Also here is something from Rob Richie expressing similar: [from [email protected]] The recount _was__ an official recount. As you may know, the real opponents of IRV to worry about in Burlington are those preferring to go to plurality or, if they can't get that, the old runoff system with a 40% threshold. Those pushing the repeal right now are motivated by thinking it would have helped Wright, the leader in first choices.
Wright asked for a recount, but when he found that it was proving nothing to help him, he called it off. But if he had finished it, those three ballots would have been valid as it turns out the machines had mistakenly flagged a write-in when there wasn't one. Quite possibly the 4th one was a goof-up as well, as all four of these invalid ballots had the same alleged "write-in" mistake. I know Abd and some other don't like to think that Bucklin led to a sharp reduction in second choice rankings, but it did. If you halve the second choice rankings on ballots cast for each candidate as a first choice, Wright wins. With the kind of passion you had in this race in the Wright and Kiss camps, with their backers much preferring their person then settling on a Democrat, you would have seen a huge increase in bullet voting. But even a 50% increase quite likely would have done it -- and I think that's a conservative estimate. With range, the Kiss and Wright backers would have been maxing out on their guy and almost certainly giving very little to anyone else. I think approval/range only elects Montroll in this kind of situation if backers of other candidates have more fear of the most hated opponent than hope to get their favorite in. The most passionate voters in Burlington were Kiss and Wright backers, particuiarly living in a state and city where the Democrats are the dominant party and you need to grab your chances to win when you have them. We don't have exit polls, so I could be wrong. But I hope you realize you might be as well, as I recognize you ackowledge at the end of this post. [end] ================================================= in view of these remarks by Richie + Bouricius, we should probably modify the "responses" page and/or "Burlington" page somewhat. [Coauthors - write me your wants.] The official election output from Burlington says 4 invalid then 8980 valid, and then OF those 8980, 4 were discarded before counting. TGB claims they were the same 4, contradicting the official report. He might be right, but that would lead to the question: should we count errors in the official report, as errors? I mean, it is kind of weird for IRV propagandists to be "defending" IRV's "success" by saying "oh, the officials made errors but we're way smarter than them." This doesn't exactly sound like a great line of argument for them... Richie claims there was a recount, and this recount would have reduced the 4 official invalid ballots, to 1 invalid ballot (because he somehow has secret unofficial info about it, I guess), except the recount was terminated before completion, therefore the official Burlington report ignored it. Again I would have to ask - if they partially did a recount, why not incorporate its results into the official results? (Or: maybe they in fact already did?) Which also by the way leads to another point: with IRV, due to its "no such thing as subtotals" property, you have a lot more trouble trying to do a partial recount, then revising results appropriately -- than as compared with other election methods, in which "subtotals" exist. Explanation: http://RangeVoting.org/IrvNonAdd.html Which is kind of a good reason IRV recounts are going to be MORE of a nightmare and more of a risk of a nightmare, than other voting methods. (Which of course rangevoting.org had been pointing out for years.) Which indeed may have been why the official report was not revised (if it was not) to incorporate recount data. In which case the IRVers have kind of been hoisted by their own petard, exactly the way we'd been predicting they would be for years. Ho hum. Anyhow, my view is, if you want to report error rates and invalid rates, you have to use the official data+counts, as officially reported after all recounting done (which we did) and if those data+counts were flawed, well, that MATTERS, in fact it is kind of the whole POINT of reporting errors+invalids... I'm not too impressed with Richie & Bouricius whining about our "tone" since basically, we just have quote after quote from them which are lies misleading the public (and we could have listed far more of them, obviously), then we note that (with hopefully-catastrophic refutations each time), then they whine about our "tone." My heart bleeds for them. (In fact, if they are wondering why we call them "propagandists" not "scientists," well, golly, I wonder how we got that impression. Might we for some reason have thought it was a more accurate descriptor? Trust me, any real scientist acting that way would have one hell of a tough time trying to get a job if anybody pointed that stuff out to their employer. Drop that guy like a hot rock.) However, if somebody objects to something tone-ish, especially if it is one of the coauthors doing the objecting, then we can maybe change it. Re TGB's company being a different company, that we definitely should fix, assuming it is correct (presumably is?). Again, I can't say I'm too impressed with TGB claiming since everybody knows him he need not say anything about his conflict of interest, but the rules differ for A.G. and his so-called "bias." TGB raised that issue, not us. So he fully deserves to get it crammed back at him. (My heart bleeds some more. And yeah, we've all got bios on the web Terry. You might actually not be the only one.) cheerio... -- Warren D. Smith http://RangeVoting.org <-- add your endorsement (by clicking "endorse" as 1st step) and math.temple.edu/~wds/homepage/works.html ---- Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
