Jedi Day

[gfish]

May the Fourth be with you!

I get the stupidest grin whenever I say that. And I've been saying it a lot today.

Also, watching a room filled with AI profs and grads discuss the Single Transferable Vote referendum here in BC was much fun. Encouragingly, they were almost unanimously in favor of it, they just had a lot of interesting implications and boundary conditions to pick apart. I don't think anyone with BC voting privileges who reads this journal isn't already a supporter, but in case I'm missing someone, please let me proselytize at you in person! It's killing me that I can't vote for it myself.

Comments

[ljtourist.livejournal.com]

I don't think that tending towards centrist candidates is necessarily a strength. But that's just my opinion.

I used to like IRV. At the time, I did not believe that its Monotonicity and Participation failures would happen in real-world scenarios. It has since been demonstrated to me that this is not true.

Condorcet, OTOH, is simply awful. It fails later-no-harm (adding preferences can hurt you), which is bad enough; it also fails Participation (voting can hurt you), and it does so spectacularly, in a way that IRV doesn't (called failing mono-add-top). Let's say that your top choice (candidate A) is winning in an election that you haven't yet voted in. Then you vote, with A as your top choice. Whoops! Now A might lose!

Approval is... not bad. It also fails later-no-harm, which is why I suspect that if it were adopted in the US then within a few elections pretty much everyone would end up bullet-voting rendering the system useless(just like what happened with Bucklin voting in the early 1900s).

I've done a lot of looking at ranked vote systems, and if I had to pick one for the US, it'd be Descending Solid Coalitions. Its two major weaknesses are that 1) it has a weird edge-case failure mode when one small group of people vote a candidate in first place and every other voter puts that same candidate in last place, and 2) it can be difficult to explain to people how it works. The best short description comes from Antonio Oneala, who said: "[it] assigns you to a team if you prefer every individual in it to every individual outside of it, and then it takes the biggest team within that, then the biggest team within that, etc... until it gets to one person".

I have not done nearly as extensive a survey of rated voting systems, so you're spared that analysis.

Probably more information than you were interested in, but I was Focussed on this problem a while back. :-)

[ashley-y.livejournal.com]

It's not so much tending towards centrist candidates as broad candidates that I consider a strength.

If I understand correctly, if there's a Condorcet winner, then no-one regrets their ballot (and I suspect this is appropriately generalisable to the Smith set). Here's the thing: if there's a Condorcet winner for everyone's sincere votes, I cannot see why that should not be the winner. I am not bothered by failing later-no-harm and Participation provided tactical voting is impractical.