[python-committers] Vote on governance will happen between Nov 16 (original) (raw)

Alex Martelli aleax at google.com
Tue Oct 23 12:51:00 EDT 2018

While I suspect most participants are aware of this, just in care some don't I thought I'd just point out that it's futile to look for a "perfect" voting system -- Kenneth Arrow proved that long ago, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theorem

Alex

On Tue, Oct 23, 2018 at 9:08 AM Tim Peters <tim.peters at gmail.com> wrote:

[Donald Stufft <donald at stufft.io>]

... I’m struggling to find a resource besides that doesn’t also include shilling for another voting system or isn’t a lengthy paper but https://rangevoting.org/IRVpartic.html gives an example and https://rangevoting.org/TarrIrv.html is a more complex example.

The rangevoting site has a great deal of info about all sorts of voting systems. Over a decade ago, Ka-Ping Yee (who used to be very active in Python development) ran some visual voting simulations on 5 popular systems, which scared him (& me) away from IRV forever: http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/ """ The following images visually demonstrate how Plurality penalizes centrist candidates and Borda favours them; how Approval and Condorcet yield nearly identical results; and how the Hare method yields extremely strange behaviour. Alarmingly, the Hare method (also known as "IRV") is gaining momentum as the most popular type of election-method reform in the United States (in Berkeley, Oakland, and just last November in San Francisco, for example). """ That said, in the absence of political factions maneuvering to increase their own power over time, with money and marketing clout to persuade voters to play along, I'm not much concerned about the system used for a one-shot vote. Even if we all strive to be as "strategic" and/or "tactical" as possible, we'll all be pushing in different directions. One massive (to my eyes) advantage of range voting is that it never pays to give your true favorite less than your top score, or your true least-favorite more than your bottom score. (Note: the "approval voting" used for PSF elections is essentially range voting limited to two possible scores - and it should be very easy in that context to see that it can't pay to approve a candidate you don't approve of, or vice versa.)

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