Yes, this makes sense from practical elections point of view. With
current computer/communications technology the amount of data in IRV
votes should not be a big problem.
When I compare the approach of sending ballot images (as in IRV with
centralized counting) to sending just the pairwise comparison matrix
(as possible in most Condorcet methods) my first concern is privacy
related. If the actual ballot images are distributed widely and maybe
made public that increases the possibility of vote buying and
coercion. Of course on the other hand making ballot images available
to all may increase the trust of the voters on the system since voters
can then themselves easily check if their vote is included in the
lists. (Sufficient trust can however typically be achieved also by
other means.) It may be wiser in most cases to read (=to digital
format) and store the original ballots close to the original polling
stations than to send them to some central location (for reading and/
or for storage).
When sending all the collected ballot information to the central vote
counting location one could in principle use the very familiar
"standard EM format" where similar votes are collected in one row, as
in "34: A>B>C". In Burlington votes were recorded (in one of the
files) as "000001-00-0008, 1) C01,C04,C02,C05,C03". I guess the
beginning part of this line is sufficient to identify the actual paper
ballot or other record that will be kept for later checking. This
Burlington format where every vote has a separate row is better than
the "standard EM format" because of the mentioned better ability to
check the actual ballots afterwards. The required space should not be
a problem although probably there will be quite a number of identical
ballots (and some space could be saved that way). In Burlington there
were almost 9000 votes and out of these the sizes of the biggest piles
of identical votes were 800, 680 and 506. There were less than 400
different kind of ballots in Burlington.
Juho
On Feb 5, 2010, at 8:12 PM, James Gilmour wrote:
Abd ul-Rahman Lomax > Sent: Friday, February 05, 2010 4:50 PM
<CUT>
Practically speaking, I'd assume, the precincts would be provided
with a spreadsheet showing the possible combinations, and they would
report the combinations using the spreadsheet, transmitting it. So
some cells would be blank or zero. With 5 candidates on the ballot,
the spreadsheet has gotten large, but it's still doable. What happens
if preferential voting encourages more candidates to file, as it
tends to do? 23 candidates in San Francisco? Even with three-rank
RCV, it gets hairy.
Respectfully, I would suggest this would NOT be a wise way to
collect the data. As I pointed out in my e-mail that correctly listed
the maximum possible number of preference profiles for various
numbers of candidates, the actual number of preference profiles in
any election (or any one precinct) with a significant number of
candidates, will be limited by the number of voters. Further,
because some (many) voters will choose the same profiles of
preferences, the actual number of preference profiles will likely be
even lower - as in the Dáil Éireann election I quoted.
Thus a spreadsheet containing all possible preference profiles would
be unnecessarily large and the probability of making mistakes
in data entry would likely be greater than if each precinct recorded
only the numbers for each profile actually found in that
precinct.
<CUT>
There is a way to avoid such massive reporting, which is to report
interactively, which is what is done in Australia. Only one set of
totals is reported from a precinct at a time, the totals for the
current round. (which can be just uncovered votes due to eliminations
that have been reported to the precinct from central tabulation.)
However, the problem with this is that a single error in a precinct
can require, then, all precincts to have to retabulate.
Yes, this "distributed counting" would work. But there is an even
simpler solution - take all the ballots to one counting centre
and then sort and count only the ballots that are necessary to
determine the winner (or winners in an STV-PR election). That what
has been done for public elections in Ireland and the UK for many
decades and it works well without problems. But I do appreciate
that is far too simple and practical a solution and it suffers from
NMH.
James Gilmour
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