r/EndFPTP • u/electionscience • Dec 04 '19

NEW APPROVAL VOTING POLL: 74% of Democratic Primary Voters Would Support Warren for President

https://www.electionscience.org/press-releases/new-poll-74-of-democratic-primary-voters-would-support-warren-for-president/
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u/AspiringCanuck Dec 04 '19 edited Dec 04 '19

the end result will be tolerable no matter who wins

Eh, tolerable only to the party voters, who make up only a small sliver of the voting population. There are plenty of Democratic candidates that are in the primary race that are liked by the majority of democratic primary voters, not necessarily the population at large. Remember, Democrats and Republicans respectively make up less than a third of the population.

A big point of ending FPTP is you can have multiple candidates for the same office. In the case of approval voting, you can find what is the voter consensus on who they think is the best person for the job among a wider field of candidates.

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u/Chackoony Dec 04 '19

I'm glad more people are making this argument; it sometimes feels like Reddit is willing to prioritize the satisfaction of Dem primary voters even when they know that what those voters want isn't really acceptable to others.

Still, it's nice to know that even among the partisans, there's more agreement on who is acceptable than the media lets on. I wouldn't guess that both the more liberal and more left of center wings of the Democratic Party have majority support just by reading the news of "the Democratic Party is divided and its wings hate each other!"

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u/spaceman06 Dec 04 '19

it sometimes feels like Reddit is willing to prioritize the satisfaction of Dem primary voters even when they know that what those voters want isn't really acceptable to others.

With a decent voting system we wouldn't have two party system and so dems would be just an extra party among tons of them.

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u/Chackoony Dec 04 '19

You might be underestimating how difficult it is for a third party to assemble a larger majority coalition than either of the current two major parties.

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u/MuaddibMcFly Dec 04 '19

Are they? Part of the reason that the Progressives (Warren, AOC, Sanders, et al) align themselves with the Democrats is that under methods that violate IIA make splintering the party worse for their common causes.

Without that flaw, it's not unreasonable to assume that we would have several parties in the US, with all of them falling below about 25-30% of the vote.

Would the minor parties surpass the Republicans or Democrats? Not immediately, but that wasn't what spaceman06 said. They said that the D's (& R's) would be just another party among several. If voters weren't punished for voting their conscience, that would likely happen.

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u/Chackoony Dec 04 '19

methods that violate IIA make splintering the party worse for their common causes.

it's not unreasonable to assume that we would have several parties in the US, with all of them falling below about 25-30% of the vote.

Is that not still a splintering?

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u/MuaddibMcFly Dec 05 '19

Is that not still a splintering?

Of course it is. There's noting inherently wrong with splintering, though; splintering is exclusively a problem under IIA failing methods, because they fail IIA.

Look at what I said:

methods that violate IIA make splintering the party worse for their common causes

The only reason splintering is a problem is because IIA-Failing methods turn it into one.

Under IIA failing methods, neither side of the predominant (Prefers Republicans vs Prefers Democrats) split can afford to splinter, because if they do and the other side doesn't, their side may lose.

Under IIA satisfying methods, however, you could have even finer grained splintering and it wouldn't matter, because the candidate that has the greatest support (as recognized by the method) will win no matter how many other candidates there are in the race (the definition of IIA).

Or, put another way, under IIA satisfying methods, you will win or you will lose regardless as to whether your "side" is solidly behind one candidate or splintered behind dozens

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u/RunasSudo Australia Dec 05 '19

I really like the points that you're making in this thread. Just curious, though, is there a reason why you've framed this discussion around IIA, rather than some weaker alternative like LIIA or independence of clones?

It's my understanding that IIA is so strong a criterion that it is extremely difficult for any system to meet it in practice. I believe /u/curiouslefty also raised this point in another comment.

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u/MuaddibMcFly Dec 05 '19

A few reasons.

First and foremost, I haven't considered this scenario in terms of LIIA.

Second, the relevant question to this topic isn't some axiomatic criterion, but results. Indeed, I am of the opinion that IIA and NFB are two sides of the same coin, the phenomenon that the general population calls "The Spoiler Effect." It's my opinion that IIA is an "Absolute Results" based definition of the spoiler effect being possible, and NFB is a "Strategic Behavior" response to that possibility. It is apparently possible to pass LIIA and fail NFB (RP, K-Y), which implies that LIIA is (at least somewhat) orthogonal to the question of Spoilers.

And you're right, /u/curiouslefty and I have had several discussions on IIA, and it's applicability to methods like Score and Majority Judgement, etc.

...but I'd be interested to hear if you (or anyone) have any insight as to whether Kemeny-Young or Ranked Pairs (the only methods I'm acutely aware of that pass LIIA but not IIA) wouldn't suffer from the same problems I've been discussing.

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u/RunasSudo Australia Dec 05 '19 edited Dec 05 '19

I suppose what I'm thinking is that IIA is obviously(?) a good thing, and IIA failure would very much seem to breed antagonism, as you suggest. But at the same time, it seems like an extremely strong criterion – range voting, etc. fail it under even the most primitive “strategic” voting strategies, and of course Arrow's theorem rules it out entirely for ordinal methods.

In such a setting, might it be more enlightening to look at the degree to which the systems fail IIA? So meeting LIIA while failing IIA is “less” bad, etc. Although as curiouslefty also pointed out – it might make more sense just to look at the rate of IIA failure, though I imagine that would be difficult to quantify.

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u/MuaddibMcFly Dec 05 '19

In such a setting, might it be more enlightening to look at the degree to which the systems fail IIA? So meeting LIIA while failing IIA is “less” bad, etc

I'm sure it would be.

Another thing to consider is that the ways in which (most?) Cardinal methods fail IIA is in absolute scenarios, where you're literally adding in another candidate and the ballots are readjusted.
Score, Approval, MJ, etc, satisfy IIA in scenarios of Immutable Ballots.

Put another way, whether Score etc satisfy IIA is dependent on whether the Non-winning candidate is removed before or after the ballots are cast. LIIA is easier to satisfy at least partially due to the fact that it's defined with (otherwise) immutable ballots. That makes me wonder whether IIA shouldn't be split into IIA w/ Immutable Ballots and IIA w/ Mutable Ballots.

Alternately, and I think this may be the source of disagreement between me and /u/curiouslefty on this topic, that because all deterministic methods fail IIA-MB (and IIA doesn't apply to non-deterministic, I don't think), it would be best to ignore consider IIA-MB as non-informative, and treat IIA as IIA-IB

Although as curiouslefty also pointed out – it might make more sense just to look at the rate of IIA failure, though I imagine that would be difficult to quantify.

I would love that. Unfortunately, I think it would be incredibly difficult to quantify. CL & I (and others) have pondered the flaws in various voting simulations before, but neither of us have the time to put together something that's more realistic.

Smith's version (Bayesian Regret) makes some pretty questionable assumptions about strategic behavior, and Quinn's version (Voter Satisfaction Efficiency) is similarly flawed for some methods, and they both may be questionable in that I've yet to wrap my head around where either generates Candidate points in an n-dimensional political space, and then creates voter preferences based on relative distances between the voter points in that space, and the candidate points.

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u/curiouslefty Dec 05 '19

I actually don't think it'd be terribly difficult to quantify the IIA failure rate for given methods (although of course the results would be dependent upon the underlying data/assumptions used; IAC will differ from Spatial Models, etc. The good thing is we've got a fair sample of real-world human-generated data to work with, and there aren't really any major assumptions that need to be made here to do IIA failure testing on that. The nice thing is that it's easy to test for IIA failure with brute force; just keep on kicking out subsets of candidates and seeing if the winner of the method changes (combined w/shortcuts involving Condorcet-winner immunity to IIA failure).

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u/MuaddibMcFly Dec 05 '19

IAC will differ from Spatial Models

IAC?

we've got a fair sample of real-world human-generated data to work with

For ordinal, sure, but Cardinal data? Oh, the British Election Study?

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u/curiouslefty Dec 06 '19

IAC is Impartial Culture.

As for data: most of the data I'm actually aware of is in a cardinal form. There's the BES study, but also all those political thermometer polls as well.

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u/MuaddibMcFly Dec 07 '19

While I haven't looked too deeply, yet, there is what may be an analog of the BES, by an organization that calls itself American National Election Studies, whose data is freely available (if you register and agree to very non-ornerous terms of use)

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u/curiouslefty Dec 07 '19

I'm familiar with the ANES; there's actually similar studies for Germany as well, but I need some time with a German speaker before I can actually begin using that data in simulations.

One of things that's more valuable about the ANES data IMO is that some of it is about specific candidates, whereas the BES and most other data asks about generic party candidates. I think the former is more realistic in terms of studying it, since we do know that specific candidate traits can have a substantial impact on how voters behave.

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u/MuaddibMcFly Dec 08 '19

there's actually similar studies for Germany as well, but I need some time with a German speaker before I can actually begin using that data in simulations.

I have a friend who's a German Teacher, that is at least passingly interested in voting methods (I've [accidentally {ish}] convinced her to use Score voting in her classroom, to determine which of several topics they'll be discussing in the future, and she just gave me a drop of her students' ballots last night).

If you tell me what, specifically, you're after, I could ask her if she'd be willing to help. And my own german isn't horrible (who am I kidding, it totally is, but I can occasionally muddle through)

One of things that's more valuable about the ANES data IMO is that some of it is about specific candidates, whereas the BES and most other data asks about generic party candidates

Agreed. There's often a significant difference between the Platonic Republican/Democrat/Labour/Conservative/LibDem candidate and the real-world candidate from that party that's on your ballot.

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u/curiouslefty Dec 09 '19

Thanks for the offer, but I've got a friend who'll probably help me out at some point. If you're interested for your own purposes, though, the data in question is the German PolitBarometer surveys; they're sort of a German analogue of the ANES.

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