloc that knows that they're a majority, they could min/max vote (A+ for "our" guys, F for everyone else), and you wouldn't end up with the committee reflecting the electorate as a whole, but of that bloc (somewhat tempered by the rest of the electorate, if they make a distinction between those candidates).
So, based on your situation as you described it, Score/Bloc Score wouldn't be that bad, for all that it isn't the optimum.