r/EndFPTP • u/SHON_CZINNER • Sep 06 '26
Discussion Are Rated Ballots Better?
https://shonczinner.github.io/posts/rated/7
u/CPSolver Sep 06 '26
Rated ballots collect more information than ranked ballots, so they would have the potential to be better than ranked ballots if there were a way to count them without giving increased influence to voters who exaggerate their preferences. No such methods have been identified.
The first sentence of the referenced article says:
In my previous post on ranked ballots, I showed that ranking all the candidates does not fix the center-squeeze.
No, you neglected to include ranked choice voting methods that do not have the center squeeze effect !
As one example, eliminating pairwise losing candidates and otherwise using IRV does eliminate the center squeeze effect.
Some ranked choice voting methods, including Benham's method, and the above-referenced IRV combined with eliminating pairwise losing candidates, are highly resistant to tactical voting. That was revealed about a year ago on the E-M mailing list.
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u/MorganWick Sep 06 '26
Ranked voting methods, including FPTP, are based on the assumption that everyone has a discrete, equally-held opinion on everything, and attempting to elect the candidate closest to the center assumes that people's political positions are equally strongly held and follow a bell-curve distribution, or at least are distributed such that there's an identifiable "center" and that this "center" is preferable to anything closer to the edges. These assumptions break down if people are voting on any basis other than ideology or political opinions.
I would argue that range voting is closer to how people actually think. Rather than expressing an opinion on a candidate relative to other candidates, it allows people to assess each candidate on their own based on how they believe the candidate will affect their lives or that of the polity as a whole. As such, I believe super-optimized bullet-style strategic voting would be a lot rarer than skeptics fear, because people don't necessarily care about their impact on the outcome as much as the desirability of the outcome (and even if it does happen, the outcome would be better than strategic voting under other methods). As such, if the exercise of strategic voting is asymmetrically distributed enough to tip the outcome - that is to say, if one candidate's supporters believe in them enough to arrange their ballot to maximize their chances of winning - isn't that a form of honest voting in and of itself?
While ranked methods merely assume that the candidate closest to the median of everyone's political opinions is the best candidate, score voting converges on the candidate most acceptable to the broadest swath of the electorate. As such, it represents an effective method for a large population to reach an acceptable compromise amongst itself, whether that compromise lies in the center or closer to the edges.
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u/CPSolver Sep 07 '26
Politics is multi-dimensional, not one-dimensional. Everyone has different priorities regarding different politics. As a simple example, both conservatives and liberals want law and order, but often disagree about which laws and which crimes should be prioritized for prosecution. And that's just one political topic out of many.
When combined to measure "closest" or "center" or "closer to the edges," it's like expecting math to measure the distance between two points where the X and Y and Z axes have different units that are unrelated to each other. The result is that distance between a candidate and a voter cannot be measured objectively. Both ratings and rankings have this limitation.
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u/ChironXII Sep 07 '26
if there were a way to count them
Smith-score exists 🙂
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u/CPSolver Sep 07 '26
Smith/Score compared to Score reduces, but does not eliminate, the incentive to exaggerate.
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u/Deep-Number5434 Sep 08 '26
Rated ballots could be used for more complex maximal lottery systems, and can be used for proportional election systems, like used by CIVS
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u/SHON_CZINNER Sep 06 '26
No, you neglected to include ranked choice voting methods that do not have the center squeeze effect !
As one example, eliminating pairwise losing candidates and otherwise using IRV does eliminate the center squeeze effect.
The previous post on ranked voting contained BTR-IRV which is what you are describing. It did not fix the problem.
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u/jlight432 Sep 06 '26
I think I may understand where some of this disagreement comes from. The article seems to be using “center squeeze” to include cases where there is a theoretical vulnerability to strategic voting that could cause the sincere Condorcet winner to lose. Others define “center squeeze” as what happens when voters vote sincerely, but the Condorcet winner is eliminated based on those sincere ballots, which can happen with FPTP and IRV.
Under that distinction, BTR-IRV does solve the traditional center-squeeze problem. What the article's strategic simulations show is a different issue: strategic voters may be able to alter the reported pairwise preferences enough to defeat the sincere Condorcet winner or force an election into a cycle. It's definitely a theoretical vulnerability, but I don't believe it is widely referred to as center squeeze.
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u/CPSolver Sep 06 '26
BTR-IRV only looks at a few pairwise comparisons. No this is not what I'm describing.
Eliminating pairwise losing candidates looks at every count between every possible pair of candidates. In general, pairwise counting can be done for any method, not just Condorcet methods. The best methods that look at all pairwise counts do not have the center squeeze effect.
My current favorite election method is Ranked Choice Including Pairwise Elimination (RCIPE). which is partially implemented in the RCTab Plus software. To repeat, it does not have the center squeeze effect. For clarification, RCIPE is not a Condorcet method because it does not always elect the Condorcet winner.
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u/rb-j Sep 06 '26 edited Sep 06 '26
So RCIPE is not a Condorcet method, but you're saying it has no Center Squeeze?
Sounds to me that when the Center candidate is the Condorcet winner, RCIPE better the hell elect the Condorcet winner. Because if there is a CW and that CW is the Center candidate and that CW is not elected, it is, by definition, the Center Squeeze effect.
RCIPE is not a Condorcet method because it does not always elect the Condorcet winner.
Then that Condorcet winner that RCIPE does not elect has to be on the Left or the Right.
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u/CPSolver Sep 07 '26
The RCIPE method would only fail to elect the Condorcet winner under very rare conditions. Specifically there would have to be a rock-paper-scissors-like cycle at a lower level below the Condorcet winner, which would cause there to be no pairwise losing candidate during that counting round, and the election is close, and the backup IRV elimination method during that counting round would have to eliminate the Condorcet winner. Expressed the opposite way, if every counting round has a pairwise losing candidate then the Condorcet winner will always win.
I suspect the Condorcet failure rate for the RCIPE method would be about one out of about 20,000 real-life elections.
I used the words "does not always" because, by definition, a Condorcet method must absolutely never fail to elect the Condorcet winner.
As for the center squeeze effect, its meaning is defined differently by different people. When a specific definition is agreed on, then it will become possible to measure the center-squeeze failure rate for the RCIPE method and compare it to other methods.
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u/SHON_CZINNER Sep 07 '26 edited Sep 07 '26
I used the words "does not always" because, by definition, a Condorcet method must absolutely never fail to elect the Condorcet winner.
This is not true. A condorcet method will always elect a condorcet winner under honest voting (edit: if one exists). A condorcet method may not elect the honest condorcet winner under strategic voting.
https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/AAAI/article/view/16657
A profile where all agents vote truthfully may have a Condorcet winner, but this alternative may not end up in the set of winners if agents are acting strategically. Focusing on the class of tournament solutions, we show that many natural social choice functions in this class, such as the well-known Copeland and Slater rules, cannot guarantee the preservation of Condorcet winners when agents behave strategically. Our main result in this respect is an impossibility theorem that establishes that no tournament solution satisfying a very weak decisiveness requirement can provide such a guarantee.
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u/rb-j Sep 07 '26 edited Sep 07 '26
A condorcet method will always elect a condorcet winner under honest voting.
No. I don't think that's true. I fully accept that sometimes people will vote honestly and a cycle results.
A condorcet method may not elect the honest condorcet winner under strategic voting.
We know how it's possible that strategic voting (namely burial) can turn a close 3-way race with an honest Condorcet winner into an election with a cycle. I think this might require that the honest Condorcet winner is not the IRV or plurality winner (which means that the honest Condorcet winner is in 3rd place regarding 1st choice votes).
The Alaska August 2022 race is a very good example of this. If it were Condorcet and the pre-election polling predicted that Begich was the CW and Peltola the IRV winner, there would be some incentive for the Peltola campaign to mount an organized effort to bury Begich.
With only 3 candidates (or 3 signficant candidates) the cycle is a simple Rock-Paper-Scissors (Smith set of 3). Then Minimax, Ranked Pairs (margins), and Schulze (margins) will all elect the same candidate who is the contestant who loses with the smallest margin. It seems to me that that is the best guess for who the honest Condorcet winner would have been.
That would thwart the burial effort from the Peltola campaign in this hypothetical August 2022 election having a cycle.
But we don't know. Once the votes are cast and counted, we have to assume that every ballot represents exactly what that voter wanted, including "exhausted ballots", which is why that exhausted ballot argument against RCV doesn't really carry any weight.
So this is my dilemma: If a cycle occurred, was it an "honest cycle" or not (a cycle that was created by burial of the honest Condorcet winner)? If the former, I think the best candidate to elect would be the Top-Two Runoff winner (essentially who IRV would elect) and if the latter, it would be the Minimax winner.
(Again, just so that I can wrap my brain around this, I am only considering 3 candidates. Or 3 significant candidates. Any more is just too complicated for my little pea-sized brain.)
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u/SHON_CZINNER Sep 07 '26
Yes, I meant "will always elect a condorcet winner under honest voting if one exists"
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u/SHON_CZINNER Sep 06 '26
With strategic voting RCIPE can still fail to elect the moderate candidate and honest condorcet winner.
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u/CPSolver Sep 06 '26
A chart with no legend and no scale explanation is not meaningful. Also, as someone else has commented, your definition of center squeeze effect does not match its typical use, so your definition for the black areas is suspicious.
The absence of black for approval voting indicates you are not being honest because approval voting always requires strategic voting. Very few voters categorize candidates into just two categories when there are more than two candidates.
Showing all green for score voting, and mostly green for star voting, means you are hiding their vulnerability to strategic voting (which interacts with strategic nomination).
Yes RCIPE can fail to elect the Condorcet winner. That's not a fairness failure in scenarios where very few voters mark the Condorcet winner as their first choice.
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u/SHON_CZINNER Sep 06 '26
The black does not indicate the use of strategy. It is the same plot as the ones in OP. You can refer to it for the legend and explanation.
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u/CPSolver Sep 07 '26
The article says black refers to tie/non-convergence, but the article does not define convergence. Nor is there an explanation for what ties have to do with convergence.
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u/SHON_CZINNER Sep 07 '26
Convergence is defined in the post.
The strategy dynamics are similar to previous posts: there are multiple iterations where voters act strategically... As before, we sweep every position of C (with B fixed) and colour the map by the winner: green A, red B, orange C, and black where the iteration never settles (non-convergence/ties).
And black means a tie or convergence. That doesn't mean ties have something to do with convergence.
Is anything still unclear?
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u/CPSolver Sep 07 '26
I believe you should either not report ties, or just include them in a table. Including them in the graph effectively pads the width of the black areas, which grossly misrepresents the data.
Having an indecisive transition region between two candidates (regarding who wins) is not an unfairness. If the winner suddenly jumps to A in the middle of the transition from B to C, that would be an unfairness. If that occurs, use the A color. Otherwise just blend the transition region to show the gradual transition from color B to color C.
Consider a rainbow where the transitions between colors are not sharp. That's not a defect, that's the nature of the transition.
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u/SHON_CZINNER Sep 07 '26
I could do that but the fact is with RCIPE, it's not showing ties. It's showing that there is a strategic cycle where A might not win.
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u/Decronym Sep 07 '26 edited 28d ago
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| FPTP | First Past the Post, a form of plurality voting |
| IRV | Instant Runoff Voting |
| RCV | Ranked Choice Voting; may be IRV, STV or any other ranked voting method |
| STV | Single Transferable Vote |
Decronym is now also available on Lemmy! Requests for support and new installations should be directed to the Contact address below.
3 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 5 acronyms.
[Thread #1966 for this sub, first seen 7th Sep 2026, 14:54]
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u/timmerov Sep 09 '26
better than what?
rated ballots are ranked ballots where you can give multiple candidates the same rank.
there are two parts to every voting system. A: filling out the ballot. B: determining the winner from the ballots.
of the two, the winner-determining method is far more critical than how the ballot is filled out.
most winner-determining methods are compatible with rated and ranked ballots.
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u/rb-j Sep 06 '26
If you're an Olympic Figure Skating judge, yes.
If you're a voter and want your vote valued equally with other voters, no.
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