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Today's Topics:
1. Re: Consultation on Implementing Single Transferrable Voting
for ARIN Elections (William Herrin)
2. Re: Consultation on Implementing Single Transferrable Voting
for ARIN Elections (Adam Thompson)
3. Re: Consultation on Implementing Single Transferrable Voting
for ARIN Elections (William Herrin)
4. Re: Consultation on Implementing Single Transferrable Voting
for ARIN Elections (Richard Laager)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Message: 1
Date: Thu, 10 Feb 2022 16:07:32 -0800
From: William Herrin <[email protected]>
To: Jo Rhett <[email protected]>
Cc: "<[email protected]>" <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [ARIN-consult] Consultation on Implementing Single
Transferrable Voting for ARIN Elections
Message-ID:
<cap-gugw69xkswzwwgjd+mgrfx8cdz6dd-ztygz4zhgjbap4...@mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
On Thu, Feb 10, 2022 at 4:02 PM Jo Rhett <[email protected]> wrote:
> STV as proposed in the consultation can lead to unexpected and
> undesirable results including:
> * election of a candidate opposed by a clear majority of voters
>
> no, that flaw is owned exclusively by standard voting. It is not possible for
> a candidate who is opposed by 51% of voters to win an election with STV
Argue with the math. I demonstrated it happening right here:
https://lists.arin.net/pipermail/arin-consult/2022-January/001507.html.
Candidate 4 was ranked -last- by 65.5% of the voters yet STV elected
him.
-Bill
--
William Herrin
[email protected]
https://bill.herrin.us/
------------------------------
Message: 2
Date: Fri, 11 Feb 2022 00:19:18 +0000
From: Adam Thompson <[email protected]>
To: William Herrin <[email protected]>
Cc: "<[email protected]>" <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [ARIN-consult] Consultation on Implementing Single
Transferrable Voting for ARIN Elections
Message-ID:
<yt2pr01mb4622a6ccb274d78fc06cdcd4ab...@yt2pr01mb4622.canprd01.prod.outlook.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
I do not agree with Bill - I suspect we are on opposite sides of this starting
from fundamental assumptions and beliefs, going right up to the implementation
details and opinions about the consequences.
I believe STV will be an improvement over the current process, as I believe FPP
voting has much greater inherent unfairness than STV. (None of these systems
are *good*, it's about which produces less bad outcomes, as far as I'm
concerned.)
Feel free to stop reading here. That might be best, in fact...
I believe Bill's fundamental approach to elections and voting is... not
compatible with my beliefs & needs. In my opinion, his two points are coloured
by _his_ ideology, as is to be expected.
* The defeat of a plurality candidate who got the most votes, while very much a
corner case, is possible - but it is neither unexpected nor undesirable.
That's a feature, not a bug. STV resembles a (hoping I remember the
terminology correctly...) weighted centroid model, where enough smaller
clusters can, in aggregate, successfully pull the center of the graph away from
a dominant cluster.
* Unless the voting system allows for both "for" and "against" votes, no-one
has voted *against* any candidate at all, ever, even if that was both their
thought process and their intent. That's logically equivalent to thinking you
can prove a negative. If you only have choices A and B, a vote for one is
*equivalent* to a vote against the other, but it is not factually a vote
against anything at all. Note that I'm not necessarily opposed to being able
to cast votes both for and against candidates, it could even massively increase
voter turnout - I'd sure love to vote against some of the jerks who run for
public office around here!
STV has by now had quite a bit of real-world testing, certainly on scales far,
far larger than ARIN and with - IMO again - much more "real-world" impact to
the average voter; it has shown itself to *not* regularly produce the bizarre
results its detractors are worried about; and it has shown to produce more
balanced, less lop-sided outcomes that do not completely ignore minority groups.
If you're regularly part of the majority and you're happy with the outcomes of
FPP voting on a regular basis, OF COURSE you wouldn't want to switch to STV -
the system is stacked in your favour. Hence why no significant _structural_
electoral reform of this sort has taken place in North America in ... well, I
think it's a couple of centuries, but I'm not that confident in my knowledge of
political history. Up here, we have a head of state who campaigned on a
promise to abolish FPP ... 6? years ago, and has done approximately nothing
about it yet - and likely won't for the reasons I just enumerated.
-Adam
-----Original Message-----
From: ARIN-consult <[email protected]> On Behalf Of William Herrin
Sent: Thursday, February 10, 2022 3:00 PM
Cc: <[email protected]> <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [ARIN-consult] Consultation on Implementing Single Transferrable
Voting for ARIN Elections
On Thu, Jan 6, 2022 at 8:38 AM ARIN <[email protected]> wrote:
> One recommendation that has arisen from this governance review is to replace
> the current first-past-the-post (FPTP) voting system with single
> transferrable voting (STV), also known as ranked-choice voting. STV would
> provide the ability for the community to realize the following primary
> benefits:
Hello,
Since the consultation is coming to a close, I want to take a moment
to reiterate:
I respectfully OPPOSE a transition to STV voting due to the
demonstrated mathematical flaws in the process.
STV as proposed in the consultation can lead to unexpected and
undesirable results including:
* defeat of the plurality candidate who got the most votes
* election of a candidate opposed by a clear majority of voters
It can reach these undesired results because the math involved in the
instant-runoff process amplifies the impact of some votes while
effectively nullifying others. I went through the math back in my
early January posts if you want to see how that happens.
Regards,
Bill Herrin
--
William Herrin
[email protected]
https://bill.herrin.us/
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Message: 3
Date: Thu, 10 Feb 2022 16:58:47 -0800
From: William Herrin <[email protected]>
To: Adam Thompson <[email protected]>
Cc: "<[email protected]>" <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [ARIN-consult] Consultation on Implementing Single
Transferrable Voting for ARIN Elections
Message-ID:
<cap-gugv5d4-qxu47-5ouch6q9czs3znm4-vx9mjm1yb6ys6...@mail.gmail.com>
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On Thu, Feb 10, 2022 at 4:19 PM Adam Thompson <[email protected]> wrote:
> * The defeat of a plurality candidate who got the most votes, while very much
> a corner case, is possible - but it is neither unexpected nor undesirable.
> That's a feature, not a bug. STV resembles a (hoping I remember the
> terminology correctly...) weighted centroid model, where enough smaller
> clusters can, in aggregate, successfully pull the center of the graph away
> from a dominant cluster.
Hi Adam,
I consider that a reasonable basis for claiming fairness. I'm not
convinced STV reliably does that but if it does then, okay,
reasonable. I'm not sure it's the right answer either but I'll agree
it has a reasonable claim to fairness.
> * Unless the voting system allows for both "for" and "against" votes, no-one
> has voted *against* any candidate at all, ever, even if that was both their
> thought process and their intent. That's logically equivalent to thinking
> you can prove a negative.
Here I have to completely disagree with you. A majority ranking a
candidate last offers only one credible inference: that the majority
disapproves of the candidate. That's what you call Sherlock Holmes
level proof - when no other explanations are reasonable, the one that
remains is probably true.
If a voting system is fair, you should be able to turn it upside down
and get more or less same result: for STV, eliminate the candidate
with the most last-rankings instead of the one with the least
first-rankings, then the next one and so on until the number of
candidates left is the number of posts to be filled. Try that with STV
and it goes completely off the rails.
> STV has by now had quite a bit of real-world testing, certainly on scales
> far, far larger than ARIN and with - IMO again - much more "real-world"
> impact to the average voter; it has shown itself to *not* regularly produce
> the bizarre results its detractors are worried about; and it has shown to
> produce more balanced, less lop-sided outcomes that do not completely ignore
> minority groups.
STV's real world testing has primarily been with single-post
elections. As far as I can tell, the math that allows the last-ranked
candidate to be elected is not possible when only a single post will
be filled by the candidates.
ARIN elections fill -two- seats on the board from the pool of
candidates. STV *as proposed for ARIN* suffers a math problem which
all that "real-world testing" largely didn't test.
Regards,
Bill Herrin
--
William Herrin
[email protected]
https://bill.herrin.us/
------------------------------
Message: 4
Date: Thu, 10 Feb 2022 21:43:39 -0600
From: Richard Laager <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [ARIN-consult] Consultation on Implementing Single
Transferrable Voting for ARIN Elections
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed
On 2/10/22 18:58, William Herrin wrote:
> A majority ranking a
> candidate last offers only one credible inference: that the majority
> disapproves of the candidate.
That's not correct, at least not for a definition of "disapprove" I
would use.
Example: "Where should we go for lunch: A, B, or C?"
Imagine I'm genuinely fine with any of those. That is to say, I approve
of all of them / I don't disapprove of any. We do a quick approval vote.
It turns out that everyone feels like me: all choices are acceptable to
everyone.
We still need a decision of which one place to go. Being voting system
enthusiasts, we then quickly run an STV election (which for a single
winner election is the same as IRV/RCV). This forces everyone to rank
their choices from most to least preferred. The results might look like
your example.
If you looked at just the voting results in isolation, you would declare
that the majority disapproves of the last-placed choice. But here we
know that's false; there is unanimous approval of all options.
It's true that the loser is the "least preferred", but that's different
from "disapprove[d] of".
Put differently, I'd define "disapproved of" as "would rather leave the
seat empty than have that candidate" or "would rank lower than 'None of
the Above'".
I think what you might really care about is that STV is violating the
Condorcet winner criterion. In your particular example, where STV
elected 3 & 4, I agree that it did. I finally took the time to do the
pairwise comparisons by hand. I showed my work below.
Unless I made a mistake, the Condorcet winners are 1 & 3. That is, 1
wins every pairwise election and 3 wins every pairwise election other
than with 1. Further, the Condorcet loser is 4; i.e. 4 loses every
pairwise election. Also, from what I can see, this election has a strict
Condorcet ranking: 1 > 3 > 2 > 5 > 4.
So maybe we want to pick a system that upholds the Condorcet winner
criterion. What are our choices? There are various Condorcet methods
that produce single-winners. As far as I can find, there are two
Condorcet methods that can be used in multiple seat elections: CPO-STV
and Schulze STV. The ballots are the same between traditional STV and
those methods, but the computations to find the winners are much more
involved; in CPO-STV, you're calculating all possible pairs of election
outcomes.
However, while those systems produce what I'd argue are better results
(honoring the Condorcet winner criterion), I think it's important that
the voters understand how the system works so that they can trust it.
When you get into systems that are so complicated that they need
computers to calculate the winner, that might be the wrong trade-off in
real life.
And to be clear, my personal view is that traditional STV is definitely
better than FPTP.
----
> Suppose you have five candidates for two positions. The votes are:
> 30% 1, 3, 2, 5, 4
> 20% 3, 1, 2, 5, 4
> 19% 4, 1, 2, 5, 3
> 10.5% 2, 3, 1, 5, 4
> 10.5% 2, 4, 1, 5, 3
> 5% 5, 4, 1, 2, 3
> 5% 5, 3, 1, 2, 4
Calculate pairwise elections:
1 > 2: 30 + 20 + 19 + + 5 + 5
1 > 3: 30 + 19 + 10.5 + 5
1 > 4: 30 + 20 + + 10.5 + 5
1 > 5: 30 + 20 + 19 + 10.5 + 10.5
2 > 3: 19 + 10.5 + 10.5 + 5
2 > 4: 30 + 20 + 10.5 + 10.5 + 5
2 > 5: 30 + 20 + 19 + 10.5 + 10.5
3 > 4: 30 + 20 + 10.5 + 5
3 > 5: 30 + 20 + 10.5
4 > 5: 19 + 10.5
Sum:
1 > 2: 79
1 > 3: 64.5
1 > 4: 65.5
1 > 5: 90
2 > 3: 45
2 > 4: 76
2 > 5: 90
3 > 4: 65.5
3 > 5: 60.5
4 > 5: 29.5
Evaluate:
2 > 3 is false; flip it as 3 > 2.
4 > 5 is false; flip it as 5 > 4.
1 > 2
1 > 3
1 > 4
1 > 5
3 > 2
2 > 4
2 > 5
3 > 4
3 > 5
5 > 4
Simplify:
1 > 2345
3 > 2
2 > 45
3 > 45
5 > 4
Simplify:
1 > 2345
3 > 2 > 45
5 > 4
Simplify:
1 > 235 > 4
3 > 2 > 5 > 4
Simplify:
1 > 3 > 2 > 5 > 4
--
Richard
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