Monotonicity: Difference between revisions
Cleanup and add nondeterministic generalization
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The '''monotonicity criterion''' is a [[voting system criterion]] used to evaluate both single and multiple winner [[ranked voting system]]s. A ranked voting system is '''monotonic''' if it is neither possible to prevent the election of a candidate by ranking them higher on some of the ballots, nor possible to elect an otherwise unelected candidate by ranking them lower on some of the ballots (while nothing else is altered on any ballot).
<ref name="Woodall-Monotonicity">D R Woodall, [http://www.votingmatters.org.uk/ISSUE6/P4.HTM "Monotonicity and Single-Seat Election Rules"], ''[[Voting matters]]'', Issue 6, 1996</ref> In deterministic single winner elections that is to say no winner is harmed by up-ranking and no loser can win by down-ranking. If the method relies on chance, then up-ranking a candidate can not decrease that candidate's chance of winning, nor can down-ranking the candidate increase it. Douglas R. Woodall called the criterion '''mono-raise'''.
Raising a candidate {{math|''x''}} on some ballots ''while changing'' the orders of other candidates does ''not'' constitute a failure of monotonicity. E.g., harming candidate {{math|''x''}} by changing some ballots from {{math|''z'' > ''x'' > ''y''}} to {{math|''x'' > ''y'' > ''z''}} isn't a violation of the monotonicity criterion.
The monotonicity criterion renders the intuition that there should be neither need to worry about harming a candidate by (nothing else than) up-ranking nor it should be possible to support a candidate by (nothing else than) counter-intuitively down-ranking.
(Something similar (down-ranking CDU '''and''' additionally up-ranking another party, e.g. FDP) happened in the German federal election of 2005, in which conservative voters in Dresden deliberately voted against their party of choice (the CDU) in order to maximize that party's number of seats in the federal parliament. This was possible due to Germany's voting system (mixed member proportional with overhang seats computed independently for each federal state) and the fact that the vote in Dresden took place a week after the rest of the country due to the death of a candidate, enabling voters in Dresden to vote tactically in full knowledge of the results already achieved elsewhere. As a result of this, the German Constitutional Court ruled on July 3 2008 that the German voting system must be reformed to eliminate its non-monotonicity.<ref> See e.g. [http://fruitsandvotes.com/blog/?p=117]</ref>▼
▲-->There are several variations of that criterion; e.g., what Douglas R. Woodall called ''mono-add-plump'': A candidate {{math|''x''}} should not be harmed if further ballots are added that have {{math|''x''}} top with no second choice. Agreement with such rather special properties is the best any ranked voting system may fulfill: The [[Gibbard–Satterthwaite theorem]] shows, that any meaningful ranked voting system is susceptible to some kind of [[tactical voting]], and [[Arrow's impossibility theorem]] shows that individual rankings can't be meaningfully translated into a community-wide ranking where the order of candidates {{math|''x''}} and {{math|''y''}} is always [[Independence of irrelevant alternatives|independent of irrelevant alternatives]] {{math|''z''}}.<!--
The result of David Austen-Smith and Jeffrey Banks that monotonicity in individual preferences is impossible is a nonissue: For given voter preferences v=v_1...v_n and a winner x under voting scheme alpha, they investigate changes in v, where e.g. altering v_i from a,b,c,d,x to d,c,x,b,a is allowed, which can't be seriously named a monotonicity property. That allows random permutations even ''ahead'' of x, and is therefore even more rigid than Woodall's mono-raise-random, which is already incompatible with [majority AND later-no-help AND later-no-harm].
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All [[plurality voting system]]s are monotone if the ballots are treated as rankings where using ''more than two ranks is forbidden''. In this setting [[first past the post]] and [[approval voting]] as well as the multiple-winner systems [[single non-transferable vote]], [[plurality-at-large voting]] (multiple non-transferable vote, bloc voting) and [[cumulative voting]] are monotonic. [[Party-list proportional representation]] using [[D'Hondt method|D'Hondt]], [[Sainte-Laguë method|Sainte-Laguë]] or the [[largest remainder method]] is monotone in the same sense.
In elections via the single-winner methods [[range voting]] and [[majority judgment]] nobody can help a candidate by reducing or removing support for them
==Statement of Monotonicity Criteria==
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However, the ballots (or information allowing them to be reconstructed) are rarely released for ranked voting elections, which means there are few recorded monotonicity violations for real elections.
===2005 German federal election===
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===2009 Burlington, Vermont mayoral election===
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