In my Swedish municipality we have public digital “suggestion box” for political ideas. An idea requires 100 citizen votes to be debated by the council. There is no negative voting however, which makes the system unreliable. There was a case (replace some car roads with parks) that got 100+ votes, but an anti-case (do not replace roads with parks) got over 3000 votes. Both had to be debated as separate topics in the council, which the media found hilarious.
The swedish democracy is one of the most fucked one in the world by strategic voting. The 4 % parties that can sway the results on who will govern (right or left) gets an insane amount of power in proportion to how many voted for them...
What even was a point of an anti-suggestion? If it’s just a non-binding suggestion and people are against it, it will not pass. I just don’t understand why would you suggest to not do something that is not planned.
@@kaltziferYT Sweden have "BankID" which is a government authentication service to verify an individual. This is used to make fake votes less of an isssue.
@@snowmanscz1011To show the council that there was opposition would be my guess. Not everyone has the time/ability necessary to show up to the meeting, Ando governments have made bad/unpopular decisions under the false impression it was popular.
This is not a flaw in every voting system. It's a flaw in every voting system that has only one winner. In a country like Finland we have 200 seats in the parliament. We could fill all the seats based on how many votes each party got. Any party that got more that 0.5% of votes would get at least one member into the parliament. Problem solved. No reason to just have one seat like the presidential election. This is not the middle ages anymore.
If you don't think you're party will get 0.5% of votes you'd vote for someone else. Or if there's an independent candidate, any ballot above the 0.5% is wasted. And there can only be 1 prime minister anyways
@@LightPink True. But this voting system diminishes the problem by 100 times. There is a threshold but it's not impenetrable like in the US where there can only be two parties in power. No new party will ever topple them. It is technically possible but the chances are near zero. You would need major upheaval close to a civil war to achieve that. For the second part. Yeah. There's only one prime minister. There's also only one heath care minister, education minister and foreign minister. The power can be diluted. One person doesn't have to hold all of it. The US system where the president holds massive power is actually the exception, not the norm. We too have a president but he only does foreign diplomacy and doesn't meddle with our country's internal affairs.
Oh have I got news for you (namely that that creates an entirely different voting issue called the apportionment problem) th-cam.com/video/GVhFBujPlVo/w-d-xo.html (btw your country uses "Jefferson's Method" except instead of states it's political parties)
My sisters and I took turns picking ice cream flavors. I loved mint and chip but I never chose it because I knew my sister would, so I always got black cherry. I got my favorites twice.
At first I thought the thumbnail said “strategic vomiting”. I then proceeded to have a conversation in my head, debating the likelihood of vomiting after eating a banana and an avocado.
I really like the last part! Considering the intensity by which people will argue over how probability distributions should be sampled in path tracing algorithms, I can only imagine what the the arguments (or civil wars) would be like when the fate of the nation depends on it!
17:02 Germany also uses FPTP voting. Everyone has two votes, one, FPTP where it determines who from your district goes to the Bundestag and a second vote that determines the % of how the rest of the seats in the Bundestag are filled.
To vote tactically you need: 1. To understand the way the system will work 2. To know how everyone else will/has voted 3. What result you want and what result you are willing to accept. I'm not convinced most of any public (electorate) are this well informed insightful or self aware.
The solution is to vote your fruit into an assembly where the number of seats for each fruit are apportioned by the number of votes, and then whichever fruits build a multi-fruit coalition of over 50% of the seats win! In more direct terms, the monkeys talk to each other and are incentivized to form alliances larger than 50% of the total. This alliance then decides who their leader is!
"An election is supposed to be a way of finding common ground, not a strategic game between voters." I would love to hear how you arrived at either of those beliefs.
Because an election is intended to decide how things are run, and if common ground is not found, then things are not running probably, if you vote on a restaurant choice with a group of friends, and three people go hungry due to dietary constraints, then that election has been a failure. Why should the same not apply to regular elections?
Their defect was trying to appease the group. Instead of appeasing themselves. If you like avocado. Eat avocado. If you like Coconuts, eat coconuts. There is no need to compromise. As for what to plant. Those who like avocados should plant avocados. Those who like coconuts, should plant coconuts. Etc. The proportion of fruit should decide itself. And if they don't know how to plant, then those don't plant. Have no saying on what food should be planted.. Incidentally this is also the defect of our societies. We try to appease the majority, when the majority just want to take advantage of you.
Well done! You researched the topic much more than I did. I am happy to inspire such a nice video. If it doesn't win, it is for sure the flaw of the voting system ;-).
What happens when theory meets actual people? I would think that Condorcet cycles become rarer as population increases. And I suspect that, for many voting systems, the efficacy of strategic voting likewise decreases as population increases. Of course, these are questions with empirical and historical answers. Does anyone know which electoral systems are probabilistically more reasonable and more stable in the limit?
You can check out the lesswrong post linked in our blog post (link in video description). If I recall correctly, in practice you have condorcet cycles in something like 5% cases or so.
@@PolylogCS Also, the voting system in use could actually incentivize Condorcet cycles in the ballots, even if there weren't any in the voters true preferences.
What if you make randomised voting a multi-round elimination voting system? So, the problem with random voting is that we have a small sample, which is generally prone to giving chaotic outcomes. If we make a larger sample, I'd bet we could get more stable results. Current (well, not current, but you get the point) system is »choose one, eliminate the rest« and I wonder if »choose half, eliminate the rest« and »choose one, eliminate the one« would be beneficial. Also, what would you say about squaring and normalising results? It would skew the votes towards the most popular candidate either way. IF you consider the definition of »reasonable system« reasonable. (I'd say we should gather not only the rankings, but some absolute values to, if that makes sense: I'd like to know, if the candidate is the least bad or the best)
In reality, the two round system indeed can get stuck (with a very small probability). But capturing that in a definition of a voting system makes stuff clumsy, hence see 4:17
Your last voting system of randomly picking the winner with those getting the most votes most likely to win isn't reasonable as somebody can win by having one vote
This systems talk only about the situation when only one post is to fill. In parliament are usually multiple persons to elect so. So you can make election districts that have more the one seat. In this case use some proposal systems like they use in Germany and Switzerland. The disadvantage is that result is multi party parliament means coalition are necessary.
Surely it can be simplified down to "Since every vote counts, and every candidate has an equal chance, you can always imagine a tie, and thus one person changing their vote will break the tie"
Add "In a 2 candidate system, they either dont care to change the tie, or wouldnt want to change to the losing side to make it win. In any size bigger, imagine their favourite is not gonna win, and their least favourite is tied with the 2nd favourite. By that one person changing their vote to put the second favourite above the first, they win the tie"
Something I've wondered for ages: are point-based voting systems a thing? A ranked-choice voting system, but not with several rounds, because it always bothers me that voting systems do not take negative preference into account. I mean ranked as in: Here are three candidates, someone's top choice receives 3 points, the second choice 2, and the third 1. I quickly calculated it for this example, and avocado would win with 20 points, and the other two would be tied with 17 points each. One obvious drawback is that people would be forced to rank (not that difficult with three candidates, but potentially quite difficult with five, or eight, or seventeen - US-primaries, I'm looking at you!) because every candidate you didn't put in would receive 0 points from your ballot. I haven't calculated this, but possibly it could be counteracted by distributing the remaining points between the remaining candidates as an average. Say there are seven candidates, someone fills in the top two and the bottom two and leaves the rest blank - then twelve points would be left to be distributed, so each of the remaining three candidates would receive four points from that ballot. Apart from this (I would have said "and the personell this requires, but in the digital age, this is the sort of thing a computer could definitely do), is there any good reason why this couldn't work?
The problem underlying all capitalist democracies is capitalism. The voting systems are also intrinsically bad, but, a system in which lobbying is basically always going to be legal (since, if it isn't, the laws to allow lobbying eventually come back in the first right wing government) allows the top percentages of income to dominate politics. Simply put, if capital ownership exists, democracy is what the owners allow the servants to vote on.
Through most of this the flaw in the voting systems seemed obvious to me - once you hit the second round you ignored the second choice of all those who voted for the 'top two'... which means those voting for the eliminated candidates (a minority) are given the deciding vote (over the majority). I immediately thought the second choice of _all_ voters should be included with no candidates being eliminated. (Avocado's win btw: 7a, 6b, 5c). When approval voting was mentioned and discarded as usable with rankings I wondered why? Going through layers considering 1st choices only - if no majority, include 2nd choices as approvals and so on. Allow voters to rank as many candidates as they wish, and allow them to exclude ones they disapprove of and you get quite close to a ranked approval system that reflects voters true opinions. I'm sure a ranked approval system would be susceptible to some tactical voting but at least it would avoid the flip-flop two party scenarios which dominate a lot of single winner voting systems... which is a different problem than the one here... i.e. I better vote for 'a' because I don't want 'b' to win, despite wanting 'c' => nobody votes for 'c' even if it became what a majority wants - what we see in the UK. Of course the USA are even worse as voters only ever have two choices there! "Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job." (HHGTTG)
Great video! I'm sad you didn't include any Condorcet systems though (especially single methods) . That being said, the monkeys might just get mad for having to learn math to have to understand who won the vote (which is a good reason to be off the island anyways).
But also, the preferences of the monkeys form a condorcet cycle, which means that Condorcet systems are not really that helpful in this concrete scenario, right? (they are guaranteed to work if there is a candidate that beats everybody in head to head election).
@@PolylogCS People act all dramatic about Condorcet cycles like they somehow fundamentally invalidate Condorcet methods, but they're just a special type of tie. Every voting system can have ties. Condorcet cycles occur in like ~1% of real-world elections.
I found your remark about not being able to tell alone from a simple ranking of movies which the author actually likes and dislikes very insightful. Is there a voting system where you provide your list of preferences and also indicate whether you actually like each candidate (possibly even on a scale)? I feel like these inputs both provide different and useful information and I don’t really see why you couldn’t theoretically account for both.
I think in the "real" world there are a couple of important factors to consider. One is for your strategic voting to work you need good information and coordination for it to work, neither of which is easy. First you need to know how to rank your votes to get to a second round for example. And that may not work if all voters are trying to be strategic by countering what they believe the strategic votes by other groups may be. That is to say, what if each group, not just a single one, engages in multi level strategic voting? Secondly, where do you get the information to know if you should vote strategically? You could say polls, but it's interesting that they are losing some credibility. Not that this changes the result of the actual premise, just that in the real world, voting "strategically" has some risk.
I don’t really see strategic voting as a flaw. If your interest is anything but coconuts it makes sense to vote banana over avocado if you know that avocado will not win.
Please consider STAR Voting method (strategic voting has a 50% chance to backfire) and is very accurate. Question: does Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem apply to "Scoring" (as opposed to Rankings) methods as well (like Approval and STAR Voting?)
Ranking is just putting candidates in order - favorite, 2nd favorite, 3rd favorite, etc. Scoring is like a test 0 to 100, or an Amazon rating 1 to 5 stars.
And, of course, in real life elections aren't held several times, but polls and predictions encourage systematic strategic voting, since they provide result scenarios that may have the same effect as the repeated election in the example of this video
It seems obvious to mean that Arrow's theorem is a good thing. People absolutely should consider the potential implications of all political parties gaining power. Preferences between parties A and B should definitely depend on the strength and ideology of parties C and D and their various relationships.
did i miss a disclaimer about secret ballots? because if we agree on rules before hand and don't announce any preliminary results until all polls are closed that takes away opportunity for informed chicanery. if you want to try to strategically vote based on opinion polling rather than actual vote data i don't think that's going to work out as well as the would-be strategic voters want.
In reality, you often have decent knowledge about other people votes because of polls. So the theory applies even with secret ballots, albeit it's more messy.
@@PolylogCS yeah that data is only as as good as the polls, and the ability to coordinate strategy is only as good as the voters' trust in the polls which is probably lower than it used to be, at least in the US. We also have a huge cohort of voters who broadly deny science so i'm not sure you can convince the people who think statistically representative samples aren't real to make decisions based on them, even if we do manage to get rid of FPTP.
I think the closest you can get to a perfect voting system would be very clunky and impractical. You'd need multiple rounds. Like, if you have 4 people in a group. Have everyone choose 1 person that you do NOT want. Most votes is eliminated. Then do the same with 3. When you have just 2 left, now vote for a winner. I think there is no way of using a single vote, to choose between 3 or more options, because of the risk of a plurality win. It needs to be a guarantee that someone gets 50.1% of the vote, or else it will never be satisfactory for everyone.
The flaw is the voting system itself and the solution is random choice of citizen parliamentarians known as Sortition. Since democracy is not lobbied for votes but a respresentative random sample of the population!
I think it would be interesting to have participants vote. Then show them results using each major voting method and ranking how happy or unhappy they are with the outcome of each result on a scale from -5 to 5 and then using the new "best" system from now on. Likely using the median or mean result. We could have participants do this for a variety of scenarios such as 2 candidates, 3 candidates 3 parties, 3 candidates 2 parties, 4 candidates 2 party etc.
The Soviet elections system doesn't really have these drawbacks. Because you can withdraw your deputy you elected at any time you want if more than 25% are unhappy about the person they elected, they may initiate a reelection at any time.
@@PolylogCS valid. Also, love your videos. I'm a writer with over 100K email subscribers in my newsletter. I cover ideas in tech and software. Would love to have you on and share some of your content there
In political elections, it is very unlikely that people will order the candidates in a rock-paper-scissors way. Two candidates A and B will tend to have more things in common with each other than with C, and people will tend to order C first or last according to the voters' preferences, and probably A and B according to the perceived chances each one has of beating C. So supposing A is perceived as having better chances, it would result in two possible arrangements: A-B-C or C-B-A.
@PolylogCS Thanks! Actually, voters of B in my example are likely to vote strategically for A, so C doesn't win. This is presently happening in Argentina, my country. Three presidential candidates came up with chances last Sunday in the first round. Speculations are that candidate B will lose many votes to A in the second round. An additional complication is that the difference between the three of them is very narrow. So, who knows what will happen.
I think that the best voting system would be the one that minimizes change in overall population happiness when strategic voting is taken into account. First Get a baseline happiness. Assume that every single person has voted honestly. Their first choice goes to one point, their second is half a point, their third is a 4th all the way down to their last which is a zero. Add up the overall happiness of the population given the victor of a given voting system Then go back and tweak the preferences via strategic voting and compare. Whichever voting system either consistently increases satisfaction the most, or decreases it the lease is most preferable
What about Smith-invariant-instant-runoff voting? After casting votes, you select the smallest non-empty set of candidates where each member defeats every candidate outside the set in a pairwise election, then do instant-runoff voting between the members of that set.
In the case of the Burlington Vermont mayoral election in 2009, there was no Condorcet cycle and there was a clear Condorcet winner, Andy Montroll. In other words, voters prefered Andy Montroll over the actual winner, and the voters preferred Andy Montroll over every single other candidate on the ballot. Any round robin would have him win all the rounds. And the idotic non reasonable voting system did _not_ pick him. If you have a voting system that can't even resolve a Condorcet winner when there is no Condorcet cycle, we might as well go with first past the post. FPTP sucks, but it doesn't suck as much as Burlington's old election system.
I appreciate the explanations, however I feel like the evolution of voting systems hasn't been discussed and is strangely important (maybe a different video). The US system actually was a Multi-Winner system (the Pres and VP were # 1 and # 2 in the polls regardless of party) before the Spoils System lumped the Pres and VP as the same vote. As such, I'd like to see how voting systems have evolved to help understand and explain why Plurality is both 'The Worst' and 'The Most Common'. Honest question came to mind: is the Plurality system's dominance a case of the Prisoner's Dilemna in action? The reason I bring that up is because a binary choice Plurality Vote cannot have 'Strategic Voting' even if you do count 'Not Voting' as a 3rd choice. In a binary Plurality Voting, if you don't vote for your preference, you will not get your preference so honesty is the only option. The reason a multi-candidate Plurarily vote is bad is because it will, over time, devolve into a bynary vote as strategic voting slowly eliminates alternative choices. And frankly the US system now isn't a pure binary choice as some states allow people to vote strategically thanks to Primaries in order to effect the General election.
I also wonder... what about voting systems in which the input is just a rating from 1-10 of each candidate? Then its clear if two candidates are close in preference (a 9 and 8) or if one is completely hated (a 9 and 1) I might be ok with my second choice if its an 8, but would do anything to avoid a 1
"I also wonder... what about voting systems in which the input is just a rating from 1-10 of each candidate? " this is strategically identical to approval voting. you vote 10 for every candidate you'd find acceptable, and 1 for ever candidate you dislike.
True. That makes sense. Maybe I would do 10s and 9s, because I really want candidate A (10), am ok with candidate B (9), but really don't want candidate C (1). The reason to give B a 9 is so that *in the case of a tie between A and B*, I want A to have an edge. Maybe? Or maybe that doesn't quite make sense. What about a constraint that you rank every candidate from 1-10, but you're not allowed to reuse numbers. Obviously there can't be more than 10 candidates. And when there's 10 candidates, it's the same as ranked choice. And it would be impractical to implement because what if someone fills out a paper ballot incorrectly and gives duplicate numbers. So I've talked myself out of this idea, but still.... what if?
@@LetsGetIntoItMedia best strategy in ratings voting is to give maximum rating to every candidate you rate above a threshold, and minimum rating to all others. The threshold is set to your expected utility of outcome. In your scenario, if the likelihood of a tie between your top two candidates is sufficiently high, that threshold will be between 9 and 10, and you should vote down your second favorite. But that's a special case in which the third candidate has a minuscule chance of winning, giving you a safe margin to do so. If your expected utility is 8.9, then candidate 3 is a significant threat, and you assign 10 to your top 2. In your scenario, I would only vote 9 for my second choice only if my expected utility of outcome is exactly 9. In all other cases, a 0 or 10 for the second candidate is the vote recommended by strategy.
Ah yeah, makes total sense. It depends on the likelihood of ties, and the threat from other candidates. Good points! I've seen a few nice videos about voting systems, but the topic is so deep, there's so much to learn! Thanks for explaining
I could go with that, with two caveats: 1. You only get to decide for a 5 year term period. 2. After your term, a vote is taken: Should you be allowed to live? If a majority of the voters say No, then it is off with your head - guillotine style. Deal?
The initial election has a few issues. Setting aside the notion of homogeneous voter blocks, it is generally going to be very rare for the votes to be split in the manner that is displayed - it is far more likely that the banana monkeys would have avocado as their second preference (at least in the case of most left/right political systems), meaning avocado would get in.
When you have only two candidates, plurality voting is actually a great system that does not incentivize strategic voting. The theorem applies only if there are at least three candidates. Does it make sense?
No system of voting will satisfy everyone all the time, but I think approval voting is the best because it satisfies the most people possible at any given time.
I was curious to check out the worst voting systems on the list 16:49, but I was unable to find Fishburn's method of voting, just some drug related stuff. Could you provide some sources?
If knowing the voting system promotes strategy... what if you decided the voting system randomly AFTER votes were collected? That way strategy is impossible.
I know that Primer had a video on this as well. I think the Dutch voting system is pretty good, but that is partially due to there being a sizeable amount of political parties to vote for. Unfortunately strategic voting is still a thing as the biggest party decides the other parties they want to join up with to form a government (together they need to have a majority of the votes in order to get laws through consistently) and bigger parties are more likely to get into the government. But all parties in the government need to be in agreement, and different parties have different levels of how much they're willing to compromise. Parties that aren't in the government are still part of the opposition, and still get to vote on whether laws get passed, but since the government has the majority they won't win. The actual system is more complex than this, and I'm not an expert on it at all, for example I simplified it to needing to have a majority of the votes, but in reality you vote for candidates within political parties and the amount votes gets simplified to an amount of points with the total amount of points being 150. And there are two parliaments. There are some improvements that could be made, but overall it's pretty good.
I like the Borda method because the two rounds system we have in France gives too much power to radical minorities who end up being the arbiters between the front runners.
I feel like this is an argument for a republic (a collection of states with a multi-tiered system of government) over a federal democracy. It seems like the quality of voting will always improve by subdividing the electorate with government power pushed down in a multi-tiered system. This (IMHO) would be true over time when combined with barriers/cost for transition from one subdivision to another. In addition, I think it argues for a limited government and capitalism, were the most decisions are made individually (multiple outcomes vs. a single rule). I am curious to see, if future videos would provide a sound basis for conclusions to these hypotheses.
CGP Grey explained this thoroughly 12 years ago in like 3 videos. What is this 2nd round you explain? That sounds like a bad system. The 2nd choice is added to the first round if the first choice drops out of the race. There is no benefit to strategic voting that way. He called it the Alternative Vote. Or maybe there is but it would be a lot more convoluted.
What about a system with weighted votes? Your vote for your preferred candidate is worth 1, your vote for your second candidate is worth .5. This shrinks the problems with instant-runoff and encourages minorities to vote for their favorite candidate, even if he has a lower chance of winning. Maybe the exact values can be adjusted. Maybe your second favorite should get .75 votes. Maybe elections with more candidates could have you cast weighted votes to your top 5 candidates. Or here's a radical idea: what if every monkey just enjoys his favorite fruit without the need to force his fruit on the whole population? Sure every monkey would be happier if they each had their own favorite, but that would be anarchy!
Just elect the representatives and let them govern. They get together however they like to elect a leader, not a president, or PM, or a winner per say. Just a leader of all representatives. You don't need apples, banana, or coco parties. Just elect representatives. They may group up in one way on some issues and form other majorities on other issues. The problem is a "reasonable" voting system. They are not reasonable if they result in nonfunctional governments that do not represent the voters. Change the system. Its the Parties that should be prohibited.
Why is "strategic" voting "flawed" providing it is fair? Essentially all you are saying is given a multitude of options and only a single winner, people can strategically choose an outcome that may not be their top preference but would at least prevent their antipathetic option. I believe your premise is wrong in that stating any system that takes a continuous input (i.e. multiple options with a variable degree of preference for each option) that leads to a single winner is flawed if someone will not enter their preference honestly. I argue thusly: the voting system is designed to pick a winner, not a survey of someones preferences and therefore they would rather ensure a somewhat favourable outcome over a disfavourable outcome even if it is not their most desired outcome.
Yes, but we want to find the best candidate overall, not what any particular subset views as the best candidate. Strategic voting turns the game into an unsolvable mess because you have to anticipate the strategy of the other voters.
I like what your comment is pointing at: the thing we ultimately care about with voting systems is probably something like "how many voters are in the end unhappy about the result". E.g. if you elect the candidate with the least support, you clearly make lot of people unhappy. Empirically, it turns out that this is closely related to strategic voting. E.g., in plurality voting you have the issue of "spoiling candidates" which both leads to strategic voting and people being unhappy in the end.
Loved that you mentioned random system since it is likely most fair, at least it feels like whenever it's implemented in video games. But yeah no way it could realistically be implemented xd
I have an idea, have a hybrid of ranked choice and approval voting. You have two lists, one in which you rank candidates in who you like the most, and one one in which you dislike the most. How would you score that tho? I am still curious in how a hybrid of these two systems would work and look like tho.
Thanks for the video. Can you clarify the statement about independence of irrelevant alternatives and Arrow's theorem? From what I could find, "reasonableness" (i.e., majority criterion) is not a necessary condition for satisfying independence of irrelevant alternatives. See: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copeland%27s_method#Comparison_with_other_systems My understanding is that Arrow's theorem states that no rank voting system can satisfy a set of fairness criteria for all voter profiles.
This is a great catch! We forgot to clarify that what we wrote as Arrow's theorem is again just a baby version of Arrow's theorem. In reality, Arrow's theorem uses the least restrictive definition of the word "reasonable" for which the conclusion still holds. You might enjoy our blog post that tries to clarify all this. Basically, although Arrow's theorem says that no system can satisfy a set of fairness criteria, I claim that a good way to think about it is that reasonable voting systems don't satisfy independence of irrelevant alternatives, under some definition of "reasonable". Does it make sense?
Just use a proportional system and force everyone to drink veritaserum befor entering the voting area, that way you are garantued to get an outcome that matches what is actualy wanted by most
nice. thanks. was reading that SAT solvers have been used, for example, to prrove Arrow's Theorem and to show other results in Fractional Social Theory (impossibility-wise). seems like there has been quite a leap in their capability. seen a few popular science articles on the attention-grabbing side but struggled with looking in more detail (too many acronyms IMHO [ok not funny]). seriously tho, how we get from DPLL to CDCL and on and on is beyond me!)
That sounds cool. I haven't heard of it, and I don't see directly hwo to do it, however usage of SAT solvers makes sense in combinatorics-like research, they also helped me with a result in my PhD. I would like to distinguish the SAT solving algorithms (simple DPLL, or CDCL which usually does the magic), and their application. People who use SAT solvers don't need to think of them in terms of the underlying algorithm, rather as blackboxes that can in practice often answer NP-complete problems. So in the example of a voting system, if you select a particular voting system (e.g. two-round election), you could encode true preferences of individual voters using boolean variables, and state a boolean formula in these variables requiring that a particular voter is incentivized to vote strategically. Then you can ask a SAT solver to find a solution of such formula -- an example where a voter has such incentive. So I can imagine using a SAT solver for finding some examples like that, on the other hand, I don't think that NP-complete language would be strong enough to help with such theorems in full generality, rather it could show researchers some useful examples they can then attempt to generalize.
@@procdalsinazev yeah thanks. I think the idea, from what I've read, though it is beyond my understanding, and comes via the wikipedia page on SAT solvers which has little information on the "how" straight into high-level academic papers, is, presumably like in the 4-color problem, to reduce everything to some kind of minimal instance set, then just use SAT solvers to "solve" that, rather than to write some kind of "specific program". I think the thing about the "new wave" is that they are "good" at both ends: proving satisfy and non-satisfy. I've watched a few simple videos on here that I could find, like "A peek inside SAT sovlers - Jon Smock" and "look ahed sat solvers: smart vs fast" with Marijn Heule.
Can you make a video about the Schulze method of voting? It's the voting system we use in our university's fraternity to make decisions with more than 2 options. Usually it spits out the "most mild" option. I'd be interested to see an analysis. The wikipedia article (but feel free to use other sources as well, obviously): en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schulze_method
Yeah, even actual reasonable systems like Borda count don't satisfy it, our definition of "reasonable voting system" frankly sucks :). You can check out our blog post that discusses it.
@@massimo4307 Minority rule is even worse! The biggest real effect of the EC is to give massive power to a minority of swing state voters. Marginal votes in Pennsylvania are tens of thousands of times more valuable than votes in Wyoming, according to voter power indices, so presidential candidates campaign in PA (and other swing states) and make promises to swing state voters, ignoring other voters, and this affects national policy. That's why the US seems to care more about rust belt fracking than the fires and droughts in CA or the plight of the deep south. Under popular vote, everyone in the country would be equally important to appeal to (whether in rural or city, swing state and not), and power would still switch back and forth between the two parties, if that's what you're worried about, because candidates would shift their strategy to appeal to the most votes, until voters are split roughly 50/50 again as they are now.
So many people are unaware of the very existence of voting theory (aka social choice). This should be taught in school because our entire society relies on how much trust people put on election results. And this trust is eroding very fast
People aren't distrusting voting systems because of tactical voting, they are distrusting voting systems due to attacks on the integrity of the government, from both within and without.
It’s a subtopic of game theory, which is already rarely taught in schools. For most people, they’ll never know about it, and even for those who do learn some, the most they’ll get is the Prisoner’s Dilemma. This isn’t exactly an easy topic to cover and I don’t expect it to be except at the most abstracted and babied-down level in a government class.
Yeah that wont happen because the ruling class would never teach people about politics or they might stop making profit and capitalist propaganda wouldnt be as effective
Yeah, but even in the first example you must assume that banana votes for coconut 1;1 for it to hold true (in the two part section). That is never honestly true, and was just generalized and moved past. Even if you are talking about ranked, or star, or whatever ranking system, a run off is not guaranteed to produce those outcomes unless only one ballot can be cast at the beginning of the election. Then it wouldn't really be a runoff, just a consensus win. If people understand that going into the process it will change their calculus and the example still falls apart. Not everyone will use all of the lines... Unless it's mandated, and then it's not really a choice now is it...
It's not that voting systems are flawed, it's that humans vote on stuff in the first place, just let those who are good at leading, do the leading and, let the sheep follow in their tracks. Dictatorships are always the best political systems after all, be them military dictatorships, instated by the US... Chile and Pinochet's Junta for example, don't mind the human rights violations.. they were sponsored by taxes after all and the US War Machine... or Absolute Monarchies, like Saudi-Arabia, don't worry about human rights, we got oil, and you want it, here's an idea... Let's shut down nuclear power plants and turn to wind and solar and hydro, and then as these are shite useless technology that has no use at all, people would need to buy more oil, coal and gas, which means we can line our pockets deeper, while extorting the general populace. Ah history, anyways, time for more modern stuff, let's put an Oil Company in power over an entire African nation and it's government and military. Shell PLC perhaps... It's interesting how far bribes can get you... Or you could rig an election, I mean you could have 247% voter turnout, you could do some ballot harvesting and other illegal stuff, then when the opposition questions how you got all them votes, call them conspiracy theorists, then take them to court in Georgia, and accusing them of racketeering for some reason. Because one can't deal with the opposition with the good old means of the past, it would rouse too much suspicions about it... Ain't want another CIA Presidential Assassination... 1 JFK is enough. Ah, politics, the worst thing that has happened to mankind ever, it was better in the good old day, when you just removed the unwanted from societal participation via less than amiable means. It was a lot better for societal cohesion as well.
@@rsm3t Bribe all the voters. Push policies which sound good on paper but actually keep them poor. Work with your political rivals; Let them be villains for those voting for you, and you a villain for those voting for them. Keep the audience caught in the emotion, the rivalries, the "Sport" of politics - Not the policies. Better yet, if something really bad happens and no-one can be the fall guy, just blame it on the 'bad luck' the system enables. Worst case scenario; Nobody needs to be at fault. Some randomly selected elements nobody could possibly account for throwing a wrench in your totally good natured plans ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Make the voters easier to bribe and dependent on your "help" , but they never actually receive what they want or need due to your 'rivals' and 'bad luck'
Sortition is the method by which we pick juries for trials in the United States and, while there can be flaws in the jury system, it's pretty solid over all.
thankfully, voting methods like approval voting, score voting, and star voting are extremely resistant to strategy. this is explained in the excellent book "gaming the vote" by william poundstone.
I agree these are good systems! Another class of great voting systems are so-called Condorcet methods. With approval voting, you sometimes still see a game of chicken, but with star voting I really find it hard to imagine how that can lead to strategic voting.
@@PolylogCS Seems to me the runoff round of STAR brings you directly into the scenario described at the start of the video? That is, if there's a condorcet cycle, you do NOT want the final runoff to be a matchup between your favorite and the choice that beats your favorite, even if that means keeping your favorite out of the running to prevent that scenario.
@@PolylogCS Every consensus-seeking voting method that allows voters to support multiple candidates simultaneously suffers from that "game of chicken scenario". It's not exactly a flaw, it's a risk. Cooperation between potentially allied factions is a desirable thing, but trying to eliminate potential betrayals generally (see below) means you have to eliminate cooperation altogether. This the idea behind Instant-Runoff Voting (AKA Ranked Choice Voting): you assume every single voter is as strategic as possible by default, only supporting their current favorite and nobody else until that candidate is removed by force. This is why this voting method is often claimed to be "resistant to strategy", but the reality is that it just forces everyone to be as strategical as possible by default (given the motivation of strategy under other voting methods, that's what it is). So there's no "chicken dilemma" because there's no cooperation at all. The only counter-example I know of to the above concerns is "Reciprocal Score Voting", which is a proof-of-concept system I created explicitly to exemplify these ideas. It rewards mutual cooperation between factions, and penalizes factions which betray one another. So you mostly deal with the "chicken dilemma", because betrayal is pointless. Factions that are true opponents are unaffected. But it's a complex system, not intended for real-world use.
@@PolylogCS Star voting can quite easily lead to strategic voting. Say before your vote the top 3 candidates are A, B and C. A is your first preference, B is your second and C is your third. If you give 5 points to A, 4 points to B and 3 points to C, then A and B goes to the final round and B wins. But if you instead give 0 points to B, then A and C go to the final round and A wins. This could also work the other way where if C goes to the final round then C wins. If it is just A and B then B wins. So you are incentivised to drop your vote from C down from 3 to 0 to keep it out of the final round. Possibly even changing your preference between A and B to make sure they go in.
One problem with these mathematical approaches is that they assume voters have a ranked preference. In reality, voters typically do not have that. The average voter might classify their candidates in 3 tiers: preferred, acceptable and objectionable, with little differentiation within the categories. Any further ordering is basically random (or noise, from an information point of view). This is why systems like approval voting have an advantage: they more closely capture voter preference.
It also assumes that each voter is motivated “towards” each item in the preference ordering, and some are just preferred higher. In practice many voters will instead be motivated “away” from certain items. A voter that ranks ABC for preference when all three are positively considered, but C is just the least positive, is different to ABC when C is absolutely hated in all circumstances. In the latter there is an incentive towards a different strategic behaviour, partly touched on (although not expanded upon) by this video.
@@kelly4187 agreed, that's what I call the objectionable category. Approval voting allows voters to indicate which candidates they positively approve of, and the rest are negative. The winner is then the candidate which is agreeable to the largest group.
@@kelly4187 I made a comment in the blog: What about something like STAR but with fibbonaci sequence (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8) and negatives half the size of the sequence (-1, -1, -2) and where you can't give the same score to multiple candidates? This way you can punish (being bad will make you worse than being unknown), but not to a huge degree (you can't give everyone a negative). Of course there could still be some strategic voting (voting 5 instead of 8) but it would be quite diminished. Under this system, say there are some more candidates, DE that nobody cares about. The first voter would vote A(8) B(5) C(3) D(0) E(0), the second would vote A(8) B(5) D(0) E(0) C(-2).
As for ties, the winner is the one with more points in the best positive category (8), if that is also a tie, the one with least points in the last negative category (-2), if also a tie, the one the second best category (5), then second last (-1), etc. It's only a true tie if they have the exact same number of votes in all categories.
I want to see an analysis of an up or down voting system. Each voter gets exactly one vote. They can either choose to vote for a candidate they like increasing the candidate's vote total by one, an up vote, or vote against a candidate that they dislike and decrease that candidate's vote total by one, a down vote. Inspired by the common complaint of people feeling like they must vote for the lesser of two evils, this instead gives the option to vote against the greater evil and gives candidates that people truly believe in to rise up.
Intresting idea. Some general observations: in a two candidate system this is identical to FPTP. If there are more than two candidates a down vote acts as an up vote for all other candidates. Due to this, this voting system might tend towards a W shaped curve, where either centrists or very obscure candidates get elected due to the lack of down votes for them.
@@Glass-vf8il We did not mention it, but if you have just two candidates, FPTP is kind of the only reasonable thing to do, so every reasonable system should reduce to FPTP there.
This idea reminds me of this method en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D21_%E2%80%93_Jane%C4%8Dek_method that is trying to do something similar, while keeping that you are supposed to give more positive than negative votes.
Actually, Arrow’s Theorem only applies to ordinal voting systems (where voters can only express their order of preference). Cardinal voting systems (where you can also say how much you like and dislike any given option) are a different matter. And indeed, price formation in an ideal market can be considered a cardinal voting system.
We said that in the video, right? Also, price formation in markets is a bit more complicated mechanism because everybody has a different amount of money, but I like how you are drawing the connection -- voting theory is just a special case of mechanism design!
That’s just what I was about to comment on, only your explanation is better stated. :) For example in either score voting or STAR voting I would give avacado 0 points , banana 5 points, and coconut 4 points because I would be happy with either a banana or a cononut with a slight preference for a banana but I _really_ don’t like avacados.
@@trevinbeattie4888 Sounds like you are not voting optimally, you should give coconut and banana both 5 to get the best chance of avoiding avocado since that is your main priority. This is my problem with cardinal voting proponents, they don't acknowledge that in practice cardinal voting requires more strategy than ordinal (and disenfranchises voters who don't understand the strategy, unlike condorcet ordinal systems where strategy is only relevant in extreme edge cases)
@@oliverwilson11 STAR has that runoff round where your vote gets ignored if you gave both finalists the same score, so there's some reason to use the 4 and 1 numbers there.
What happens if you ask everyone to vote not knowing what the voting system is, and then randomly select a reasonable voting system after all the ballots are cast?
Would a random choice from a set of reasonable voting systems with different methods of distributing spent votes constitute a reasonable voting system? It looks like one of the axioms for the law is that voters can predict how votes are distributed by the system. If you violate this axiom, it seems like the law no longer holds.
Idea: use a voting system which is simply a culmination of the results of 10 or more established voting systems. collect a ranked list of a select number of fruits and convert that into every voting system’s input. Then, use ANOTHER voting system on those results until a winner is found. The only downside is all the confusion and red tape!😁
@@jonathanodude6660 No I am personaly a fan of a system wich works as that there are 150 seats in parlement and if you get enough votes for 1 seat you get 1 seat in the parlement
I saw the title real fast and thought it said "vomiting" and quickly made up my mind about this being a video explaining how we evolved vomiting as primates and how that helped us evolve
What if every monkey wrote their favorite fruit and we randomly selected a ballot to be the winner POV: I didn't watch the entire video before commenting
@@gregoryfenn1462Although it superficially resembles first past the post, it has NONE of FPTP's downsides, and has some different downsides of its own. The fact that it becomes completely unnecessary to represent second preferences is actually one of its upsides!
The problem lies in thinking that a single winner-takes-all vote can comprise the entirety of democracy. There's a reason voting is considered the minimum responsibility of a citizen.
I never vote. They end up making the same garbage decisions no mater who gets elected. Voting is pointless. Just look at the US, who switches between two sides every 4th year. Does it really matter which 4 years are to one side and which 4 years are to the other side? The reason they keep voting for the opposite side is that they both suck, and they want to get rid of what is currently there. Apparently they never realize that what they get instead is not better.
The fact that the avocado monkeys voted for their known second choice to avoid their third is a good thing. They are sacrificing their favorite so that their second favorite wins, and the most voters are happy (7 vs 2)
@@PolylogCS The key factor on if Strategic Voting is good or not is the motivation. Like if you strategically vote in a way that would get a terrible choice as the winner, because you think it is funny.
Sorry if i'm misunderstanding something here but wouldn't that be very similar to approval voting in that sense that the metric is most people happy(ish) the avocado mokeys would also approve of banans which would make bananas win 7 vs 2
@@ebentually The coconut monkeys could then strategically not approve of avocados, even if they tolerate them, so their first choice, coconuts, wins. Approval voting has the issue that if you approve all or disapprove of all candidates that have a chance of winning, then you wasted your vote. This incentives you to strategically either not approve of a candidate you like, because you like his opposition slightly less or to approve of a candidate you don't like because you hate their opposition slightly more.
What if we used science to take the candidates and construct a randomised monster candidate based on a ratio of all votes? Avonananut? Bacocodo? Cocadona?
Simplicity is _not_ a flaw. It's a form of transparency that allows people of all levels of intelligence to feel confident the outcome of a vote is legitimate. This is a challenge with so many alternative voting systems, if it adds any sort of complexity it begins to feel like the system is being gamed to harm one group or another. Unfortunately, the people who feel harmed are also the most likely to get very angry and frustrated. I love the idea of instant-run off voting but I see most people I know uncomfortable with this "new fangled" idea because it is way more complicated relative to first-past the post. The only reasonable choice I've been able to come up with that preserves legitimacy while granting better results is a combination system: ranked-choice primaries but two candidate run-offs for the final, separate, vote. *You cannot underestimate the importance* of having a system that *feels* legitimate because it is transparent and easy to understand. And I think most people would prefer to have the cost of multiple-round voting to feel, in their bones, that the system is legitimate.
@@Speedster___I agree so much with this but there is nuance here. I don't think this is catering or pandering. It's confidence building. And it has the virtue of keeping people focused on who the leaders are and what they actually did or not do instead of trying to assail the system that elected them. We shouldn't ignore those benefits.
@@x--. even without multiple voting systems you still get cranks. Makes me think speed accuracy and transparency matter way more for confidence then system used
It is not hard to determine results in all voting systems. And being simple doesn't make something better or worse. It is mathematically untrue, that "most votes win" systems represent the highest number/majority of what people want. It represents the largest group of people that choose one winner, which means that on average two thirds of people are not represented by them. This is because one third can be the largest group, but that means that the other two thirds _did not vote for_ the winner.
I was watching this going "I hope he mentions the Approval Voting system..." and you did! I live in Scotland, and yes, I really wish we could throw out the disastrous FPTP for our UK parliament elections, but at least we get AMS for our devolved parliament, and STV for our local elections. But we cling on to it for many reasons (the big parties have no incentive to change, ignorance about how voting works, belief that it gives better outcomes etc.). Glad to see it's just as disliked by voting theory experts.
I recall the UK had a referendum on ranked voting in 2011 and voters soundly rejected the proposal. This also wasn't a regional thing as Scotland itself rejected it in a landslide.
There's only one thing I dislike about Scotland, and that is the haughty English that live next door. My least favorite people. Keep the faith brothers, it's about to get good.
Excluding situations where a Condorcet paradox exists (which I think would be very unlikely in a vote with millions of ballots), to me it seems like the Condorcet method is the best system because strategic voting is usually unlikely to be helpful
It's also nice because it tends to elect moderate candidates that everyone is at least okay with, and does so in an obvious way. Imagine how much happier Republicans in the US would be if Bernie Sanders was also an option in the 2020 general election, and they ranked Biden over Bernie, and they were successful in keeping Bernie out of the presidency. Having a winner who most people see as "not the worst" is a powerful thing.
@@brandonm949 This is a great point. The main "strategy" in approval voting is to vote for everyone except the one you absolutely can't abide. And while that's not ideal, it will still probably result in an outcome that everyone is generally kinda okay with. The other advantage is that since there isn't a strategic advantage to NOT vote for your favorite, there is no regression to two parties - and the more candidates there are, the less strategic voting matters because there are more people in both the acceptable and unacceptable category.
Blog post with more details & clarifications: vasekrozhon.wordpress.com/2023/09/10/voting-systems/
In my Swedish municipality we have public digital “suggestion box” for political ideas. An idea requires 100 citizen votes to be debated by the council. There is no negative voting however, which makes the system unreliable. There was a case (replace some car roads with parks) that got 100+ votes, but an anti-case (do not replace roads with parks) got over 3000 votes. Both had to be debated as separate topics in the council, which the media found hilarious.
The swedish democracy is one of the most fucked one in the world by strategic voting. The 4 % parties that can sway the results on who will govern (right or left) gets an insane amount of power in proportion to how many voted for them...
How bot (fake votes) protection work there?
What even was a point of an anti-suggestion? If it’s just a non-binding suggestion and people are against it, it will not pass. I just don’t understand why would you suggest to not do something that is not planned.
@@kaltziferYT Sweden have "BankID" which is a government authentication service to verify an individual. This is used to make fake votes less of an isssue.
@@snowmanscz1011To show the council that there was opposition would be my guess. Not everyone has the time/ability necessary to show up to the meeting, Ando governments have made bad/unpopular decisions under the false impression it was popular.
This is not a flaw in every voting system. It's a flaw in every voting system that has only one winner. In a country like Finland we have 200 seats in the parliament. We could fill all the seats based on how many votes each party got. Any party that got more that 0.5% of votes would get at least one member into the parliament. Problem solved. No reason to just have one seat like the presidential election. This is not the middle ages anymore.
If you don't think you're party will get 0.5% of votes you'd vote for someone else. Or if there's an independent candidate, any ballot above the 0.5% is wasted.
And there can only be 1 prime minister anyways
@@LightPink
True. But this voting system diminishes the problem by 100 times. There is a threshold but it's not impenetrable like in the US where there can only be two parties in power. No new party will ever topple them. It is technically possible but the chances are near zero. You would need major upheaval close to a civil war to achieve that.
For the second part. Yeah. There's only one prime minister. There's also only one heath care minister, education minister and foreign minister. The power can be diluted. One person doesn't have to hold all of it. The US system where the president holds massive power is actually the exception, not the norm. We too have a president but he only does foreign diplomacy and doesn't meddle with our country's internal affairs.
Oh have I got news for you (namely that that creates an entirely different voting issue called the apportionment problem)
th-cam.com/video/GVhFBujPlVo/w-d-xo.html
(btw your country uses "Jefferson's Method" except instead of states it's political parties)
I also like parliaments! However, even in Finland, you may want to decide with your classmates which film to see, or use top 100 movie lists, etc.
And how will the 200 members of parliament vote? Say, about who gets to represent Finland on the international stage.
My sisters and I took turns picking ice cream flavors. I loved mint and chip but I never chose it because I knew my sister would, so I always got black cherry. I got my favorites twice.
At first I thought the thumbnail said “strategic vomiting”. I then proceeded to have a conversation in my head, debating the likelihood of vomiting after eating a banana and an avocado.
I really like the last part! Considering the intensity by which people will argue over how probability distributions should be sampled in path tracing algorithms, I can only imagine what the the arguments (or civil wars) would be like when the fate of the nation depends on it!
17:02
Germany also uses FPTP voting. Everyone has two votes, one, FPTP where it determines who from your district goes to the Bundestag and a second vote that determines the % of how the rest of the seats in the Bundestag are filled.
To vote tactically you need:
1. To understand the way the system will work
2. To know how everyone else will/has voted
3. What result you want and what result you are willing to accept.
I'm not convinced most of any public (electorate)
are this well informed
insightful
or self aware.
The only part of the electorate that needs to figure it out is partisan media outlets. They'll tell the voters what the best strategy is.
The solution is to vote your fruit into an assembly where the number of seats for each fruit are apportioned by the number of votes, and then whichever fruits build a multi-fruit coalition of over 50% of the seats win!
In more direct terms, the monkeys talk to each other and are incentivized to form alliances larger than 50% of the total. This alliance then decides who their leader is!
"An election is supposed to be a way of finding common ground, not a strategic game between voters."
I would love to hear how you arrived at either of those beliefs.
Yeah I agree, the only purpose is to arrive to an outcome based on predetermined rules IMO
This is what happens when you invent an axiom that you like, and then derive an explanation which works backwards to support your unfounded axiom.
Because an election is intended to decide how things are run, and if common ground is not found, then things are not running probably, if you vote on a restaurant choice with a group of friends, and three people go hungry due to dietary constraints, then that election has been a failure.
Why should the same not apply to regular elections?
@@mynameisben123 What purpose should those rules serve?
@@teebob21 Expressing the will of the people is like the whole point of democracy
Their defect was trying to appease the group. Instead of appeasing themselves.
If you like avocado. Eat avocado. If you like Coconuts, eat coconuts.
There is no need to compromise.
As for what to plant. Those who like avocados should plant avocados. Those who like coconuts, should plant coconuts. Etc.
The proportion of fruit should decide itself. And if they don't know how to plant, then those don't plant. Have no saying on what food should be planted..
Incidentally this is also the defect of our societies. We try to appease the majority, when the majority just want to take advantage of you.
Well done! You researched the topic much more than I did. I am happy to inspire such a nice video. If it doesn't win, it is for sure the flaw of the voting system ;-).
Thanks :)
What happens when theory meets actual people? I would think that Condorcet cycles become rarer as population increases. And I suspect that, for many voting systems, the efficacy of strategic voting likewise decreases as population increases. Of course, these are questions with empirical and historical answers. Does anyone know which electoral systems are probabilistically more reasonable and more stable in the limit?
You can check out the lesswrong post linked in our blog post (link in video description). If I recall correctly, in practice you have condorcet cycles in something like 5% cases or so.
@@PolylogCS Also, the voting system in use could actually incentivize Condorcet cycles in the ballots, even if there weren't any in the voters true preferences.
What if you make randomised voting a multi-round elimination voting system?
So, the problem with random voting is that we have a small sample, which is generally prone to giving chaotic outcomes. If we make a larger sample, I'd bet we could get more stable results. Current (well, not current, but you get the point) system is »choose one, eliminate the rest« and I wonder if »choose half, eliminate the rest« and »choose one, eliminate the one« would be beneficial.
Also, what would you say about squaring and normalising results? It would skew the votes towards the most popular candidate either way. IF you consider the definition of »reasonable system« reasonable. (I'd say we should gather not only the rankings, but some absolute values to, if that makes sense: I'd like to know, if the candidate is the least bad or the best)
the scientists should have ranked the voting systems several times. every time using a different voting system :D
In reality, the two round system indeed can get stuck (with a very small probability). But capturing that in a definition of a voting system makes stuff clumsy, hence see 4:17
@@PolylogCS I think this answer belongs to a different comment?
Thanks, you've made me feel less bad about the instant-runoff voting system Australia uses.
Your last voting system of randomly picking the winner with those getting the most votes most likely to win isn't reasonable as somebody can win by having one vote
This systems talk only about the situation when only one post is to fill.
In parliament are usually multiple persons to elect so. So you can make election districts that have more the one seat.
In this case use some proposal systems like they use in Germany and Switzerland.
The disadvantage is that result is multi party parliament means coalition are necessary.
"Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote." Benjamin Franklin
So liberty is when the loser rules.
Liberty can contest the vote, but they all still have to live with the final outcome.
"Democracy is the dictatorship of the majority."
Surely it can be simplified down to
"Since every vote counts, and every candidate has an equal chance, you can always imagine a tie, and thus one person changing their vote will break the tie"
Add
"In a 2 candidate system, they either dont care to change the tie, or wouldnt want to change to the losing side to make it win.
In any size bigger, imagine their favourite is not gonna win, and their least favourite is tied with the 2nd favourite. By that one person changing their vote to put the second favourite above the first, they win the tie"
Something I've wondered for ages: are point-based voting systems a thing? A ranked-choice voting system, but not with several rounds, because it always bothers me that voting systems do not take negative preference into account.
I mean ranked as in: Here are three candidates, someone's top choice receives 3 points, the second choice 2, and the third 1. I quickly calculated it for this example, and avocado would win with 20 points, and the other two would be tied with 17 points each.
One obvious drawback is that people would be forced to rank (not that difficult with three candidates, but potentially quite difficult with five, or eight, or seventeen - US-primaries, I'm looking at you!) because every candidate you didn't put in would receive 0 points from your ballot. I haven't calculated this, but possibly it could be counteracted by distributing the remaining points between the remaining candidates as an average. Say there are seven candidates, someone fills in the top two and the bottom two and leaves the rest blank - then twelve points would be left to be distributed, so each of the remaining three candidates would receive four points from that ballot.
Apart from this (I would have said "and the personell this requires, but in the digital age, this is the sort of thing a computer could definitely do), is there any good reason why this couldn't work?
Look up the Borda count, that's basically the idea behind it.
The problem underlying all capitalist democracies is capitalism. The voting systems are also intrinsically bad, but, a system in which lobbying is basically always going to be legal (since, if it isn't, the laws to allow lobbying eventually come back in the first right wing government) allows the top percentages of income to dominate politics. Simply put, if capital ownership exists, democracy is what the owners allow the servants to vote on.
Hey! This video is really wonderful! ❤❤ congratulations for the great work!🎉🎉🎉
Through most of this the flaw in the voting systems seemed obvious to me - once you hit the second round you ignored the second choice of all those who voted for the 'top two'... which means those voting for the eliminated candidates (a minority) are given the deciding vote (over the majority). I immediately thought the second choice of _all_ voters should be included with no candidates being eliminated. (Avocado's win btw: 7a, 6b, 5c). When approval voting was mentioned and discarded as usable with rankings I wondered why? Going through layers considering 1st choices only - if no majority, include 2nd choices as approvals and so on. Allow voters to rank as many candidates as they wish, and allow them to exclude ones they disapprove of and you get quite close to a ranked approval system that reflects voters true opinions.
I'm sure a ranked approval system would be susceptible to some tactical voting but at least it would avoid the flip-flop two party scenarios which dominate a lot of single winner voting systems... which is a different problem than the one here... i.e. I better vote for 'a' because I don't want 'b' to win, despite wanting 'c' => nobody votes for 'c' even if it became what a majority wants - what we see in the UK. Of course the USA are even worse as voters only ever have two choices there!
"Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job." (HHGTTG)
Great video! I'm sad you didn't include any Condorcet systems though (especially single methods) . That being said, the monkeys might just get mad for having to learn math to have to understand who won the vote (which is a good reason to be off the island anyways).
But also, the preferences of the monkeys form a condorcet cycle, which means that Condorcet systems are not really that helpful in this concrete scenario, right? (they are guaranteed to work if there is a candidate that beats everybody in head to head election).
@@PolylogCS People act all dramatic about Condorcet cycles like they somehow fundamentally invalidate Condorcet methods, but they're just a special type of tie. Every voting system can have ties. Condorcet cycles occur in like ~1% of real-world elections.
I found your remark about not being able to tell alone from a simple ranking of movies which the author actually likes and dislikes very insightful. Is there a voting system where you provide your list of preferences and also indicate whether you actually like each candidate (possibly even on a scale)? I feel like these inputs both provide different and useful information and I don’t really see why you couldn’t theoretically account for both.
I think in the "real" world there are a couple of important factors to consider. One is for your strategic voting to work you need good information and coordination for it to work, neither of which is easy. First you need to know how to rank your votes to get to a second round for example. And that may not work if all voters are trying to be strategic by countering what they believe the strategic votes by other groups may be. That is to say, what if each group, not just a single one, engages in multi level strategic voting?
Secondly, where do you get the information to know if you should vote strategically? You could say polls, but it's interesting that they are losing some credibility.
Not that this changes the result of the actual premise, just that in the real world, voting "strategically" has some risk.
I don’t really see strategic voting as a flaw. If your interest is anything but coconuts it makes sense to vote banana over avocado if you know that avocado will not win.
You might enjoy the blog post that discusses this a bit at the end.
This video is talking about proportional representation by single transferable vote model. The first past the post model doesn't have such paradoxes.
Please consider STAR Voting method (strategic voting has a 50% chance to backfire) and is very accurate.
Question: does Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem apply to "Scoring" (as opposed to Rankings) methods as well (like Approval and STAR Voting?)
What would you say is the difference between scoring and ranking?
Ranking is just putting candidates in order - favorite, 2nd favorite, 3rd favorite, etc.
Scoring is like a test 0 to 100, or an Amazon rating 1 to 5 stars.
Yes it does. G-S applies to all voting method ever conceived and all voting methods yet to be conceived.
It applies to all systems that satisfies the criteria of the theorem.
The Preferential System lets every vote count without any second rounds
In this case, Avocado 🥑, Coconut 🥥 banana 🍌 is the order of preference
At 10:29, shouldn't the top input elect banana. Avocado losses the first round, and the second round favours bananas 6 to 3
Dude I’m so confused too. Look at the bottom group of 7 at 9:09. How is avocado winning?
Great video. It reminds me of CGP Grey. Subscribed!
And, of course, in real life elections aren't held several times, but polls and predictions encourage systematic strategic voting, since they provide result scenarios that may have the same effect as the repeated election in the example of this video
It seems obvious to mean that Arrow's theorem is a good thing. People absolutely should consider the potential implications of all political parties gaining power. Preferences between parties A and B should definitely depend on the strength and ideology of parties C and D and their various relationships.
did i miss a disclaimer about secret ballots? because if we agree on rules before hand and don't announce any preliminary results until all polls are closed that takes away opportunity for informed chicanery. if you want to try to strategically vote based on opinion polling rather than actual vote data i don't think that's going to work out as well as the would-be strategic voters want.
In reality, you often have decent knowledge about other people votes because of polls. So the theory applies even with secret ballots, albeit it's more messy.
@@PolylogCS yeah that data is only as as good as the polls, and the ability to coordinate strategy is only as good as the voters' trust in the polls which is probably lower than it used to be, at least in the US.
We also have a huge cohort of voters who broadly deny science so i'm not sure you can convince the people who think statistically representative samples aren't real to make decisions based on them, even if we do manage to get rid of FPTP.
I think the closest you can get to a perfect voting system would be very clunky and impractical. You'd need multiple rounds.
Like, if you have 4 people in a group. Have everyone choose 1 person that you do NOT want. Most votes is eliminated.
Then do the same with 3.
When you have just 2 left, now vote for a winner.
I think there is no way of using a single vote, to choose between 3 or more options, because of the risk of a plurality win. It needs to be a guarantee that someone gets 50.1% of the vote, or else it will never be satisfactory for everyone.
The flaw is the voting system itself and the solution is random choice of citizen parliamentarians known as Sortition. Since democracy is not lobbied for votes but a respresentative random sample of the population!
I think it would be interesting to have participants vote. Then show them results using each major voting method and ranking how happy or unhappy they are with the outcome of each result on a scale from -5 to 5 and then using the new "best" system from now on. Likely using the median or mean result.
We could have participants do this for a variety of scenarios such as 2 candidates, 3 candidates 3 parties, 3 candidates 2 parties, 4 candidates 2 party etc.
We should vote to see which one is the best...
The Soviet elections system doesn't really have these drawbacks. Because you can withdraw your deputy you elected at any time you want if more than 25% are unhappy about the person they elected, they may initiate a reelection at any time.
What an amazing channel! Would love to see more computer science applications ❤️
So... Could you maybe demonstrate this for a few more popular voting systems? I'm not convinced.
Specifically, systems that have more than one winner.
This assumes a winner takes all election style. The flaw can be overcome by changing the system
Sometimes, yes. But voting systems are not just about politics, a list of top movies is also constructed by a voting system.
@@PolylogCS valid. Also, love your videos. I'm a writer with over 100K email subscribers in my newsletter. I cover ideas in tech and software. Would love to have you on and share some of your content there
Not really, voters still have a bad faith incentive
In political elections, it is very unlikely that people will order the candidates in a rock-paper-scissors way. Two candidates A and B will tend to have more things in common with each other than with C, and people will tend to order C first or last according to the voters' preferences, and probably A and B according to the perceived chances each one has of beating C. So supposing A is perceived as having better chances, it would result in two possible arrangements: A-B-C or C-B-A.
Great point, in fact if everybody's preference can be fully characterized only how left wrong/ right wing they are, then there is no strategic voting.
@PolylogCS Thanks! Actually, voters of B in my example are likely to vote strategically for A, so C doesn't win.
This is presently happening in Argentina, my country. Three presidential candidates came up with chances last Sunday in the first round. Speculations are that candidate B will lose many votes to A in the second round. An additional complication is that the difference between the three of them is very narrow. So, who knows what will happen.
I think that the best voting system would be the one that minimizes change in overall population happiness when strategic voting is taken into account.
First Get a baseline happiness. Assume that every single person has voted honestly.
Their first choice goes to one point, their second is half a point, their third is a 4th all the way down to their last which is a zero.
Add up the overall happiness of the population given the victor of a given voting system
Then go back and tweak the preferences via strategic voting and compare.
Whichever voting system either consistently increases satisfaction the most, or decreases it the lease is most preferable
What about Smith-invariant-instant-runoff voting? After casting votes, you select the smallest non-empty set of candidates where each member defeats every candidate outside the set in a pairwise election, then do instant-runoff voting between the members of that set.
In the case of the Burlington Vermont mayoral election in 2009, there was no Condorcet cycle and there was a clear Condorcet winner, Andy Montroll. In other words, voters prefered Andy Montroll over the actual winner, and the voters preferred Andy Montroll over every single other candidate on the ballot. Any round robin would have him win all the rounds. And the idotic non reasonable voting system did _not_ pick him. If you have a voting system that can't even resolve a Condorcet winner when there is no Condorcet cycle, we might as well go with first past the post. FPTP sucks, but it doesn't suck as much as Burlington's old election system.
It’s funny to immagine if the shuffle vote away implemented in 2016 and Harambe got pulled
I appreciate the explanations, however I feel like the evolution of voting systems hasn't been discussed and is strangely important (maybe a different video). The US system actually was a Multi-Winner system (the Pres and VP were # 1 and # 2 in the polls regardless of party) before the Spoils System lumped the Pres and VP as the same vote. As such, I'd like to see how voting systems have evolved to help understand and explain why Plurality is both 'The Worst' and 'The Most Common'. Honest question came to mind: is the Plurality system's dominance a case of the Prisoner's Dilemna in action?
The reason I bring that up is because a binary choice Plurality Vote cannot have 'Strategic Voting' even if you do count 'Not Voting' as a 3rd choice. In a binary Plurality Voting, if you don't vote for your preference, you will not get your preference so honesty is the only option. The reason a multi-candidate Plurarily vote is bad is because it will, over time, devolve into a bynary vote as strategic voting slowly eliminates alternative choices. And frankly the US system now isn't a pure binary choice as some states allow people to vote strategically thanks to Primaries in order to effect the General election.
Hmm...
I also wonder... what about voting systems in which the input is just a rating from 1-10 of each candidate? Then its clear if two candidates are close in preference (a 9 and 8) or if one is completely hated (a 9 and 1)
I might be ok with my second choice if its an 8, but would do anything to avoid a 1
"I also wonder... what about voting systems in which the input is just a rating from 1-10 of each candidate? "
this is strategically identical to approval voting. you vote 10 for every candidate you'd find acceptable, and 1 for ever candidate you dislike.
True. That makes sense. Maybe I would do 10s and 9s, because I really want candidate A (10), am ok with candidate B (9), but really don't want candidate C (1).
The reason to give B a 9 is so that *in the case of a tie between A and B*, I want A to have an edge. Maybe? Or maybe that doesn't quite make sense.
What about a constraint that you rank every candidate from 1-10, but you're not allowed to reuse numbers. Obviously there can't be more than 10 candidates. And when there's 10 candidates, it's the same as ranked choice. And it would be impractical to implement because what if someone fills out a paper ballot incorrectly and gives duplicate numbers. So I've talked myself out of this idea, but still.... what if?
@@LetsGetIntoItMedia best strategy in ratings voting is to give maximum rating to every candidate you rate above a threshold, and minimum rating to all others. The threshold is set to your expected utility of outcome. In your scenario, if the likelihood of a tie between your top two candidates is sufficiently high, that threshold will be between 9 and 10, and you should vote down your second favorite. But that's a special case in which the third candidate has a minuscule chance of winning, giving you a safe margin to do so. If your expected utility is 8.9, then candidate 3 is a significant threat, and you assign 10 to your top 2.
In your scenario, I would only vote 9 for my second choice only if my expected utility of outcome is exactly 9. In all other cases, a 0 or 10 for the second candidate is the vote recommended by strategy.
Ah yeah, makes total sense. It depends on the likelihood of ties, and the threat from other candidates. Good points!
I've seen a few nice videos about voting systems, but the topic is so deep, there's so much to learn! Thanks for explaining
so whIch system is the best? Let's take a vote...
Hand all the decisions to me, and we don't have to vote, understood?
I could go with that, with two caveats:
1. You only get to decide for a 5 year term period.
2. After your term, a vote is taken: Should you be allowed to live?
If a majority of the voters say No, then it is off with your head - guillotine style. Deal?
The initial election has a few issues. Setting aside the notion of homogeneous voter blocks, it is generally going to be very rare for the votes to be split in the manner that is displayed - it is far more likely that the banana monkeys would have avocado as their second preference (at least in the case of most left/right political systems), meaning avocado would get in.
the issue with this, is that you're coming from an american, FPTP system. Having "one winner" is unreasonable.
Doesn't this problem imply three or more options? Would a voting system where only two options are available not be considered reasonable?
When you have only two candidates, plurality voting is actually a great system that does not incentivize strategic voting. The theorem applies only if there are at least three candidates. Does it make sense?
@@PolylogCS Yeah it makes sense, I just found it weird that the theorem didn't specify.
You can make some people happy some of the time, but you can't make all people happy all the time.
No system of voting will satisfy everyone all the time, but I think approval voting is the best because it satisfies the most people possible at any given time.
Am I the only one who read, strategic vomiting in the thumbnail and was confused and intrigued?
I was curious to check out the worst voting systems on the list 16:49, but I was unable to find Fishburn's method of voting, just some drug related stuff. Could you provide some sources?
Not sure, wikipedia links to this stub. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landau_set
@@PolylogCSYeah, that's the thing… And »untrapped set« is just plain-text. Thank you for the reply anyway! Really cool video!
If knowing the voting system promotes strategy... what if you decided the voting system randomly AFTER votes were collected? That way strategy is impossible.
I know that Primer had a video on this as well.
I think the Dutch voting system is pretty good, but that is partially due to there being a sizeable amount of political parties to vote for. Unfortunately strategic voting is still a thing as the biggest party decides the other parties they want to join up with to form a government (together they need to have a majority of the votes in order to get laws through consistently) and bigger parties are more likely to get into the government. But all parties in the government need to be in agreement, and different parties have different levels of how much they're willing to compromise. Parties that aren't in the government are still part of the opposition, and still get to vote on whether laws get passed, but since the government has the majority they won't win.
The actual system is more complex than this, and I'm not an expert on it at all, for example I simplified it to needing to have a majority of the votes, but in reality you vote for candidates within political parties and the amount votes gets simplified to an amount of points with the total amount of points being 150. And there are two parliaments. There are some improvements that could be made, but overall it's pretty good.
I like the Borda method because the two rounds system we have in France gives too much power to radical minorities who end up being the arbiters between the front runners.
I feel like this is an argument for a republic (a collection of states with a multi-tiered system of government) over a federal democracy. It seems like the quality of voting will always improve by subdividing the electorate with government power pushed down in a multi-tiered system. This (IMHO) would be true over time when combined with barriers/cost for transition from one subdivision to another. In addition, I think it argues for a limited government and capitalism, were the most decisions are made individually (multiple outcomes vs. a single rule). I am curious to see, if future videos would provide a sound basis for conclusions to these hypotheses.
That's just the Electoral College with extra steps.
CGP Grey explained this thoroughly 12 years ago in like 3 videos.
What is this 2nd round you explain? That sounds like a bad system.
The 2nd choice is added to the first round if the first choice drops out of the race. There is no benefit to strategic voting that way.
He called it the Alternative Vote.
Or maybe there is but it would be a lot more convoluted.
What about a system with weighted votes? Your vote for your preferred candidate is worth 1, your vote for your second candidate is worth .5. This shrinks the problems with instant-runoff and encourages minorities to vote for their favorite candidate, even if he has a lower chance of winning. Maybe the exact values can be adjusted. Maybe your second favorite should get .75 votes. Maybe elections with more candidates could have you cast weighted votes to your top 5 candidates.
Or here's a radical idea: what if every monkey just enjoys his favorite fruit without the need to force his fruit on the whole population? Sure every monkey would be happier if they each had their own favorite, but that would be anarchy!
Just elect the representatives and let them govern. They get together however they like to elect a leader, not a president, or PM, or a winner per say. Just a leader of all representatives. You don't need apples, banana, or coco parties. Just elect representatives. They may group up in one way on some issues and form other majorities on other issues. The problem is a "reasonable" voting system. They are not reasonable if they result in nonfunctional governments that do not represent the voters. Change the system. Its the Parties that should be prohibited.
Loved the video. But the Vsauce sound was enough for me to laugh audibly and sub. Keep up the good content and thanks for the little chuckle.
Curious, could you have each monkey list their real vote and their strategic vote, then just use the results of the real vote?
Why is "strategic" voting "flawed" providing it is fair? Essentially all you are saying is given a multitude of options and only a single winner, people can strategically choose an outcome that may not be their top preference but would at least prevent their antipathetic option. I believe your premise is wrong in that stating any system that takes a continuous input (i.e. multiple options with a variable degree of preference for each option) that leads to a single winner is flawed if someone will not enter their preference honestly. I argue thusly: the voting system is designed to pick a winner, not a survey of someones preferences and therefore they would rather ensure a somewhat favourable outcome over a disfavourable outcome even if it is not their most desired outcome.
Yes, but we want to find the best candidate overall, not what any particular subset views as the best candidate. Strategic voting turns the game into an unsolvable mess because you have to anticipate the strategy of the other voters.
I like what your comment is pointing at: the thing we ultimately care about with voting systems is probably something like "how many voters are in the end unhappy about the result". E.g. if you elect the candidate with the least support, you clearly make lot of people unhappy. Empirically, it turns out that this is closely related to strategic voting. E.g., in plurality voting you have the issue of "spoiling candidates" which both leads to strategic voting and people being unhappy in the end.
Isn't approval voting pure strategic voting? It tries to turn strategic voting into a system strength instead of a weakness.
That randomized vote doesn't seem reasonable but it probably actually does quite well assuming we take enough sample from the ballot
Like to know how approval voting system would fair if all the systems were analysed and ranked thro other systems? Wonder approval will hold up?
Loved that you mentioned random system since it is likely most fair, at least it feels like whenever it's implemented in video games. But yeah no way it could realistically be implemented xd
I have an idea, have a hybrid of ranked choice and approval voting. You have two lists, one in which you rank candidates in who you like the most, and one one in which you dislike the most. How would you score that tho? I am still curious in how a hybrid of these two systems would work and look like tho.
Wouldn't it be the same list just in reverse?
Thanks for the video. Can you clarify the statement about independence of irrelevant alternatives and Arrow's theorem? From what I could find, "reasonableness" (i.e., majority criterion) is not a necessary condition for satisfying independence of irrelevant alternatives. See: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copeland%27s_method#Comparison_with_other_systems
My understanding is that Arrow's theorem states that no rank voting system can satisfy a set of fairness criteria for all voter profiles.
This is a great catch! We forgot to clarify that what we wrote as Arrow's theorem is again just a baby version of Arrow's theorem. In reality, Arrow's theorem uses the least restrictive definition of the word "reasonable" for which the conclusion still holds. You might enjoy our blog post that tries to clarify all this. Basically, although Arrow's theorem says that no system can satisfy a set of fairness criteria, I claim that a good way to think about it is that reasonable voting systems don't satisfy independence of irrelevant alternatives, under some definition of "reasonable". Does it make sense?
@@PolylogCS, thank you for your reply. I will checkout your blog. I look forward to viewing more of your content.
Just use a proportional system and force everyone to drink veritaserum befor entering the voting area, that way you are garantued to get an outcome that matches what is actualy wanted by most
nice. thanks. was reading that SAT solvers have been used, for example, to prrove Arrow's Theorem and to show other results in Fractional Social Theory (impossibility-wise). seems like there has been quite a leap in their capability. seen a few popular science articles on the attention-grabbing side but struggled with looking in more detail (too many acronyms IMHO [ok not funny]). seriously tho, how we get from DPLL to CDCL and on and on is beyond me!)
That sounds cool. I haven't heard of it, and I don't see directly hwo to do it, however usage of SAT solvers makes sense in combinatorics-like research, they also helped me with a result in my PhD.
I would like to distinguish the SAT solving algorithms (simple DPLL, or CDCL which usually does the magic), and their application. People who use SAT solvers don't need to think of them in terms of the underlying algorithm, rather as blackboxes that can in practice often answer NP-complete problems. So in the example of a voting system, if you select a particular voting system (e.g. two-round election), you could encode true preferences of individual voters using boolean variables, and state a boolean formula in these variables requiring that a particular voter is incentivized to vote strategically. Then you can ask a SAT solver to find a solution of such formula -- an example where a voter has such incentive. So I can imagine using a SAT solver for finding some examples like that, on the other hand, I don't think that NP-complete language would be strong enough to help with such theorems in full generality, rather it could show researchers some useful examples they can then attempt to generalize.
@@procdalsinazev yeah thanks. I think the idea, from what I've read, though it is beyond my understanding, and comes via the wikipedia page on SAT solvers which has little information on the "how" straight into high-level academic papers, is, presumably like in the 4-color problem, to reduce everything to some kind of minimal instance set, then just use SAT solvers to "solve" that, rather than to write some kind of "specific program". I think the thing about the "new wave" is that they are "good" at both ends: proving satisfy and non-satisfy. I've watched a few simple videos on here that I could find, like "A peek inside SAT sovlers - Jon Smock" and "look ahed sat solvers: smart vs fast" with Marijn Heule.
Can you make a video about the Schulze method of voting? It's the voting system we use in our university's fraternity to make decisions with more than 2 options. Usually it spits out the "most mild" option. I'd be interested to see an analysis.
The wikipedia article (but feel free to use other sources as well, obviously): en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schulze_method
Probably not anytime soon, but we actually have it in a list of possible topics because it is a nice algorithm. Thanks for the tip!
OH why did it take me so long to realise the title didn’t say strategic vomiting 🥲
I love how the US electoral college does not satisfy these requirements to be considered a "reasonable voting system."
Yeah, even actual reasonable systems like Borda count don't satisfy it, our definition of "reasonable voting system" frankly sucks :). You can check out our blog post that discusses it.
The electoral college is actually a good thing. Pure majority rule is horrible.
The error introduced by the electoral college is what, 1 or 2%? The error result of plurality or runoff voting is an order of magnitude greater.
@@massimo4307I hate how much I can believe that.
@@massimo4307 Minority rule is even worse! The biggest real effect of the EC is to give massive power to a minority of swing state voters. Marginal votes in Pennsylvania are tens of thousands of times more valuable than votes in Wyoming, according to voter power indices, so presidential candidates campaign in PA (and other swing states) and make promises to swing state voters, ignoring other voters, and this affects national policy. That's why the US seems to care more about rust belt fracking than the fires and droughts in CA or the plight of the deep south.
Under popular vote, everyone in the country would be equally important to appeal to (whether in rural or city, swing state and not), and power would still switch back and forth between the two parties, if that's what you're worried about, because candidates would shift their strategy to appeal to the most votes, until voters are split roughly 50/50 again as they are now.
So many people are unaware of the very existence of voting theory (aka social choice). This should be taught in school because our entire society relies on how much trust people put on election results. And this trust is eroding very fast
People aren't distrusting voting systems because of tactical voting, they are distrusting voting systems due to attacks on the integrity of the government, from both within and without.
It’s a subtopic of game theory, which is already rarely taught in schools. For most people, they’ll never know about it, and even for those who do learn some, the most they’ll get is the Prisoner’s Dilemma. This isn’t exactly an easy topic to cover and I don’t expect it to be except at the most abstracted and babied-down level in a government class.
We are taught that "voting = freedom" and many can't think past that indoctrination.
Yeah that wont happen because the ruling class would never teach people about politics or they might stop making profit and capitalist propaganda wouldnt be as effective
Yeah, but even in the first example you must assume that banana votes for coconut 1;1 for it to hold true (in the two part section). That is never honestly true, and was just generalized and moved past. Even if you are talking about ranked, or star, or whatever ranking system, a run off is not guaranteed to produce those outcomes unless only one ballot can be cast at the beginning of the election. Then it wouldn't really be a runoff, just a consensus win. If people understand that going into the process it will change their calculus and the example still falls apart. Not everyone will use all of the lines... Unless it's mandated, and then it's not really a choice now is it...
This should be taught on high school math, so everybody knows about the flaws of voting systems
Thanks, I also think this should be common knowledge.
that would make a great cross topic set of lesson.
Start is social studies, go over to math and tie it back to history.
You vastly overestimate how many people would actually understand or care about it.
Which is why it will never even be hinted at in the education systems of those countries on the List of Shame
It's not that voting systems are flawed, it's that humans vote on stuff in the first place, just let those who are good at leading, do the leading and, let the sheep follow in their tracks.
Dictatorships are always the best political systems after all, be them military dictatorships, instated by the US... Chile and Pinochet's Junta for example, don't mind the human rights violations.. they were sponsored by taxes after all and the US War Machine...
or Absolute Monarchies, like Saudi-Arabia, don't worry about human rights, we got oil, and you want it, here's an idea...
Let's shut down nuclear power plants and turn to wind and solar and hydro, and then as these are shite useless technology that has no use at all, people would need to buy more oil, coal and gas, which means we can line our pockets deeper, while extorting the general populace.
Ah history, anyways, time for more modern stuff, let's put an Oil Company in power over an entire African nation and it's government and military. Shell PLC perhaps... It's interesting how far bribes can get you...
Or you could rig an election, I mean you could have 247% voter turnout, you could do some ballot harvesting and other illegal stuff, then when the opposition questions how you got all them votes, call them conspiracy theorists, then take them to court in Georgia, and accusing them of racketeering for some reason. Because one can't deal with the opposition with the good old means of the past, it would rouse too much suspicions about it... Ain't want another CIA Presidential Assassination... 1 JFK is enough.
Ah, politics, the worst thing that has happened to mankind ever, it was better in the good old day, when you just removed the unwanted from societal participation via less than amiable means. It was a lot better for societal cohesion as well.
To be fair, the random voting system was used in one of the longest lasting voting systems ever used: the venetian voting system.
Apparently the randomness existed to hide corruption...
@@eyescreamcakeor prevent it. You can't bribe a voter unless you know which voter is the one that matters.
@@rsm3t Bribe all the voters.
Push policies which sound good on paper but actually keep them poor.
Work with your political rivals; Let them be villains for those voting for you, and you a villain for those voting for them.
Keep the audience caught in the emotion, the rivalries, the "Sport" of politics - Not the policies.
Better yet, if something really bad happens and no-one can be the fall guy, just blame it on the 'bad luck' the system enables. Worst case scenario; Nobody needs to be at fault.
Some randomly selected elements nobody could possibly account for throwing a wrench in your totally good natured plans ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Make the voters easier to bribe and dependent on your "help" , but they never actually receive what they want or need due to your 'rivals' and 'bad luck'
@@TheGaboom It's expensive to bribe all the voters.
Sortition is the method by which we pick juries for trials in the United States and, while there can be flaws in the jury system, it's pretty solid over all.
thankfully, voting methods like approval voting, score voting, and star voting are extremely resistant to strategy. this is explained in the excellent book "gaming the vote" by william poundstone.
I agree these are good systems! Another class of great voting systems are so-called Condorcet methods. With approval voting, you sometimes still see a game of chicken, but with star voting I really find it hard to imagine how that can lead to strategic voting.
@@PolylogCS Seems to me the runoff round of STAR brings you directly into the scenario described at the start of the video? That is, if there's a condorcet cycle, you do NOT want the final runoff to be a matchup between your favorite and the choice that beats your favorite, even if that means keeping your favorite out of the running to prevent that scenario.
@@PolylogCS Every consensus-seeking voting method that allows voters to support multiple candidates simultaneously suffers from that "game of chicken scenario". It's not exactly a flaw, it's a risk. Cooperation between potentially allied factions is a desirable thing, but trying to eliminate potential betrayals generally (see below) means you have to eliminate cooperation altogether.
This the idea behind Instant-Runoff Voting (AKA Ranked Choice Voting): you assume every single voter is as strategic as possible by default, only supporting their current favorite and nobody else until that candidate is removed by force. This is why this voting method is often claimed to be "resistant to strategy", but the reality is that it just forces everyone to be as strategical as possible by default (given the motivation of strategy under other voting methods, that's what it is). So there's no "chicken dilemma" because there's no cooperation at all.
The only counter-example I know of to the above concerns is "Reciprocal Score Voting", which is a proof-of-concept system I created explicitly to exemplify these ideas. It rewards mutual cooperation between factions, and penalizes factions which betray one another. So you mostly deal with the "chicken dilemma", because betrayal is pointless. Factions that are true opponents are unaffected. But it's a complex system, not intended for real-world use.
@@PolylogCS Star voting can quite easily lead to strategic voting.
Say before your vote the top 3 candidates are A, B and C.
A is your first preference, B is your second and C is your third.
If you give 5 points to A, 4 points to B and 3 points to C, then A and B goes to the final round and B wins.
But if you instead give 0 points to B, then A and C go to the final round and A wins.
This could also work the other way where if C goes to the final round then C wins. If it is just A and B then B wins.
So you are incentivised to drop your vote from C down from 3 to 0 to keep it out of the final round. Possibly even changing your preference between A and B to make sure they go in.
Approval voting, score voting, and star voting are extremely rubbish at indicating disapproval.
One problem with these mathematical approaches is that they assume voters have a ranked preference. In reality, voters typically do not have that. The average voter might classify their candidates in 3 tiers: preferred, acceptable and objectionable, with little differentiation within the categories. Any further ordering is basically random (or noise, from an information point of view). This is why systems like approval voting have an advantage: they more closely capture voter preference.
It also assumes that each voter is motivated “towards” each item in the preference ordering, and some are just preferred higher. In practice many voters will instead be motivated “away” from certain items.
A voter that ranks ABC for preference when all three are positively considered, but C is just the least positive, is different to ABC when C is absolutely hated in all circumstances. In the latter there is an incentive towards a different strategic behaviour, partly touched on (although not expanded upon) by this video.
@@kelly4187 agreed, that's what I call the objectionable category. Approval voting allows voters to indicate which candidates they positively approve of, and the rest are negative. The winner is then the candidate which is agreeable to the largest group.
@@kelly4187 I made a comment in the blog:
What about something like STAR but with fibbonaci sequence (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8) and negatives half the size of the sequence (-1, -1, -2) and where you can't give the same score to multiple candidates? This way you can punish (being bad will make you worse than being unknown), but not to a huge degree (you can't give everyone a negative). Of course there could still be some strategic voting (voting 5 instead of 8) but it would be quite diminished.
Under this system, say there are some more candidates, DE that nobody cares about. The first voter would vote A(8) B(5) C(3) D(0) E(0), the second would vote A(8) B(5) D(0) E(0) C(-2).
As for ties, the winner is the one with more points in the best positive category (8), if that is also a tie, the one with least points in the last negative category (-2), if also a tie, the one the second best category (5), then second last (-1), etc. It's only a true tie if they have the exact same number of votes in all categories.
In case of a true tie the candidates face each other in a all-vs-all no quarters hunger games competition :D
I want to see an analysis of an up or down voting system.
Each voter gets exactly one vote. They can either choose to vote for a candidate they like increasing the candidate's vote total by one, an up vote, or vote against a candidate that they dislike and decrease that candidate's vote total by one, a down vote.
Inspired by the common complaint of people feeling like they must vote for the lesser of two evils, this instead gives the option to vote against the greater evil and gives candidates that people truly believe in to rise up.
Intresting idea. Some general observations: in a two candidate system this is identical to FPTP. If there are more than two candidates a down vote acts as an up vote for all other candidates. Due to this, this voting system might tend towards a W shaped curve, where either centrists or very obscure candidates get elected due to the lack of down votes for them.
@Glass-vf8il yes, giving third party candidates a real chance a victory is one of the things I see as an advantage to the system.
@@Harkmagic As a Centrist Moderate Independent, I vote up.
@@Glass-vf8il We did not mention it, but if you have just two candidates, FPTP is kind of the only reasonable thing to do, so every reasonable system should reduce to FPTP there.
This idea reminds me of this method en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D21_%E2%80%93_Jane%C4%8Dek_method that is trying to do something similar, while keeping that you are supposed to give more positive than negative votes.
Actually, Arrow’s Theorem only applies to ordinal voting systems (where voters can only express their order of preference). Cardinal voting systems (where you can also say how much you like and dislike any given option) are a different matter. And indeed, price formation in an ideal market can be considered a cardinal voting system.
We said that in the video, right?
Also, price formation in markets is a bit more complicated mechanism because everybody has a different amount of money, but I like how you are drawing the connection -- voting theory is just a special case of mechanism design!
That’s just what I was about to comment on, only your explanation is better stated. :) For example in either score voting or STAR voting I would give avacado 0 points , banana 5 points, and coconut 4 points because I would be happy with either a banana or a cononut with a slight preference for a banana but I _really_ don’t like avacados.
@@PolylogCSyou implied it, but never specified what kinds of systems G-S applies to where Arrow’s doesn’t.
@@trevinbeattie4888
Sounds like you are not voting optimally, you should give coconut and banana both 5 to get the best chance of avoiding avocado since that is your main priority. This is my problem with cardinal voting proponents, they don't acknowledge that in practice cardinal voting requires more strategy than ordinal (and disenfranchises voters who don't understand the strategy, unlike condorcet ordinal systems where strategy is only relevant in extreme edge cases)
@@oliverwilson11 STAR has that runoff round where your vote gets ignored if you gave both finalists the same score, so there's some reason to use the 4 and 1 numbers there.
What happens if you ask everyone to vote not knowing what the voting system is, and then randomly select a reasonable voting system after all the ballots are cast?
Then you become GOD as you can ultimately decide the winner in anything resembling a close race.
because you are the only person who matters (dictator) because based on what voting system you choose could completely change the result
Would a random choice from a set of reasonable voting systems with different methods of distributing spent votes constitute a reasonable voting system? It looks like one of the axioms for the law is that voters can predict how votes are distributed by the system. If you violate this axiom, it seems like the law no longer holds.
@@zen_tewmbs That's why it's random
That's why it's random@@Cheasle2
Idea: use a voting system which is simply a culmination of the results of 10 or more established voting systems. collect a ranked list of a select number of fruits and convert that into every voting system’s input. Then, use ANOTHER voting system on those results until a winner is found. The only downside is all the confusion and red tape!😁
xD
if each voting system comes up with a different winner, which voting system do you use to determine the winner?
@@jonathanodude6660 The one who won the most voting systems
@@geenkaas6380 you’re seriously going to use first past the post to determine the winner after all that? 😭
@@jonathanodude6660 No I am personaly a fan of a system wich works as that there are 150 seats in parlement and if you get enough votes for 1 seat you get 1 seat in the parlement
I saw the title real fast and thought it said "vomiting" and quickly made up my mind about this being a video explaining how we evolved vomiting as primates and how that helped us evolve
Saw this again on my feed two months later and my brain read "Strategic Vomiting" AGAIN
and you clicked on the video 😂😭
@@JaimeareRainey twice
What if every monkey wrote their favorite fruit and we randomly selected a ballot to be the winner
POV: I didn't watch the entire video before commenting
That would be a schocastic version of first past the post. It would also eliminate the abililty to represent second preferences
@@gregoryfenn1462Although it superficially resembles first past the post, it has NONE of FPTP's downsides, and has some different downsides of its own.
The fact that it becomes completely unnecessary to represent second preferences is actually one of its upsides!
One of biggest downsides: You get total psycho elected cause 1 monkey out of 1000 voted for him
@@koteghe7600 I feel like that is a better problem than most people have right now.
The problem lies in thinking that a single winner-takes-all vote can comprise the entirety of democracy. There's a reason voting is considered the minimum responsibility of a citizen.
I never vote. They end up making the same garbage decisions no mater who gets elected. Voting is pointless. Just look at the US, who switches between two sides every 4th year. Does it really matter which 4 years are to one side and which 4 years are to the other side? The reason they keep voting for the opposite side is that they both suck, and they want to get rid of what is currently there. Apparently they never realize that what they get instead is not better.
The fact that the avocado monkeys voted for their known second choice to avoid their third is a good thing. They are sacrificing their favorite so that their second favorite wins, and the most voters are happy (7 vs 2)
I like how you are implicitly questioning whether we should care about strategic voting. We are discussing it a bit in the blog post.
@@PolylogCS The key factor on if Strategic Voting is good or not is the motivation.
Like if you strategically vote in a way that would get a terrible choice as the winner, because you think it is funny.
Sorry if i'm misunderstanding something here but wouldn't that be very similar to approval voting in that sense that the metric is most people happy(ish)
the avocado mokeys would also approve of banans which would make bananas win 7 vs 2
@@ebentually
Exactly.
But what happens if everyone voted strategically? Or worse, voted for their least favorite option as a gag?
@@ebentually The coconut monkeys could then strategically not approve of avocados, even if they tolerate them, so their first choice, coconuts, wins. Approval voting has the issue that if you approve all or disapprove of all candidates that have a chance of winning, then you wasted your vote. This incentives you to strategically either not approve of a candidate you like, because you like his opposition slightly less or to approve of a candidate you don't like because you hate their opposition slightly more.
What if we used science to take the candidates and construct a randomised monster candidate based on a ratio of all votes?
Avonananut?
Bacocodo?
Cocadona?
Simplicity is _not_ a flaw. It's a form of transparency that allows people of all levels of intelligence to feel confident the outcome of a vote is legitimate. This is a challenge with so many alternative voting systems, if it adds any sort of complexity it begins to feel like the system is being gamed to harm one group or another.
Unfortunately, the people who feel harmed are also the most likely to get very angry and frustrated.
I love the idea of instant-run off voting but I see most people I know uncomfortable with this "new fangled" idea because it is way more complicated relative to first-past the post.
The only reasonable choice I've been able to come up with that preserves legitimacy while granting better results is a combination system: ranked-choice primaries but two candidate run-offs for the final, separate, vote. *You cannot underestimate the importance* of having a system that *feels* legitimate because it is transparent and easy to understand.
And I think most people would prefer to have the cost of multiple-round voting to feel, in their bones, that the system is legitimate.
If you can't understand instant run-off voting you're not intelligent or knowledgable enough to vote at all. Its not very complicated at all
It’s also a flaw to cater to lowest common denominator so to speak
@@Speedster___I agree so much with this but there is nuance here. I don't think this is catering or pandering. It's confidence building. And it has the virtue of keeping people focused on who the leaders are and what they actually did or not do instead of trying to assail the system that elected them.
We shouldn't ignore those benefits.
@@x--. even without multiple voting systems you still get cranks. Makes me think speed accuracy and transparency matter way more for confidence then system used
It is not hard to determine results in all voting systems. And being simple doesn't make something better or worse. It is mathematically untrue, that "most votes win" systems represent the highest number/majority of what people want. It represents the largest group of people that choose one winner, which means that on average two thirds of people are not represented by them. This is because one third can be the largest group, but that means that the other two thirds _did not vote for_ the winner.
Awesome video! I'd lovw to build a website where people can play around with setting up different inputs, and try different voting systems
I was watching this going "I hope he mentions the Approval Voting system..." and you did!
I live in Scotland, and yes, I really wish we could throw out the disastrous FPTP for our UK parliament elections, but at least we get AMS for our devolved parliament, and STV for our local elections. But we cling on to it for many reasons (the big parties have no incentive to change, ignorance about how voting works, belief that it gives better outcomes etc.). Glad to see it's just as disliked by voting theory experts.
I recall the UK had a referendum on ranked voting in 2011 and voters soundly rejected the proposal. This also wasn't a regional thing as Scotland itself rejected it in a landslide.
There's only one thing I dislike about Scotland, and that is the haughty English that live next door. My least favorite people. Keep the faith brothers, it's about to get good.
"This was supposed to be a random fruit, not banana" got me :D
Excluding situations where a Condorcet paradox exists (which I think would be very unlikely in a vote with millions of ballots), to me it seems like the Condorcet method is the best system because strategic voting is usually unlikely to be helpful
It's also nice because it tends to elect moderate candidates that everyone is at least okay with, and does so in an obvious way.
Imagine how much happier Republicans in the US would be if Bernie Sanders was also an option in the 2020 general election, and they ranked Biden over Bernie, and they were successful in keeping Bernie out of the presidency. Having a winner who most people see as "not the worst" is a powerful thing.
@@brandonm949 This is a great point. The main "strategy" in approval voting is to vote for everyone except the one you absolutely can't abide. And while that's not ideal, it will still probably result in an outcome that everyone is generally kinda okay with. The other advantage is that since there isn't a strategic advantage to NOT vote for your favorite, there is no regression to two parties - and the more candidates there are, the less strategic voting matters because there are more people in both the acceptable and unacceptable category.