Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
Since Burlington has made ballot images available, and since we only
have, from summary results, part of the story of this election, I
decided to analyze the images. I'm writing this as I do the work, both
as a way to record what I find and to report it. I will interpret the
data elsewhere, so, unless I make mistakes, there shouldn't be any
controversy about this.
There are instructions that Burlington gives for loading the data into a
spreadsheet. The votes are contained in a series of .prm files. Each
record begins with a precinct and ballot number, but, I noticed, in some
cases these are duplicated, they could represent different counting
batches or some other unexplained anomaly.
In the Excel file I compiled, there were 9865 records, which agrees with
the total number of ballots as reported. Burlington reports 77 invalid
ballots.
I'm not going to report the IRV results, per se, those are available at
http://www.burlingtonvotes.org/20060307/2006%20Burlington%20Mayor%20Round.htm
I find 77 ballots with no choice at all; as far as the ballot images are
concerned, these are blank. (In an audit, it's not impossible for some
of these ballots to be found valid, it depends on rules. For example, no
ballots showed a blank first choice and then some later preference.
That's unlikely, this is a known and reasonably common error.)
This leaves 9788 ballots. The software they used was general-purpose STV
software, I believe it's open source, so the report mentions the Droop
quota, which is a simple majority of the valid ballots, if we assume
that even overvoted ballots are valid: so the software is seeking, until
it's found or all but two candidates are left, 4895 votes as a majority.
Under the Burlington rules, according to the instructions at
http://www.burlingtonvotes.org/20060307/manualverification.php , a
ballot with equal ranking (two or more candidates at the same rank) is
"exhausted" if more than one of the candidates is not eliminated when
that rank is reached. Quite a number of voters overvoted in first rank,
which will result in immediate exhaustion. I'm going to list all these
initially exhausted ballots
[snip]
The candidate names, for reference, are this:
.CANDIDATE C01, "Louie The Cowman Beaudin"
.CANDIDATE C02, "Kevin J. Curley" (Republican)
.CANDIDATE C03, "Bob Kiss" (Progressive)
.CANDIDATE C04, "Hinda Miller" (Democrat)
.CANDIDATE C05, "Loyal Ploof"
.CANDIDATE C06, "Write-ins"
To my knowledge, Loyal Ploof is (Green).
Some more information on this data set, according to my election program:
Schulze returns C03 > C04 > C02 > C01 > C05 > C06. So does minmax,
Borda, Vote For and Against (1, 0, 0..., -1), and Nauru Borda.
Plurality returns C03 > C04 > C02 > C01 > C06 > C05. So does Hare (IRV)
and Carey.
Antiplurality returns C03 > C02 = C01 > C04 > C05 > C06.
All positional methods are whole.
The Condorcet matrix is
0 1289 804 1161 2028 3290
5165 0 3397 3556 5136 5875
6961 5730 0 4763 7027 7351
6747 5545 3991 0 6790 7336
1869 1318 603 987 0 3094
431 311 194 323 510 0
(row beats column), and the WV basis is thus:
0 0 0 0 2028 3290
5165 0 0 0 5136 5875
6961 5730 0 4763 7027 7351
6747 5545 0 0 6790 7336
0 0 0 0 0 3094
0 0 0 0 0 0
which means that C03 is the CW.
(If my program has bugs, there will be errors in the above.)
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