What Is Voter Satisfaction Efficiency? • Hacker News Board

Re: What Is Voter Satisfaction Efficiency?

#31

Post by vintermann » Wed, Jun 23, 2021, 9:02 AM UTC

It looks like it's a metric constructed to justify Range-ish voting systems, a la Warren Smith's Bayesian regret models.

It performs the same core sleigh of hand: it takes a very simple view of strategic voting, assuming a fixed share of the electorate vote "strategically" regardless of election method, and making big assumptions about what's a good strategy.

That is, to put it mildly, not a reasonable assumption. It varies widely how much information about other people's preferences you need to "vote strategically", and the strategies also vary widely in how risky they are. If I have false beliefs about other people's preferences, how likely is it that I shoot myself in the foot with "strategic" voting? And how likely is it that we get caught in a bad equilibrium where our false beliefs about the other side's preferences reinforce each other?

All this makes the sort of modelling attempted here a vain pursuit. You just can't model strategy this naively.

But some methods come MUCH better out of this hopelessly naive modelling of strategy than others.

For instance, Approval voting requires very little information about other people's beliefs to vote strategically - you just need to know who the top two contenders are - The strategy is to approve the "least evil" of those two, plus any from the rest of the field you prefer to those two. It degenerates to pretty much the same problem as Plurality voting, with maybe slightly better chance to get out of bad equilibriums in the long run.

And Range/Score voting is even more extreme: you can vote strategically there even knowing nothing about other people's preferences. Just always use extreme values (0 and 100).

By comparison, strategic voting in Condorcet systems requires really exact information about the electorate's full range of preferences - and even then, you usually need to coordinate your strategic voting without the opposition getting wind of it, otherwise they can counter it. It's just not practical.

(Likewise, Borda gets a bad rap in these comparisons. It's not a good system, but the likelihood that "strategic voting" will backfire horribly means that in all likelihood, voters would not pursue those strategies. )

Re: What Is Voter Satisfaction Efficiency?

#32

Post by js8 » Wed, Jun 23, 2021, 9:08 AM UTC

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.

Never heard of it, but it looks interesting.

My interpretation, not sure if correct, is that basically you're expressing each vote as a point in d-dimensional Euclid space (where d is number of choices), and the result of the vote is the center of mass of all these points. Stated like this it perhaps makes more sense than just linear range voting.

Re: What Is Voter Satisfaction Efficiency?

#33

Post by kilotaras » Wed, Jun 23, 2021, 9:10 AM UTC

What VSE doesn't capture, but I feel is an important part of voting is signaling voter preferences.

Election where a democrat vote with 70% of the vote conveys a different information than the one in which 30% of those 70% first went to the green party candidate.

Re: What Is Voter Satisfaction Efficiency?

#34

Post by vintermann » Wed, Jun 23, 2021, 9:11 AM UTC

jabl wrote: post #23

marcosdumay wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, I fail to see how STAR and approval are superior. If I were to lobby for some electoral change, I would lobby for approval votes, because they are easy to lobby for (just change "you gt ONE vote" into "vote for as many people you like"). But compared to ranked choice, it creates a situation where you can't differentiate candidates between who you clearly have a preference, and this has large odds of chang…

OTOH, with ordinal methods you are forced to distinguish between candidates that you think are equally good. Say if you have three candidates, A, B, and C, where A and B are very similar and you like both, though with a slight preference to A, whereas you dislike C very much. With approval voting you'd approve A and B, with score voting (say the vote is an integer between 1 and 5) you could vote A=5, B=4, C=1 (or A=5…

> Whereas with an ordinal system you'd vote A-B-C, but you have no way of 'telling the voting math' that the distance between A and B is much shorter than between B and C.

Kenneth Arrow is famous for his impossibility theorem, but he also rejected cardinal systems out of hand, because you can't honestly judge the strength of your own preferences compared to other voters. He argued (pretty well, I thought) that the extra information in cardinal systems was useless.

Re: What Is Voter Satisfaction Efficiency?

#35

Post by adamjb » Wed, Jun 23, 2021, 9:24 AM UTC

_delirium wrote: post #11

rayiner wrote: post #7

Not knowing on the same day who won the NYC primary is much more annoying than I thought it would be. I wonder if there is a psychological effect in play here, like lag in a game controller. Makes you feel less like you’re actually in control.

Do you know what the source of the lag is? There's a concept of "rounds" in IRV, but if you have access to computers, a "round" should resolve in less than a second, if election data is digitized. Is the lag digitizing the votes in the first place?

The machines at the polling places can only count first preferences. Distribution of preferences will occur once the votes are transferred to the central scrutiny centre.

https://twitter.com/AntonyGreenABC/status/140752370034202214...

Re: What Is Voter Satisfaction Efficiency?

#36

Post by roenxi » Wed, Jun 23, 2021, 9:33 AM UTC

vintermann wrote: post #31

It looks like it's a metric constructed to justify Range-ish voting systems, a la Warren Smith's Bayesian regret models. It performs the same core sleigh of hand: it takes a very simple view of strategic voting, assuming a fixed share of the electorate vote "strategically" regardless of election method, and making big assumptions about what's a good strategy. That is, to put it mildly, not a reasonable assumption. It…

> It degenerates to pretty much the same problem as Plurality voting, with maybe slightly better chance to get out of bad equilibriums in the long run.

No, in practice, because the top two contenders are likely to be two who are actually popular.

Plurality voting typically finds an equilibrium where the "two most popular" candidates are both extremists.

http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/ has some nice plots showing how the two most popular candidates change from centrists under approval voting to relative extremists under plurality. (I advocate IRV because when in doubt the voting system should degenerate into random chaos. 1 person in 100 shouldn't be a big enough margin to secure power as a principle either)

Re: What Is Voter Satisfaction Efficiency?

#37

Post by bsdetector » Wed, Jun 23, 2021, 9:58 AM UTC

vintermann wrote: post #31

It looks like it's a metric constructed to justify Range-ish voting systems, a la Warren Smith's Bayesian regret models. It performs the same core sleigh of hand: it takes a very simple view of strategic voting, assuming a fixed share of the electorate vote "strategically" regardless of election method, and making big assumptions about what's a good strategy. That is, to put it mildly, not a reasonable assumption. It…

Probably the most important dimension, time, isn't ever included in any of these mathematical evaluations of voting systems.

Strategic voting doesn't just happen once, people apply a strategy over multiple elections and can exert influence before the election even happens. In a two-party system the party in charge knows they'll be punished for egregious transgressions - even by some of their core supporters - leading to opposite policies, whereas in multi-party if one party is caught cheating for instance they know voters will defect to a party with similar policies. The parties also act strategically.

If they want to use a satisfaction model it should be lifetime satisfaction, how well the system represented people overall. This may be basically impossible to model without a complete understanding of human nature, but it matters in the real world; if your country gets overthrown or ultimately makes poor decisions it doesn't matter how satisfied you were with the candidates at one point in time.

Re: What Is Voter Satisfaction Efficiency?

#38

Post by aragilar » Wed, Jun 23, 2021, 9:59 AM UTC

jabl wrote: post #23

marcosdumay wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, I fail to see how STAR and approval are superior. If I were to lobby for some electoral change, I would lobby for approval votes, because they are easy to lobby for (just change "you gt ONE vote" into "vote for as many people you like"). But compared to ranked choice, it creates a situation where you can't differentiate candidates between who you clearly have a preference, and this has large odds of chang…

OTOH, with ordinal methods you are forced to distinguish between candidates that you think are equally good. Say if you have three candidates, A, B, and C, where A and B are very similar and you like both, though with a slight preference to A, whereas you dislike C very much. With approval voting you'd approve A and B, with score voting (say the vote is an integer between 1 and 5) you could vote A=5, B=4, C=1 (or A=5…

Can you point to a real example where you can't distinguish between candidates (I'm Australian, so vote with IRV, and I can't say it ever comes up, except perhaps when choosing who should be last vs second last ;)? Approval voting would seem to have the same convergence to a two party system as FPTP where you have a chamber composed of multiple members, a mayor or similar role would be different.

Multi-member representation would be ideal, but I can see the appeal of having a single person represent you.

Re: What Is Voter Satisfaction Efficiency?

#39

Post by jabl » Wed, Jun 23, 2021, 10:31 AM UTC

vintermann wrote: post #34

jabl wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OTOH, with ordinal methods you are forced to distinguish between candidates that you think are equally good. Say if you have three candidates, A, B, and C, where A and B are very similar and you like both, though with a slight preference to A, whereas you dislike C very much. With approval voting you'd approve A and B, with score voting (say the vote is an integer between 1 and 5) you could vote A=5, B=4, C=1 (or A=5…

> Whereas with an ordinal system you'd vote A-B-C, but you have no way of 'telling the voting math' that the distance between A and B is much shorter than between B and C. Kenneth Arrow is famous for his impossibility theorem, but he also rejected cardinal systems out of hand, because you can't honestly judge the strength of your own preferences compared to other voters. He argued (pretty well, I thought) that the ex…

> Kenneth Arrow is famous for his impossibility theorem, but he also rejected cardinal systems out of hand, because you can't honestly judge the strength of your own preferences compared to other voters. He argued (pretty well, I thought) that the extra information in cardinal systems was useless.

Indeed, that is a strong argument in favor of approval voting; if everybody votes strategically under score voting it reduces to approval voting, so why bother with the extra complexity of score voting? FWIW, I recall Arrow himself said in some interview that his personal favorite was approval voting.

Secondly, I'm not sure I understand the point about strength of preferences. Since everybody has the same range from within to assign preferences, it's all about the relative preferences among the candidates. Doesn't matter if I hate candidate X with the heat of a thousand suns, I can't give that candidate a score of -1000, only the minimum, just like everybody else.

Re: What Is Voter Satisfaction Efficiency?

#40

Post by jabl » Wed, Jun 23, 2021, 10:42 AM UTC

aragilar wrote: post #38

jabl wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OTOH, with ordinal methods you are forced to distinguish between candidates that you think are equally good. Say if you have three candidates, A, B, and C, where A and B are very similar and you like both, though with a slight preference to A, whereas you dislike C very much. With approval voting you'd approve A and B, with score voting (say the vote is an integer between 1 and 5) you could vote A=5, B=4, C=1 (or A=5…

Can you point to a real example where you can't distinguish between candidates (I'm Australian, so vote with IRV, and I can't say it ever comes up, except perhaps when choosing who should be last vs second last ;)? Approval voting would seem to have the same convergence to a two party system as FPTP where you have a chamber composed of multiple members, a mayor or similar role would be different. Multi-member represe…

> Can you point to a real example where you can't distinguish between candidates

With hundreds/thousands(?) of ranked voting elections worldwide, with certainly millions of voters, you're statistically guaranteed to have that situation for some voter somewhere.

> Approval voting would seem to have the same convergence to a two party system as FPTP where you have a chamber composed of multiple members, a mayor or similar role would be different.

Not sure the voting method used for single-winner elections matter that much for the dynamics leading to a duopoly or not. I think convergence to a duopoly is most strongly influenced by winner-take-all districts. The solution to that, as you pointed out, is multi-member districts with proportional representation.

> but I can see the appeal of having a single person represent you

... assuming that 'your' party wins. Otherwise you have no representation at all and you feel disfranchised?

I'd say the major appeal of single-winner districts is that the districts are much smaller, and you have a better chance to get to know your own representative (again, assuming it's somebody you find broadly acceptable).