I object to your translation of actual-votes into approval-votes and RCV-votes, at least in the case of my vote. I gave almost all of my points to my top pick, almost all of the rest to my second pick, almost all of the rest to my third pick, and so forth until I was sure I had chosen something that would make top 3. But e.g. I would have approved of multiple. (Sidenote: I claim my strategy is optimal under very reasonable assumptions/approximations. You shouldn’t distribute points like you’re trying to build a diverse portfolio.)
Thanks! I agree that the approach you describe is optimal under very reasonable assumptions, but I think in practice few people used it (the median ratio between someone’s top choice and their second choice was 2, the mean if you throw out one outlier was ~20; only 7 people voted for at least 2 candidates and had ratios between their top two that were at least 20). Moreover, we had some[1] voters who didn’t vote the way you describe, but who did assign a fairly big number of projects similar small point values — I think kind of throwing in some points for charities they don’t favor that much, and I didn’t want to overweight their votes in the way I tallied the RCV-translated (or approval-translated) scores.
Still, I agree that my translations are bad — I should at least represent scores from people who basically approximated RCV in the current voting method the way they would be counted in RCV. I might try this (and think about what translation actually makes sense — just the top 10 charities people voted for?) later, but might not prioritize doing it.
For approval voting, you could also just look at the number of voters who gave a charity any (positive) number of points; these counts are included in this post and wouldn’t have changed the top 3.
Quickly estimating: there were 90 voters who voted for at least 4 candidates whose last two votes differed by a ratio of less than 1.5. There were 27 if instead of requiring at least 4 candidates, you require that the smallest point assignment is <5.
Or looking at it another way: across all ratios (across all voters) between what a given voter gave the candidate they ranked N and the candidate they ranked N+1, if we remove only the top 1 percentile of ratios (removing because a few people did use an approximation of RCV—equivalent in this case to removing ratios higher than 100:1), the mean is 2. Across all ~12K ratios, about 500 are exactly 1.
I object to your translation of actual-votes into approval-votes and RCV-votes, at least in the case of my vote. I gave almost all of my points to my top pick, almost all of the rest to my second pick, almost all of the rest to my third pick, and so forth until I was sure I had chosen something that would make top 3. But e.g. I would have approved of multiple. (Sidenote: I claim my strategy is optimal under very reasonable assumptions/approximations. You shouldn’t distribute points like you’re trying to build a diverse portfolio.)
Thanks! I agree that the approach you describe is optimal under very reasonable assumptions, but I think in practice few people used it (the median ratio between someone’s top choice and their second choice was 2, the mean if you throw out one outlier was ~20; only 7 people voted for at least 2 candidates and had ratios between their top two that were at least 20). Moreover, we had some[1] voters who didn’t vote the way you describe, but who did assign a fairly big number of projects similar small point values — I think kind of throwing in some points for charities they don’t favor that much, and I didn’t want to overweight their votes in the way I tallied the RCV-translated (or approval-translated) scores.
Still, I agree that my translations are bad — I should at least represent scores from people who basically approximated RCV in the current voting method the way they would be counted in RCV. I might try this (and think about what translation actually makes sense — just the top 10 charities people voted for?) later, but might not prioritize doing it.
For approval voting, you could also just look at the number of voters who gave a charity any (positive) number of points; these counts are included in this post and wouldn’t have changed the top 3.
Quickly estimating: there were 90 voters who voted for at least 4 candidates whose last two votes differed by a ratio of less than 1.5. There were 27 if instead of requiring at least 4 candidates, you require that the smallest point assignment is <5.
Or looking at it another way: across all ratios (across all voters) between what a given voter gave the candidate they ranked N and the candidate they ranked N+1, if we remove only the top 1 percentile of ratios (removing because a few people did use an approximation of RCV—equivalent in this case to removing ratios higher than 100:1), the mean is 2. Across all ~12K ratios, about 500 are exactly 1.