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What Is Voter Satisfaction Efficiency?

electionscience.github.io

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Re: What Is Voter Satisfaction Efficiency?

#61

Post by xpe »

unholiness wrote: post #58

These results aren't passing the sniff-test for me. If I understand, "honest" voters in the score-like systems stick to some magically-shared mapping of their own utility to scores on the ballot (totally unreasonable, but let's grant it). Strategic voters, meanwhile, just use the ballots to maximize their own utility. Let's take the simplest, common scenario of two clear frontrunners. In score voting's one-sided stra…

The VSE metric implicitly rewards strategic voting, because strategic voting works. By "works" I mean it helps the individual voter maximize their chance of having their preferences reflected in the outcome.

  > VSE cannot measure: 
  > - Any desirable characteristics of a voting method
  > that do not directly relate to outcome (who wins).
This includes, for example, a value judgment that says "strategic voting is less desirable than honest voting".

Re: What Is Voter Satisfaction Efficiency?

#62

Post by xpe »

js8 wrote: post #26

I like range voting (of which approval is a special case). It's simple, and it always takes everybody's point of view into account (it doesn't lose any voter information), which is a really nice property IMHO. Yes, you can argue that the more extremely somebody puts the ranges, they have an advantage. (I would argue we should always normalize the cast vote so that most wanted candidate gets 100 and the least wanted 0…

> I like range voting (of which approval is a special case). It's simple, and it always takes everybody's point of view into account (it doesn't lose any voter information), which is a really nice property IMHO.

I don't agree with the claim "it doesn't lose any voter information"; unless voter preferences are aligned, any preference aggregation method must lose information. (More broadly, this happens with any statistic.)

You probably know this, so I think you meant something slight different? Can you elaborate?

Re: What Is Voter Satisfaction Efficiency?

#63

Post by xpe »

js8 wrote: post #26

I like range voting (of which approval is a special case). It's simple, and it always takes everybody's point of view into account (it doesn't lose any voter information), which is a really nice property IMHO. Yes, you can argue that the more extremely somebody puts the ranges, they have an advantage. (I would argue we should always normalize the cast vote so that most wanted candidate gets 100 and the least wanted 0…

> Yes, you can argue that the more extremely somebody puts the ranges, they have an advantage.

Yes, when aggregating preferences in one dimension using the arithmetic mean, people with a more divergent preference have relatively more impact.

> (I would argue we should always normalize the cast vote so that most wanted candidate gets 100 and the least wanted 0, ...

Yes, all other things equal, this appears like a reasonable thing to do.*

> but then we take away people's ability to express only mild interest.) And through that, they can in certain cases manipulate the outcome.

Right. You've given a clear example of the complexity of balancing desirable properties in voting systems.

* The problem of course is that there are many reasonable properties that most reasonable people would want, and yet, they don't coexist well.

Re: What Is Voter Satisfaction Efficiency?

#64

Post by walto2 »

xpe wrote: post #59
specialist wrote: post #51

Geeking out about voting systems is great. Big fan. Even better are voting systems in context. Voter education, cost of administration, quality of outcomes, cultural impact. For examples: - Approval voting has the best balance between simplicity, fairness, and certainty. (For single winner contents.) - The multiple choice systems reduce partisanship, negativity. Because all candidates want to be your second choice. -…

I would really enjoy staying in touch with people who spend a good number of brain cycles on these topic. What forums or discussion groups would you all recommend?

These folks [0] have a discord and a number of other resources.

[0]: https://electionscience.org/

Re: What Is Voter Satisfaction Efficiency?

#65

Post by xpe »

walto2 wrote: post #64
xpe wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would really enjoy staying in touch with people who spend a good number of brain cycles on these topic. What forums or discussion groups would you all recommend?

These folks [0] have a discord and a number of other resources. [0]: https://electionscience.org/

Thanks for the recommendation.

The Center for Election Science doesn't hide their preference* and advocacy:

> Let’s put approval voting ON THE MAP!

* Generally, each organization has some kind of bias, and I appreciate it when they are up-front about it.

My preferred group would have these biases / goals:

1. Valuing a diverse group of people

2. Valuing clear and honest discussion about member preferences in voting systems

3. Valuing understanding among the group members

4. Help group members form alliances with each other, should they desire to organize and do advocacy, because while each of us might have our 'preferred' voting system, we all benefit from moving beyond the 'worst' voting systems

Re: What Is Voter Satisfaction Efficiency?

#66

Post by crazygringo »

kortex wrote: post #44

I've been a proponent of STAR for some time, but today I'm happy to learn about 321. It sounds even easier to explain and implement than STAR (though approval is likely the method with the least friction using existing equipment). I really don't see the appeal of IRV, other than momentum. It's harder to implement. It's not really intuitive why you have to rank them. (I belive) it has higher chance of screwing up ball…

> I think 321 most closely matches the political climate in America. People tend to like a candidate, hate them, or "eh, they're fine."

I couldn't disagree more. I voted in yesterday's NYC Democratic mayoral primary (13 candidates on the ballot), and there were three candidates I considered "like", but with a very strong preference for the first over the second, as well as the second over the third. In today's political climate, people tend to be very passionate about their #1 choice, even if there are 3 they "like". That passion matters.

Re: What Is Voter Satisfaction Efficiency?

#67

Post by scoopertrooper »

specialist wrote: post #51

Geeking out about voting systems is great. Big fan. Even better are voting systems in context. Voter education, cost of administration, quality of outcomes, cultural impact. For examples: - Approval voting has the best balance between simplicity, fairness, and certainty. (For single winner contents.) - The multiple choice systems reduce partisanship, negativity. Because all candidates want to be your second choice. -…

Getting rid of primaries? That’d effectively end political parties.

Re: What Is Voter Satisfaction Efficiency?

#68

Post by crazygringo »

kortex wrote: post #50
elihu wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there's a couple reasons. IRV has been around a lot longer and is used in other countries. (It was first used in Australia in 1893.) In the U.S. it's supported most prominently by FairVote, which seems to be a pretty well-funded organization. (FairVote calls the proposal RCV, and most media follows suit.) The main proponent of approval voting seems to be the Center for Election Science, which is a pretty smal…

IRV has a non-complicate-to-explain problem: you can screw up the ballot and invalidate your vote. > Unlike many single-winner methods, instant-runoff cannot accept equal rankings, and must discard ballots with multiple first-preferred remaining alternatives: such ballots would be equivalent to casting multiple ballots in a plurality election With all-the hubbub on the last election about vote validity, and hanging c…

It's easy enough to have a scanner reject an invalid ballot and force you to fill out a new one. At least in NYC where I vote, you feed it into the scanner yourself.

And you've always been able to produce invalid ballots, like voting for two candidates when you're only allowed to pick one.

You're describing a UX problem which has UX solutions. It's not even remotely a justification for selecting a democratic procedure to express the will of the people.

Re: What Is Voter Satisfaction Efficiency?

#69

Post by notahacker »

kortex wrote: post #49
notahacker wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main advantage of IRV is that it isn't a particularly strategic vote. You put the candidates you in the order of your actual preference, and that's it (there are edge cases, but compared with other systems, pretty rare ones, and their complexity tends to actually discourage strategic behaviours like elevating a decent candidate you think is more likely to win than your first choices). The strategic considerations…

Excellent critique of ratings based system. I think this is the biggest problem with multi-point (more than 3 values for score) STAR voting. What constitutes "5 star"? What about 0/blank vs 1 star? Framing is important, and I think STAR would be most optimal with good ol' Likert scale (five or seven point) rather than 0-N stars. But I think even simpler is the "3-point Likert" behavior of V321: approve, disapprove, a…

You're entitled to leave both the Kick Puppies and Trip Grandparents party off your ranking!

V321 is certainly more intuitive in the ratings (it's basically an upvote/downvote system) if not the counting, but it's still quite strategic. On the plus side, the most basic strategy of simply upvoting who you want to win and downvoting the candidates you hate ensures the most divisive candidates are removed from the pool and the obscure fringe candidates are unlikely to benefit, but there's a fair bit of juggling how many candidates to upvote or downvote depending on what you think of the candidates seen as most likely to win the final round

Re: What Is Voter Satisfaction Efficiency?

#70

Post by zajio1am »

specialist wrote: post #51

Geeking out about voting systems is great. Big fan. Even better are voting systems in context. Voter education, cost of administration, quality of outcomes, cultural impact. For examples: - Approval voting has the best balance between simplicity, fairness, and certainty. (For single winner contents.) - The multiple choice systems reduce partisanship, negativity. Because all candidates want to be your second choice. -…

> Approval voting has the best balance between simplicity, fairness, and certainty.

Approval voting is completely inappropriate for common situations in Europe, where you have center-right, center-left, far-right and far-left candidate (e.g. presidental elections in France). Reasonable people should approve both center candidates despite of strong political disagreement with the other side (but still beter than fascists or communists). That essetially eliminates information from them entering to voting (although finding balance between right and left is one of the most important aspect of elections).

But that assumes people would hold common good strategy and not defect to vote only for their preferred candidate (while risking that extermists win). As the side who first defects wins, it is likely that it will just degrade to plurality voting.

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