What Is Voter Satisfaction Efficiency? • Hacker News Board

Re: What Is Voter Satisfaction Efficiency?

#71

Post by specialist » Wed, Jun 23, 2021, 3:43 PM UTC

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?

Because elections and voting are trigger issues, it's a huge challenge.

Ages ago, before I burned out, Election Verification Network (EVN) was really good. Bringing together academics, activists, officials. Very low key, low profile. To avoid the outrage machine.

EVN mostly focused on gear and procedures. Not much overlap with adjacent topics.

I organized an every-partisan election integrity group for a while. We had some small local victories. (Prohibit putting serial number on paper ballot linked to voter ID. Delayed adoption of janky new gear.)

But drift into adjacent issues and coalitions fall apart. For instance: Voter registration databases. Correct answer is universal automatic voter registration where everyone is listed and has an eligibility flag, with audit history. But improving data quality is a no go because of misbelief that higher registration (and participation) has partisan advantage. (Spoiler: It doesn't.)

Another fundamental problem is being outside looking in. Asking the establishment to modify the very system that got them their power is really, really challenging. The vetocracy. That's why all these stupid obvious reforms with +70% support languish. Default answer is always "no", with demands for ever more ridiculous standards of proof, because reasons. This is a fundamental trait of all orgs, groups. Why would the public sphere be any different? Sadly, when change does finally happen, it's disruptive. Punctuated equilibrium vs slow and steady progress.

Re: What Is Voter Satisfaction Efficiency?

#72

Post by InitialLastName » Wed, Jun 23, 2021, 3:47 PM UTC

scoopertrooper wrote: post #67

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.

Good. Breaking up the duopoly of US parties with deeply calcified sets of positions and constituents in favor of a more flexible set of platforms (that may or may not overlap with others on various concerns) could lubricate the government (especially the legislature) into operating based on policies and priorities that more accurately represent the majority view on any given topic.

Re: What Is Voter Satisfaction Efficiency?

#73

Post by specialist » Wed, Jun 23, 2021, 3:53 PM UTC

zajio1am wrote: post #70

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 fasci…

I advocate PR for assemblies, approval voting for executive positions.

In the USA, replace most (all?) all house, council, board, assembly, etc. districts with PR.

I understand that different systems are needed per context.

Re: What Is Voter Satisfaction Efficiency?

#74

Post by obelos » Wed, Jun 23, 2021, 3:56 PM UTC

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #27

troydavis wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Seattle, many of us reached the same conclusion as you did. We’re now trying to change Seattle’s primary elections to use approval voting: https://seattleapproves.org/ Approval voting is extremely effective at capturing voters’ preferences, simple to implement, and incredibly easy to explain - not just the ballot, but how the ballots are tabulated and how the winner is chosen. The entity you linked to, The Center…

> easy to explain What is the simple way to pitch its advantage to IRV without using technical terms? The spoiler effect is simple to explain because we’ve seen it. A hypothetical centre squeeze isn’t. My belief is IRV opens the door to approval voting. (I am still sceptical of it, though I welcome experiments like the one your propose in Seattle.) When approval voting advocates oppose IRV in jurisdictions with plura…

I just don't see any evidence that IRV can be considered a stepping stone to truly better voting methods. Looking empirically at the matter, the places that adopt and later repeal IRV don't adopt better methods. They revert to choose-one. (Or in the case of Burlington, revert to choose-one and then confoundingly re-adopt IRV). Are there counterexamples I'm missing?

Re: What Is Voter Satisfaction Efficiency?

#75

Post by zajio1am » Wed, Jun 23, 2021, 3:57 PM UTC

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…

> I don't like how IRV forces me to rank candidates I may know little to nothing about

That is an implementation issue. IRV can be implemented as either requiring complete ordering or allow partial ordering (you have n candidates, you can assign each one level 1..n, but you may use the same level for more candidates to describe partial ordering).

Re: What Is Voter Satisfaction Efficiency?

#76

Post by zajio1am » Wed, Jun 23, 2021, 4:03 PM 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…

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

Exactly. Voting systems that have strong advantages to vote strategically should be analyzed in game theory framework (analyzing nash equilibria in payoff matrices defined by voter strategies)

Re: What Is Voter Satisfaction Efficiency?

#77

Post by obelos » Wed, Jun 23, 2021, 4:03 PM UTC

notahacker wrote: post #46

infogulch wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you break that down? Periods are your friend, your comment makes me feel like I'm rereading Moby Dick.

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…

It's simply not accurate to say that IRV isn't particularly strategic. It removes strategy from basically one case: two viable major candidates and one or more nonviable minor candidates. As soon are there are more than two viable choices, IRV often requires you to betray your favorite and rank them lower in order to reduce the likelihood that your least favorite will win.

Re: What Is Voter Satisfaction Efficiency?

#78

Post by obelos » Wed, Jun 23, 2021, 4:04 PM UTC

jlokier wrote: post #52

kortex wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That's why I favour ranked systems that allow you to place multiple candidates at equal rank if you wish, and to leave off ones you really don't like.

Isn't that just a score/range system, then?

Re: What Is Voter Satisfaction Efficiency?

#79

Post by obelos » Wed, Jun 23, 2021, 4:06 PM UTC

crazygringo wrote: post #68

kortex wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 procedur…

Another benefit of Approval Voting ballots is you basically cannot spoil them. You can't rate/rank the same candidate more than once, and marking multiple candidates is valid.

Re: What Is Voter Satisfaction Efficiency?

#80

Post by dragonwriter » Wed, Jun 23, 2021, 4:14 PM UTC

gjm11 wrote: post #47

infogulch wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you break that down? Periods are your friend, your comment makes me feel like I'm rereading Moby Dick.

> when you construct a measure designed around their shared features dragonwriter thinks the metric being used in the article linked here was cherry-picked because it favours particular voting systems that the author likes for other reasons. (I do not believe this, nor do I believe the similar allegation made by vintermann in a top-level comment that's currently the highest rated. Neither offered any actual evidence,…

> dragonwriter thinks that different voting systems, implemented in different cultures, will exhibit strategic ("dishonest") voting to different extents

No, that's not it at all. I mean, now that you mention it, that sounds like something I would agree with, but its not either what I was saying here or particulary relevant to this discussion.

What I said here is about honest not dishonest votes. For ballots that do not ask a question with an objective mapping to preferences, honest ballots for the same preferences are a cultural variable. (This article implictly recognizes that honest ballots have no consistent meaning for approval, when testing it with two different consistent mathematical models, though that doesn’t really address the issue and it ignores the same issue for other methods to which it applies.)

For typical public elections, this problem occurs mostly with: ballots that ask the user to assign a score or rating to each candidate which is either more detailed than an unforced ranked preference ballot (a ranked preference ballot allowing ties) or less detailed than a forced preference ballot (a ranked preference ballot not allowing ties). Phrased another way, it applies to ballots that ask the user to assign scores or categories to candidates, where either the maximum number of distinct scores or categories is either more or less than the number of candidates.

There's fairly extensive literature on scoring systems (mostly outside of voting research, because they aren't widely implemented as voting systems), whether with a wide number (e.g., 0-100) or narrow range (5 stars) showing that without an objective touchstone, these are highly variable between individuals, in a way which strongly correlates with culture, in how they relate to what people actually think, on an absolute or relative scale, about the things rated, with the only consistent thing being that they tend to be consistent with ordered preferences, but the additional information (for score systems) or compression (for limited-categories) is inconsistent.

For that reason, approval/score/etc. ballots are, at best (that is, considering only personal variation and discounting any significance of the cultural correlations) just ranked preference ballots with either randomized noise or randomized compression, into which the associated tallying methods read false signficance.

EDIT: MORE that this applies to the use of these ballots in typical public elections of candidates. For other types of voting scenarios, the ballot markings involved may have concrete meanings that make these methods better, even ideal in some cases.

For instance, when planning a group activity for which you want maximum participation from the voter pool, approval where an “approve” mark is a binding commitment to participate if that option wins is an ideal method. Similarly, score voting where the assigned score is a binding commitment of that many units some scarce resource to the common project in the event of victory for the chosen option makes perfect sense.