Re: [wsbpel-reqts] Approval Voting

["Yaron Y. Goland" <ygoland@bea.com>]

Hey, if you are willing to live with the complexity then I think using 
Condorcet voting would be OUTSTANDING! But we will need a way to deal 
with the very unlikely possibility of a tie.

Diane Jordan wrote:
> I've read the site - it makes very good points about anomalies of STV/IRV. 
>  After thinking about the approval voting approach, I'm uncomfortable telling 
> our members to treat all choices that they could live with equally in a vote - 
> given the strengths of opinions on the TC, I'm not sure this would work well.  
> 
> This web site goes into some depth explaining alternate voting methods and 
> recommends "condorcet" voting  which allows for ranking of choices much like the 
> STV/IRV but eliminates some of the oddities of the vote transfer with that 
> method.  It is a bit more complex to figure out the results as it takes each two 
> way vote preference into account but the good news is they provide a link to a 
> site which can do the calculations.    
> To the voter it would appear the same as STV/IRV - you'd get to indicate your 
> preferences in a 1st, 2nd, 3rd (or on indefinately - you can rank as many 
> options as exist or cap the choices at 3 out of x).  
> 
> I'm ok with using this method.  Let me know what you think.    
> Regards, Diane
> IBM  Emerging Internet Software Standards
> drj@us.ibm.com
> (919)254-7221 or 8-444-7221, Mobile: 919-624-5123, Fax 845-491-5709
> 
> 
> 
> *"Yaron Y. Goland" <ygoland@bea.com>*
> 
> 10/06/2004 05:06 PM
> Please respond to
> ygoland
> 
> 
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> To
> 	bpel rqmts <wsbpel-reqts@lists.oasis-open.org>
> cc
> 	
> Subject
> 	[wsbpel-reqts] Approval Voting
> 
> 
> 	
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Here is an excerpt from the mail I sent to Martin on Monday about
> approval voting:
> 
> Slashdot had an article last week on different voting techniques so I
> read up.
> 
> One of the most interesting things I found was the Arrow Theorem by
> Professor Kenneth Arrow. He won a Nobel prize for the theorem which
> proved that all voting systems MUST be unfair in some way.
> 
> I then read up on IRV and found that it has a really nasty behavior
> (besides being incredibly complex). It violates the monotonicity
> principle. In a nutshell this says that voting for a choice you want
> shouldn't make that choice lose and not voting for the choice you want
> should help that choice win. That may seem obvious but it turns out that
> IRV violates it. See <http://www.electionmethods.org/evaluation.html#MC>
>  for an example.
> 
> I then discovered another voting system that is trivial to run, can be
> used with Kavi as is and doesn't violate the monotonicity principle.
> It's called approval voting. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approval_voting>
> 
> The way approval voting works is that if you have N choices then you
> open a ballot and let people put a check next to each choice they can
> live with. Then you add up the results and which ever choice got the
> most votes wins.
> 
> Kavi can already do this today. In fact, just about all voting systems
> can do this today. This is just a 'select N entries from M choices' vote
> where N = M. Diane actually used this feature in our IRV ballot for the
> BPEL spec name when she let people select 2 out of the N choices so they
> could indicate a preference for spec name and version number from the
> same list.
> 
> So if we use approval voting then we can run the whole thing on a single
> ballot, no fancy math, nothing. Just add up the votes and which ever
> choice got the most wins.
> 
> Of course approval voting also has a flaw (remember the Arrow theorem).
> Imagine that we have a vote with 10 people and three choices, A, B and
> C. 6 people strongly support A. 2 people strongly support B and 2 people
> strongly support C. However, 7 people weakly support B and 3 people
> weakly support C. Since people can vote for multiple options this means
> that someone who strongly supports A and weakly supports B but doesn't
> support C would cast a vote for A and B but not C. In that case the
> voting total will be:
> 
> A - 6 votes
> B - 9 votes
> C - 5 votes
> 
> So even though over 50% of the group strongly supports A, A still loses.
> 
> The reason is that approval voting detects consensus. It explicitly
> looks for the option that the largest number of people can live with.
> 
> I actually think the 'flaw' in approval voting is a feature in our case.
> Standards bodies are supposed to be run on consensus and approval voting
> is excellent at finding that consensus.
> 
> As such, given that it is simple to run, doesn't violate the
> monotonicity principle and is well designed to detect consensus doesn't
> it make sense for us to switch from IRV to approval voting?
> 
>                 Yaron
>