I’m curious about the question of wasted votes. In the link you provide to explain PLACE, it talks about wasted votes a lot. My understanding is this:
1) Under the loose definition, any vote not for the winning candidate is wasted.
2) Under the strict definition, any vote not needed to win is also wasted.
This is deeply unintuitive to me. Just inferring from the above, this suggests that what should be done is to calculate the least-worst smallest-majority candidate, and then everyone else stays home. The direct implication is that votes are intrinsically worthless, which seems weird. As a term-of-art it seems to be so heavily dependent on FPTP as to be inapplicable elsewhere.
Am I reading too much into it, and it just basically means ‘the badness of FPTP’? How prevalent is this concept in distinguishing between voting systems, in your view?
Has it undergone any recent changes, for example as a result of the voting utility calculations when comparing different decision theory agents?
This is a very good question. I have a friend who’s working on making a rigorous definition for “wasted votes” that squares with your rough understanding, and she’s a smart, professional mathematician; if it were trivial, she’d have solved it in 10 minutes.
You are basically right about your understanding and intuition. In particular, under FPTP, “wasted votes” includes anybody who doesn’t support a winner, and some of those who do. But note that in a multi-winner voting method, it’s possible to ensure that a supermajority of votes have some say in picking the winner. For instance, if all ballots are full strict rankings, under STV only 1 Droop quota are wasted; for 19 winners, that would be just 5%.
This is an active area of research and I hope to be able to come back to your comment a year or so from now and have a better answer.
In principle, I agree with your point that the concept of wasted votes seems pretty incoherent.
In practice, I have frequently felt somewhat bad over having voted for someone in a way which feels like it “wasted” my vote. Despite knowing that this makes no sense.
So I know this is a common feeling, but I have never felt that way. To provide some intuition for the other way, consider the concept of the popular mandate: when a President or Governor in the United States wins by a large margin, they have extra political capital for driving their agenda.
Importantly this political capital is spent among other elites, so at the very least other elected officials are prone to treat it as significant.
It seems obvious to me that voting is an information-bearing signal, but something must be amiss here because I appear to be in a small minority and without agreement from experts.
I’m curious about the question of wasted votes. In the link you provide to explain PLACE, it talks about wasted votes a lot. My understanding is this:
1) Under the loose definition, any vote not for the winning candidate is wasted.
2) Under the strict definition, any vote not needed to win is also wasted.
This is deeply unintuitive to me. Just inferring from the above, this suggests that what should be done is to calculate the least-worst smallest-majority candidate, and then everyone else stays home. The direct implication is that votes are intrinsically worthless, which seems weird. As a term-of-art it seems to be so heavily dependent on FPTP as to be inapplicable elsewhere.
Am I reading too much into it, and it just basically means ‘the badness of FPTP’? How prevalent is this concept in distinguishing between voting systems, in your view?
Has it undergone any recent changes, for example as a result of the voting utility calculations when comparing different decision theory agents?
This is a very good question. I have a friend who’s working on making a rigorous definition for “wasted votes” that squares with your rough understanding, and she’s a smart, professional mathematician; if it were trivial, she’d have solved it in 10 minutes.
You are basically right about your understanding and intuition. In particular, under FPTP, “wasted votes” includes anybody who doesn’t support a winner, and some of those who do. But note that in a multi-winner voting method, it’s possible to ensure that a supermajority of votes have some say in picking the winner. For instance, if all ballots are full strict rankings, under STV only 1 Droop quota are wasted; for 19 winners, that would be just 5%.
This is an active area of research and I hope to be able to come back to your comment a year or so from now and have a better answer.
(ps. It’s PLACE, not PACE.)
Oops, typo. Fixed!
In principle, I agree with your point that the concept of wasted votes seems pretty incoherent.
In practice, I have frequently felt somewhat bad over having voted for someone in a way which feels like it “wasted” my vote. Despite knowing that this makes no sense.
I’m guessing something-something-tribal-instincts-that-want-to-place-you-in-the-same-coalition-as-the-guys-with-the-most-power-something-something.
So I know this is a common feeling, but I have never felt that way. To provide some intuition for the other way, consider the concept of the popular mandate: when a President or Governor in the United States wins by a large margin, they have extra political capital for driving their agenda.
Importantly this political capital is spent among other elites, so at the very least other elected officials are prone to treat it as significant.
It seems obvious to me that voting is an information-bearing signal, but something must be amiss here because I appear to be in a small minority and without agreement from experts.