> From Peter Zbornik: > It seems a bit unusual to keep switching methods.
On the surface, it does seem unusual. What seldom gets pointed out about STV (single transferable vote) is that it only produces somewhat reasonable results for electing the first-seat and second-seat winners. (This assumes that the underlying unfairness, namely looking for a majority or quota of currently-top-choice votes, can be tolerated.) After that, using STV to fill a third seat (and fourth seat, etc.) easily produces unrepresentative results (although not unproportional results, ironically). With that in mind .... > I don't understand how proportionality is achieved. The proportionality can be thought of as a balance between the "majority" and an "opposition." This can be regarded as a two-sided balance, such as between a 60% majority and a 40% minority. The switching between methods allows one method (Condorcet-Kemeny) to select majority-based candidates, and the other method (VoteFair representation ranking, with Condorcet-Kemeny used to calculate popularity) to select candidates who are in the minority (or minorities). Note that very small minorities do not get direct (!) representation using this approach. (They do get representation, but not with a council member who is specifically identified as representing that particular small minority.) Here is the reason: In order to get additional levels of proportionality (i.e. representation for small minorities), there would need to be a way to categorize the subgroups within your group (the Czech Green party). For example, if there were categories within the Green party -- such as environmentalists, social-justice members, pacifists, consensus-decision-making members, etc. -- then there are many ways (including additional aspects of VoteFair ranking) to ensure that the elected members represent those subgroups roughly in proportion to their numbers (percentages). But all those methods require allowing voters to identify which subgroup they most want to support. Without that self-categorization, there is no way to identify, and then ensure representation for, those small minorities. There does exist a way to get proportional results for smaller (but not the smallest) minorities without self-categorization. I've created a website at NegotiationTool.com that does that kind of calculation. However, that method is complex, and I don't recommend it for your situation. > I would appreciate if Votefair ranking would have some mathematical > description and at least well described and discussed in some > peer-reviewed paper. If you replace the word "paper" with the word "article," there is a widely peer-reviewed, published description of the Condorcet-Kemeny method. (Below I'll get to the issue of VoteFair representation ranking.) It's in Wikipedia under the name "Kemeny-Young method." The description is rigorous, which is what I presume you mean by "mathematical." (I presume you don't mean mathematical in the sense of using mathematical symbols, because that would have to be translated back into plain language for your members to understand.) The "Kemeny-Young method" article includes a list of which voting-method criteria are satisfied by the Condorcet-Kemeny method, and that list has been heavily peer-reviewed, so I'll summarize it here: * The Condorcet-Kemeny meets the criteria named "monotonicity" and "summable," which someone in another message points out are the most important voting criteria for your situation. * There are other criteria that the Condorcet-Kemeny method automatically meets and fails as a result of meeting the Condorcet criterion (i.e. they apply to all Condorcet methods), but those are not as important as meeting the Condorcet criterion. * The additional criteria of importance that the Condorcet-Kemeny method meet are: unrestricted domain, pareto efficiency, Smith criterion, independence of Smith-dominated alternatives, reinforcement, and reversal symmetry. Translation: the method is very good. (Again, this list is from the peer-reviewed "Kemeny-Young method" article.) * The significant criteria that the Condorcet-Kemeny method fails are: independence of clones and invulnerability to push-over. In your situation (having about 2000 members), these failed criteria are very unlikely to be noticeable even after careful analysis of the results. * Also consider that some of the above failed criteria can only fail in cases that involve circular ambiguity. To visualize an example of circular ambiguity, suppose a group of people at a table are asked for their first choice and point to the person on their right, and then when asked for their second choice each person points to the person on their left, and finally when asked for their third choice everyone points to the person at the head of the table. These situations (when there is no Condorcet winner) are not common (although neither are they rare). In other words, the Condorcet-Kemeny method has great fairness characteristics. Also recall that several people in this forum have recommended that your Green-party President be elected using a Condorcet method. Also note that the reason that the U.S. cities of Aspen (Colorado) and Burlington (Vermont?) recently stopped using IRV is that recent official winners were not the Condorcet winners. As for a peer-reviewed description of VoteFair representation ranking, I have repeatedly offered (here and elsewhere in the online voting-methods community) to write a description some place where it can be peer-reviewed, but there has been no request for such a description. Ironically, if the Czech Green party adopts VoteFair representation ranking (along with the Condorcet-Kemeny method), then the method would qualify as notable, and then I would be allowed to describe it in Wikipedia, where it would get peer reviewed. It's a chicken-and-egg problem; each requires the other. A fan of VoteFair ranking in Canada encouraged me to propose VoteFair ranking to a committee in the Canadian province of Ontario when they solicited recommendations for improved voting methods. I submitted my proposal for a subset of VoteFair ranking, and it was reviewed by numerous people, and I was among those asked to submit a concise summary (because many other submissions were unnecessarily lengthy and/or complex), and that adds a bit more credibility. (No new method was adopted for Ontario province because the voting-method experts, although supposedly unbiased, slanted information to support an unfair PR method that was then defeated in the province-wide vote.) > According to the description votefair ranking looks like STV. To answer this question, let's separate my recommendation into three parts: * The ballots are similar. (However, VoteFair ranking does not have restrictions that are commonly imposed on STV ballots.) * The popularity of choices are calculated differently, with STV assuming that the choice with the fewest votes is the least popular, whereas Condorcet-Kemeny uses a deeper-looking algorithm. * Finally, STV uses a quota cut-off and basically only looks at the top-ranked choices, whereas VoteFair representation ranking identifies "already-used" ballots in a way that strongly resists strategic voting attempts. If these differences are kept in mind, then the part of VoteFair ranking I recommend for your situation does have similarities with STV, especially when contrasted with methods such as approval voting and range voting. > I also have some concerns about the vote-counting. > We would need to make sure that the vote counting cannot not be > manipulated > and that the count is independently verifiable. This can be done by having three interested people independently (but probably with assistance from others) enter the ballot information into the VoteFair.org site as three different elections. As a further precaution, alias names (such as alpha, beta, gamma, delta, etc.) can be used instead of the candidates' real names. If all three results match one another (after converting back to real names), the vote-counting has been independently verified. In addition, if any voter disputes the results, he or she can look at the pairwise counts (which appear on every VoteFair results page) to verify that each winner was preferred over their losing favorite candidate. Notice that this simple comparison of numbers is much easier to understand compared to keeping track of eliminations sequences and vote transfers as used in IRV and STV. > Is the vote-counting program possible to install on a computer? > Is it open source? I have not yet released the software for use outside the server. At a later time I will release it on an open-source basis. (It's the chicken-and-egg problem again.) > Is the count implementable by a reasonably skilled programmer? In theory, yes, but in reality, no. It took me several years to figure out how to do the Condorcet-Kemeny calculations quickly (for all cases). And it took me about a year to write the code for VoteFair representation ranking. In both code segments there are many "edge" effects to handle, such as dealing with ties, accommodating voters who rank multiple candidates at the same preference level, and more. Also, I spent extra time writing code that does not reject ballots as "spoiled"; most reasonably skilled programmers would choose (especially initially) the lazier approach of discarding those ballots as spoiled. For clarification, I have a degree in Physics (from the University of California at Davis), and this gives me a mathematical advantage over average programmers. When other proposals claim that the software for their method does not yet exist, but that it would be easy to create, don't count on that happening quickly. It always takes much longer than expected to write new code. And programmers typically fail to budget time to encounter rare special cases that the programmer forgot to handle, and then to fix those bugs. As a reminder, the voting method I recommend for electing your council members has already been implemented in software and debugged, and it has been running successfully for more than five years. I hope this reply answers your questions. Please ask more questions as they arise. I apologize for the delay in answering these questions; I was busy preparing for a presentation I gave yesterday. Again, thank you for considering the use of the Condorcet-Kemeny method and VoteFair representation ranking for electing your council's members. Richard Fobes ---- Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
