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What Is Voter Satisfaction Efficiency?

electionscience.github.io

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Re: What Is Voter Satisfaction Efficiency?

#101

Post by specialist »

godelski wrote: post #93
scoopertrooper wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Funny enough, Washington wasn't a fan of parties. The argument against them is that they encourage lazy voting. Sure, there are advantages in that a party will help summarize a list of policies, but the disadvantage is tribalism. I think in modern day we don't have the same need for policy hinting (what parties give) because every major politician lists all their policies and positions on their campaign websites. 50…

Yes, and:

Parties get candidates elected. It's a form of social validation, vetting. The alternative is more money (buy votes).

Everyone should run for office at least once. Folk theories don't jive with the reality.

Yes, and #2:

Polarization != partisanship. Factors outside of the parties begat our current polarization. Ezra Klein's Why We Are Polarized is a good primer.

Re: What Is Voter Satisfaction Efficiency?

#102

Post by kortex »

crazygringo wrote: post #66
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 politi…

Wow, I envy you. We don't get a lot of choice in Upstate NY. You're lucky if you even get 2 candidates for a lot of the smaller races.

I'm probably over-generalizing but I still think this disparity is a result of low/med density vs high density like NYC. You're always gonna have more choices in high density areas, and I'm definitely in favor of more granular signals whenever possible.

I'd love to see an IRV where you don't have to obey any strict ordering rules (which I guess is like score voting where the max score is the number of candidates) which I guess might be a thing?

Re: What Is Voter Satisfaction Efficiency?

#103

Post by elihu »

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'm not convinced eliminating primaries is a good idea. They have a useful role in reducing the effort and cost of campaigning in a general election. Consider a scenario where some party spends a hundred million dollars in the general election promoting one candidate versus another party that spends a hundred million dollars in the general election split between five different candidates. I would expect the former party to be more likely to get their candidate elected that the latter.

Also another nice thing about primaries is that they're staggered. I think it's ridiculous that Iowa and New Hampshire always go first, but ignoring that it's great that a candidate without a lot of funding only has to focus on a couple of states in the initial stage, and can use success in the early states to gain momentum (and funding). That means you don't have to be some self-funding rich person to run for president, which is a nice property.

Re: What Is Voter Satisfaction Efficiency?

#104

Post by unholiness »

xpe wrote: post #61
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 des…

An outcome where 30 strategic B voters win over 70 unstrategic A voters is one I would expect VSE to rate very poorly. That is not a value judgement, and is directly related to the outcome.

Re: What Is Voter Satisfaction Efficiency?

#105

Post by xpe »

unholiness wrote: post #104
xpe wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 des…

An outcome where 30 strategic B voters win over 70 unstrategic A voters is one I would expect VSE to rate very poorly. That is not a value judgement, and is directly related to the outcome.

Your expectation is not aligned with how VSE is described. See my quotes above, and respond specifically to them if you would like me to continue discussing.

Re: What Is Voter Satisfaction Efficiency?

#106

Post by ad8e »

remolacha wrote: post #29
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…

Are you familiar with quadratic voting? It takes into account much of what you’re taking about, with the benefit of being less gameable.

Quadratic voting is gameable on the candidate side, if candidates have free entry in and out.

Re: What Is Voter Satisfaction Efficiency?

#107

Post by xpe »

elihu wrote: post #90
xpe wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is by definition; honest voting is not rational (in the narrow sense of the term).

Not necessarily; I think it's usually more of a prisoner's dilemma situation: if you optimize for getting what you want, then the overall outcome is worse. For example, in the results Borda count is much worse when everyone strategic votes. The new results contrast with an older simulation (graph shown down the page): https://electionscience.org/library/tactical-voting-basics/ Those results show honest voting always…

Thanks for broadening the discussion beyond low-trust, purely self-interested rationality.

Re: What Is Voter Satisfaction Efficiency?

#108

Post by ad8e »

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…

I believe you are stating that Score0to2 one-sided strategy should measure worse than plurality one-sided strategy. I don't think this is an obvious claim. It seems to depend on the underlying distribution of candidate quality (especially correlations of preferences).

I don't know what is up with 1-sided score vs 1-sided approval. That is an interesting observation you made and does look suspicious; we should expect the distortion of power to be greater than the loss of honest expressiveness.

When I looked at this project a year ago, I found other strange behaviors that led me to ignore its results, similar to how you are comparing its graphs to your intuition. There is no "correct" model in voting theory. Models are neither good or bad, only to the author's taste or not. For example, with voters on a single dimension, should utility of a candidate be the squared distance, or the absolute distance? How should a candidate's positions be distributed, is n-dimensional Euclidean space good? Should some candidates be straight-up better than others, and what should the distribution be? How should voters be clustered, if at all? What does "strategic" voting mean in each context? What does "honest" voting mean in cardinal contexts?

The author's discussion of methodology was lacking, and the missing priors make its results partially meaningless. I also had no success looking through the code for even basic behavior, because it was too hard to navigate. However, this is only a graduate project, and most graduate projects (including mine) are of lower quality than this one, so I wasn't upset.

In score systems, voters can sometimes be made honest to an extent. For example, on a book rating site, you probably don't rate all books 0 or 5; you use the full scale. Your ratings have greater self-value than your desire to tip the global score. While your assertion is reasonable that it is not the expected "honest" voting behavior, it is also a behavior worth looking at. This goes back to discussion of methodology; all these assumptions need to be documented, rather than buried in hard-to-read code.

Re: What Is Voter Satisfaction Efficiency?

#109

Post by ranicki »

godelski wrote: post #84
xpe wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sy…

What's kinda interesting about Election Science is how they've changed strategies. They used to push STAR till about a year ago and have since moved to approval voting. It seems they have found that approval is easier to sell to the average person and is still good enough. > Valuing clear and honest discussion about member preferences in voting systems This is a difficult thing tbh. A lot of people learn about voting…

You may be confusing CES with some other organization. I asked on CES's public discord:

    ranicki: someone on HN claimed that Center for Election Science switched from pushing STAR to pushing approval. is it true that this organization formerly supported STAR, or was it one of the other organizations? I don't remember who was advocating for what
    -redacted name-: Center for Election Science has broadly supported cardinal voting methods, score voting and approval voting basically since its inception. From everything I can tell it still is supportive of cardinal methods broadly, but as a political tactic has honed in on approval voting specifically due to its Pareto optimality.
    ...
    -redacted name 2-: I don't think CES ever changed from STAR to approval. IIRC they existed long before STAR was invented
(Names are redacted because I didn't ask permission to quote, but the discussion is publicly visible and not sensitive at all.)

Re: What Is Voter Satisfaction Efficiency?

#110

Post by specialist »

elihu wrote: post #103
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'm not convinced eliminating primaries is a good idea. They have a useful role in reducing the effort and cost of campaigning in a general election. Consider a scenario where some party spends a hundred million dollars in the general election promoting one candidate versus another party that spends a hundred million dollars in the general election split between five different candidates. I would expect the former pa…

> They have a useful role in reducing the effort and cost of campaigning in a general election.

If the goal is to reduce costs, the conventional wisdom is to shorten the campaign season. Time box them. Say 4 weeks.

Eliminating primaries reduces one whole campaign cycle. (Candidates consider primary and general election as two separate campaigns.)

> it's great that a candidate without a lot of funding

Third party access to the ballot is crucial. Support proven methods. Public financing of campaigns is probably the most effective. Fair redistricting lowers barriers. Greatly increase the number of representatives by reducing the size of districts. There are many other proposals.

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