On Sat, Jan 16, 2010 at 2:54 PM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax <[email protected]> wrote: > results. Generally, voting security people like to use audits that select a > sample of votes and look for errors, then they use statistical analysis to > estimate the overall error in result probability. That's not nearly as easy > with IRV, because IRV is a chaotic method, sensitive to a single vote error > that ripples into shifting many votes. With many places where that single > vote error can occur. > > At least that's my understanding, I'd defer to Kathy on this!
Yes, IRV is virtually impossible (practically) to audit in a way that the general public could understand. There are several ways to manually audit IRV/STV as far as publicly reporting the tallies and randomly selecting them: 1. report every rank choice ballot for every voter and make a humanly readable mark on every ballot (preferrably after the voter casts or as the voter casts the ballot to avoid vote-buying) that is also listed alongside the ballot choices, and then randomly select ballots, or 2. publicly report all the tallies for each possible unique rank choice vote for each precinct (a huge number larger than the number of voters who vote in most precincts if there are many candidates running), and then randomly sample from those, or 3. manually count 100% of the ballots No one, to my knowledge, has tried to develop the mathematics for sampling sufficiently to verify the accuracy of the election outcomes to a desired high probability for IRV/STV and I wouldn't want to try. It has got to be virtually impossible to figure out given how difficult it has been just to develop the mathematics for the simple plurality case. Any method needs to be precinct-summable and possible for the public to tally the results from whatever tallies are publicly reported and IRV/STV does not meet that fundamental requirement for the vast majority of the public who could not even comprehend how many unique ballot combinations there are, let alone figure out how to check the tallies from the publicly posted results. Any other method than IRV/STV (any method that treats all voters' votes equally) would be easier to figure out how to audit IMO, although I've not tried to figure out how to audit any other methods yet as far as the mathematics of sample sizes. Abd ul your posts are always so informative. Thank you. -- Kathy Dopp Town of Colonie, NY 12304 phone 518-952-4030 cell 518-505-0220 http://utahcountvotes.org http://electionmathematics.org http://kathydopp.com/serendipity/ Realities Mar Instant Runoff Voting http://electionmathematics.org/ucvAnalysis/US/RCV-IRV/InstantRunoffVotingFlaws.pdf Voters Have Reason to Worry http://utahcountvotes.org/UT/UtahCountVotes-ThadHall-Response.pdf Checking election outcome accuracy --- Post-election audit sampling http://electionmathematics.org/em-audits/US/PEAuditSamplingMethods.pdf ---- Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
