Kathy Dopp wrote:
Wow,
I had to laugh out loud after finally figuring out these instructions
that Chris Telesca of NC sent me in this PDF doc:
"Instant Runoff Voting, Single‐Seat Contests, ES&S Optical Scan
Tabulation Procedures"
http://electionmathematics.org/em-IRV/NC/IRVcountingProced.pdf
Aren't IRV proponents (of the most fundamentally unfair voting method
that has ever been used) CLEVER!
IRV proponents have figured out how to count a NC-style IRV election
(where all but the top two candidates are dropped in the first round)
in the polling locations on Election Night in a way that makes
IRV-NC-style precinct-summable!
Sure - if you have an elimination method where you batch eliminate all
candidates but k, where k is some constant, then do a count among those,
that method will be summable. Since k is a constant, k! will also be.
The constant would be extremely large for large numbers of k, though.
I wouldn't call this method IRV, either, but "contingent vote". About
the only thing it has going over Plurality is that it never elects a
Condorcet loser.
The summable version for k = 2 would work like this: you have an array
of n, which is the Plurality count for the first election. Then you have
an n*n matrix, call it c, where c[a, b] designates how many times A is
ranked before B. The idea would be to first determine the two Plurality
winners, then (call them x and y) check if c[x, y] > c[y, x]. If so, x
wins; if c[x, y] < c[y, x], then y wins, otherwise there's a tie.
But hold on. Isn't c the Condorcet matrix?
Wow. I'm really impressed for once by the skills of the IRV proponents
in figuring out a way to make round #2 of IRV precinct-summable -
which works in the NC version of IRV because all but two candidates
are eliminated in round #1.
However, there are some issues with the IRV proponents' method for
making IRV precinct-summable in this NC-style IRV contest that also
restricts voters to ranking at most three candidates and therefore has
at most two counting rounds altogether for a one-winner contest due to
eliminating all but the two candidates who receive the most first
choice votes (a method that could often eliminate the most popular
majority candidate as happened recently in Burlington, VT
http://rangevoting.org/Burlington.html)
That almost turns it into the Supplementary Vote (where people can only
rank two candidates).
4. Are the election officials going to create the three PCMCIA cards
accurately for EACH precinct or poll loc for each IRV contest, label
them accurately and make sure that the right card is inserted at the
exact right time in the process?
This sounds like simply bad programming. Having to use different PCMCIA
cards is a limitation of the voting machine, not the system; and if they
really want to use this method, they could presumably ask for a machine
that counts c (and the Plurality counts) in one go. If c really is the
Condorcet matrix, this may make it easier to move to Condorcet methods
in the future, too.
6. Wow. I would LOVE to see what happens if the late-counted absentee,
early, or provisional ballots changes who the top-two 1st choice vote
winners are, and the entire polling location counts have to be thrown
out and all the ballots have to be recounted! Lovely thought for all
those poll workers who are going to stay up all night counting but
whose counts may be entirely scrapped later on whenever the number of
first choice votes is very close for the candidate with the second
most and third most first choice votes!
I don't see how that would be messy. Say the plurality count is 100 A,
99 B, and c[A, B] is 125 and c[B, A] is 124. Then adding a few more B
first, A second ballots will change the plurality count (to say, 101 A,
105 B), and c (to say c[A, B] 131, c[B, A] 125). The actual winner
calculation would proceed differently, but since the method is district
summable, it's also individually summable ("districts" of one per voter).
----
Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
