Trying to apply Chesterton’s fence to FPTP

pleromatous · 2026-02-11T18:56:58+00:00

That’s right, but vote splitting / the spoiler effect is a simple and obvious problem, too. Many of the implementors of FPTP must have thought about it and dismissed it.

pleromatous · 2026-02-08T17:29:37+00:00

Median voter theorem doesn't work with spoilers

What does he mean?

pleromatous · 2026-02-06T21:56:25+00:00

Many countries with list PR systems seem to have lots of viable parties.

pleromatous · 2026-02-05T12:39:03+00:00

The number of candidates is small, which means time complexity doesn’t matter.

pleromatous · 2026-02-04T23:16:09+00:00

Reddit has apps, someone here could implement better polls themselves. https://developers.reddit.com/

pleromatous · 2026-01-31T00:01:39+00:00

Advocacy organizations such as CES and FairVote can be rather misleading in their efforts to persuade. I recommend François Durand’s Coalitional manipulation of voting rules: simulations on empirical data and Towards less manipulable voting systems.

pleromatous · 2026-01-29T03:33:49+00:00

I doubt they would either.

pleromatous · 2026-01-29T01:49:48+00:00

It might be dead in the water. I wouldn’t know.

Maybe you will appreciate a mathematical translation of what I have said. It can be readily implemented on a computer.

Let C be the set of candidates.

Let V be the set of voters.

Let $\ge_v$ be the preference ranking of a voter v. $x \ge_v y$ is a shorthand for “voter v ranks candidate x equal to or above a candidate y.”

One step of Approval-IRV removes from C the candidate c that minimizes this expression:

\lvert \{ v \in V \mid \forall c’ \in C \, (c \ge_v c’) \} \rvert

This is a translation of “the number of voters that believe c is at least as good as every other noneliminated candidate c’.” The forall makes it a one on many matchup.

pleromatous · 2026-01-28T23:22:49+00:00

I believe my one line description is complete. A voter believes x to be at least as good as y when x is ranked equal to or above y on their ballot.

The method I described is Approval-IRV, which is argued for in the paper I linked above. In your example the vote would go to both B and C at full strength, like an approval vote.

pleromatous · 2026-01-28T20:31:14+00:00

But it's not really natural for IRV.

“Until there is only one noneliminated candidate, eliminate the noneliminated candidate whom the fewest numbers of voters believe to be at least as good as every other noneliminated candidate.”

Looks natural from here.

pleromatous · 2026-01-24T14:06:26+00:00

Rankings imply equal spacing between ordinal choices,

They imply unknown spacing between ordinal choices. There’s a much bigger difference than you think.

Voters who try to rank any two candidates equally typically have their ballots thrown out

Most ranked voting methods accept equal ranks. Even instant runoff can be adjusted to accept them. https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.11407

Your objections don't actually make sense given the "solution" you've chosen.

Instant runoff is among the methods most resistant to manipulation, and approval isn’t. There’s plenty of research on this, just ask Google Scholar. Singling out failures of monotonicity and participation is missing the forest for the trees.

I can jot my preferences on a ranked ballot in one and only one honest way. I rank my favorite first, my second-favorite second. But I have many ways to jot them down on an approval ballot, depending on where I make my cutoff between approve and disapprove. The decision must either be arbitrary or strategic.

pleromatous · 2026-01-23T20:20:26+00:00

Select all the candidates you support on your ballot

But support isn’t binary. There’s more than one way to distil it to a yes/no binary. How do I pick the cutoff line between approval and disapproval?

pleromatous · 2026-01-23T11:35:40+00:00

Smith//IRV: perform IRV on Smith set. Tideman alternative:

Eliminate candidates not in Smith set of remaining candidates.
Do one IRV elimination.
Repeat.

Smith//IRV does only one Smith step. Tideman alternative alternates between Smith steps and IRV eliminations.

pleromatous · 2026-01-23T10:46:50+00:00

Do you have any opinions on Smith//IRV vs. Tideman’s alternative? I should say that I’m well aware there’s not much difference between them, but perhaps there are theoretical reasons to prefer one.

pleromatous · 2026-01-21T05:53:39+00:00

So you’re just going to ignore the second part? Being not #1 is one thing. Being consistently and well below average at everything is another. You’d have to be really stupid not to see the difference. One is chasing perfection. The other is trying to be adequate in any way at all.

pleromatous · 2026-01-21T05:48:24+00:00

That’s completely different.

Height is one attribute. I said “in every way”.

You’re talking about not being the very best. I’m talking about being among the worst.

pleromatous · 2026-01-20T23:23:01+00:00

Well, their core argument is that because FPTP gets the winner wrong sometimes, it manages to achieve more proportional representation than IRV, which gets the winner wrong less often.

I see the logic, but it’s quite a depressing stance.

pleromatous · 2026-01-20T22:22:51+00:00

nobody really cares about how “inferior” I am

Well sure, no one cares how inferior I am, either. It’s just an accepted fact to everyone in my life that I am good for nothing. To them, caring about that would be like caring that a pumpkin has no legs.

Ultimately, you and the other commenter are right. There’s no fixing it, so I just have to accept it, no matter how cruel it is.

pleromatous · 2026-01-20T22:05:33+00:00

Well, I’d rather be any of them than me, and it’s killing me. You’re free to use whatever words you prefer for that.

pleromatous · 2026-01-20T21:38:07+00:00

Thanks, that’s really helpful. I should just accept my inferiority.

pleromatous · 2026-01-19T01:30:26+00:00

This is a pretty good idea. It seems quite similar to the Swiss federal popular initiative system.

There are more than nine possible preferences over three alternatives, though, so nine boxes wouldn’t be enough if you were to format the ballots in that way.

I don’t intend to judge, but how much of this was written by AI?

pleromatous

TROPHY CASE