Kathy Dopp wrote:
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
Offtopic, perhaps, but would these problems hold for Condorcet as well?
Both IRV and Condorcet methods are ranked-ballot ones, though I guess
auditing Condorcet would be easier since it's precinct-summable. It
doesn't appear to be as easy as Plurality, though, because you can't tie
"A beat B N times" to what kind of votes the N voters submitted other
than that they ranked A ahead of B.
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