Thanks! I’ll add some brief glosses from later on that page:
It’s rare for them to actually differ, so I think factors other than their electoral effectiveness would dominate the quality. Perhaps how explainable they are.
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or how computable? I think RP wins one and Schulze wins the other, if I remember correctly.
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They’re both very similar on both measures. I think if presented correctly, Schulze edges out on both counts, but by the way it’s explained on Wikipedia it loses on both.
Bingo. It’s Wikipedia’s fault .
This is a major part of why I’m much more a fan of schemes derived from range voting: they’re very easy to understand once someone gets over the prejudice that “merely counting the raw numbers of who ranks higher than who” is somehow a God-given requirement.
In the AMA, Tideman notes that range voting is more susceptible to strategic manipulation than some other methods, but schemes like STAR and 3-2-1 intentionally use range-scoring variants only to pick the two finalists, and then do “the one that merely ranks higher (regardless of score) on more ballots wins”. That’s to make pure range-voting tactics much less attractive (play them, and you’re likely to hurt your favorites if they make it to the final stage). They’re instances of what’s called “Score-Runoff Voting” in the AMA.
Tideman’s answers to all that read well, but keep going and it’s clear that he didn’t really understand what VSE simulations are doing (he appeared to think they were only looking at cases where all sides are 100% strategic) - and that simulation results contradict several of his claims.
He does make the good point that simulations are using computer-generated voter preferences, as opposed to real-life data. I’m uncomfortable about that too, but simulations have tried to become more realistic over time, and it’s simply not possible to get real-life data on millions of real-life elections.
As is, state-of-the-art simulations clearly show that the easy-but-not-trivial to explain and understand “Score-Runoff” methods are the most resistant to strategic manipulation, although Schulze/RP do slightly better when everyone is 100% honest. Curiously, in the graph you reproduced before, RP was significantly more resistant than Schulze to 1-sided strategic voting, and RP very slightly better than Schulze when everyone is honest. So, based on that, I’d prefer RP. But I’d like STAR best - too bad nobody has ever used it .