On this topic, something gets missed in the technical details of
transmitting precinct data. First of all, there is no doubt but that
with scanning techniques, it's possible to transmit all ballot data
from a precinct to a central counting facility, with IRV or any other
ballot, without requiring sophisticated equipment at the precinct.
I've suggested public ballot imaging, which would be literal images,
so that any member of the public can see what an election observer
could see. A simple form of this would be fax transmission; with
various simple forms of optimization, this could be reasonably efficient.
If there is local analysis of ballots then the necessary data
transmission requirements are reduced, but, then, this opens up a
door to various manipulations unless the analysis is open and visible
to observers. Traditional IRV counting, as in Australia, avoids this
by manual counting, the ballots are sorted into piles, the pile
counts are transmitted, and then when central tabulation has the
counts from all precincts, totals are made and then instructions go
back to the precinct to distribute the ballots of eliminated
candidates and transmit back the additions to each remaining stack.
But how does one audit an election? This is the concern of voting
security people like Kathy Dopp. With precinct-summable methods,
sampling techniques can be used, and a sample is like a precinct.
However, IRV's chaotic behavior with eliminations means that samples
can't predict election results, it's actually necessary (or at least
necessary with considerable frequency) to count all the ballots.
That's only necessary with summable methods when the result is
extremely close, i.e., a near-tie, but IRV creates multiple
opportunities for near-ties that can affect the outcome of a necessary round.
The real problem, then, is the chaotic behavior of IRV, easily
visible in Yee diagrams. The voting security problem is simply one
consequence of that chaos. FairVote tries to cover it up with
arguments about "core support," but in real elections when there is a
real problem, the Core Support Criterion that they invented, just so
they'd have a criterion to satisfy, is really irrelevant. There is no
violation of that Criterion in those elections, i.e., a winner with
no first preference votes. Rather, a candidate is eliminated who
merely was in third place in higher preference votes, and by only a
small margin.
Plurality "eliminates" all candidates not in first place in first
preference votes, thus requiring strategic voting for voters who
support other than one of the top two. IRV really does the same, if
there are three viable candidates, as in Burlington, Vermont, in the
2009 mayoral race. It fixes only the "first-order" spoiler effect,
where the third place candidate or other minor spoiler candidates is
so far below being electable that bullet votes are truly wasted.
Given that much better methods exist, have been tried and worked, and
are much easier to canvass, WTF?
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