Rich and Strange Aeons

score runoff voting

Mon, 21 Nov 2016 17:21:40 GMT

Yesterday I discovered a a new voting system which is growing on me as I think about it.

With basic score voting, you rate each candidate on some scale -- 1-10, or 0-1 (which is called approval voting), say. Add the ratings up, and the winner is whoever has the highest total. Or average, in some variants. If voters vote honestly then it's pretty expressive; however, there are strong incentives to not do so. I'll use a standard G D R example, where D and R are the most likely winners, and D is in between G and R.

A G voter rates G top, of course. But, knowing that the winner will likely be D or R, she has reason to also rate D top, to maximize her influence on the real contest. If she hold backs, she's just handicapping herself.

Meanwhile a D or R voter is already voting for a likely winner, and they have no incentive to bother rating anyone else. So you end up with a mix of bullet voting from the top two parties, and simple approval ballots from the others. The strategy is simple: "give a max rating to your favorite candidate, and also to your preferred front-runner if not the same as your favorite." It avoid spoiler effects, but is pretty centrist.

And if G becomes competitive, it's possible everyone just approves their own party, and we're back to the instability of plurality voting.

So, score runoff. Despite the name, there's no separate runoff election, just another round of counting. You use the same ballots, but pick the top two winners based on score total. Then the winner of those two is decided by relative preference. So if G and D end up in runoff and I gave a 10 to each, my ballot is a wash. But if I gave (10,9,0), then my ballot is a G vote in the runoff, while if I gave (1,10,0) my ballot is a D vote. The exact numbers don't matter, just whether one is higher than another.

Going back to the examples: if the G voter rates G and D max, then if they get lucky and have a G,D runoff, their ballot won't count. So there's reason to rate D at least a bit less -- (10,9,0) say. This way they'll still count as a G vote in the runoff. As the equal.vote people say, you give up a bit of influence in the first around in return for getting influence in the second round.

(Dark strategy: suppose the voter thinks G is more likely to beat R than D in a runoff. Could she vote (10,0,9), hoping to force a G-R runoff? Yes she could. But our premise is that D and R are the likely winners, so mostly likely she would end up casting an R vote in the runoff. Bad plan.)

As for a left-wing D voter, she doesn't have much to lose by giving G a bit of a rating: she's giving her max score to a front-runner already, a bit of score to a third party won't hurt. This lets her influence a G-R runoff properly, while even if lots of D voters accidentally combine to give G a higher total than D, as long as it's a G-D runoff they're still fine: their ballots will still be D votes in the runoff, fixing their 'mistake'.

How about an R voter? She really does have reason to think R>G is more likely than R>D in a runoff, as in the former case some D voters will crossover to R, whereas in the latter there's a solid G+D coalition againt R. So maybe she should vote (9,0,10). It's a gamble, though: if G ends up beating R anyway, then she's helped her worst outcome. So I think this might actually be unlikely. Conversely, a more cautious voter has no reason not to vote (0,1,10) -- it's not hurting R chances at ending up in the runoff at all, while ensuring (as insurance) a say in the event of G-D runoff.

So, while I see no incentive to be exactly honest, there is an incentive to at least moderate one's ratings and use some of the middle numbers. You give only a top rating to your real favorite (or favorites, if genuinely indifferent) so as to win runoffs, a high rating to a preferred front-runner if different, or a low rating to "insurance" choices. And while I can't rule out really perverted voting as being strategic, so far it seems bad or risky for the voter, which is a lot better than outright compelled as with plurality or IRV.

I *think* it's better to have a wide scale; if the scale is just 0-1-2, then the moderate choice seems to be giving up or granting more influence than a voter might be comfortable with, vs. numbers above.

One note on practicality. Score voting is easy, you just add up scores and pass on the totals. The 'runoff' round takes more information, but not a lot: yuseou the relative ratings to fill in a pairwise comparison matrix, a la Condorcet. So (10,9,0) would mean incrementing G>D, D>R, and D>R; (9,0,10) would mean incrementing G>D, R>D, and R>G. A district's ballots can be aggregated as the candidate totals plus a matrix, both of which can be added to the totals and matrices from other districts. Far simpler than IRV, which needs centralized counting of all the ballots to do the instant runoffs.

So is this better than Condorcet? I don't know. The ballots are theoretically more expressive. It's not guaranteed to elect a Condorcet winner, because such winners aren't guaranteed to make it into the runoff. But with ratings, arguably we have reason to identify situations when that's a good result; ranked ballots can't do that. It doesn't have to pick a Condorcet cycle tie-breaking method, which makes it much simpler to describe in full. It seems maybe harder to game, but that's said based on little analysis. Right now I'd be happy to try either.

Of course, I'd rather have a PR legislature than lots of single-winner elections.

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Why IRV sucks:

31 G > D > R
18 D > G > R
11 D > R > G
40 R > D > G

D is eliminated in the first round, and R wins 51-49, despite D being the Condorcet winner. If G hadn't run, D would win 60-40, which is a result G voters would prefer, so their own candidate running hurt their cause. That's classic vote splitting/spoiler effect, exactly what advocates claim can't happen.

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Primary surprise and party politics

Tue, 01 Mar 2016 23:42:23 GMT

Here something that has nothing to do with the presidential primary: when I voted (actually, when I looked at the sample ballot ahead of time), there were also people running for state and ward committee positions. (And not for Congress; apparently that's a *different* primary.) What are those? Turn out they're *party* positions, and reddit led to some fascinating primers on the subject:

http://www.democraticstatecommittee.com/DSC/Primer_DSC.htm
http://www.democraticstatecommittee.com/DSC/Primer_DTCs.htm

Even if you don't live in MA, it might be an interesting look at how party politics works. Like, it sounds really easy to join up and start working your way up from the ground floor. Also, not much of a progressive caucus -- because the party is old and hostile, or because progressives haven't been showing up? And the MA Democratic party has a lot of diversity baked in, like equal state seats for men and women, and seats reserved for gays, racial minorities, linguistic minorities, etc.

If I wasn't busy job hunting and possibly relocating, I'd be tempted to go look up my local committee right now. Maybe in a few months. I've said before "it's not like I'm committed to being a Democrat, they just run the people I can vote for", which is true, but it seems likely they'll be running all the people I can vote for for the foreseeable future, might as well get involved.

(I wonder if anyone has ever been centrist enough to be involved in both parties at the same time.)

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A reminder to Bernie fans

Tue, 01 Mar 2016 07:09:32 GMT

Bernie's campaign is a long shot.

It's easy to forget that now, in all the enthusiasm, but step back some months and look at the candidates objectively:

Hillary is an established national figure who finished the 2008 primary in a dead heat. (Say what you want about DNC bias, she's proven the ability to get the support of half the Democratic voters.) She's gotten only stronger since then, with a fine career as Secretary of State.

Martin O'Malley -- remember him? -- is an actual Democratic governor, who talked more about the environment than either of the other two.

Bernie is a Senator from a small state, a self-described socialist, unhead of to much of the Democratic base, and *not even a member of the party he's now running in*. (DNC bias? Shockingly, people in a party prefer people who have put in the time to help build or at least be part of the party, to outsiders suddenly crashing the party...) He'd also be the oldest person to become President, by over five years. (Reagan's currently oldest. Hillary's a bit younger than Reagan, relatively, and women have better life expectancy.)

Go back a year, and we'd rationally expect Bernie's campaign to die an ignominious death, like that of Kucinich and various would-be progressive candidates. That the old socialist who's not even a Democrat would be, not just getting 5-10% of the vote, but crushing out a governor and turning the race into a two-way, would be incredible. That it's actually happening is amazing, and kudos to Bernie. (And that O'Malley got ignored is I think some evidence that Bernie's support is actual hunger for leftist ideas, not just sexism against Hillary. There was another man available. (Not to mention Webb, but really.))

But for all that, it's *still* a long shot. It's possible he can pull another Obama. It's possible Hillary can snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Those aren't even terribly unlikely possibilities, at this point.

But I'd say they're well less than 50% chances. Again: socialist who hasn't even been a Democrat, vs. a long-standing Democrat who's already roped in half of the electorate before, and has the "first woman President" cachet to boot. If he wins, wow. But if he doesn't? Don't feel crushingly disappointed, feel amazed that he did as well as he did. And then go vote for Hillary in November, the way you voted for Obama before.

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A related reminder: the Democratic Party is not naturally a liberal or leftist party. It is a big tent party that liberals can find a place in. A coalition of diverse interest groups loosely united by an interest in equality, fairness, or helping the underdog (especially when it's themselves.) But full-bore ideological leftists? We're a distinct minority. The party has big chunks who care about economic help but aren't all that socially liberal, and social liberals who feel the existing market economy is treating them quite well. And if we want to get things done, we need to work with at least one of those chunks, if not both, not view the Democratic party as our natural territory that's somehow been stolen from us.

Conversely, it's not the enemy either: a plurality electoral system can only stably support two parties, and at the moment the Democratic party is the one for us. Not satisfied with it? Try to change it, first of all by voting at every chance, second by convincing other voters that your ideas are attractive.

Cuz, well, for all the talk about plutocracy, money doesn't win elections. Ask Jeb Bush or Ross Perot. Money buys airtime, money can influence elections, but votes (or electoral fraud) wins elections. And politicians listen to the voters... especially voters they can *mostly* rely on. Like, voters who actually come out to vote in every election, as opposed to ones who vote for the Presidency but skip the Congressional primaries and elections. Which, sadly, describes much of the Democratic base, especially youth and progressive blocs.

Especially the youth. Young people who don't vote because Bernie didn't win aren't sending a message, they're just doing what young people have always done: not vote, and thus be not worth politicians worrying about.

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(And if you need a reminder of what the Democratic party has done for us recently: just off the top of my head: raised the minimum wage by 40%; fundamentally reformed how health care is provided; regulated tobacco and credit card companies; at least tried to regulate carbon emissions; stimulated the economy back from complete sickness; funding that's causing a big boom in renewable energy; Dodd-Frank Wall street reform; repealed DADT. And that's with the GOP controlling Congress for most of the last 8 years, because Democratic turnout collapsed in 2010 and 2014.)

At state levels, increased minimum wage further in many places. A whole slew of new progressive laws in California. Pharmacy birth control in Oregon. Banning "conversion therapy" in Illinois. Etc.)

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Democratic Primary

Mon, 15 Feb 2016 22:54:02 GMT

I'm still undecided as to my vote, but since most of my friends seem to be pro-Bernie, I find myself in the position of skeptic, by which I mean passing on links.

Bernie pandering to liberals?

One woman's "How Bernie lost me". Links to Sady Doyle on progressive sexism, and another column on defending Hillary.

Imagine GOP attacks on a self-declared socialist. (From back when the Cold War was still on!)

Someone on Facebook on Hillary as embattled survivor, Bernie from a nice safe environment. Point is, Bernie's had the luxury of sticking to his principles and freely speaking his mind because he had liberal Vermont voters who loved him. As I've put it, Hillary had to change her own name to help Bill win over Arkansas voters. Not to mention the over 20 years of attacks that Doyle talks about.

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Off topic but maybe thematically related: Kevin Drum on liberal reality distortion. I haven't had the time to read all the stuff he links to, so I'm posting it as "maybe interesting".

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links: Bernie, bus, taxis, Japan, etc.

Fri, 05 Feb 2016 06:08:55 GMT

I'm tired and lazy. Here's some things I found interesting.

Nacreous clouds seen in UK.

Couple pieces on "Bernie bros" and sexist attacks on Hillary.
http://www.buzzfeed.com/evanmcsan/the-bernie-bros?utm_term=.ir8KRbEOo#.vl4DeMR27
http://www.vox.com/2016/2/4/10918710/berniebro-bernie-bro
And is Bernie ready for Republican attacks? For being asked unfair questions like why he wants to destroy the economy and turn us into Venezuela, or why he thought socialism was cool during the Cold War? http://www.vox.com/2016/2/3/10903404/gop-campaign-against-sanders
Speaking of Venezuela, the rationing is so bad even lines are being rationed. And the economy czar doesn't believe in inflation. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/01/29/venezuela-is-on-the-brink-of-a-complete-collapse/?tid=pm_business_pop_b
But to be positive: Bernie's Fed agenda http://www.vox.com/2016/1/26/10829888/bernie-sanders-federal-reserve

Harry Reid saved the renewable energy revolution.

How Houston improved bus ridership "for free": sparser network of higher frequency buses, in a grid rather than radial pattern. http://www.vox.com/2016/1/28/10852884/houston-bus-ridership

How Likud won the 2015 election in Israel. http://www.vox.com/2016/1/28/10861560/israel-election-amit-channel-2

From last April, one article on how taxi medallions prices have dropped due to Lyft and Uber. http://www.foxbusiness.com/features/2015/04/07/as-uber-lyft-hire-more-drivers-taxicab-medallion-values-tank.html

A trippy 9 minute history of Japan. The Reddit comments linked to by Vox are good glosses. http://www.vox.com/2016/2/3/10905274/japan-history-video

Purported evolution of fairy tales. http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-35358487

Memoization in Python https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1988804/what-is-memoization-and-how-can-i-use-it-in-python

Thread on previews of a new edition of the Blue Rose RPG http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?775100-Blue-Rose-previews

Obama's reform of federal solitary confinement http://www.vox.com/2016/1/26/10834770/obama-solitary-confinement-changes

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Information theory content of STV vs. party list vs. referendums, take 2

Thu, 05 Jun 2014 18:52:08 GMT

A comment on the previous post has me rethinking or wanting to clarify some things.

I was comparing the input space to the output space; this wasn't meant as a direct measure of the work done, though that was probably unclear. Ranking 25 candidates *does* have an space of 25! possibilities, vs. a smaller output set. Making 9 votes *does* cover a space of 512 possible votes, with 512 possible election outcomes. But it's also true that voting STV is nothing like a linear search of 25! possibilities, and for the work we'd better look at the computations involved.

Closed party list: your decision is a linear O(N) search through the number of parties, finding the maximum. The physical act of voting is probably trivial. I was going to say that proportionality can increase freely for the voter, but that's not true: lowering the threshold to get in means you can have smaller and thus more viable parties. 12% means no more than 8 parties can get in, 6.25% means 16, 3% means 32, 1% means 100 parties could get in. (In reality some will be big and taking up much of the vote, but still.) Whatever the threshold, though, learning of a new party is constant time: you compare them to your current favorite. Proxy voting would be exactly the same, with fewer warm bodies in seats.

Open party list: similar, except now N is the number of candidates. If proportionality is high, there may be lots of candidates, and physically voting might mean a log(N) search to find yours -- or linear, if the ballots are randomly unordered. A huge district with 100 members could have very fine-grained proportionality but also mean each party running up to 100 candidates -- big ballot. Still, pretty simple to do and understand.

STV: ranking N candidates is a sorting problem, O(N log(N)) in the ideal case, though possibly O(N^2) in practical naive sorting. Learning of a new candidate means comparing them to on average half the other candidates if you're simple, or to log(N) of them if you're clever. The physical act of voting... well, depends on the machine probably; Cambridge has you filling out a wide array of scantron bubbles, and I've needed a second ballot in both elections due to messing up the first one. I'm sure there are better ways.

Re-weighted score voting (RSV): O(N), you go down the list of candidates and rate each one. A new candidate simply means rating that one. Much simpler, cognitively and physically.

Referendums: lj:notthebuddha pointed out a twist. Naively, voting on N proposed laws is simply O(N), like score voting: go down the list voting up or down. 9 laws would mean 512 possibilities, but only 9 decision points. New law, new decision point. But it's possible for proposals to interact, so that in a worst case you are having to consider all the different possibilities, with exponential explosion: 10 laws meaning 1024 possibilities!

In practice, they don't interact that much; even more important, you don't get to vote on that many items at once, and pruning is enforced by time and temporal ordering. The Swiss vote on 3-4 referendums at a time. In a high-frequency legislature, you vote on one law at a time. US state ballots I don't know; voting every 2-4 years may allow them to pile up, vs. the Swiss every 3 months.

On the flip side, as I said before, here any increase in work is matched by an increase in power over the outcomes, whereas it's unclear that the higher workload of STV compared to proportional score voting has any benefit whatsoever, and the benefit of either of those compared to open party list depends on how much your grouping of the candidates cuts across the parties they've grouped themselves into. (That is, open party list means your vote for a successful candidate can spillover into another party member, based on the party list; STV/RSV lets you spillover to an unrelated candidate of your choice. And Cambridge elections are ostensibly non-partisan.)

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Also on the information theory front: picking among from say 8 candidates or parties means expressing 3 bits of choice, every 2 to 6 years based on standard practice these days. 32 candidates, 5 bits. An American would be very lucky to have 8 choices, say if both main parties were running 4 candidates in their primaries. (Though California now has a top-two "open primary" system which can mean lots of choices up front... I think this is a terrible system, but another time for that.) Commonly we have like 1 bit: incumbent or some obscure challenger, so it's basically "keep or toss?" Bit rate from 3/2 years (8 candidates, House) to 1/6 year (incumbency, Senate).

By contrast, 9 referendums a year means 9 bits of voter input a year. The Swiss actually seem to be average between 12 and 16. Plus, any law or treaty could be subjected to referendum, and anything could be an initiative, so so there's some harder to measure aura of voter input as I imagine the legislature tries to avoid anything obviously unpopular, while Congress could do lots of unpopular (or not do lots of popular) things as long as those weren't more important than key issues of crime and the economy.

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Information theory content of STV vs. party list vs. referendums

Wed, 04 Jun 2014 16:23:45 GMT

Slapdash post, from a comment I made elsewhere:

Eh, there's tradeoffs. I actually live under STV for Cambridge (MA USA) city election; having to rank 9-25 candidates can be a real cognitive pain, I find. (There's 9 seats, so you have to rank at least that many to have a full voice, and we had 25 candidates last election.) And 9 seats from a district means a threshold of at least 11% for a faction to get a distinct voice; if a group is spread evenly as 8% around the country, too bad.

Conversely, closed party list might as well be proxy voting for the party leaders, save for the dim possibility of revolt, and open part list gives you some control over specific candidates but you're still voting for a party group, not make-your-own-list in STV. Much simpler to vote for though, pick a candidate or party, bam you're done.

And thing is, STV extracts a lot more information from you but doesn't do much with it, since all that ranking precision just controls how your vote trickles through the count, without making things that much more representative in the end. To invoke math, ranking 25 candidates means 25! (factorial) or 1e25 possibilities, but the final result is simply choosing 9 out of 25, which is a much smaller number (2 million, or 2e6). Conversely, party list converts a simple vote directly into a party percentage.

And frequent referendums a la Swiss democracy would give me much more direct influence on the laws that pass, for still far less work than ranking 25 candidates, most of whom won't win... Voting in 9 referenda has me picking out of 2^9 options, and there are 2^9 possible outcomes of 9 laws passing or failing. Again, the work involved is directly proportionate to the result achieved.

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Obama predictions, past and future

Thu, 08 Nov 2012 04:42:50 GMT

Yeah, politics and my legs beat New Orleans.

BTW, AFAICT the right is blaming the "mainstream media" for losing. "If only they'd reported on Benghazi". Or sometimes blaming the media for ensuring that Romney won the primaries.

http://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2012/Pres/Maps/Nov07.html#item-3 notes that the states which have voted Demoocratic 6 times in a row add up to 242 EVs. At this point a Democrat needs 28 EVs from somewhere else to win.
Wonkblog notes Democrats have won 5 of the last 6 Presidential popular votes. Demographics at work.

I don't have a proper schaedenfreude userpic.

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2008
http://johncwright.livejournal.com/199898.html:

"Look for a return of the Great Depression, as the administration enacts all the policies exactly opposite of what sound economic principles would suggest. A one year market correction will expand into a four or ten year ongoing disaster." A mixed bag. Unemployment is something of an ongoing disaster, and Obama didn't entirely follow sound economic principles, but those are the opposite of what Wright thinks they are.

"Look for the emboldened terror-masters to purchase nuclear arms from a relieved and encouraged Iran, while a too rapid pull out from Iraq leads to a general massacre," False.

"Look for terrorist attacks to resume in the Continental United States. Nuclear attacks? I hope not, but I fear that weakness in a world of danger invites attack. " False.

"Look for national legislation to legitimize taxpayer-funded abortion on-demand, and all state and local restrictions and parental notification regulations will be federally pre-empted." False.

"Look for nationwide gay marriage." Working on it! But far from true, and little thanks to Obama.

"Look for a vehement renewal of the war against guns. Go buy one now, before January." False.

"Look for three or four of the most activist and leftist Justices in history to be appointed to the High Court," False, AFAIK.

"Look for the strangulation and death of Talk Radio under the fairness doctrine." False.

"Look for a rapid decline in the rule of law, and respect for legal procedures. Look for intimidation and open violence against political adversaries. " False.

2012
http://www.scifiwright.com/2012/11/mr-obama-wins-reelection/
"financial euthanasia" of the US; American funding of terror; betrayal of Israel; 50% unemployment (see comments, 20% was a typo); ruination of the health care system; mass closings of Catholic charities; the dollar ceasing to be a reserve currency; hypertaxation and hyperinflation. He refuses to make a bet on hyperinflation though, e.g. borrowing $10 now to repay $15 4 years from now.

I wonder if he's looked back at his old predictions with any sense of humility. I'd bet not. I'd suggest it, but it's bad for my time use to register to comment on his site.

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2008
http://jordan179.livejournal.com/100836.html
"Raises in taxes, trade wars, diplomatic and foreign policy disasters, and serious reductions in personal freedoms. On the bright side, this should discredit the Democratic Left for a generation." All false, except perhaps for the reductions of freedom aka killing alleged American terrorists without trial -- but Jordan probably approves of that.

"No, because Obama's tax hikes and trade wars will make this impossible. America has voted herself a Second Great Depression." False. Any Second Great Depression happened before Obama took office; he's overseen slow recovery.

"With Obama in office, Russia has a free hand to reconquer the former USSR and continue on its self-destructive path of feeding the very Islamist terrorists who ultimately want to destroy her. This will probaby not lead to a general European war, but it may spell the end of NATO." False.

"Obama's election will re-energize the Terrorists and give them hope for victory. Obama has promised to pull out of Iraq within a year and a half. If the Iraqi regime isn't strong enough to survive by then, Iraq will fall to the Terrorists -- and then begins the real dying of the Iraqi people, at the hands of the victors" False.

"It is also possible that Iraq will win over the Terrorists -- and then be invaded by a nuclear-capable Iran" False. No invasion, and Iran still isn't nuclear-capable. Why Iran would invade was not mentioned; Iraq invaded last time...

"Of course not." [We won't be better off.] Unemployment is down, corporate profits are way up. I'd call this false, though I'm sure he'd weasel out.

2012
http://jordan179.livejournal.com/254816.html
Much more reticent, mostly "we Americans are going to at least in part be responsible for the now almost-inevitable major war now brewing in the area between Libya's Western border and India's Eastern border. Oh, the Muslim Terrorist States will be guilty of the war crimes, but we will be guilty of sitting idly by and watching it happen. A lot of Israeli and Indian civilians are going to die in the initial attacks." Adds disintegration of the health care system in the comments. Other people predict Iranian nukes over the coasts and Egypt pulling out of Camp David.

2008
http://btripp.livejournal.com/886823.html Gas chambers!

http://rhjunior.livejournal.com/431715.html "Gas lines, recession, unemployment, hostage crisis". Partial credit, if we count 'predicting' a recession and unemployment that were already happening.

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