Continuing down this, you're essentially discussing bullet voting. I should EXPLICITLY state that this is a well known case and has been extensively studied[0][1]. I appreciate that you have concern with the system and I implore you to continue to search for flaws, but also to look for information discussing these ideas. The reason the bullet voting was likely so low in this study is that most voters are rational and understand that they are giving up significant leverage when bullet voting (note that the case is even worse in approval!). We often think our neighbors are far less rational than they actually are and we shouldn't make this mistake.
We should probably also discuss Monotonicity[2], but maybe in a follow-up conversation.
[0] https://www.rangevoting.org/BulletBugaboo
[1] https://www.rangevoting.org/RVstrat3.html (called Plurality here, strategy B)
You're right, I was arguing that voters degenerate into bullet voting over time 100% for the candidate they liked, 0% for the ones they don't. Your article [0] contends that it's not a good strategy to vote like this if you're trying to be strategic, because if candidates are A=974, B=974, F=231 and you liked F, you'd be foolish to vote 100% F, as if you like B better than A you should vote some for B.
This looks too much like the current system we have, where people don't vote for the person they like best, they cast all their votes for the person they hate the least who could beat the person they hate the most. Basically: if you normalize votes, people are going to vote 100% for the lesser of 2 evils and we're back to square 1.
If you don't normalize votes, you'll get one of the other voting strategies you've already linked to in your [1]. I expect it would essentially devolve into approval voting, as it's still voting for the lesser of 2 evils of the strongest candidates, then casting additional votes for anyone who seems viable. Perhaps it finds some other equilibrium.
Either way, I think it takes too much strategy and voter headspace compared to ranked voting, where you can just vote for the candidates you want, in the order you want, and you didn't waste a vote if your top candidate loses because your #2 vote didn't lose any weight.
But this strategy and consequence exists in ordinal systems just as much as cardinal systems. There is nothing stopping a voter from bullet voting on a ranked ballot. They just rank one person and no one else. The consequences are quite similar actually but might be more obvious that you're throwing away your ballot in this case. But I assure you, you're effectively throwing away your ballot in the cardinal case too.
I'm also not sure what is wrong with approval. Approval is awesome.
I am also not sure why you keep using the phrase "lesser of 2 evils". If we have a 2 candidate election then there's no point in using any of these voting systems because plurality is a strictly better system (in a 2 candidate election). In fact, it is preferential that a multi-candidate system degenerates into a plurality system when there are only two candidates! The phrase "lesser of n equals" is not really about a voting system so much as it is related to another saying: "those that seek power do not deserve it" (or Plato's alternative: "Only those who do not seek power are qualified to hold it"). This has nothing to do with a voting system but has everything to do with a candidate selection process. There's an ethical conundrum though because you need strong authoritarian power to force thrust (the potential for) power upon people. But we're digressing, just like the normalization discussion is digressing (it was intended to introduce the concept of scaled sincerity, which we see people use in practice).
> I think you're trying too hard to look for errors in a system that isn't your preference and not looking hard enough at errors for the system that is your preference.
This is true that I have that bias. I think there's currently momentum in the US for switching from single vote to ranked voting, and I worry that if we get into disputes over which alternative voting system is better, that momentum will be lost and we won't change at all. You're right I was far too quick to dismiss approval voting as a devolution from cardinal voting.
> I am also not sure why you keep using the phrase "lesser of 2 evils".
I don't know if you're from the US or not, but this is a common idiom about how our election process works in practice. The Simpsons [0], South Park [1] and dozens of others have pretty great parodies of it. In each of our presidential elections, even though there will be a plurality of presidents running, there are practically only 2 -- the ones backed by the major parties. And often, they happen to be the 2 worst -- where they're either shamelessly narcissistic enough to be unfazed by criticism, or are overly agreeable and quick to make impossible promises. Your quote by Plato is on point here.
That's the phenomenon that I desperately don't want to have any more, that I want n-candidate elections to actually have n candidates. I (perhaps wrongly) attribute a lot of the polarization in the US to two-party elections.
It's true that you can be a bullet voter on a ranked ballot, but there's no incentive to (that I can think of). In an n-candidate election, if there are 2 known popular candidates, and you absolutely despise one of them, then in a normalized cardinal system you'd be incentivized to bullet vote for the other popular candidate -- whether or not they're terrible. That's the scenario I'm talking about when I say lesser of 2 evils. Without normalization, you'd be incentivized to approval vote. And I don't have anything wrong with approval voting, I shouldn't have criticized it in my last comment.
But I do still dislike cardinal voting, because of the fact that it gives people strategies for voting. I think some people will vote earnestly like A:1, B:3, C:6 and others will vote strategically like A:10, B:0, C:0, and so this will leave the earnest voters feeling like they had the election stolen from them by strategic voters when A wins.
I worry that history will repeat itself and that we'll try it for awhile and then turn back because it does not resolve the things people care about (multi-parties and strong spoilers).
> I don't know if you're from the US or not
I am and demonstrated knowledge about this idiom. My comment was that the idiom is inappropriate for the conversation at hand, not that it is inappropriate for all circumstances. Why else do you think I quoted Plato?
> I want n-candidate elections to actually have n candidates.
Then you want a system that is scalable, transparent (i.e. low computational complexity, trivially parallelizable, and trivially verifiable from statistical subsets).
> It's true that you can be a bullet voter on a ranked ballot, but there's no incentive to (that I can think of).
Don't explain it to me, explain this to yourself. Why is the logic for "no incentive" invalidating in one case but not another? I argued that these are nearly identical situations and have several comments noting that there is no incentive to vote in the way you are suggesting. You are not being consistent in your logic and I'm trying to explain but it is frustrating. Maybe I am being too liberal in using my links and expecting others to read. So let me state it explicitly: there is no incentive to not give your top candidate the maximal score. So your logic is inconsistent. On the other hand, I don't expect all voters to be rational but I do expect (and have linked to experiments with people) a convergence to rationality (also consider what rational means. It doesn't mean smart but that people will play near optimally. We mix normal language and game theory language and this can create a lot of confusion).
You're making the argument that I shouldn't be concerned about people thresholding their votes because scaled sincerity is a nearly optimal strategy in a cardinal voting scheme, so people can vote with their heart and not feel like their vote has been wasted. That's one of the findings in the paper you shared[1] that Scaled Sincerity gets (at worst) 91% of the utility compared to Mean Based Thresholding when there are 3 candidates, 80% percent for 5 candidates, 78% for 9... etc
But there'll still inevitably be an election where 2 candidates were very close and the scaled sincerity voters who supported the 2nd place candidate feel like the election was stolen from them. The media will make an uproar about it. Voters will vote with a thresholding scheme after that. So in this case we should just skip to approval voting so people don't feel like they were robbed of the fraction of the vote they didn't contribute to their candidate.
Your other point is people will bullet vote in ranked voting and so I'm defending it too strongly. Your other article[0] very strongly argues that IRV is worse than approval voting in regards to getting bullet voters. I know it's a cop out of me to quote the criticisms that the article itself provides, but the data size really is too small. In their summary of comparisons, 16% bullet voting in Burlington and ~21% bullet voting in Irish presidential are not bad percentages in my opinion, and I don't know anything about the SF 07 or Dartmouth 06 elections.
I don't understand why the low computational complexity is important as long as the algorithm is simple to understand. Bubble sort has higher computational complexity but is a simpler algorithm than merge sort. But I don't know the details of vote counting in practice. If the computational complexity is so high that you wouldn't even determine who won until days or weeks later and was highly prone to error, then I'd stand corrected.
I don't see how cardinal voting would make a difference in there being multiple parties.
I'm actually trying to get you to apply the same scrutiny to ordinal systems as you are giving to cardinal systems. I actually appreciate that you are critical of cardinal systems but I don't appreciate that you aren't being as critical of ordinals (recognize I'm talking about at least a dozen voting systems here. We have to start here before we can enter the nuance of individual systems but we're not even clear here). To be a good scientist you need to detach yourself from your preference. You need to critique YOUR preference more than you critique the opposing options. You're smart and if you've picked the right system then you should be able to defend it. But if you're smart and picked the wrong thing then you need to change because it isn't about what you like, it is about what is right (I'll keep stressing that no voting system is optimal and we need to define our metrics -- I have stated mine -- but we're not discussing these, we're caught up on a single strategy which appears in both cardinal and ordinal and as far as I can tell you don't recognize the latter).
> But there'll still inevitably be an election where 2 candidates were very close
Yes, and we need to think about how distant these candidates are from one another. Then ask yourself, can we compose a system where these candidates are similar? Is it always random and we have no control? Or are these candidates always distant and on opposite sides of the spectrum? You may be primed to believe the latter because that's the likely scenario in plurality voting but is this true for all systems? To answer this you need to have a deep understanding of Voter Satisfaction Efficiency (VSE), spoilers (both weak and strong -- aka favorite betrayer criteria), and how we embed preference (this is why I keep mentioning distances between candidates on the ballot. Note that this is a different distance/manifold than the previously mentioned one at the beginning of this paragraph).
> 16% bullet voting in Burlington and ~21% bullet voting in Irish presidential are not bad percentages in my opinion
I agree it is a cop-out since we see lower bullet voting tendencies in cardinal systems. I agree that sample sizes are small but we do have lots of simulations. Unfortunately we have very little real world data. Unfortunately that means we need to advocate for these systems to get real world natural experiments. Fortunately there are a few approval systems: Fargo ND and St. Luis MS (also Latvia). So we are collecting some of this data and it is very promising so far. We also have non-political versions of this like HN itself! There is only a binary voting system here (until you reach a certain score, then we get range voting). So I'd also argue we have tons of data (also surveys frequently use disapprove/neutral/approve styles of voting. Yes, this is voting). We've seen substantial success with these and I think that's not something we can exclude (though we must be aware of things like vote inflation for certain services, like Uber, that don't exhibit in other services, like old Netflix rating or current ratings).
> I don't see how cardinal voting would make a difference in there being multiple parties.
Back to the embedding.
> I could be sold on approval voting if that's the takeaway you're trying to get it.
Let's say all things are equal in effectiveness. Approval is O(n) and RCV is O(n2). I think that's killer and matters a lot (see the main topic).
> Also I don't mean to occupy either of our New Years Eves on this conversation.
This is one of the few political topics I'm extremely passionate about so I enjoy discussing it. I do want to be clear in that my goal here is not necessarily to get you to come to the cardinal side (though that'd be nice) but I want you to understand that voting methods are extremely complex (lots of people want you to think they are simple) and we shouldn't have strong passions about them without putting significant time to learn (I think discussions can be good learning mechanisms fwiw). Also plenty of time before I'm going anywhere tonight. And you have not offended me in any way. I'm glad we had this conversation.
Happy New Years :)
This kind of voting rewards dumb votes over informed votes. I'd rather have ranked voting.