Francois Armand

• Francois Armand 13 Jul 2018 16:37 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Jameson Quinn’s comment on: A vot­ing the­ory primer for rationalists

  By the way, just to be sure I understood correctly: 3-2-1 is a summable voting method and so is not subject to that risk?

  If so, it seems to be definitly the best voting method available.

• Francois Armand 13 Jul 2018 16:29 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Francois Armand’s comment on: A vot­ing the­ory primer for rationalists

  Obviously, you did it somewhere, and now that I navigated a little bit more in the mass of very good documents you produced, I can point towards:

  • http://​​electology.github.io/​​vse-sim/​​VSE/​​ for the code repository, with a long explanation, of a statistical test of a lot of methods. That implies that we have the actual code to understand:

    • the model used (for voters preferences and strategies—extremely interesting!)

    • the actual algorithmic definition of all the methods

    • nice VSE graph for each method :)

  • http://​​electology.github.io/​​vse-sim/​​VSEbasic/​​ which is a nice summary of the main methods.

  Also, I wanted to point out that there was a big real life test of a variant of score voting (with 6 score from “reject” to “very good”) before french presidential election in 2017: https://​​articles.laprimaire.org/​​l%C3%A9lection-pr%C3%A9sidentielle-au-jugement-majoritaire-les-r%C3%A9sultats-373e089315a4

  (sorry in French).

  The scrutin was a little complex, with a first tour with 16 candidates and >10k voters. Each voter was presented a random set of 5 candidates and was asked for evaluation of each candidate project on ~10 aspects (your clusters) (each time with the 6 states scale) (see https://​​articles.laprimaire.org/​​r%C3%A9sultats-du-1er-tour-de-laprimaire-org-c8fe612b64cb). Smart contracts on ethereum were used to register votes.

  Then a second round took the 5 bests candidates, and more than 30k voters ranked them. (https://​​articles.laprimaire.org/​​r%C3%A9sultats-du-2nd-tour-de-laprimaire-org-2d61b2ad1394)

  It was a real pleasure to participate to it because you really try to estimate each candidate project, and you don’t try to be strategic.

  But it does not seems possible in real life major elections (like French or USA presidential), because it requires quite a lot of time and will from voters.

• Francois Armand 9 Jul 2018 8:20 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Jameson Quinn’s comment on: A vot­ing the­ory primer for rationalists

  Thanks.

  As fall of democracies goes, it seems that auditability is a better properties to have than anonymity (because when the totalitariam regime is sufficiently powerful to openly threat people, anonymity most certainly doesn’t matter anymore. But on a working democracy, people need to be sure of the transparency of the system to believe and accept it).

  Is there a place where all these methods are formally defined in a comparable way?

  I’m a little lost with all the acronym, and having all of them in a big table with their algorithm & properties would be extremelly useful.

• Francois Armand 6 Jul 2018 10:58 UTC

  1 point

  on: A vot­ing the­ory primer for rationalists

  Hello,

  Thank you for that very insightful article.

  Sorry to post a question so long after its publication, I hope it will reach you. I’m wondering how all these methods stands for anonimity of voters, I’m explaining: in most election, there is a lot of candidats (at leat, it’s the case in France, where for example the last 1st round of Presidential election had 11 voters. That leads to a lot of unique permutation (for example, with Approval, we can encode 2^11 = 2048 states, for a fully sorted algo we get 11!, etc). In France, votes are organized in small polling station of generally less than 2000 people.

  So it seems that a bad actor would be able to threat people to vote for someone, forcing them to vote for a special encoding, and that just by comparing the number of total vote for that encoding, the bad actor would get a good guess about the actual vote of the threaten people.

  Is there any electoral algorithms robust againts that threat vector?

  Thanks,