Re: [EM] IRV vs Plurality
On Jan 14, 2010, at 10:17 PM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote: Would that FairVote and Rob Richie had listened, they'd have learned and they would have modified their strategy to focus on deeper and more effective goals. The ultimate goal of FairVote, in its foundation, was proportional representation, but they got stuck on a political choice as to how to implement it, and then on a strategy to faciliate the adoption of that method by using a method which is crazy for single-winner, but which is better for multiwinner. When one is determining representation, the goal is to have one vote from each voter go to one candidate, or to be split among candidates, and the goal is to maximize this so that as few votes as possible are wasted and the maximum number are represented. So Later-No-Harm makes sense when finding representatives where most votes will find their way. But STV, the general method, is still defective, and there are better methods, including ones much easier to canvass, so trying to get IRV in order to get the basic STV voting system in place was putting the cart before the horse. A political error that, I'm sure, looked good at the time. And what happens with political errors when someone bets their career on it? Summary: it gets hard to change course, unless the person involved is able to see beyond their own limitations. Not a common skill among most political activists, who are trained to be bulldogs who don't give up no matter what arguments are tossed at them. Debate skills. People are taught how to debate to win, not to produce the most sensible result after all has been considered. It's too often a piece of an adversarial system, with gladiatorial combats, and then the crowd gives thumbs-up or thumbs-down. Entertaining, but not particularly efficient for producing intelligent and sustainable decisions with a distracted crowd. There are much better ways that will work with people-as-they-are. And it only takes a few people to realize this to start building the structures. It is *not* necessary to convince the masses. That will come later, after they have examples to look at, which is what most people need. all of the above resonate very closely to what i've been thinking for about 10 months. So my political recommendations are based on what is already known, what has been already tried, with only minor variations beyond that. Approval voting, one might note the critics state, can default to Plurality if most voters vote for their favorite and leave it at that. *That's fine.* no it ain't. (Plurality is not fine.) :-) (it's fine and good for us to have different positions. i just think, and have for decades, that in a multi-candidate race, the problems with FPTP are too well known to revert back to that because IRV doesn't cut the mustard.) Most voters, indeed, will vote that way in most elections. So it's *harmless* and can be tried, particularly since it is essentially no cost to just Count All the Votes, and we should be doing that anyway! Does anyone think that it's an irrelevant and worthless fact to know how many ballots in Florida 2000 contained votes for each of the candidates, regardless of whether or not some were overvotes? Even if this information couldn't be used in that election because the rules required disregarding overvoted ballots. Instead, what's reported is this: overvotes are reported only as spoiled ballots. The votes on them are not counted at all. So the damage is concealed from us. If a rule has disproportionate impact, it can't be seen. Count All the Votes. And then, I claim, we should use the votes that are counted, and political theory generally says that Approval Voting, which is simply a matter of Counting All the Votes, is quite a good method, superior to plain Plurality, and simply defaulting to Plurality if people just vote for their favorite. i think the folks on the edges want a way to express a preference for their guy that will actually count against their fallback guy if the race were to become such that's between the two of them. with Approval, they still have to strategize do I vote for both or do I vote just for my favorite? actually (Terry knows about this), in Vermont, the State Senate races are sorta weird. unlike the Representatives that have legislative districts drawn (and have a single winner for each district), the State Senate candidates run at large for the whole county. being that Burlington is the largest city in the state, our county is also the largest, i think. we have 6 state Senators and the rules are we can vote for up to 6 on a single ballot, and the 6 highest vote getters are elected. usually a party puts out 6 candidates and one might think that they could just plug the 6 of their party unless they like to cross over for some particular candidate they like. but if there
Re: [EM] IRV vs Plurality (or is it about Range?)
On Jan 27, 2010, at 6:55 PM, Juho wrote: On Jan 27, 2010, at 11:47 PM, Jameson Quinn wrote: Without the uneven strategy problem, full-blown Range would be, hands down, the best (single-winner) voting system possible Would you be happy with fixed range ballots (e.g. 0 - 99) or should one allow any integer to be used ( -infinity - infinity )? :-) If one uses a fixed range should all voters then normalize their ratings (worst=0, best=99) or use a narrower scale (e.g. worst=40, best=85) if their feelings about the candidates are not very strong? :-) implicit to that question is what voters, who bother to come to the poll to express their opinions/wishes, would voluntarily reduce their influence by narrowing their ranges of approval. who comes to the polls without a desire to support a favorite candidate? if they do not wish to reduce their influence, what will they do with Range? i think nearly every voter will have a 99 and at least one 0. otherwise, they leave the poll thinking they threw part of their vote away. Should one determine some reference points for the voters (e.g. less than 10 = not accepted, 90 = excellent) to make sure that the given ratings are comparable? (this is more important if the range is infinite) :-) no, i think that if i can think up a negative number with greater magnitude than anyone else, i should be able to single-handedly scuttle a popular candidate. Is the sum of votes (or average) really what one wants or should one aim at providing about equal results to all, or maybe try to keep the worst results to individual voters as high as possible (40,40,40 vs. 0,60,60)? Would there still be electons where we would want to decide based on majority and breadth of opposition, or should all elections follow the sum of utilities pholosophy? maybe if we changed it from sum of utility (which is just a scaled version of mean of utility) to median of utility. that might help prevent skewing by extremists that will plug their candidate with 99 and every opponent with 0. but if people all do that, Range becomes Plurality. this is the strategy problem of Olympic judges (say of figure skating or gymnastics or something with 8 judges holding up cards rating the performance). there is a problem with adding sincere ratings to insincere and exaggerated ratings. *especially* with a secret ballot where no one needs to own up to and justify their exaggerated rating. My point is maybe that if we would get rid of the strategy related problems we would be well off but we might then move towards solving more detailed problems, performance with sincere votes and other problems that are just noise today. On the other hand we do have also (almost) strategy free environments/elections/polls today, with the exception of the strategy called compromising. that happens quite a bit when there are more than two candidates and there are at least two candidates that go into the election nearly evenly matched in pre-election polls. it's amazing that anyone touts Range as the most strategy free. the more handles one finds on a control device (think of the ballot as such) or the more positions one can set the knobs to, the more one has to strategize on how to control it to one's intent. -- r b-j r...@audioimagination.com Imagination is more important than knowledge. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] IRV vs Plurality (or is it about Range?)
On Jan 28, 2010, at 8:20 PM, robert bristow-johnson wrote: On Jan 27, 2010, at 6:55 PM, Juho wrote: On Jan 27, 2010, at 11:47 PM, Jameson Quinn wrote: Without the uneven strategy problem, full-blown Range would be, hands down, the best (single-winner) voting system possible Would you be happy with fixed range ballots (e.g. 0 - 99) or should one allow any integer to be used ( -infinity - infinity )? :-) If one uses a fixed range should all voters then normalize their ratings (worst=0, best=99) or use a narrower scale (e.g. worst=40, best=85) if their feelings about the candidates are not very strong? :-) implicit to that question is what voters, who bother to come to the poll to express their opinions/wishes, would voluntarily reduce their influence by narrowing their ranges of approval. who comes to the polls without a desire to support a favorite candidate? if they do not wish to reduce their influence, what will they do with Range? i think nearly every voter will have a 99 and at least one 0. otherwise, they leave the poll thinking they threw part of their vote away. Should one determine some reference points for the voters (e.g. less than 10 = not accepted, 90 = excellent) to make sure that the given ratings are comparable? (this is more important if the range is infinite) :-) no, i think that if i can think up a negative number with greater magnitude than anyone else, i should be able to single-handedly scuttle a popular candidate. Ok, you seem to think that one can not get rid of strategic voting in typical (political I guess) elections. Same with normalization and probably also exaggeration in Range. (Normalization could also be sincere in the sense that the society might recommend all to normalize in order to make all votes a bit more equal.) I agree that this is very caracteristic to political elections that tend to be more or less competitive when arranged by us humans. (I note that normalization may not be enough. My sincere normalized opinion is A=100 B=75 C=0. Then someone introduces intentionally a new candidate that others find quite ok but that I strongly dislike. Should I vote then A=100 B=95 C=80 D=0? I think they did that on purpose! (the normalization tendency can be used strategically) So maybe I'll vote A=100 B=75 C=0 D=0 if I don't believe the leading candidates are C and D.) Is the sum of votes (or average) really what one wants or should one aim at providing about equal results to all, or maybe try to keep the worst results to individual voters as high as possible (40,40,40 vs. 0,60,60)? Would there still be electons where we would want to decide based on majority and breadth of opposition, or should all elections follow the sum of utilities pholosophy? maybe if we changed it from sum of utility (which is just a scaled version of mean of utility) to median of utility. that might help prevent skewing by extremists that will plug their candidate with 99 and every opponent with 0. but if people all do that, Range becomes Plurality. That would be a good approach in a situation where most voters are sincere but we are afraid that some (small subset) of them might be strategic. this is the strategy problem of Olympic judges (say of figure skating or gymnastics or something with 8 judges holding up cards rating the performance). there is a problem with adding sincere ratings to insincere and exaggerated ratings. *especially* with a secret ballot where no one needs to own up to and justify their exaggerated rating. In ski jumping the practice is that the highest and lowest score will not be included in the sum of votes. This approach is somewhere between mean and median. Maybe it has some benefits of both. Judges come from different major ski jumping countries so often one of the judges has a temptation to vote strategically. Votes are public, so a strong bias will be visible. My point is maybe that if we would get rid of the strategy related problems we would be well off but we might then move towards solving more detailed problems, performance with sincere votes and other problems that are just noise today. On the other hand we do have also (almost) strategy free environments/elections/polls today, Strategy free elections are typically non-political. For example if I go to restaurant with some of my friends and we will vote what kind of giant pizza to order (using Range) then the votes might be sincere. One additional reason is that some of my friends might get angry to me and leave if my strategic voting gets too obvious. In politics the strength of this sincerity encouraging phenomenon is btw quite different in different societies. with the exception of the strategy called compromising. that happens quite a bit when there are more than two candidates and there are at least two candidates that go into the
Re: [EM] IRV vs Plurality (or is it about Range? maybe it should be about Condorcet.)
On Jan 28, 2010, at 3:12 PM, Juho wrote: On Jan 28, 2010, at 8:20 PM, robert bristow-johnson wrote: ... no, i think that if i can think up a negative number with greater magnitude than anyone else, i should be able to single-handedly scuttle a popular candidate. Ok, you seem to think that one can not get rid of strategic voting in typical (political I guess) elections. i think there are ways of not encouraging strategic voting by not punishing sincere voting. i'll defer to Arrow and the common wisdom here that ultimately no system completely ditches strategic voting under all conceivable conditions. Is the sum of votes (or average) really what one wants or should one aim at providing about equal results to all, or maybe try to keep the worst results to individual voters as high as possible (40,40,40 vs. 0,60,60)? Would there still be electons where we would want to decide based on majority and breadth of opposition, or should all elections follow the sum of utilities pholosophy? maybe if we changed it from sum of utility (which is just a scaled version of mean of utility) to median of utility. that might help prevent skewing by extremists that will plug their candidate with 99 and every opponent with 0. but if people all do that, Range becomes Plurality. That would be a good approach in a situation where most voters are sincere but we are afraid that some (small subset) of them might be strategic. i actually don't think it's so good. i was just trying to point out one of the main problems i see with Range. this is the strategy problem of Olympic judges (say of figure skating or gymnastics or something with 8 judges holding up cards rating the performance). there is a problem with adding sincere ratings to insincere and exaggerated ratings. *especially* with a secret ballot where no one needs to own up to and justify their exaggerated rating. In ski jumping the practice is that the highest and lowest score will not be included in the sum of votes. This approach is somewhere between mean and median. Maybe it has some benefits of both. Judges come from different major ski jumping countries so often one of the judges has a temptation to vote strategically. Votes are public, so a strong bias will be visible. and, again, my point is that with my secret ballot, and my suspicion that political opponents may well be voting with exaggerated ratings, that *i* would feel pressured to exaggerate *my* preferences and that i might expect *any* savvy voter to do the same. then, if everyone does that, the continuous gradation of Range loses its meaning. My point is maybe that if we would get rid of the strategy related problems we would be well off but we might then move towards solving more detailed problems, performance with sincere votes and other problems that are just noise today. On the other hand we do have also (almost) strategy free environments/ elections/polls today, Strategy free elections are typically non-political. For example if I go to restaurant with some of my friends and we will vote what kind of giant pizza to order (using Range) then the votes might be sincere. One additional reason is that some of my friends might get angry to me and leave if my strategic voting gets too obvious. In politics the strength of this sincerity encouraging phenomenon is btw quite different in different societies. i think that we should expect political opponents to strategize on how to defeat their opponents in any society. with the exception of the strategy called compromising. that happens quite a bit when there are more than two candidates and there are at least two candidates that go into the election nearly evenly matched in pre-election polls. it's amazing that anyone touts Range as the most strategy free. the more handles one finds on a control device (think of the ballot as such) or the more positions one can set the knobs to, the more one has to strategize on how to control it to one's intent. The basic Range strategy is unfortunately present in almost all elections, i don't see how it would be with a simple ranked-order ballot. especially, if decided by Condorcet, you cannot exaggerate your rankings. if you like A better than anyone and you like B better than C, then there is nothing to be gained by any other ranking than ABC. if you really hate C, you can rank a bunch of other candidates you don't care about between B and C. but it doesn't change how the election would work between the candidates A, B, and C. available to almost all voters and is easy to apply (if we see Range as a method where voters are supposed to give their sincere (non-normalized or normalized) opinions). and again, in a response i made long ago to Warren Smith, i think the best system is one that assumes that, if there is anything to be gained by voting
Re: [EM] IRV vs Plurality (or is it about Range? maybe it should be about Condorcet.)
On Jan 28, 2010, at 10:33 PM, robert bristow-johnson wrote: On Jan 28, 2010, at 3:12 PM, Juho wrote: On Jan 28, 2010, at 8:20 PM, robert bristow-johnson wrote: ... no, i think that if i can think up a negative number with greater magnitude than anyone else, i should be able to single-handedly scuttle a popular candidate. Ok, you seem to think that one can not get rid of strategic voting in typical (political I guess) elections. i think there are ways of not encouraging strategic voting by not punishing sincere voting. i'll defer to Arrow and the common wisdom here that ultimately no system completely ditches strategic voting under all conceivable conditions. Yes. Arrow's statements of course leaves space for methods that are strategy free enough to work in practice as if they were strategy free. (I should btw have talked only about not getting rid of the interest of voters to vote strategically.) this is the strategy problem of Olympic judges (say of figure skating or gymnastics or something with 8 judges holding up cards rating the performance). there is a problem with adding sincere ratings to insincere and exaggerated ratings. *especially* with a secret ballot where no one needs to own up to and justify their exaggerated rating. In ski jumping the practice is that the highest and lowest score will not be included in the sum of votes. This approach is somewhere between mean and median. Maybe it has some benefits of both. Judges come from different major ski jumping countries so often one of the judges has a temptation to vote strategically. Votes are public, so a strong bias will be visible. and, again, my point is that with my secret ballot, and my suspicion that political opponents may well be voting with exaggerated ratings, that *i* would feel pressured to exaggerate *my* preferences and that i might expect *any* savvy voter to do the same. then, if everyone does that, the continuous gradation of Range loses its meaning. Yes, strategic voting escalates since it doesn't make sense to anyone to let the strategists decide and let the sincere votes to be ignored. with the exception of the strategy called compromising. that happens quite a bit when there are more than two candidates and there are at least two candidates that go into the election nearly evenly matched in pre-election polls. it's amazing that anyone touts Range as the most strategy free. the more handles one finds on a control device (think of the ballot as such) or the more positions one can set the knobs to, the more one has to strategize on how to control it to one's intent. The basic Range strategy is unfortunately present in almost all elections, i don't see how it would be with a simple ranked-order ballot. especially, if decided by Condorcet, you cannot exaggerate your rankings. if you like A better than anyone and you like B better than C, then there is nothing to be gained by any other ranking than ABC. if you really hate C, you can rank a bunch of other candidates you don't care about between B and C. but it doesn't change how the election would work between the candidates A, B, and C. Yes, the main rule in Condorcet is that sincere voting is enough. Condorcet has also strategic vulnerabilities but in most environments one can expect those problems to be so marginal that sincere voting will be dominant and is the most practical strategy for all voters. Juho Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] IRV vs Plurality (or is it about Range? maybe it should be about Condorcet.)
On Jan 28, 2010, at 5:13 PM, Juho wrote: On Jan 28, 2010, at 10:33 PM, robert bristow-johnson wrote: On Jan 28, 2010, at 3:12 PM, Juho wrote: On Jan 28, 2010, at 8:20 PM, robert bristow-johnson wrote: ... it's amazing that anyone touts Range as the most strategy free. the more handles one finds on a control device (think of the ballot as such) or the more positions one can set the knobs to, the more one has to strategize on how to control it to one's intent. The basic Range strategy is unfortunately present in almost all elections, i don't see how it would be with a simple ranked-order ballot. especially, if decided by Condorcet, you cannot exaggerate your rankings. if you like A better than anyone and you like B better than C, then there is nothing to be gained by any other ranking than ABC. if you really hate C, you can rank a bunch of other candidates you don't care about between B and C. but it doesn't change how the election would work between the candidates A, B, and C. Yes, the main rule in Condorcet is that sincere voting is enough. Condorcet has also strategic vulnerabilities but in most environments one can expect those problems to be so marginal that sincere voting will be dominant and is the most practical strategy for all voters. again, other than to attempt to throw an election (decided by Condorcet rules) into a cycle, i can't think of any situation where it would serve any voter's political interests to rank a less preferred candidate higher than one that is more preferred. and, it's hard for me to imagine such a strategy serving the voter(s) using it, since it could be anyone's guess how the cycle that they create gets resolved. -- r b-j r...@audioimagination.com Imagination is more important than knowledge. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] IRV vs Plurality (or is it about Range? maybe it should be about Condorcet.)
On Jan 29, 2010, at 3:36 AM, robert bristow-johnson wrote: On Jan 28, 2010, at 5:13 PM, Juho wrote: On Jan 28, 2010, at 10:33 PM, robert bristow-johnson wrote: On Jan 28, 2010, at 3:12 PM, Juho wrote: On Jan 28, 2010, at 8:20 PM, robert bristow-johnson wrote: ... it's amazing that anyone touts Range as the most strategy free. the more handles one finds on a control device (think of the ballot as such) or the more positions one can set the knobs to, the more one has to strategize on how to control it to one's intent. The basic Range strategy is unfortunately present in almost all elections, i don't see how it would be with a simple ranked-order ballot. especially, if decided by Condorcet, you cannot exaggerate your rankings. if you like A better than anyone and you like B better than C, then there is nothing to be gained by any other ranking than ABC. if you really hate C, you can rank a bunch of other candidates you don't care about between B and C. but it doesn't change how the election would work between the candidates A, B, and C. Yes, the main rule in Condorcet is that sincere voting is enough. Condorcet has also strategic vulnerabilities but in most environments one can expect those problems to be so marginal that sincere voting will be dominant and is the most practical strategy for all voters. again, other than to attempt to throw an election (decided by Condorcet rules) into a cycle, i can't think of any situation where it would serve any voter's political interests to rank a less preferred candidate higher than one that is more preferred. and, it's hard for me to imagine such a strategy serving the voter(s) using it, since it could be anyone's guess how the cycle that they create gets resolved. To be exact, one could also break an already existing cycle for strategic reasons (compromise to elect a better winner). And yes, the strategies are in most cases difficult to master (due to risk of backfiring, no 100% control of the voters, no 100% accurate information of the opinions, changing opinions, other strategic voters, counterstrategies, losing second preferences of the targets of the strategy). Juho -- r b-j r...@audioimagination.com Imagination is more important than knowledge. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] IRV vs Plurality
On Jan 27, 2010, at 7:02 AM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote: At 08:10 PM 1/26/2010, Juho wrote: The scenario that you described requires some goodwill among the voters. That's correct. We seem to imagine that better voting systems will produce better results even if people continue to lack goodwill and cooperative spirit. It's a fantasy. There are structural changes that will encourage the seeking of consensus, but voting methods are only a tiny part of that. I think also the strong tradition of trying to develop methods that have as good performance as possible even when voters are competitive and strategic is a good and healthy tradition. An ideal method might achieve even better results when voters want to cooperate without sacrificing the performance with strategic votes. Or if the environment is non-competitive then one could use also methods that rely on the required sincerity of all voters. In typical political environments good poll information including approvals and ratings is thus a positive thing, but it may still be necessary to assume that strong competition is not uncommon in the actual election and prepare for that. Yes. I do suggest Bucklin. Most voters will bullet vote, it's very likely, but, then, use it as a primary in a runoff system, which provides a very specific meaning to the lowest approved rank: I prefer the election of this candidate to holding a runoff. It's an absolute, sincere vote that is strategically maximal! Because that is exactly the effect it has, monotonically. Bucklin + runoff might indeed work better than e.g. plain Approval (and plain Plurality of course) (assuming that the increased complexity is not seen as a big problem). Juho Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] IRV vs Plurality
On Jan 27, 2010, at 8:16 AM, Chris Benham wrote: Juho wrote (26 Jan 2010): snip It may well be that this method can be characterized as not fully Condorcet and Approval strategy added. I'm not quite sure that the intended idea of mostly Condorcet with core support rewarded (= do what the IRV core support idea is supposed to do) works well enough to justify this characterization and the use of this method (when core support is required). There is however some tendency to reward the large parties or other core support (as intended) and the behaviour is quite natural with some more common sets of votes. snip Juho, I don't see the IRV core support idea as a serious part of IRV's motivation. Rather I see it as reasonable propaganda to on the one hand offer some vague philosophical excuse for not meeting the Condorcet criterion, and on the other reassure those who are wary of too radical a change (from Plurality) that this method will not elect a candidate with very few first preferences. I too believe the requirement of core support is largely used for defensive reasons and to make other systems look worse, not that much as a true sincere requirement. On the other hand I understand that if the current system is a two-party system with single party governments, led by one single very powerful person with a long term, then in that system those rules tend to have (or at least appear to have) about 50% first preference support among the voters, and any deviation from this towards having leaders with less first preference support and need to cooperate with others in order to be able to rule may look like electing too weak candidates. New ways of working may look frightening, and if taken directly into use while parts of the system remains in the old mode there might indeed be a transition period with problems and confusion, even if the end result would be a system that eventually will work better. For these reasons I'd like to see good definitions of what kind of core support requirements people might have in their mind. The proper criterion that I see it as being most closely positively linked to is Mutual Dominant Third, a weakened version of Condorcet that says that if more than a third of the voters vote all the members of subset S of candidates above all the non-member candidates and all the members of S pairwise beat all the non-members, then the winner must come from S. This criterion may well be acceptable to people who are used to thinking in terms of Plurality. Also of course it seeks to put a positive spin on the fact that the candidate with the fewest first preferences can't win, even if that candidate is the big pairwise beats-all winner. snip 51: ABC 41: BCA 08: CAB BA 61.5 - 59, BC 112.5 - 12, AC 76.5 - 53 51% voted A as their unique favourite and 59% voted A above B, and yet B wins. Yes, and I believe there are more criteria that the method fails. We should however from some point of view be happy since the method elected B that seems to have 92% core support (maybe this is how I defined core support in this method). snip Defining as you do core support as approval, what is your objection to simpler methods that don't allow ranking among unapproved candidates (and so just interpret ranking above bottom as approval) such as the Smith//Approval(ranking) method I endorse? That is another working method that also at some level rewards core support (=approvals). I don't object the method. My first concerns are maybe in the direction that you mentioned, methods that don't allow ranking among unapproved candidates. It sounds a bit problematic if the voters of the losing side would generally not take any position on which one of the candidates of the winning side should win (if they choose not to rank them in order to show their non-approval of them). That might lead to not electing a candidate that all like but a candidate that the winning side internally likes (but that could be the worst candidate from the point of view of the losing side voters). Or if you think that it is justified for a candidate with a very big approval score to beat a majority favourite with less approval, why not simply promote the plain Approval method? I'm actually not taking any position on if core support should be required = just saying what one could do if (this particular kind of) core support is required. A two-party system is based on heavy use of core support but in a genuine multiparty environment it is more difficult for me to find reasons to explicitly require strong core support to be present. The first reason in my head why I don't feel like promoting Approval as a good general purpose single winner method for all needs is that although it does pretty good work in finding a widely approved candidate (when that is what the society wants) when there are two leading candidates it
Re: [EM] IRV vs Plurality
2010/1/26 Abd ul-Rahman Lomax a...@lomaxdesign.com The typical error is in assuming some strategic faction which votes sensibly, when everyone else votes in a way that they will regret if they discover the result they cause. You can't study history for two minutes without finding significant groups of people (that is, ~5% fractions, not everyone else) behaving in ways they come to regret later. This is unavoidable human nature, and acknowledging it is no error. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] IRV vs Plurality
At 08:51 AM 1/27/2010, Jameson Quinn wrote: 2010/1/26 Abd ul-Rahman Lomax mailto:a...@lomaxdesign.coma...@lomaxdesign.com The typical error is in assuming some strategic faction which votes sensibly, when everyone else votes in a way that they will regret if they discover the result they cause. You can't study history for two minutes without finding significant groups of people (that is, ~5% fractions, not everyone else) behaving in ways they come to regret later. This is unavoidable human nature, and acknowledging it is no error. Now, is the voting system supposed to protect them from their stupidity? We were not talking about a minor faction voting that way, but half of the two largest, with 20% of the vote, in the example Mr. Quinn created, the total faction being 40%. The opposing 40% vote *normally!*, all of them. The vote cast by this 20% faction effectively says I have very little preference between Bore and Cush. (It's 1/5 vote!) So if the voting system interprets their vote that way, we are supposed to blame the system? There is supposedly a Moral issue here, the idea that we are not supposed to reward dishonesty. But a vote is never dishonest, it is an action, tossing a weight or weights in a balance or balances, intending to swing the balances some way. It's not a sentiment, and it is not a statement under some binding rule of honesty that could be defined. Reversing preference is more arguable, perhaps, but this still applies. Moral responsibility lies in the consequences of the actions, or at least in what we could anticipate from them. Hence, if the 20% believes that their vote was foolish, the responsibility for that lies with them. Look, I would not dump full-blown Range on an electorate. I'm proposing Bucklin, which would allow ranking in a way that makes it roughly equivalent to rating, with the three ranks meaning -- and it might say that right on the ballot -- Favorite, Preferred, and Also Approved. I prefer to see this as the primary in a runoff system, so that Also Approved has a very clear preference meaning: I prefer to see these candidates elected to a runoff being held. Later-No-Harm is important to you? Fine. Just vote for your favorite. If your favorite gets a majority, done. If not, then, if your favorite is a leader by the criteria used to determine runoff candidates, you will presumably vote for your favorite again. If your favorite doesn't make it, you will still have your option to cast a vote indicating preference again. This isn't *difficult.* But it leads, later, after there is more experience, to using a Range Ballot to accomplish the same thing, only with a bit more subtlety, and the Range ballot would start with only one more rank: Preferred to the worst. The original ballot can be analyzed as Range 4, with a vote of 1 missing, the values are 4, 3, 2, 0. The extended ballot adds the 1. Initially, that might not even be used to determine a winner, but would be used to collect preference information from voters who don't support a winner. It might then be used to make somewhat better choices for runoffs. It would never be considered approval of such a candidate, indeed, it is disapproval. Following basic democratic procedures, a winner would never be declared in a primary with less than a majority, but if, after study of such elections and runoffs, it is determined that there is no significant risk of reversal in a runoff with a less stringent standard, that's fine with me; compromises are made in the name of efficiency when the loss in efficiency is great enough to warrant the loss in full confidence. Note that in the election described, by the votes, there would be a majority winner if we assume that 80% is approval Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] IRV vs Plurality
2010/1/27 Abd ul-Rahman Lomax a...@lomaxdesign.com At 08:51 AM 1/27/2010, Jameson Quinn wrote: 2010/1/26 Abd ul-Rahman Lomax mailto:a...@lomaxdesign.com a...@lomaxdesign.com The typical error is in assuming some strategic faction which votes sensibly, when everyone else votes in a way that they will regret if they discover the result they cause. You can't study history for two minutes without finding significant groups of people (that is, ~5% fractions, not everyone else) behaving in ways they come to regret later. This is unavoidable human nature, and acknowledging it is no error. Now, is the voting system supposed to protect them from their stupidity? It isn't necessarily stupidity. It could be ethics, or genuine lack of available information. It's not just protecting them. It's protecting the majority of which they form a part. And every other serious voting system would do so. So yes. We were not talking about a minor faction voting that way, My example had showed how even large advantages could, theoretically, be overruled by uneven strategy. But I keep insisting, and you keep not hearing, that that's just to illustrate a point. For something more realistic, consider my example as the middle 10%, with 45% bullet voters on either side. In that case, 49% strategic voters are overcoming 45% strategic and 6% unstrategic voters. It's easy to change the numbers so that even 47% strategic voters (with 2% unstrategic ones on their side) can overcome the same odds, and still be overturning the true Range winner. Look, I would not dump full-blown Range on an electorate. OK, I guess you do get it. So why do you keep arguing with me? Without the uneven strategy problem, full-blown Range would be, hands down, the best (single-winner) voting system possible, and the EM list's days would be numbered until we all just agreed on that and went home. Because of this problem, Range is not perfect, and there is still a lot to talk about here. Jameson Quinn Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] IRV vs Plurality
On Jan 27, 2010, at 11:47 PM, Jameson Quinn wrote: Without the uneven strategy problem, full-blown Range would be, hands down, the best (single-winner) voting system possible Would you be happy with fixed range ballots (e.g. 0 - 99) or should one allow any integer to be used ( -infinity - infinity )? If one uses a fixed range should all voters then normalize their ratings (worst=0, best=99) or use a narrower scale (e.g. worst=40, best=85) if their feelings about the candidates are not very strong? Should one determine some reference points for the voters (e.g. less than 10 = not accepted, 90 = excellent) to make sure that the given ratings are comparable? (this is more important if the range is infinite) Is the sum of votes (or average) really what one wants or should one aim at providing about equal results to all, or maybe try to keep the worst results to individual voters as high as possible (40,40,40 vs. 0,60,60)? Would there still be electons where we would want to decide based on majority and breadth of opposition, or should all elections follow the sum of utilities pholosophy? My point is maybe that if we would get rid of the strategy related problems we would be well off but we might then move towards solving more detailed problems, performance with sincere votes and other problems that are just noise today. On the other hand we do have also (almost) strategy free environments/elections/polls today, so our selection of decision making (or utility measuring) algorithms should cover also them. Juho Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] IRV vs Plurality
On Jan 26, 2010, at 4:43 AM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote: At 07:22 PM 1/25/2010, Juho wrote: There are many (working) uses for an approval cutoff in ranked ballots. But on the other hand they may add complexity and confusion and not add anything essential. = Careful consideration needed. Only a voting systems theorist who is not a parliamentarian or familiar with the principles of parliamentary traditions, essential in direct democracy, would think approval not relevant. Approval is Yes/No on the series of possible choices. It's fundamental, actually, and compromises with this are *never* made in direct democracies, they are only made in the name of efficiency in large- scale elections. I referred only to approval cutoffs as additional components in existing methods. Bucklin does that, basically, by only considering approval votes, but it sets up a declining approval cutoff, typically in three batches, loosely named as Favorite, Preferred, and Approved. I've suggested that in a runoff voting situation, majority required, Approved has a very specific meaning: it means I would prefer to see this candidate elected over holding a runoff election. Voters, then, by what candidates they choose to approve given their overall understanding of election possibilities, will sincerely vote this. It makes no sense not to. Bucklin is a bit simpler. Simpler than what? The proposed method? Sure. By definition, range methods put extra weight on first preferences, if the voter chooses to express the first preference exclusively, as does Bucklin, at least in the first round. Range is also designed to elect candidates with no core support, e.g. one that gets 60% of the points from all voters while all others have only limited amount of strong support and no support from the rest. IRV puts always main weight on first preferences (among the remaining candidates). Yes. However, designed to elect candidates with no core support is an overstatement. It certainly is not designed for that, but it allows it. It's pretty unlikely, eh? Yes, but desirable if one wants to respect the basic philosophy of sum of ratings. The most common response to this claim when it comes from FairVote is,Really, even the candidate and her mother prefer someone else? And when there really is a problem with core support, it comes down to, usually, center squeeze, and the compromise winner is, in fact, quite strong in first preference votes, but merely ends up, in a three-way race, in third place, and not by a large margin. Not at all no core support. Appeasing the core support criterion is a very bad idea, rewarding partisan affiliation without sound reason for it; the only arguments I've seen for it that carry any weight are arguments that core support is necessary for good governance, which is not entirely incorrect, but which doesn't counterbalance the danger of serious social division. Remember that the Nazi Party in Germany had core support. Mmmm, did that help them govern? Sure it did! But good governance? No, not at all, I certainly hope we will agree. Any core support criterion pushes results away from true majority- supported results toward domination by the largest faction. Which, of course, then encourages a two-party system, at best. There is no good definition of core support. It is quite possible that there are elections where core support or weight on first preferences is a desirable feature. But it is hard to discuss and judge as long as that feature is not well specified (I don't consider the operational definition as derived from how IRV works to be a proper definition). Juho Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] IRV vs Plurality
On Jan 26, 2010, at 6:07 AM, Chris Benham wrote: Juho wrote (25 Jan 2010): I reply to myself since I want to present one possible simple method that combines Condorcet and added weight to first preferences (something that IRV offers in its own peculiar way). Let's add an approval cutoff in the Condorcet ballots. The first approach could be to accept only winners that have some agreed amount of approvals. But I'll skip that approach and propose something softer. A clear approval cutoff sounds too black and white to me (unless there is already some agreed level of approval that must be met). The proposal is simply to add some more strength to opinions that cross the approval cutoff. Ballot ABCD would be counted as 1 point to pairwise comparisons AB and CD but some higher number of points (e.g. 1.5) to comparisons AC, AD, BC and BD. This would introduce some approval style strategic opportunities in the method but basic ranking would stay as sincere as it was. I don't believe the approval related strategic problems would be as bad in this method as in Approval itself. snip The some higher number of points (e.g. 1.5) looks arbitrary Yes it is (with the intention to allow the required amount of core support to be adjusted), just like the whole method is (somewhat ad hoc). I'd like to have a good definition of what the target of core support and weight on first preferences is. That would make it possible to discuss the benefits and problems better. Now the proposed method is just simple, it may work well enough in real elections, and offers one approach to emphasizing core support. and results in the method failing Majority Favourite, never mind Condorcet etc. 51: ABC 41: BCA 08: CAB BA 61.5 - 59, BC 112.5 - 12, AC 76.5 - 53 51% voted A as their unique favourite and 59% voted A above B, and yet B wins. Yes, and I believe there are more criteria that the method fails. We should however from some point of view be happy since the method elected B that seems to have 92% core support (maybe this is how I defined core support in this method). Those 51% that approved both A and B must be quite happy with electing B since they indicated that B is approved (has their core support). If some of them strongly think that A should have won instead of B then they applied the Approval strategy poorly (= should have approved A only in a situation where A and B are the main competitors). Those 59% that preferred A over B include also the C supporters. They should have approved also A to make the chances of A winning B bigger. Thus also the C supporters didn't use the traditional Approval strategy properly (assuming that they strongly want A to win B). The basic assumption thus is that the voter given rankings are mainly sincere but large part of the approvals may be strategic. In real life the strategic incentives are probably not as strong as in this example. It may well be that this method can be characterized as not fully Condorcet and Approval strategy added. I'm not quite sure that the intended idea of mostly Condorcet with core support rewarded (= do what the IRV core support idea is supposed to do) works well enough to justify this characterization and the use of this method (when core support is required). There is however some tendency to reward the large parties or other core support (as intended) and the behaviour is quite natural with some more common sets of votes. See example below. 45: ABC 10: BA=C 45: CBA This is an example with a centrist Condorcet winner. In Condorcet B would win. In the proposed method the core support of B is not sufficient. A=C 67.5 - 67.5, AB 82.5 - 60, CB 82.5 - 60. If the number of votes would be changed to 42: ABC, 16: BA=C, 42: CBA that would be enough to make B the winner with the chosen factor 1.5 (16 = sufficient amount of core support). Juho Chris Benham __ Yahoo!7: Catch-up on your favourite Channel 7 TV shows easily, legally, and for free at PLUS7. www.tv.yahoo..com.au/plus7 Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] IRV vs Plurality
At 03:04 AM 1/26/2010, Juho wrote: On Jan 26, 2010, at 4:43 AM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote: At 07:22 PM 1/25/2010, Juho wrote: There are many (working) uses for an approval cutoff in ranked ballots. But on the other hand they may add complexity and confusion and not add anything essential. = Careful consideration needed. Only a voting systems theorist who is not a parliamentarian or familiar with the principles of parliamentary traditions, essential in direct democracy, would think approval not relevant. Approval is Yes/No on the series of possible choices. It's fundamental, actually, and compromises with this are *never* made in direct democracies, they are only made in the name of efficiency in large- scale elections. I referred only to approval cutoffs as additional components in existing methods. My point is that approval is a separate issue from ranking, and it's actually a crucial issue in multiple-choice decision-making in general. I've seen, after an approval poll in a context where the first preference of most members was about 70% for one option, but an approval polls showed little more than that as approval for that option, but 99% approval for an alternative, a motion to adopt the alternative, seconded and passed with no dissent at all, unanimity. The only way to discover a situation like this is some later poll, repeated election. Had the original poll been an actual election, choosing the highest approval would have, in fact, implemented the will of the majority. Usually. That's why approval voting is reasonable, but also why runoff elections or similar tests are sometimes needed. Note that, in a situation where they already knew (this was show-of-hands voting, and the status quo voting was first) that they had a strong majority, the 70% nevertheless approved also the alternative, probably based on the thorough discussion that had preceded the poll. They understood the depth of feeling behind the opposition to the status quo, and, seeking the common welfare, which depends on organizational unity, they allowed the other option to prevail by approving it as well. In repeated polling, approval is an excellent way to rapidly seek a majority; in contentious issues without adequate deliberation, such polls may start out as largely bullet-voted, but as the process continues, approvals will be added, and some prior approvals might be dropped (representing an actual change in preference order, a phenomenon possible in repeated elections and obviously impossible with a single-ballot. In the situation I described, many of those preferring the status quo -- which had stood for maybe forty years -- had said, at first, over my dead body. I'd call that strong disapproval, eh? But, after discussion and expression of many different member sentiments, those members obviously changed their minds.) Yes. However, designed to elect candidates with no core support is an overstatement. It certainly is not designed for that, but it allows it. It's pretty unlikely, eh? Yes, but desirable if one wants to respect the basic philosophy of sum of ratings. Right. Setting aside the issue of using averages, which I consider foolish as a practical proposal at this time, but which, when we get real Range elections happening, sum of votes obviously maximizes expressed expected satisfaction with the various outcomes. Range voting is interesting precisely because it bases outcomes on a metric for election performance, and the only issue is a lot of hot air about strategic voting in Range. My view on this is simple: strategic voting in Range expresses real preference strength. In other words, it's an oxymoron, created by an assumption that when a voter exaggerates, the voter doesn't really care that much. But how much we care always depends on our perception of realities. If a range outcome benefits me to the tune of $100, and another costs me $100, other things being equal, what's my preference strength between these. We can assign an absolute value ($200) to the preference strength, but that does not determine a sensible Range vote. If those are the only two options, the vote strength I will exercise is 100% between them. But say there are two more options, but all of them are considered by me to be impossible, the other voters won't support them. Suppose with one of these options, I gain $1000, and with another, I lose $1000. Does this change my sincere vote? I say no. But with unlimited Range, sure, I'd honestly state the actual utilities, as long as the analysis made sense (as with a Clarke tax). With normalized range, which is what we ordinarily see, I will express, reasonably, my utilities within a truncated set, where unrealistic alternatives are excluded. I have called this magnification, because a sincere vote represents only the spectrum including realistic candidates. Which then indicates, with Approval, an obvious and oft-suggested
Re: [EM] IRV vs Plurality
Hi, --- En date de : Mar 26.1.10, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax a...@lomaxdesign.com a écrit : Range voting is interesting precisely because it bases outcomes on a metric for election performance, and the only issue is a lot of hot air about strategic voting in Range. My view on this is simple: strategic voting in Range expresses real preference strength. In other words, it's an oxymoron, created by an assumption that when a voter exaggerates, the voter doesn't really care that much. But how much we care always depends on our perception of realities. Well, this is just a change of terminology. You can say that Range relatively has strategic incentive to exaggerate, or you can say that in Range the sincere vote is relatively dependent on voters' perceptions of which candidates are viable. Either way this will be often be regarded as a disadvantage. Kevin Venzke Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] IRV vs Plurality
At 08:10 PM 1/26/2010, Juho wrote: The scenario that you described requires some goodwill among the voters. That's correct. We seem to imagine that better voting systems will produce better results even if people continue to lack goodwill and cooperative spirit. It's a fantasy. There are structural changes that will encourage the seeking of consensus, but voting methods are only a tiny part of that. If the competition is really strong then one could expect the 70% of the voters not to even mention the 99% approved candidate in the polls if they already know that they have 70% majority behind their first preference. That's right, if they don't care about alienating 30% of the members of the organization, an organization that breaks down and becomes dysfunctional if people fight with each other and fail to respect the need for unity. On the other hand the availability of reliable poll information may reduce the competitive spirit of the election. What you do is to poll, and allowing approval polling is simple, nobody even though of suggesting that people only vote once in the show of hands. The question wasn't a preference question, it was would you consider this choice acceptable. The poll wasn't going to decide anything, and this was a group of people whose culture facilitated and encouraged complete honesty, and the whole thing would become a stupid waste of time without the honesty, it was fundamental and crucial, or even more than a stupid waste of time, positively harmful. Some part of strategic voting and strong competitiveness is based on the fear of unknown and lack of understanding of the viewpoints of the others. If all take a defensive attitude from the start and paint all their competitors with dark colours then there may never be any consensus. Right. In typical political environments good poll information including approvals and ratings is thus a positive thing, but it may still be necessary to assume that strong competition is not uncommon in the actual election and prepare for that. Yes. I do suggest Bucklin. Most voters will bullet vote, it's very likely, but, then, use it as a primary in a runoff system, which provides a very specific meaning to the lowest approved rank: I prefer the election of this candidate to holding a runoff. It's an absolute, sincere vote that is strategically maximal! Because that is exactly the effect it has, monotonically. Voters may also understand that a society that makes consensus decisions may be a better place to live in than a society where the current majority always ignores the minorities. And people may vote for parties that support this approach. But also here, it may still be wise to allow the majority to decide when consensus decisions (that cover also the needs of the other side) will be made. In a way we are talking about a benevolent majority and the growth of a society towards away from a conflict driven mode. Majority rule is a crucial foundation for democracy. But if the majority is stupid, it can wreck the place, and everyone is in the minority from time to time. Seeking supermajority approval actually helps everyone, long-term, but there is a tradeoff with efficiency. Yes, the good part of Range is in the satisfaction measurements. I think the strategy problems are very real in many environments, not just hot air. So one must be careful with Range. The typical error is in assuming some strategic faction which votes sensibly, when everyone else votes in a way that they will regret if they discover the result they cause. [...] There is a natural incentive to the two largest groupings to promote this kind of polarization. And a two-party system is a demonstration that such systems may also work reasonably well in practice. Sometimes, when the social contract is strong and the distance between the two parties is actually not large (i.e., Tweedledum and Tweedledee might be a bit of a good thing!), it works, but sometimes it leads to civil war and genocide, when the polarization becomes too great Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] IRV vs Plurality
] IRV vs Plurality On Jan 13, 2010, at 9:14 AM, robert bristow-johnson wrote: it still is a curiosity to me how, historically, some leaders and proponents of election reform thunked up the idea to have a ranked- order ballot and then took that good idea and married it to the IRV protocol. with the 200 year old Condorcet idea in existence, why would they do that? 1) The basic idea of IRV is in some sense natural. It is like a street fight. The weakest players are regularly kicked out and they must give up. I'm not saying that this would lead to good results but at least this game is understandable to most people. Condorcet on the other hand is more like a mathematical equation, and the details of the most complex Condorcet variants may be too much for most voters. Here I'm not saying that each voter (and not even each legislator) should understand all the details of their voting system. The basic Condorcet winner rule is however a simple enough principle to be explained to all. But it may be that IRV is easier to market (to the legislators and voters) from this point of view. 2) IRV is easier to count manually. Condorcet gets quite tedious to count manually when the number of candidates and voters goes up. One can use some tricks and shortcuts to speed up manual Condorcet counting but IRV probably still beats it from this point of view. Manual counting was the only way to count for a long time. Nowadays we have computers and Condorcet tabulation should thus be no problem at all (at least in places where computers are available). But this is one reason why IRV has taken an early lead. 3) Large parties are typically in a key role when electoral reforms are made. Election method experts within those parties may well have found out that IRV tends to favour large parties. In addition to trying to improve the society the best way they can, political parties and people within them also tend to think that they are the ones who are right and therefore the society would benefit of just them being in power and getting more votes and more seats. The parties and their representatives may also have other more selfish drivers behind their interest to grab as large share of the power as possible :-). IRV thus seems to maintain the power of the current strongest players better than Condorcet does, and that may mean some bias towards IRV. 4) The problems of different election methods may appear only later. A superficial understanding of IRV reveals first its positive features. Like in Burlington the negative features may be understood only after something negative happens in real elections. This applies also to Condorcet. On that side one may however live in the hope that the problems are rare enough and not easy to take advantage of so that sincere voting and good results would be dominant. The point is that IRV may be taken into use first (see other points above and below) without understanding what problems might emerge later. And once it has been taken into use it may well stay in use for a long time (electoral reforms are not made every year, people have already gotten used to the method, having to change the method could be seen by the society/legislators as a failure/embarrassment, and people/parties who were elected based on those rules and are strong in that system may be reluctant to change the rules). 5) Both IRV and Condorcet have some weak spots that can be attacked. As you point out the weak spots of IRV may well be worse than those of Condorcet methods (for most typical use cases in politics). Different problems may have different weight in different political environments. For example in countries with strong two-party tradition and single party government some Condorcet properties like the possibility of electing candidates that do not have strong first preference support in the ballots may work against it (both in the case that one does not want the system to change and in the case that one wants to renew the system). Also strategic voting and fraud related problems (like later no harm, burial, precinct counting) may be seen in different light in different societies, e.g. in countries where strategic voting is the norm vs. in ones where sincere voting is the norm. One may thus have/develop points of view where Condorcet looks worse than IRV (I guess it could also be worse for some uses in some societies from some points of view). Juho P.S. One more reason is that Condorcet promoters seem to be lazier that IRV promoters :-). Condorcet has made some progress in the academic circles but not yet in politics. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] IRV vs Plurality
At 07:22 PM 1/25/2010, Juho wrote: There are many (working) uses for an approval cutoff in ranked ballots. But on the other hand they may add complexity and confusion and not add anything essential. = Careful consideration needed. Only a voting systems theorist who is not a parliamentarian or familiar with the principles of parliamentary traditions, essential in direct democracy, would think approval not relevant. Approval is Yes/No on the series of possible choices. It's fundamental, actually, and compromises with this are *never* made in direct democracies, they are only made in the name of efficiency in large-scale elections. Bucklin does that, basically, by only considering approval votes, but it sets up a declining approval cutoff, typically in three batches, loosely named as Favorite, Preferred, and Approved. I've suggested that in a runoff voting situation, majority required, Approved has a very specific meaning: it means I would prefer to see this candidate elected over holding a runoff election. Voters, then, by what candidates they choose to approve given their overall understanding of election possibilities, will sincerely vote this. It makes no sense not to. Bucklin is a bit simpler. Simpler than what? The proposed method? Sure. By definition, range methods put extra weight on first preferences, if the voter chooses to express the first preference exclusively, as does Bucklin, at least in the first round. Range is also designed to elect candidates with no core support, e.g. one that gets 60% of the points from all voters while all others have only limited amount of strong support and no support from the rest. IRV puts always main weight on first preferences (among the remaining candidates). Yes. However, designed to elect candidates with no core support is an overstatement. It certainly is not designed for that, but it allows it. It's pretty unlikely, eh? The most common response to this claim when it comes from FairVote is,Really, even the candidate and her mother prefer someone else? And when there really is a problem with core support, it comes down to, usually, center squeeze, and the compromise winner is, in fact, quite strong in first preference votes, but merely ends up, in a three-way race, in third place, and not by a large margin. Not at all no core support. Appeasing the core support criterion is a very bad idea, rewarding partisan affiliation without sound reason for it; the only arguments I've seen for it that carry any weight are arguments that core support is necessary for good governance, which is not entirely incorrect, but which doesn't counterbalance the danger of serious social division. Remember that the Nazi Party in Germany had core support. Mmmm, did that help them govern? Sure it did! But good governance? No, not at all, I certainly hope we will agree. Any core support criterion pushes results away from true majority-supported results toward domination by the largest faction. Which, of course, then encourages a two-party system, at best. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] IRV vs Plurality (back to the pile count controversy)
Kathy Dopp wrote: James, Your formulas below are only correct in the case that voters are allowed to rank all the candidates who run for an election contest. That may be true in Australia, but is not true in the US where typically voters are allowed to rank up to only three candidates. As a note: some methods (most discussed here, actually) also permit both truncation and equal-ranking. If one takes that into account, the formulas become more complex still. Yet, on another level, this may not really matter. On the one hand, if there'll ever just be a few candidates, the amount of information to transmit is managable. On the other, setting a hard limit to, say, no more than 5 candidates may participate in this election is rather inelegant, and I would say, unfair, and if the potential number of candidates can grow to any number, it doesn't matter what formula is being used as long as it's superpolynomial (and so the values grow very large very quickly). Truncation or no truncation, equal rank or not, the number of unique orderings grow in that manner. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] IRV vs Plurality (back to the pile count controversy)
At 09:52 PM 1/22/2010, robert bristow-johnson wrote: now remember in the case we're discussing here, there is only two candidates. again, what consequence to the outcome of the election (that is, who of A or B wins) occurs whether a ballot is marked A (and B is last by default) or is marked AB? there is none. If there are only two possible choices, that's the case. However, in fully democratic elections, the only case where there are only two choices is election by motion. The question is of the form of Resolved: that A be elected to the office. Yes/No. I will be putting together a document that compiles relevant rules and discussion from Robert's Rules of Order as it relates to voting, elections, ballots, and particularly preferential voting, because I consider an understanding of deliberative election process as essential to understanding voting system optimization. It is far more sophisticated than any voting system on the table, and the only problem is one of efficiency. While it is a method of election, in the general sense, it has been neglected because it is very difficult to study. It is not deterministic from a single set of preference profiles, even if they include preference strength information. In public elections where write-in votes are allowed (which is so much the norm in the U.S. that it is preposterous to neglect it, and sometimes write-in candidates win), there are actually a practically unlimited number of optional votes. That *normally* write-in votes are largely irrelevant does not change this. The methods must allow for the possibility. So, as a compromise, canvassing methods may neglect the possible variety of write-in votes, and canvass them as if for a single candidate. But, then, if the number of votes for the single write-in candidate, were they all one candidate, possibly affect the result, it becomes necessary to count and report those individual write-in votes. I have not detailed how this would be done, and it is possible that, depending on conditions, it could be made more efficient than simply reporting every vote. But in some cases, reporting every vote might be necessary! i'm not going to discuss this any more with Abd, because he's not a straight shooter, but James, if you want to get into this, it's pretty much cut and dried from the POV of Information Theory (a.la. Claude Shannon). This conclusion depends on understanding the situation to which the theory is being applied. That's what Robert misses. He makes simplifying assumptions without being aware that these assumptions are not applicable in the general case, but he does not specify the assumptions, nor does he take note of them when they are specified by others, including me, he merely concludes that I'm not a straight shooter, which would imply some deceptive intent, but he has adduced no evidence of that, merely his idea that I am wrong, which he has repeated over and over as if that would establish it as a fact, rather than a detailed examination of the evidence and arguments. His privilege, here. 1. there are three eligible candidates, A, B, and C. 2. a particular voter has A as his/her first preference. 3. the same voter has B as the second preference. 4. the same voter has C as the last preference. The question is whether or not the vote ABC is different from AB, whether or not the difference is worth reporting, or, stronger, necessary to report. And that depends on details of the rules, which Robert has neither stated nor accepted, and he has denied, without evidence, comments that did specify exceptions to the rules he proposes, -- not made-up, but real-world exceptions. I'll give the most notable: if a majority is required for election, and according to accepted parliamentary procedure, majority means more than half of all non-black ballots cast. Whether or not a candidate is eligible or not is irrelevant! Robert has adduced a preference profile, but has not specified one critical piece of information, in determining the relevance of an ABC vote compared to AB. Is the voter willing to accept the result of the election of C, or would the voter prefer that the election fail? In short, does the voter approve of the election of C? We cannot tell that from the raw preference profile without approval information. I gave examples -- and analyzed Robert's examples -- where the two votes are different in consequence. Now, let's narrow the question, being aware that we are now more narrowly specifying it. If the election is election by plurality, does the third preference vote make a practical difference? Not in determining the result, but it is still important in assessing election quality, and examples could be shown where this is important as public information. There are rarely IRV elections which are by plurality, where, if the counting is continued one more step, the election would be by a majority. Even though this is
Re: [EM] IRV vs Plurality (back to the pile count controversy)
robert bristow-johnson Sent: Friday, January 22, 2010 12:25 AM On Jan 21, 2010, at 7:05 PM, James Gilmour wrote: N Unique Preference Profiles 2 4 3 15 ... then your calculation is mistaken. the fact that you ostensibly need 4 piles when there are only two candidates should serve as a clue. If there are two candidates, A and B, then the possible unique preference profiles are: A B AB BA what, on a ballot, is the consequential difference in meaning between A and AB? what effect does a ballot marked AB have over one marked just A (or vise versa) in *any* election method that uses ranked ballots? In terms of preference profiles the question is completely irrelevant. A and AB are two different preference profiles. So the possible numbers of preference profiles for given numbers of candidates are, I think, correctly stated in the table in my earlier post. How the STV counting rules handle the two preference profiles A and AB is a different matter. Some STV counting rules handle these two profiles identically. But for some other STV counting rules the profiles A and AB are handled differently. This second set of rules are those that prescribe the transfer of votes to the bitter end, i.e. even after the winners have all been determined. Under this rule a ballot marked A would be treated differently from a ballot marked AB: at the last possible transfer, the A ballot would become 'non-transferable (exhausted)', but the AB ballot would be transferred to A. This second rule is, of course, a stupid rule but that does not mean it has not been implemented in some jurisdictions, including, sadly, Scotland. It is also a highly undesirable rule because it means that my vote could, in some circumstances, be transferred to the candidate I deliberately ranked last in the lowest possible place, e.g. 12th out of 12 candidates. Following on from the concept of 'Later No Harm' (which underpins the whole of contingency voting, as in IRV and STV-PR), it is very important to be able to give a voter the absolutely assurance that under no circumstances will her vote ever be transferred to the candidate she has ranked 12th out of 12. Sadly, the stupid transfer to the bitter end rule undermines this. James Gilmour No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG - www.avg.com Version: 9.0.730 / Virus Database: 271.1.1/2637 - Release Date: 01/21/10 19:34:00 Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] IRV vs Plurality (back to the pile count controversy)
Kathy I think my post made clear that I was referring only to preference profiles. I was not dealing with the situation where some artificial, and highly undesirable, restriction had been placed on the numbers of rankings the voters could mark. I think my comments about the counting procedure adopted in Minneapolis should have indicated that I am well aware of the restrictions that can be imposed. But note that in Minneapolis the restriction was an artificial one imposed by the certified counting machines available for use in the precincts. There is nothing in the Minneapolis Election Ordinance that imposes such a restriction. So when Minneapolis can obtain certified counting machines that can deal with fully ranked ballots, there will be no such restriction in practice. James Behalf Of Kathy Dopp Sent: Friday, January 22, 2010 12:43 AM Subject: Re: [EM] IRV vs Plurality (back to the pile count controversy) James, Your formulas below are only correct in the case that voters are allowed to rank all the candidates who run for an election contest. That may be true in Australia, but is not true in the US where typically voters are allowed to rank up to only three candidates. I put the general formula that applies to *all* cases with n candidates and with r rankings allowed in my paper on IRV that I wrote a year or two ago: Realities Mar Instant Runoff Voting http://electionmathematics.org/ucvAnalysis/US/RCV-IRV/InstantR unoffVotingFlaws.pdf Because it's hard to write a summation, fraction formula, etc. here I'll let you look it up. It's on page 6 of the doc linked above. Cheers, Kathy From: James Gilmour jgilm...@globalnet.co.uk I do not intend to comment on your formula, but I calculate the numbers of possible unique preference profiles for increasing numbers of candidates (N) as follows: N Unique Preference Profiles 2 4 3 15 4 64 5 325 6 1,956 7 13,699 8 109,600 9 986,409 10 9,864,100 11 108,505,111 12 1,302,061,344 13 16,926,797,485 14 236,975,164,804 15 3,554,627,472,075 16 56,874,039,553,216 17 966,858,672,404,689 18 17,403,456,103,284,400 19 330,665,665,962,404,000 20 6,613,313,319,248,080,000 Where there are large numbers of candidates, the maximum possible number of unique preference profiles will be limited by the number of voters. Thus if there are 10,000 valid votes and 12 candidates, the maximum possible number of preference profiles would be 10,000 and not 1,302,061,344. In practice the actual number of preference profiles would be even lower, as significant numbers of voters would record identical patterns of preferences. Thus in the Meath constituency for the D?il ?ireann election in 2002 with 14 candidates (236,975,164,804 possibilities), there were 64,081 valid votes, but only 25,101 unique preference profiles. The Minneapolis STV (RCV) ballots were all hand sorted to unique preference profiles for each precinct and hand counted. This was unnecessary but feasible as the voters could not record more than three preferences (rankings), no matter the numbers of candidates. I understand the full preference profiles, probably at precinct level, will be published on the City website, but they are not there yet. James Gilmour No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG - www.avg.com Version: 9.0.730 / Virus Database: 271.1.1/2637 - Release Date: 01/21/10 19:34:00 Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] IRV vs Plurality (back to the pile count controversy)
OK James. As I said before, I agree with you that you were giving the total number of profiles *if* voters were allowed to rank all candidates, which they were not allowed to do in Minneapolis or elsewhere in the US public elections if I am right. Further, I think that Robert is correct, that one could collapse the last N profiles into prior profiles if that is the system that is used (allowing ranking all candidates), although I do not think that gives any advantage, practically, to the counting process and may even complicate it. My formula provides the more practical number of how many profiles are allowed to be cast by voters and how many profiles are needed if one wants to count the number of votes cast for each profile and make IRV precinct-summable for an actual election. Obviously Condorcet counting methods are much simpler to make precinct-summable than IRV, requiring far fewer number of sums per precinct as the number of candidates increases. I think one thing that some election methods experts sometimes fail to consider are the election administration practicalities that are crucial to whether or not a method is functionally practical to provide public oversight over. I am fully aware that it is voting system technology, costs, and the increasing impracticality of manually auditing the election if the full range of preference profiles is allowed, if one is making an attempt to use paper ballots, that limits the number of choices a voter may fill out. I've studied this issue for 7 years now. Cheers, Kathy On Fri, Jan 22, 2010 at 4:08 AM, James Gilmour jgilm...@globalnet.co.uk wrote: Kathy I think my post made clear that I was referring only to preference profiles. I was not dealing with the situation where some artificial, and highly undesirable, restriction had been placed on the numbers of rankings the voters could mark. I think my comments about the counting procedure adopted in Minneapolis should have indicated that I am well aware of the restrictions that can be imposed. But note that in Minneapolis the restriction was an artificial one imposed by the certified counting machines available for use in the precincts. There is nothing in the Minneapolis Election Ordinance that imposes such a restriction. So when Minneapolis can obtain certified counting machines that can deal with fully ranked ballots, there will be no such restriction in practice. James Behalf Of Kathy Dopp Sent: Friday, January 22, 2010 12:43 AM Subject: Re: [EM] IRV vs Plurality (back to the pile count controversy) James, Your formulas below are only correct in the case that voters are allowed to rank all the candidates who run for an election contest. That may be true in Australia, but is not true in the US where typically voters are allowed to rank up to only three candidates. I put the general formula that applies to *all* cases with n candidates and with r rankings allowed in my paper on IRV that I wrote a year or two ago: Realities Mar Instant Runoff Voting http://electionmathematics.org/ucvAnalysis/US/RCV-IRV/InstantR unoffVotingFlaws.pdf Because it's hard to write a summation, fraction formula, etc. here I'll let you look it up. It's on page 6 of the doc linked above. Cheers, Kathy From: James Gilmour jgilm...@globalnet.co.uk I do not intend to comment on your formula, but I calculate the numbers of possible unique preference profiles for increasing numbers of candidates (N) as follows: N Unique Preference Profiles 2 4 3 15 4 64 5 325 6 1,956 7 13,699 8 109,600 9 986,409 10 9,864,100 11 108,505,111 12 1,302,061,344 13 16,926,797,485 14 236,975,164,804 15 3,554,627,472,075 16 56,874,039,553,216 17 966,858,672,404,689 18 17,403,456,103,284,400 19 330,665,665,962,404,000 20 6,613,313,319,248,080,000 Where there are large numbers of candidates, the maximum possible number of unique preference profiles will be limited by the number of voters. Thus if there are 10,000 valid votes and 12 candidates, the maximum possible number of preference profiles would be 10,000 and not 1,302,061,344. In practice the actual number of preference profiles would be even lower, as significant numbers of voters would record identical patterns of preferences. Thus in the Meath constituency for the D?il ?ireann election in 2002 with 14 candidates (236,975,164,804 possibilities), there were 64,081 valid votes, but only 25,101 unique preference profiles. The Minneapolis STV (RCV) ballots were all hand sorted to unique preference profiles for each precinct and hand counted. This was unnecessary but feasible as the voters could not record more than three preferences (rankings), no matter the numbers of candidates. I understand the full preference profiles, probably
Re: [EM] IRV vs Plurality (back to the pile count controversy)
Kathy Dopp Sent: Friday, January 22, 2010 1:42 PM OK James. As I said before, I agree with you that you were giving the total number of profiles *if* voters were allowed to rank all candidates, which they were not allowed to do in Minneapolis or elsewhere in the US public elections if I am right. In STV elections (STV, IRV, RCV) there should be NO restrictions of any kind on the number of rankings each voter may mark, up to the limit of the number of candidates. The voters should be completely free to mark as many or as few rankings as each wishes. Further, I think that Robert is correct, that one could collapse the last N profiles into prior profiles if that is the system that is used (allowing ranking all candidates), although I do not think that gives any advantage, practically, to the counting process and may even complicate it. As I explained in my earlier post, whether or not you can do that depends on the version of the STV counting rules you have to use. My formula provides the more practical number of how many profiles are allowed to be cast by voters and how many profiles are needed if one wants to count the number of votes cast for each profile and make IRV precinct-summable for an actual election. But if you do not report the complete preference profiles, down the last preference position (whether or not it is relevant to the count), you reduce the transparency of the process. The full ballot data should be published as soon as possible after the election. To provide complete information in the smallest size, the STV ballot data should be published as preference profiles, i.e. COMPLETE preference profiles. The BLT format is convenient for this. The full ballot data from the 2007 STV-PR local government elections in the City of Glasgow (Scotland) were published on the City Council's website as very soon after the count closed on the day after polling. They are still all there for inspection. Obviously Condorcet counting methods are much simpler to make precinct-summable than IRV, requiring far fewer number of sums per precinct as the number of candidates increases. If you are going to do a manual sort of the ballots, then making three piles for each pair-wise comparison (AB, BA, neither ranked) would involve less work than sorting to complete preference profiles. But if you have sensible processing equipment that task is trivial and the difference irrelevant. I think one thing that some election methods experts sometimes fail to consider are the election administration practicalities that are crucial to whether or not a method is functionally practical to provide public oversight over. The practicalities of election administration are extremely important and as a returning officer for some elections, I am well aware of that. But electoral administration must not be allowed to put artificial or convenient limitations on the democratic process. I am fully aware that it is voting system technology, costs, and the increasing impracticality of manually auditing the election if the full range of preference profiles is allowed, if one is making an attempt to use paper ballots, that limits the number of choices a voter may fill out. I've studied this issue for 7 years now. We have absolutely no problems with any of this in our STV public elections in the UK. We always take all our paper ballots to one counting centre for each electoral district. In Northern Ireland, the ballots are sorted and counted manually, under scrutiny. In Scotland in 2007 we used optical scanning equipment and OCR to produce the vote vector for each ballot and the vote vectors were then consolidated into preference profiles for the STV counting program. All the ballot handling was done under scrutiny. There are always some who are unhappy with the results (defeated candidates and their supporters!), but the process has not been challenged. James No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG - www.avg.com Version: 9.0.730 / Virus Database: 271.1.1/2637 - Release Date: 01/21/10 19:34:00 Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] IRV vs Plurality (back to the pile count controversy)
On Fri, Jan 22, 2010 at 11:10 AM, James Gilmour jgilm...@globalnet.co.uk wrote: Kathy Dopp Sent: Friday, January 22, 2010 1:42 PM My formula provides the more practical number of how many profiles are allowed to be cast by voters and how many profiles are needed if one wants to count the number of votes cast for each profile and make IRV precinct-summable for an actual election. But if you do not report the complete preference profiles, down the last preference position (whether or not it is relevant to the count), you reduce the transparency of the process. The full ballot data should be published as soon as possible after the election. To provide complete information in the smallest size, the STV ballot data should be published as preference profiles, i.e. COMPLETE preference profiles. The BLT format is convenient for this. The full ballot data from the 2007 STV-PR local government elections in the City of Glasgow (Scotland) were published on the City Council's website as very soon after the count closed on the day after polling. They are still all there for inspection. James, you are using a straw man argument with me, setting up a false premise that I said something I never did, rather than responding to my formula which is more broad and general than yours. I.e. your formula is a subset of mine where r, the number of candidates voters may rank is equal to the number of candidates. Recall it was Robert who suggested collapsing and not reporting all of the exact preferences specified by voters, not myself, although I agree with Robert that if the number of candidates equals the number of rankings allowed, it could be collapsed for any IRV counting method I've heard of, although you say that there are methods I've never heard of where it could not be collapsed. To require, as you suggest that all election be administered in a way that allows all voters to fully rank all candidates may sounds nice and would eliminate one of the problems with IRV, but with so many election contests on one ballot here in the US, it would be costly and possibly impractical unless you insist on using inauditable, easily hacked, electronic ballots and touchscreen devices rather than auditable voter marked paper ballots. As I said earlier, if paper ballots are required, the length of the paper ballot must be unlimited if the number of candidates who can run for office is unlimited and you want voters to be able to fully rank (not that most voters would want to.) Dealing with practical election administration issues seem to be very low down on the totem pole for most electoral methods people it seems. Obviously Condorcet counting methods are much simpler to make precinct-summable than IRV, requiring far fewer number of sums per precinct as the number of candidates increases. If you are going to do a manual sort of the ballots, then making three piles for each pair-wise comparison (AB, BA, neither ranked) would involve less work than sorting to complete preference profiles. But if you have sensible processing equipment that task is trivial and the difference irrelevant. Sorting ballots is not a logically coherent method of counting Condorcet ballots James, so I'm not sure what you mean. Also, of course three piles only works for the first round of sorting for an IRV-type of count in the special case where there are three candidates running for office, not for the general case of IRV and not for Condorcet, so I have no idea what you're thinking about. If you reread one of my recent emails, I describe the two methods for handcounting IRV and the two methods for counting Condorcet. The only methods they have in common is to begin by sorting into all the unique votes. Sorting ballots into piles and confusing subpiles only works for IRV and does not work for STV, except if there are no transferrable votes or you want to cut up pieces of ballots or xerox copies of ballots (what a confusing mess that would be.) I think one thing that some election methods experts sometimes fail to consider are the election administration practicalities that are crucial to whether or not a method is functionally practical to provide public oversight over. The practicalities of election administration are extremely important and as a returning officer for some elections, I am well aware of that. But electoral administration must not be allowed to put artificial or convenient limitations on the democratic process. Except in the case of such methods as IRV when the method is not only wholly inconvenient and costly and virtually impossible to hand count understandably and quickly and is also unfair and produces awful outcomes. A simpler method to administer is always preferable, other things being equal, to a complex costly method such as IRV, but IRV does not even provide any reason to use it since it fails more fairness criteria than plurality, takes us backwards in election fairness
Re: [EM] IRV vs Plurality (back to the pile count controversy)
On Jan 22, 2010, at 8:54 AM, Kathy Dopp wrote: As I said earlier, if paper ballots are required, the length of the paper ballot must be unlimited if the number of candidates who can run for office is unlimited and you want voters to be able to fully rank (not that most voters would want to.) What point are you making here? If the number of candidates is unlimited, then so is the length of the ballot, but that's true for any method that lists the candidates, including fptp and Condorcet methods. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] IRV vs Plurality (back to the pile count controversy)
At 03:57 AM 1/22/2010, James Gilmour wrote: This second set of rules are those that prescribe the transfer of votes to the bitter end, i.e. even after the winners have all been determined. Under this rule a ballot marked A would be treated differently from a ballot marked AB: at the last possible transfer, the A ballot would become 'non-transferable (exhausted)', but the AB ballot would be transferred to A. You mean transferred to B, of course. This second rule is, of course, a stupid rule but that does not mean it has not been implemented in some jurisdictions, including, sadly, Scotland. Not stupid, precisely because of the difference between AB and A. The former is an acceptance of the last listed preference, the latter is not. It makes a difference if a majority is required. Not if it is not, though it might make a difference with some methods. But not IRV. It is also a highly undesirable rule because it means that my vote could, in some circumstances, be transferred to the candidate I deliberately ranked last in the lowest possible place, e.g. 12th out of 12 candidates. Basically, if there are as many ranks as candidates, don't vote for that last one! That's your choice, unless full ranking is required, in which case you *can't* vote the truncated vote and it is irrelevant if it's counted or not. Following on from the concept of 'Later No Harm' (which underpins the whole of contingency voting, as in IRV and STV-PR), it is very important to be able to give a voter the absolutely assurance that under no circumstances will her vote ever be transferred to the candidate she has ranked 12th out of 12. Sadly, the stupid transfer to the bitter end rule undermines this. Only because of voter ignorance, an ignorance which has sometimes been encouraged by activists. The ballot instructions should state that one should not rank any candidate one is not willing to support over alternatives. If there are twelve candidates on the ballot, and write-in votes are not allowed (is that the truth there)?, and a majority is not required, there should only be eleven ranks, not twelve. Otherwise the ballot encourages the behavior you don't like. But with write-in votes allowed, you need twelve ranks to cover a single allowed write-in. So that's thirteen candidates. And then the ballot instruction is important, because otherwise voters will imagine they are voting maximally against a candidate with a ranking of 12th. Instead, in these conditions, it's a vote for a candidate as against any possible write-in, including one the voter might well have preferred if aware that a write-in candidate had a prayer. You are right, there is a problem, but it isn't with the rule that continues to the end, it's with voter education. If a majority is not required, though, it's moot. But with better preferential voting methods than IRV, there is indeed a difference between AB and A. I'm not at all convinced that full ranking provides useful information beyond the first few ranks. With Bucklin, three ranks are pretty obviously enough. In reality, in Bucklin elections, udner some conditions, only a bit over 10% of voters even used additional ranks. It's not about later-no-harm, it's about how much information the voters have. If they have a strong preference for a frontrunner over all others, truncating is a perfectly sensible vote. It gets even more sensible if it's a runoff system. If your voting method does indeed require a majority, why in the world do you add that 12th preference? By adding it, you are contributing to the community acceptance of the result, by withholding it, you are asking for a possible second chance for your favorite. If a majority is required, the absolute Later No Harm promise of IRV is false. That's been missed by focus on the method as deterministic. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] IRV vs Plurality (back to the pile count controversy)
Kathy Dopp Sent: Friday, January 22, 2010 4:54 PM James, you are using a straw man argument with me, setting up a false premise that I said something I never did, Kathy, I was not setting up any straw man argument with you or anyone else. I simply stated what a preference profile is and the possible numbers of such profiles. Anything else is not a preference profile and is irrelevant. Of course, no-one in their right mind (or not under legal restraint) would do a manual count of STV ballots by sorting to preference profiles. It is completely unnecessary and would extend time taken for the count very greatly. Sorting STV ballots to preference profiles makes sense only in computerised counting. To require, as you suggest that all election be administered in a way that allows all voters to fully rank all candidates may sounds nice No, Kathy it is not something that sounds nice - it is an essential requirement for the proper implementation of democratic choice. Any artificiality imposed constraint on that is a restriction of that democratic choice. But I am aware that factors of administrative convenience outweigh such considerations in some jurisdictions - it must be so, else they would never be tolerated. and would eliminate one of the problems with IRV, but with so many election contests on one ballot here in the US, it would be costly and possibly impractical unless you insist on using inauditable, easily hacked, electronic ballots and touchscreen devices rather than auditable voter marked paper ballots. No, Kathy, here in the UK we do NOT use any easily hacked, electronic ballots and touchscreen devices. We use good old-fashioned paper ballots which we mark with a stubby pencil secured to the polling booth by a short length of string! It is very old technology, but it works, and it is extremely flexible in that this voting method (paper and pencil) can be adapted to any voting system (and we use five different voting systems for public elections in Scotland). And of course, where electronic counting is employed, we always have the original paper ballots should anyone demand an audit. As I said earlier, if paper ballots are required, the length of the paper ballot must be unlimited if the number of candidates who can run for office is unlimited and you want voters to be able to fully rank (not that most voters would want to.) Length has not been a problem. Dealing with practical election administration issues seem to be very low down on the totem pole for most electoral methods people it seems. I cannot speak for any other EM member, but practical election administration is an important priority for me, especially as I am the returning officer for some elections and the supervising officer for some others. CUT Sorting ballots into piles and confusing subpiles only works for IRV and does not work for STV, except if there are no transferrable votes or you want to cut up pieces of ballots or xerox copies of ballots (what a confusing mess that would be.) If by STV you mean STV-PR (a multi-seat election), this statement is nonsense. IF you are sorting ballots into unique preference profiles, that is as easily done for STV-PR as it is for IRV. Of course, as I have already said, it makes no sense to do that in a manual count of any IRV or STV-PR election. And when it comes to the practical transfer of ballots in an STV-PR election there is no problem at all, whether you are dealing with whole vote transfers on an exclusion or fractional transfers of a surplus. The practicalities of election administration are extremely important and as a returning officer for some elections, I am well aware of that. But electoral administration must not be allowed to put artificial or convenient limitations on the democratic process. Except in the case of such methods as IRV when the method is not only wholly inconvenient and costly and virtually impossible to hand count understandably and quickly and is also unfair and produces awful outcomes. IRV and STV-PR are quite easy to count by hand and the procedures and the outcomes are widely understood. They have been doing just that in Ireland and Malta since 1920, and in Northern Ireland again since 1973. The multi-seat count may take longer than one plurality count, but that one multi-seat count replaces several plurality counts. And of course, there is no comparison at all in what is achieved in terms of fair and democratic representation of the voters - which should always be the deciding factor. A simpler method to administer is always preferable, other things being equal, to a complex costly method such as IRV, But of course, other thing are not equal. And there are higher priorities in achieving democratic representation than cost and complexity. but IRV does not even provide any reason to use it since it fails more fairness criteria
Re: [EM] IRV vs Plurality (back to the pile count controversy)
At 09:33 PM 1/21/2010, robert bristow-johnson wrote:
On Jan 21, 2010, at 7:42 PM, Kathy Dopp wrote:
James,
Your formulas below are only correct in the case that voters are
allowed to rank all the candidates who run for an election contest.
James didn't put forth any formulae. but he did put forth a table ,
which appears to be consistent with
N-1
P(N) = SUM{ N!/n! }
n=0
he, appears to miss the same point as Abd and you do.
Okay, now, three missing Robert's point against Robert's superior
opinion, as he insists, that totally ignores the substantial and
thorough arguments and evidence presented and focuses on alleged
errors in details.
That may be true in Australia, but is not true in the US where
typically voters are allowed to rank up to only three candidates.
where do you get your information, Kathy? that is *not* at all the
case in the IRV election in Burlington VT.
or is Burlington untypical?
Yes, it is. Most IRV elections in the U.S. are Ranked Choice
Voting, typically referring to a three-rank ballot, even if there
are more than two candidates plus the write-in option.
Burlington allowed ranking of all candidates on the ballot. There
were six slots and six candidates on the ballot. This allows full
ranking, however, it is misleading a bit, because it encourages a
voter to rank all the candidates, including the lowest preference,
imagining that this last ranking is a vote against the candidate,
when, in fact, it is a vote for the candidate under some conditions,
a vote against every write-in, unless the voter explicitly ranks the
write-in, which then *is* a vote against the unranked candidate.
Imagine that there is some write-in campaign that brings up a real
possibility with, say, a three-rank ballot. With that 6-rank ballot,
almost impossible for the candidate to win, because of the knee-jerk
full ranking that some voters will do. If voters truncate, fine.
Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] IRV vs Plurality (back to the pile count controversy)
Abd ul-Rahman Lomax Sent: Friday, January 22, 2010 5:53 PM At 03:57 AM 1/22/2010, James Gilmour wrote: This second set of rules are those that prescribe the transfer of votes to the bitter end, i.e. even after the winners have all been determined. Under this rule a ballot marked A would be treated differently from a ballot marked AB: at the last possible transfer, the A ballot would become 'non-transferable (exhausted)', but the AB ballot would be transferred to A. You mean transferred to B, of course. Apologies - my example was incomplete. To illustrate this stupid rule properly, I should have posited two candidates, A and B, (or just two left after all others have been eliminated), with A the winner. Then consider two ballots, one marked B and the other marked BA. In the last round of a count under the to the bitter end transfer rule, the ballot marked B would be 'non-transferrable (exhausted)', but the vote on the BA ballot would be transferred to A. It is illogical to treat these ballots differently in an STV (contingency choice) election and it offends the underlying concepts of 'Later No Harm' to transfer the BA ballot to A. This second rule is, of course, a stupid rule but that does not mean it has not been implemented in some jurisdictions, including, sadly, Scotland. Not stupid, precisely because of the difference between AB and A. The former is an acceptance of the last listed preference, the latter is not. It makes a difference if a majority is required. Not if it is not, though it might make a difference with some methods. But not IRV. But my comments were exclusively in the context of STV elections (IRV, STV-PR, RCV). It is also a highly undesirable rule because it means that my vote could, in some circumstances, be transferred to the candidate I deliberately ranked last in the lowest possible place, e.g. 12th out of 12 candidates. Basically, if there are as many ranks as candidates, don't vote for that last one! That's your choice, unless full ranking is required, in which case you *can't* vote the truncated vote and it is irrelevant if it's counted or not. That's why when running an STV election where we can use write in boxes for all preferences, I always provide one fewer preference box than the number of candidates (as I see you recommended in a later part of your post). But all of our ballots for public elections have the candidates names printed on them. Following on from the concept of 'Later No Harm' (which underpins the whole of contingency voting, as in IRV and STV-PR), it is very important to be able to give a voter the absolutely assurance that under no circumstances will her vote ever be transferred to the candidate she has ranked 12th out of 12. Sadly, the stupid transfer to the bitter end rule undermines this. Only because of voter ignorance, an ignorance which has sometimes been encouraged by activists. No, not at all. This is a piece of nonsense that some have introduced into STV counting, especially since electronic counting became available. It does not feature in any of the long-established versions of STV counting rules promoted in the UK. James Gilmour No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG - www.avg.com Version: 9.0.730 / Virus Database: 271.1.1/2637 - Release Date: 01/21/10 19:34:00 Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] IRV vs Plurality (back to the pile count controversy)
On Jan 21, 2010, at 8:54 PM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote: At 05:17 PM 1/21/2010, robert bristow-johnson wrote: and i believe that it is perfectly practical when the number of *credible* candidates is small. doesn't matter what the voting system is. IRV, or whatever. Yes. But how small? Don't use the bogus numbers that aren't at all realistic given real-world election rules, lotsa blather deleted and left unresponded being 54 and having voted in every prez election since Carter-Ford (and aware of the 1968 election with Wallace-Nixon-Humphery), i have never once seen a presidential election in the US that had more than two candidates with any chance of winning, and no more than three candidates of national salience. so my bogus number is 3, maybe 4 at the most. individual precincts could total 40 different virtual piles. doesn't matter what the counting method is, those precinct summable pile tallies are sufficient to completely describe the election for those 4. for 3 candidates, that number is 9. Okay, three candidates, A, B, C, the ballot possibilities are, to be complete, much more than 9. I'll assume that write-ins are illegal and void the ballot. Some of the possibilities are legally equivalent to others, and in actual IRV ballot imaging, they are collapsed and reported the same, to the displeasure of voting security people who do want to know the error rate, which includes overvoting and exact overvoting patterns. So-called ballot images are not, generally. They are processed data reducing a ballot to legally equivalent votes. The reduced set is this: A B C AB AC BA BC CA CB Note that this assumes a 2-rank ballot. no, it can be a 3-rank ballot where the voter declines to rate their last choice. 3rd choice is left unmarked. I meant something a little different. I address the possibility of a 3-rank ballot in the next section. The basic issue here is whether or not the third rank is irrelevant or not. If it's irrelevant, I claim, it's not really a three-rank ballot, it's got two relevant ranks and one that means nothing. Why was it even there? blather. you said absolutely nothing of substance. It also assumes that majority vote isn't important. bullshit. it (the number of consequential ballot permutations) has nothing to do with it (whether or not majority vote is important). This is, in fact, serious ignorance. Bullshit, properly used, allows things to grow. Consider where the growth lies here. If a majority is required, there is a difference in meaning between BCA and BC. I will assume the counting method described by Robert's Rules of Order for preferential voting. 3 candidates Situation with truncated B vote: 35 AB 34 BC 31 C C eliminated, votes become 35 AB 34 B Majority basis is 100. 51 votes are required to win. No majority, B eliminated. I would guess that Robert doesn't consider this step because he is used to thinking of plurality IRV, no majority required, and the counting can stop with the last two in that case. A would win. 35 AB. A is plurality winner, no majority, election fails. Who would be the runoff candidates? Under Robert's Rules, the question is unanswerable and undeterminable from the first round results. It's a new election. Under top two runoff rules, the rules were not designed for a preferential ballot, but I'd suggest considering *every IRV vote* as an approval, then pick the top two in that. so you're making up rules to prove a point. chapter 13, section 45 of RONR (regarding preferential voting) have *no* consequential difference between marking the last preference last or deducing the same preference is last because it is the *only* one remaining unmarked. there is no consequential difference between. 35 AB 34 BC 31 C and 35 AB 34 BCA 31 C or 35 ABC 34 BCA 31 C end of discussion. Pay attention, Robert, there is far more here than you imagine. the problem for you is that i *am* paying attention. you're wrong and, by examination, that fact that you're wrong becomes manifest. the rest of the blather is deleted without comment. people need to warned that, although you fancy yourself an expert, you are not. you make things up. they should just ignore you. -- r b-j r...@audioimagination.com Imagination is more important than knowledge. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] IRV vs Plurality (back to the pile count controversy)
On Jan 22, 2010, at 3:57 AM, James Gilmour wrote:
robert bristow-johnson Sent: Friday, January 22, 2010 12:25 AM
On Jan 21, 2010, at 7:05 PM, James Gilmour wrote:
N Unique Preference Profiles
2 4
3 15
...
then your calculation is mistaken. the fact that you
ostensibly need
4 piles when there are only two candidates should serve as a clue.
If there are two candidates, A and B, then the possible unique
preference profiles are:
A
B
AB
BA
what, on a ballot, is the consequential difference in meaning between
A and AB? what effect does a ballot marked AB have over one
marked just A (or vise versa) in *any* election method that uses
ranked ballots?
In terms of preference profiles the question is completely
irrelevant. A and AB are two different preference profiles. So
the possible numbers of preference profiles for given numbers of
candidates are, I think, correctly stated in the table in my
earlier post.
How the STV counting rules handle the two preference profiles A
and AB is a different matter. Some STV counting rules handle
these two profiles identically. But for some other STV counting
rules the profiles A and AB are handled differently. This
second set of rules are those that prescribe the transfer of votes
to the bitter end, i.e. even after the winners have all been
determined.
so what consequential difference is that?
Under this rule a ballot marked A would be treated differently
from a ballot marked AB: at the last possible
transfer, the A ballot would become 'non-transferable
(exhausted)', but the AB ballot would be transferred to A.
now remember in the case we're discussing here, there is only two
candidates. again, what consequence to the outcome of the election
(that is, who of A or B wins) occurs whether a ballot is marked
A (and B is last by default) or is marked AB?
there is none.
i'm not going to discuss this any more with Abd, because he's not a
straight shooter, but James, if you want to get into this, it's
pretty much cut and dried from the POV of Information Theory (a.la.
Claude Shannon). it's a discipline within my purview (being an
electrical engineer that does signal processing), but the fundamental
fact comes early. for information to be transmitted from one
location (the voter and his ballot) to another location (the ballot
counters), it is necessary that such information does not exist at
the destination prior. Information Theory is about the measure of
how much information is contained in a message and how many bits one
bests commit to a message.
the first three statements following provide a non-zero amount of
information (providing the destination was originally ignorant of the
same). the fourth statement (given the first three) has a measure of
information of precisely zero (which means that it is inconsequential
whether the message is transmitted or not).
1. there are three eligible candidates, A, B, and C.
2. a particular voter has A as his/her first preference.
3. the same voter has B as the second preference.
4. the same voter has C as the last preference.
when i taught Information Theory (just once, almost two decades ago),
i was sorta enamored of some of George Carlin's humor and found an
interesting example i used to illustrate a similar point. Consider a
weather forecast (say on TV). If it were to say tonight's forecast:
snow, that would have some real information and the number of bits
needed to encode it is greater than zero. But now consider Carlin's
Hippie-Dippie Weatherman, Al Sleet: Tonight's forecast: Dark.
Continued dark throughout most of the evening, with some widely-
scattered light towards morning. If you're not considering Joshua in
the Old Testament, how much information is in that forecast?
in general, the number of bits inherent to a particular message,
given the probability of occurrence of the message, is:
I(m) = -log2( p(m) )(base 2 log and p(m) is the probability)
if p(m)=1, there is no information content in the message.
committing bits or words or time to saying it is redundant.
again, the number of piles *necessary* (for recording and
transmitting the information) when there are precisely N distinct
candidates is
N-1
P(N) = SUM{ N!/n! }
n=1
not
N-1
P(N) = SUM{ N!/n! }
n=0
the latter redundantly (and unnecessarily) divides N! piles into
twice that number with no difference of information between the two
piles of each pair.
this is not social science. it's not politics. it's not opinion.
it's just math.
i think i am now going to bow out of this.
it's similar to the alien abduction controversy. no matter how many
people claim to be abducted by extra-terrestials and can provide
vivid and detailed information of they're alleged abduction (and even
scars, where they stuck the needles in),
Re: [EM] IRV vs Plurality (back to the pile count controversy)
At 01:55 PM 1/22/2010, James Gilmour wrote: Abd ul-Rahman Lomax Sent: Friday, January 22, 2010 5:53 PM At 03:57 AM 1/22/2010, James Gilmour wrote: This second set of rules are those that prescribe the transfer of votes to the bitter end, i.e. even after the winners have all been determined. Under this rule a ballot marked A would be treated differently from a ballot marked AB: at the last possible transfer, the A ballot would become 'non-transferable (exhausted)', but the AB ballot would be transferred to A. You mean transferred to B, of course. Apologies - my example was incomplete. To illustrate this stupid rule properly, I should have posited two candidates, A and B, (or just two left after all others have been eliminated), with A the winner. Then consider two ballots, one marked B and the other marked BA. In the last round of a count under the to the bitter end transfer rule, the ballot marked B would be 'non-transferrable (exhausted)', but the vote on the BA ballot would be transferred to A. It is illogical to treat these ballots differently in an STV (contingency choice) election and it offends the underlying concepts of 'Later No Harm' to transfer the BA ballot to A. If truncation is allowed, there is a difference, as you know. However, if a plurality of ballots is sufficient for victory, it's irrelevant to the result. The real difference shows up when a true majority is required. In Australia, they use the term absolute majority as the quota that must be reached, but that is with mandatory full ranking. So there is never majority failure, absent a tie, and a majority is always found when there are only two candidates still standing. Where truncation is permitted, which is in a few places in Australia, they change the quota to a majority of votes for candidates not eliminated. That, too, never requires that last counting step. But we have been discussing the general case, and that case most notably includes elections as described in Robert's Rules of Order, Newly Revised, RRONR 10th edition, where a single-transferable vote method is described for single-winner (and a multiwinner variation is also described, a detail I won't address). RRONR never permits election without a majority unless a special bylaw has been passed allowing election by plurality. Which is strongly discouraged. FairVote managed to confuse nearly everyone with their description of what is in Robert's Rules. They have slightly modified their rhetoric since I started nailing them on this, so that generally they aren't actually lying any more, but they still cherry-pick and create deceptive implications. If a majority is sought, and full ranking is optional, and the ballots are ones on which the voter writes candidates in order of preference, going to the last elimination is quite proper, for one has thereby found all the ballots containing a vote for the leader. If that is not a majority of all ballots, the election fails. And, yes, this violates Later No Harm. If only a plurality is required, Later No Harm is not violated. LNH is incompatible with a majority requirement, unless voters are coerced or misled, that is one of the dirty little secrets of IRV. In RRONR elections, the voters are not constrained to a list of candidates. In the normal procedure, the ballots are blank, and the voter writes down the names of candidates, ranking them. The voter may vote for *anyone*, including ineligible candidates or Donald Duck, or, more importantly, Mr. None of the Above. Why does RRONR even propose the STV method? Good question! They propose it in cases where repeated balloting is not considered practical. But they think of it as a way to find a majority, and they advise the voters to rank all the candidates, cautioning that if they don't, it is possible that no candidate will get a majority, thus requiring the election to be repeated. Now, this is what I've found in studying U.S. elections with IRV. In partisan elections, IRV sometimes works and finds a better winner, clearly more democratic, than FPTP or Plurality. In nonpartisan elections, however, at least in these public elections studied, IRV simply reproduces the results of Plurality. There is enough evidence to come to the conclusion that exceptions would be rare and typically close elections. We have been discussing the election in Burlington, Vermont. There, a naive impression can be created that Plurality would have elected Wright, the Republican, he did get the most first preference votes. However, prior to IRV being adopted there, they used top two runoff, with a 40% requirement for election, otherwise a runoff was held between the top two. The runoff would have been between Kiss and Wright. Likely result would have been the same as with IRV. The problem is that, while Kiss was a better winner than Wright, the eliminated Democrat, Montroll, was a beats-all winner, based on the
Re: [EM] IRV vs Plurality (back to the pile count controversy)
WARNING: this is a metacommunication, about the communication process here and elsewhere in voting system advocacy, not about voting methods, per se. At 01:48 AM 1/21/2010, robert bristow-johnson wrote: On Jan 20, 2010, at 11:23 AM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote: Variation on previous post. Silly time! At 02:31 PM 1/16/2010, robert bristow-johnson wrote: On Jan 16, 2010, at 12:05 PM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote: Robert, your slip is showing. what slip? i don't have nuttin' under me kilt. We already knew that. you do? you keep saying that you can see it. Yes, I said that. Slip is showing is a metaphor, stating that something relatively unmentionable is visible. I can see something. Others can see something. Do you see or know what we see? Perhaps you do, but you are defending yourself as if you cannot see it. Others who do see it might respond differently. This is meta talk, it's about the communication, not election methods. I will therefore limit it to what's relevant to the *extended* purposes of this list, which include voting system advocacy, not merely theory. If you are going to be a public advocate, you will be much more effective if you know how your actions and words will be seen, and if you can learn as much as possible about debate tactics and strategy. Silly hat, Off. Robert, if you want to be effective in public debate, what makes you think i'm not effective? do you actually think you were effective? 1. I suspect you are less effective than you can be. You get caught, easily, in irrelevancies, distracting from the central points to be conveyed. As a public activist, to be effective, you must use polemic and all the skills of advocacy, which is different from discussion. Here, we discuss, and no collective decisions are actually made here. However, I inferred from behavior here what might happen in a public debate. If, in fact, some of this behavior carries over to public debate, you could get creamed. Unnecessarily. That is, over your own style and personality, not over the issue you are advocating. 2. Was I effective? In what? I'm engaged only in a diffuse kind of advocacy here. However, I've also repeated ideas that I've expressed here many times, and this is part of my own learning and polishing process. This is of benefit to those who find it useful to follow my discussions, to explore these topics repeatedly so that they become familiar, and so that deeper understanding spreads. It's my method and approach, and it certainly is not for everyone. Were I to do in a public forum, not a specialized forum like this, what I do here, I'd almost completely fail. (3.) I have, however, come to the point that I'm sufficiently familiar with the issues that I'd engage, if invited, in public debate. I'm an effective speaker, making clear and direct contact with the audience. We'll see if that happens. I have made blog posts in public fora on these issues, they are far briefer, in general. The effort per word and per message is much higher for them. i won't slap on the argumentum verbosium and explode the debate about a single testable issue (like how many piles one needs if there are 3 candidates) into pages and pages, that when i responded, my post was rejected by the list server as too large. Oh, we are crushed at the loss actually, usually it isn't exactly rejected, it is held for moderator approval, which can take some time. Depends. I'd suggest avoiding setting up an immediate victory by the other side by feeding him or her lines like that. you're the one feeding lines. Sure. Like a debate opponent might. Your slip is showing is a metacommunication to the audience, calling attention very briefly to the opponent's behavior, or sometimes to an issue of substance (possibly). As an ad hominem argument, it's irrelevant, but in real debate, it could be very important. People respond to the person, usually, more than to the substance. They judge the substance by the person. Only in careful deliberative process is this effect reduced much. who brought up the slip showing in the first place? Me. A stand-in for your debate opponent. However, it wasn't intended as a debate tactic, but as personal advice, which you could take or leave. You took it, in fact, but as if it were bait in a debate, and you also took, therefore, the hook and the line. And in so doing, you got jerked out of the water. My judgement. Yours might be different, but if you really want to know, ask someone neutral. how does one respond when facing: Your slip is showing, now onto a verbose response that does not speak to the core factual issues at all. How? It's actually terminally easy. No response at all is probably the most efficient. A quick joke, though, may be even more efficient. Learn to think on your feet, if you have to puzzle over this, no response is better. Robert, your slip is showing was very efficient for me, it took,
Re: [EM] IRV vs Plurality (back to the pile count controversy)
On Jan 21, 2010, at 3:24 PM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote: WARNING: this is a metacommunication, about the communication process here and elsewhere in voting system advocacy, not about voting methods, per se. At 01:48 AM 1/21/2010, robert bristow-johnson wrote: On Jan 20, 2010, at 11:23 AM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote: Variation on previous post. Silly time! At 02:31 PM 1/16/2010, robert bristow-johnson wrote: On Jan 16, 2010, at 12:05 PM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote: Robert, your slip is showing. what slip? i don't have nuttin' under me kilt. We already knew that. you do? you keep saying that you can see it. Yes, I said that. Slip is showing is a metaphor, stating that something relatively unmentionable is visible. I can see something. Others can see something. Do you see or know what we see? Perhaps you do, but you are defending yourself as if you cannot see it. Others who do see it might respond differently. better say what it is right now, or you're just blowing smoke (to make use of another metaphor). 1. I suspect you are less effective than you can be. You get caught, easily, in irrelevancies, distracting from the central points to be conveyed. it wasn't me that amplified the length of text by a factor of 10. i was trying to keep it focused and my mistake was responding to your asides. As a public activist, to be effective, you must use polemic and all the skills of advocacy, which is different from discussion. Here, we discuss, and no collective decisions are actually made here. However, I inferred from behavior here what might happen in a public debate. If, in fact, some of this behavior carries over to public debate, you could get creamed. Unnecessarily. That is, over your own style and personality, not over the issue you are advocating. blather. (quoting Warren Smith.) 2. Was I effective? In what? I'm engaged only in a diffuse kind of advocacy here. However, I've also repeated ideas that I've expressed here many times, and this is part of my own learning and polishing process. This is of benefit to those who find it useful to follow my discussions, to explore these topics repeatedly so that they become familiar, and so that deeper understanding spreads. It's my method and approach, and it certainly is not for everyone. Were I to do in a public forum, not a specialized forum like this, what I do here, I'd almost completely fail. more blather. (3.) I have, however, come to the point that I'm sufficiently familiar with the issues that I'd engage, if invited, in public debate. I'm an effective speaker, making clear and direct contact with the audience. We'll see if that happens. I have made blog posts in public fora on these issues, they are far briefer, in general. The effort per word and per message is much higher for them. sometimes effective public speakers are successful not because of their efforts to focus the issue, but because of their efforts to distract. e.g. Sarah Palin. i won't slap on the argumentum verbosium and explode the debate about a single testable issue (like how many piles one needs if there are 3 candidates) into pages and pages, that when i responded, my post was rejected by the list server as too large. Oh, we are crushed at the loss actually, usually it isn't exactly rejected, it is held for moderator approval, which can take some time. Depends. i'm not messing with it further. i just ask that you don't amplify the quantity of responses by a factor of 10 and bring your post to 40K so that if anyone actually bothers to read through it and respond to most or all of the points, their effort goes into the trash can. since your name was in the To: header, you got that response, but no one else did. what i have learned from that is to not play your argumentum verbosium game. from now on, i must pick and choose, respond to only one point, delete all the other blather, and keep the issue focussed. thus i am deleting and not bothering to engage in the other text. care to discuss how many piles one needs (for precinct summability) when there are N candidates? or N credible candidates? that's what the issue was before it was buried in blather. -- r b-j r...@audioimagination.com Imagination is more important than knowledge. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] IRV vs Plurality (back to the pile count controversy)
People, please. This is not a debate class, and even if it were, no, I won is really useless even if true. Please take this discussion off list, if you find it important enough not to stop. There's practically no voting system content left. As for what is left: we all know that the number of piles is large, that full ballots can be transmitted, and we can work out the implications to our own perhaps-incorrect satisfaction. Respectfully to you both, but tired of this wordy debate, Jameson Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] IRV vs Plurality (back to the pile count controversy)
i just want to settle the issue about how many piles one needs to be precinct summable when there are N candidates. Kathy was pointing to Abd ul as the qualified actor who refuted the falsifiable assertion that i made that you needed only 9 piles for 3 candidates. She repeated labeled (without any justification other than citing Abd ul's blather) the math that i clearly presented as illogical. Abd ul did nothing to support Kathy's assertion. Kathy, fancying herself as an election security expert, continues to try to taint IRV as being insecure because it's not precinct summable. and that is a demonstrably false claim. i'll leave it to the experts here to judge who was trying to stay on topic and who was decreasing the signal-to-noise ratio with unnecessary text (with aim to distract from the core issue and to denigrate the other side). r b-j On Jan 21, 2010, at 3:56 PM, Jameson Quinn wrote: People, please. This is not a debate class, and even if it were, no, I won is really useless even if true. Please take this discussion off list, if you find it important enough not to stop. There's practically no voting system content left. As for what is left: we all know that the number of piles is large, that full ballots can be transmitted, and we can work out the implications to our own perhaps-incorrect satisfaction. Respectfully to you both, but tired of this wordy debate, Jameson -- r b-j r...@audioimagination.com Imagination is more important than knowledge. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] IRV vs Plurality (back to the pile count controversy)
At 01:48 AM 1/21/2010, robert bristow-johnson wrote: the fact is, transmitting the content (to a central counting location) of *every ballot* is the transfer of a finite amount of information. that is even *more* general than sorting to piles and transmitting the tallies for piles. Yes, of course. And this is an equivalent to carrying all the ballots to a central location, merely, if done, say, over the internet, faster. But ... it raises some security issues. And with central counting there are other issues. This is a red herring, because we are talking about precinct summability, and when the number of candidates is very small, precinct summability isn't relevant, because the raw ballot data may be transmitted. So, back to the real question: is precinct summability an important practical criterion to be applied to voting systems? A related question is the sensitivity of the method to small variations in votes. Noise, if you will. That can be seen with Yee diagrams, in the presence of chaotic regions in issue space, with IRV. But I won't address that here, beyond noting that IRV multiples the probability of ties, and many of the ties will drastically flip the overall result. With most other methods, there is only one relevant tie possible (beyond extraordinarily rare three-way ties) and when this happens, a coin flip doesn't change the expected voter satisfaction much, if at all. With IRV, the effect can be enormous, because the tie can affect a candidate elimination before all the votes for that candidate have been counted. but breaking it down to piles regarding every conceivable permutation of candidate preference is *still* breaking it down to a finite number of piles. Sure. Finite. I'll point out that a google is finite. With computers, this can be done even with moderately large numbers of candidates. It's still a problem with voting security, though. I've argued for Public Ballot Imaging, which would make available actual ballot images, transmitted from polling places, perhaps by fax or more likely through digital camera images -- no touching of ballots necessary except by election officers, all visible openly --, independently by voting watchdog organization through election observers, so that anyone can verify the count in a precinct or as many as they care, or can even just check one serialized ballot (serialized before counting) and mark it as reviewed, in a system that collects and displays such reviews. Many details omitted here! for 3 candidates, that number is 9. Okay, three candidates, A, B, C, the ballot possibilities are, to be complete, much more than 9. I'll assume that write-ins are illegal and void the ballot. Some of the possibilities are legally equivalent to others, and in actual IRV ballot imaging, they are collapsed and reported the same, to the displeasure of voting security people who do want to know the error rate, which includes overvoting and exact overvoting patterns. So-called ballot images are not, generally. They are processed data reducing a ballot to legally equivalent votes. The reduced set is this: A B C AB AC BA BC CA CB Note that this assumes a 2-rank ballot. It also assumes that majority vote isn't important. If it's important, as it would be in an IRV election under Robert's Rules, we have some more possibilities. They are all the three-rank permutations. ABC ACB BAC BCA CAB CBA Each of these is equivalent, for the purposes of finding a plurality winner, to a two-candidate combination. if you or Kathy say it's 15, then you're wrong (and it's your slip that's showing). Well, I won't speak about Kathy, but in terms of practical elections in the U.S., she's right. You did not state enough information to establish your reduced count, and you actually added language that indicated that a larger total would be necessary. You used the qualifier credible to indicate that there might be candidates not credible, and you did not take care to define this. What you have asserted is true under two qualifications: there are only three candidates legally eligible to receive votes. And there are only two ranks on the ballot. If there are three ranks on the ballot, we have a poor situation, an invitation to voters to cast an irrelevant vote, if, in fact, that third rank has any effect on outcome, which, in the general case, it can. If it can affect outcome in some way, the piles must be reported separately. for 4 candidates the number of necessary piles is 40. Under the restricted conditions, perhaps. I haven't checked the math. I distrust formulas compared to exhaustive enumeration, they take more work and there is more room for error. My lists, which I provided before, showed what is shown above, though it may be better explained this time. The slip is an assumption that one's analysis is more complete than that of another, when it may be, instead, ignorant of some of the
Re: [EM] IRV vs Plurality (back to the pile count controversy)
On Jan 21, 2010, at 4:26 PM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
But ... it raises some security issues. And with central counting
there are other issues. This is a red herring, because we are
talking about precinct summability, and when the number of
candidates is very small, precinct summability isn't relevant,
because the raw ballot data may be transmitted.
no, the problem is that the raw ballot data may be the only practical
information to transmitt if the number of candidates is *large*, not
very small. when the number of candidates is very small, then it
makes sense to transmit the tallies for piles because the number of
piles, which are precinct summable, is manageable.
So, back to the real question: is precinct summability an important
practical criterion to be applied to voting systems?
i would ask instead if precinct summability is important for
security? i believe that it is. and i believe that it is perfectly
practical when the number of *credible* candidates is small. doesn't
matter what the voting system is. IRV, or whatever.
for 3 candidates, that number is 9.
Okay, three candidates, A, B, C, the ballot possibilities are, to
be complete, much more than 9. I'll assume that write-ins are
illegal and void the ballot. Some of the possibilities are legally
equivalent to others, and in actual IRV ballot imaging, they are
collapsed and reported the same, to the displeasure of voting
security people who do want to know the error rate, which
includes overvoting and exact overvoting patterns. So-called ballot
images are not, generally. They are processed data reducing a
ballot to legally equivalent votes. The reduced set is this:
A
B
C
AB
AC
BA
BC
CA
CB
Note that this assumes a 2-rank ballot.
no, it can be a 3-rank ballot where the voter declines to rate their
last choice. 3rd choice is left unmarked.
It also assumes that majority vote isn't important.
bullshit. it (the number of consequential ballot permutations) has
nothing to do with it (whether or not majority vote is important).
If it's important, as it would be in an IRV election under Robert's
Rules, we have some more possibilities. They are all the three-rank
permutations.
ABC
ACB
BAC
BCA
CAB
CBA
Each of these is equivalent, for the purposes of finding a
plurality winner, to a two-candidate combination.
it's equivalent for the purposes of IRV or Condorcet or *any* method
that relies solely on the relative rank of candidates. those 6
markings are equivalent to the corresponding 6 above.
if you or
Kathy say it's 15, then you're wrong (and it's your slip that's
showing).
Well, I won't speak about Kathy, but in terms of practical
elections in the U.S., she's right. You did not state enough
information to establish your reduced count, ...
yes i did state enough information. may i remind you? i said that
there is *no* consequential difference in these two marked ballots
(in the case of N=3). there is no consequential difference between a
ballot marked AB to one marked ABC . there is no election
scenario, whether it's IRV, Condorcet, Borda or any other method
using ranked ballots that will count those two ballots differently.
there is no need to separate the AB and ABC into two piles.
for N candidates, the number of piles necessary, P(N) is
N-1
P(N) = SUM{ N!/n! }
n=1
not
N-1
P(N) = SUM{ N!/n! }
n=0
which is appears to be the formula you and Kathy continue to insist
is correct.
Which it is under some conditions and yours is correct under some
conditions. I assume. I haven't checked them because it's more work
than I can put in now.
want me to spell it out. it's a simple application of combinatorial
analysis, what is the first chapter of my introductory probability
textbook (of a course i took more than 3 decades ago). you're doing
it already for the specific case of 3 candidates A, B, and C. if you
want to look it up, look for language that says something like: how
many unique ways can a group of n items be selected from a pool of N
items when the order of selection is relevant? and the answer to
that is N!/n! . but there is one more fact that you need to toss
in. and that fact is that all candidates unmarked or unranked are
tied for last place. if there is only one candidate left unmarked,
we know how all N candidates are ranked, including the unmarked
candidate.
everything else between is deleted without comment
A vote of ABC, is that the same as AB? Robert assumes, yes. But
what about write-ins? ABC is equivalent to ABCW.
that's not 3 candidates. that's four. you just changed the
premise. that's an official logical fallacy. a form of straw man.
if the write-ins are insignificant (usually the case) we can sweep
them all into a single insignificant candidate and we have 4
candidates and 40 piles. but we'll see that
Re: [EM] IRV vs Plurality (back to the pile count controversy)
robert bristow-johnson Sent: Thursday, January 21, 2010 6:49 AM
but breaking it down to piles regarding every conceivable permutation
of candidate preference is *still* breaking it down to a finite
number of piles. for 3 candidates, that number is 9. if you or
Kathy say it's 15, then you're wrong (and it's your slip that's
showing). for 4 candidates the number of necessary piles is
40.
for N candidates, the number of piles necessary, P(N) is
N-1
P(N) = SUM{ N!/n! }
n=1
not
N-1
P(N) = SUM{ N!/n! }
n=0
I do not intend to comment on your formula, but I calculate the numbers of
possible unique preference profiles for increasing
numbers of candidates (N) as follows:
N Unique Preference Profiles
2 4
3 15
4 64
5 325
6 1,956
7 13,699
8 109,600
9 986,409
10 9,864,100
11 108,505,111
12 1,302,061,344
13 16,926,797,485
14 236,975,164,804
15 3,554,627,472,075
16 56,874,039,553,216
17 966,858,672,404,689
18 17,403,456,103,284,400
19 330,665,665,962,404,000
20 6,613,313,319,248,080,000
Where there are large numbers of candidates, the maximum possible number of
unique preference profiles will be limited by the number
of voters. Thus if there are 10,000 valid votes and 12 candidates, the maximum
possible number of preference profiles would be
10,000 and not 1,302,061,344.
In practice the actual number of preference profiles would be even lower, as
significant numbers of voters would record identical
patterns of preferences. Thus in the Meath constituency for the Dáil Éireann
election in 2002 with 14 candidates (236,975,164,804
possibilities), there were 64,081 valid votes, but only 25,101 unique
preference profiles.
The Minneapolis STV (RCV) ballots were all hand sorted to unique preference
profiles for each precinct and hand counted. This was
unnecessary but feasible as the voters could not record more than three
preferences (rankings), no matter the numbers of candidates.
I understand the full preference profiles, probably at precinct level, will be
published on the City website, but they are not there
yet.
James Gilmour
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Re: [EM] IRV vs Plurality (back to the pile count controversy)
On Jan 21, 2010, at 6:30 PM, James Gilmour wrote:
robert bristow-johnson Sent: Thursday, January 21, 2010 6:49 AM
but breaking it down to piles regarding every conceivable permutation
of candidate preference is *still* breaking it down to a finite
number of piles. for 3 candidates, that number is 9. if you or
Kathy say it's 15, then you're wrong (and it's your slip that's
showing). for 4 candidates the number of necessary piles is
40.
for N candidates, the number of piles necessary, P(N) is
N-1
P(N) = SUM{ N!/n! }
n=1
not
N-1
P(N) = SUM{ N!/n! }
n=0
I do not intend to comment on your formula, but I calculate the
numbers of possible unique preference profiles for increasing
numbers of candidates (N) as follows:
N Unique Preference Profiles
2 4
3 15
...
then your calculation is mistaken. the fact that you ostensibly need
4 piles when there are only two candidates should serve as a clue.
--
r b-j r...@audioimagination.com
Imagination is more important than knowledge.
Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] IRV vs Plurality (back to the pile count controversy)
N Unique Preference Profiles 2 4 3 15 ... then your calculation is mistaken. the fact that you ostensibly need 4 piles when there are only two candidates should serve as a clue. If there are two candidates, A and B, then the possible unique preference profiles are: A B A B B A Anything that does not conform to this is an incorrect use of the term preference profile. James Gilmour No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG - www.avg.com Version: 9.0.730 / Virus Database: 271.1.1/2636 - Release Date: 01/21/10 07:34:00 Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] IRV vs Plurality (back to the pile count controversy)
On Jan 21, 2010, at 7:05 PM, James Gilmour wrote: N Unique Preference Profiles 2 4 3 15 ... then your calculation is mistaken. the fact that you ostensibly need 4 piles when there are only two candidates should serve as a clue. If there are two candidates, A and B, then the possible unique preference profiles are: A B AB BA what, on a ballot, is the consequential difference in meaning between A and AB? what effect does a ballot marked AB have over one marked just A (or vise versa) in *any* election method that uses ranked ballots? -- r b-j r...@audioimagination.com Imagination is more important than knowledge. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] IRV vs Plurality (back to the pile count controversy)
ballot to legally equivalent votes. The reduced set is this: A B C AB AC BA BC CA CB Note that this assumes a 2-rank ballot. no, it can be a 3-rank ballot where the voter declines to rate their last choice. 3rd choice is left unmarked. It also assumes that majority vote isn't important. bullshit. it (the number of consequential ballot permutations) has nothing to do with it (whether or not majority vote is important). If it's important, as it would be in an IRV election under Robert's Rules, we have some more possibilities. They are all the three-rank permutations. ABC ACB BAC BCA CAB CBA Well, I won't speak about Kathy, but in terms of practical elections in the U.S., she's right. You did not state enough information to establish your reduced count, ... yes i did state enough information. may i remind you? i said that there is *no* consequential difference in these two marked ballots (in the case of N=3). there is no consequential difference between a ballot marked AB to one marked ABC . there is no election scenario, whether it's IRV, Condorcet, Borda or any other method using ranked ballots that will count those two ballots differently. there is no need to separate the AB and ABC into two piles. OK. I understand now why you are confused Robert: 1. on the formula for the number of possible unique candidate orderings for any rank choice voting method you incorrectly assume that the number of possible ballot rankings that a voter may fill out is always equal to the number of candidates running for office and so you can collapse N of the rankings, but this simply is not the case in US IRV elections and it would just be unnecessarily confusing to collapse rankings for the special (and unusual) case when there are three candidates and three rankings, when a more general formula that always applies to all situations regardless of the number of candidates and allowed rankings could be used; and 2. on the fact that IRV and Condorcet must be reported similarly and counted similarly, because there are different methods available to count each one. With Condorcet, you can easily count it with an NxN matrix and you cannot count IRV that way at all generally (although I wouldn't put it past you to find an unusual special case where you could). With IRV, you can count it (albeit not easily depending on the number of candidates) with sorting into piles, but you cannot count Condorcet method that way. You can count either Condorcet or IRV by sorting into unique vote orderings, as I gave you the general formula for that works in all cases earlier. However that would be a very difficult and time-consuming way to count Condorcet since Condorcet is precinct-summable in the far simpler n x n matrix. It is the only way to make IRV precinct summable using the formulas I gave you earlier or you can look them up in my IRV report, unless you want to publicly report all voters' individual choices. Minneapolis chose to use the first method. I.e. The counting methods available and ideally used for Condorcet and IRV are different. -- 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
Re: [EM] IRV vs Plurality (back to the pile count controversy)
James, Your formulas below are only correct in the case that voters are allowed to rank all the candidates who run for an election contest. That may be true in Australia, but is not true in the US where typically voters are allowed to rank up to only three candidates. I put the general formula that applies to *all* cases with n candidates and with r rankings allowed in my paper on IRV that I wrote a year or two ago: Realities Mar Instant Runoff Voting http://electionmathematics.org/ucvAnalysis/US/RCV-IRV/InstantRunoffVotingFlaws.pdf Because it's hard to write a summation, fraction formula, etc. here I'll let you look it up. It's on page 6 of the doc linked above. Cheers, Kathy From: James Gilmour jgilm...@globalnet.co.uk I do not intend to comment on your formula, but I calculate the numbers of possible unique preference profiles for increasing numbers of candidates (N) as follows: N Unique Preference Profiles 2 4 3 15 4 64 5 325 6 1,956 7 13,699 8 109,600 9 986,409 10 9,864,100 11 108,505,111 12 1,302,061,344 13 16,926,797,485 14 236,975,164,804 15 3,554,627,472,075 16 56,874,039,553,216 17 966,858,672,404,689 18 17,403,456,103,284,400 19 330,665,665,962,404,000 20 6,613,313,319,248,080,000 Where there are large numbers of candidates, the maximum possible number of unique preference profiles will be limited by the number of voters. Thus if there are 10,000 valid votes and 12 candidates, the maximum possible number of preference profiles would be 10,000 and not 1,302,061,344. In practice the actual number of preference profiles would be even lower, as significant numbers of voters would record identical patterns of preferences. Thus in the Meath constituency for the D?il ?ireann election in 2002 with 14 candidates (236,975,164,804 possibilities), there were 64,081 valid votes, but only 25,101 unique preference profiles. The Minneapolis STV (RCV) ballots were all hand sorted to unique preference profiles for each precinct and hand counted. This was unnecessary but feasible as the voters could not record more than three preferences (rankings), no matter the numbers of candidates. I understand the full preference profiles, probably at precinct level, will be published on the City website, but they are not there yet. James Gilmour -- 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
Re: [EM] IRV vs Plurality (back to the pile count controversy)
On Jan 21, 2010, at 7:42 PM, Kathy Dopp wrote:
James,
Your formulas below are only correct in the case that voters are
allowed to rank all the candidates who run for an election contest.
James didn't put forth any formulae. but he did put forth a table
which appears to be consistent with
N-1
P(N) = SUM{ N!/n! }
n=0
he, appears to miss the same point as Abd and you do.
That may be true in Australia, but is not true in the US where
typically voters are allowed to rank up to only three candidates.
where do you get your information, Kathy? that is *not* at all the
case in the IRV election in Burlington VT.
or is Burlington untypical?
--
r b-j r...@audioimagination.com
Imagination is more important than knowledge.
Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] IRV vs Plurality (back to the pile count controversy)
At 05:17 PM 1/21/2010, robert bristow-johnson wrote: On Jan 21, 2010, at 4:26 PM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote: But ... it raises some security issues. And with central counting there are other issues. This is a red herring, because we are talking about precinct summability, and when the number of candidates is very small, precinct summability isn't relevant, because the raw ballot data may be transmitted. no, the problem is that the raw ballot data may be the only practical information to transmitt if the number of candidates is *large*, not very small. when the number of candidates is very small, then it makes sense to transmit the tallies for piles because the number of piles, which are precinct summable, is manageable. This is correct. I actually stated it oppositely, slip of the pen, so to speak. It's still a red herring, because the topic is precinct summability and the general use of precinct sums. The only precinct sum that can be used with IRV is the relevant-ballot-pattern summary, which becomes extremely large very rapidly. Forget about it with manual ballots and more than a quite small number of candidates. Remember, as well, that preferential voting, like top-two runoff, encourages lots of candidates to run, since they can do so with relative safety and get a payoff: some first rank votes that show support. They can turn that into cash in the next election when they are seeking the office again, or in other ways. So, back to the real question: is precinct summability an important practical criterion to be applied to voting systems? i would ask instead if precinct summability is important for security? i believe that it is. Good. So do I. Or was that a slip? and i believe that it is perfectly practical when the number of *credible* candidates is small. doesn't matter what the voting system is. IRV, or whatever. Yes. But how small? Don't use the bogus numbers that aren't at all realistic given real-world election rules, and since we are talking about the U.S., there must be accomodation for every ballot candidate that gets any votes at all in the precinct, plus a write-in provision at a minimum, and God help the election officials if there are a *lot* of write-in candidates, with the sum being more than enough to alter the elimination sequence for the remaining candidate. Write-ins, in all the actual election reported counts, are counted as a category and then dropped when the total for all of them was insufficient to do other then batch-eliminate them, possibly with other candidates as I've seen. I.e., one assumes the simplest case, that all the write-in votes are for the same candidate. Now, if it turns out that the write-ins are relevant, suppose that we set up some rule to lump all candidates with only one vote and report all the others explicitly. But the problem rapidly gets hairy. One has to report another candidate as relevant in addition to all the write-ins. For voting system security issues, one must be able to count the votes manually, as part of an audit. I'm sure that Kathy could explain audit process, but, again, it gets very hairy rapidly with IRV, because vote samples aren't enough, given the sensitivity of the method to many small differences in vote patterns. What is actually being done? Only ballot images, with machines that collect and report them, in toto, from the precinct. In other words, the only solution in actual usage that doesn't involve toting all the ballots to a central location involves reporting ballot images. But this is precisely a system that is quite vulnerable to hacking and some very real voting security issues. If there are no paper ballots or at least bulletproof paper records that the voter personally verified, it's impossible to verify that there were no shenanigans. Precinct summable methods are not nearly as sensitive to manipulation as are IRV totals, it appears. It can only take a very small shift in voting patterns to shift an IRV result, under some conditions, and this isn't merely a very close election in terms of overall support for a candidate, it gets down to exact preference order and how it interacts with elimination sequence, which is determined sometimes at many places in the election process. And, note: if it's ballot images, these images don't include, generally, the actual write-in votes. If it turns out that write-ins need to be counted, only manual counting can do it, the name was hand written on a record, if I'm correct. for 3 candidates, that number is 9. Okay, three candidates, A, B, C, the ballot possibilities are, to be complete, much more than 9. I'll assume that write-ins are illegal and void the ballot. Some of the possibilities are legally equivalent to others, and in actual IRV ballot imaging, they are collapsed and reported the same, to the displeasure of voting security people who do want to know the error rate, which includes overvoting and
Re: [EM] IRV vs Plurality
At 03:01 AM 1/17/2010, robert bristow-johnson wrote: On Jan 17, 2010, at 12:53 AM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote: There is a common error here, which is to assume that Range requires too much information from the voter. well, it does force the voter to consider the questions oh, i hate this guy 28% more than i hate the other guy, so how do i rate each candidate in range? It forces no such consideration. If the voter thinks that thought, the voter has far more quantitative information than is probably even possible. All that Range Voting is is an allowance for fractional voting. Almost certainly any sensible voter would start with ranking, sorting the candidates into rank order or into ranked sets, the simplest being approved and disapproved. If that's all the voter wants to do, done. Vote max for approved and min for disapproved. And the approved set may be one candidate or none. (When a majority is required, voting against all candidates is not a moot vote. It is a vote, generally, to hold a runoff or maybe even to reconsider the entire election, is this office necessary to fill? Sometimes we forget that public elections are not the only application of voting systems!) All the voter is doing is distributing voting power. It can be distributed in a very simple way or in a more complex and sophisticated way. It is up to the voter, and every voter has one vote, and one vote only, and may exercise the whole vote or just part of it. Voter freedom. I'm amazed at how many people object to it. the range rating values are a superset of the adjacent integer rankings from a ranked-order ballot like one for Condorcet, IRV, Borda. in the ranked-order ballot, all the voter has to decide is who she would vote for in adjacent candidates: ABC. she doesn't have to decide how much more she likes B over C than how much A is over B. That's true. But the voter can vote Range in quite this way. This argument would amaze me if I hadn't seen it so many times. Range is too hard for voters, supposedly. But, let's back up. I'm not recommending diving into public implementation of Range immediately, beyond Range 1, or approval. Which is simply Plurality with a freedom to multiply approve. Why in the world would we want to prevent this? Robert's Rules of Order doesn't allow, on written ballots, multiple votes, it voids the vote. However, that seems to be an historical tradition, and the only reason given is that the vote must be an error. How can they count the vote if it's an error. And it's an error because it won't be counted. It's possible that there was, at some point, some thought that it would violate one person-one vote. But it is no more a violation of that, than is preferential voting, which allows casting more than one vote. In the end, the voter has only one vote to cast in each pairwise election. Plurality requires that the voter cast all these votes with only one preferred candidate, and to abstain from voting in all other pairs. Preferential voting allows the voter to vote in different pairs (but the voter can generally vote it just as Plurality), but most preferential voting implementations don't allow equal ranking, which is an obvious defect. If rating is supposedly so hard, why don't we notice that requiring a voter to rank when the voter has no significant preference is also hard? Very simple to vote Range if the number of ranks is equal to the number of candidates, i.e., it's a Borda ballot and is counted like Borda. And the only thing that makes Borda different from Range is that generally Borda doesn't allow equal ranking. Why not? The reason give, supposedly, is to prevent strategic voting, but that's a defective concept applied to Range. Strategic voting, boiled down, is a method whereby voters attempt to use the method to gain a preferred outcome. That's what we want voters to do! The goal of a good voting system is to allow their natural preferences to accomplish this, and if a voter wants to vote Anybody but Joe, why not? Various Borda rules have been proposed as to how to treat incomplete ranking (and equal ranking, if allowed by the ballot design, is considered incomplete ranking). To me, the offensive way is to devalue the ballot. That is, the ballot isn't given full value for the highest rank, or, alternatively, minimum value for the bottom rank. The effect is to weaken the vote. Why? Why should a voter who decides to vote no preference between two candidates be assigned less voting power in all the *other* pairwise elections? Very simple concept. Allow equal ranking. It makes just about every voting system perform better. It helps Plurality find majorities, to the extent that voters use it. Supporters of no-hope candidates may use it, thus showing, in the election, true support for their candidate (because those votes are now unconstrained by a desire to cast an effective vote for election purposes). Sure, simple
Re: [EM] IRV vs Plurality (Dave Ketchum) (Kathy Dopp)
I couldn't resist this and another. Silly time! At 04:15 PM 1/16/2010, robert bristow-johnson wrote: (I'd written previously) no slip nor nuttin' else under me kilt. want me to show you? You already did. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] IRV vs Plurality (Dave Ketchum)
Variation on previous post. Silly time! At 02:31 PM 1/16/2010, robert bristow-johnson wrote: On Jan 16, 2010, at 12:05 PM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote: Robert, your slip is showing. what slip? i don't have nuttin' under me kilt. We already knew that. Silly hat, Off. Robert, if you want to be effective in public debate, I'd suggest avoiding setting up an immediate victory by the other side by feeding him or her lines like that. In person, face-to-face, people would fall over laughing, and whatever value there was in your position would be lost. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] IRV vs Plurality (Dave Ketchum)
At 02:31 PM 1/16/2010, robert bristow-johnson wrote: and FairVote.org will point to experts that strongly advocate IRV. big fat hairy deel. They will. Anecdotal. Look, a lot of experts follow the EM list. Have been for a long time. Very few who aren't politically committed in some way, such as Terry Bouricius, who is actually more of a politician than an expert on voting systems, will defend IRV here. I can only think of Chris Benham, who is from Australia, and we all know what that means. He's upside-down. (Seriously, Chris is quite knowledgeable, but he's pretty isolated. IRV has been considered unacceptable by experts since the 19th century, I found criticism from political scientists from that century. It was not adopted in Australia because it was an ideal system, it was adopted because it saved the day for a party in power, eliminating the spoiler effect, defanging minor parties and thus eventually killing them.) whether it's here or on the Burlington blog or longer ago at the Fairvote site (that i have since gotten tired of), i have never appealed to authority in evaluating or advocating any method. It's just a fact, and it's relevant, whether you appeal to it or not. FairVote has really poisoned the air, citing Tideman, for example, when criticising other methods but never mentioning that Tideman considers IRV unacceptable. I'm thinking over the opposition material. It might look rabid to someone who isn't aware of the problems, but i think i *am* aware of the salient problems. You are only aware of some of the problems, not enough to realize that IRV may actually be worse than plurality in some situations. Which happen to be most of the implementations, i.e., nonpartisan elections. but despite that, i support the goals that we had in adopting IRV. i still don't support correcting IRV by reverting back to FPTP, given that is the choice presented (the reverted rules would include a delayed-runoff for less than 40%). The only problem with the 40% is that it's the wrong margin to be looking for. Or it's inadequate. 40%/39% is very different, runoff required, than 40%/30%, which is probably an unrecoverable margin. Depends. In particular, it depends on data which isn't on the primary ballot. Hence, make the primary ballot a preferential ballot, but simply use a better method to analyze it. Or, at least, allow additional approvals in the primary. Count All the Votes. Look, Robert, if you can't get behind that slogan, you will continue to irritate both the election integrity experts and the voting system experts and voting security concerns have been persuasive. even with IRV, with a reasonably small number of credible candidates (and assuming the worse case, that write-in is always the same person, without yet checking), there are a finite number of ranking permutations, and there can be a ballot for each. continued below... I'm going to cut to the chase, here. Robert, you have failed to understand what happens in the first counting. All votes in the first rank must be counted and reported, period. Even write-in votes must be counted, but they can generally be reported as a sum, and only if the sum is large enough that it is all for one candidate, would the instruction have to go back to the precinct to break down and separately report the category. It goes back to all precincts reporting any write-in votes! Normally, that would be all of them. You cannot tell which votes should be reported, in advance, based solely on local precinct data. It's quite possible that the winner has no votes in the local precinct at all, is just unpopular there. Are you saying that dark horses should be ignored, that write-in candidates should be ignored? So, consider Burlington. Three major candidates. How many minor on the ballot? Three? That's six, plus write-in. You must report all combinations, but you may collapse where there are empty ranks, because, with the IRV counting methods, A(blank)B is equivalent to AB is equivalent to (blank)AB. Credible candidate, quite simply, must be ignored by the method. Data for any combination of 7 candidates including Write-in, which is lumped tentatively, must be tabulated into all of the relevant patterns (after collapse of equivalent ones as described). So with RCV, three-rank, you would have: three candidate combinations: 7*6*5 = 210. two candidate combinations: 7*6 = 42. bullet votes or equivalent: 7 Total 258 piles. Now, go to San Francisco. 23 candidates on the ballot, plus write-ins. I'm not even going to do the math. Simpler to just transmit the raw ballot images, with computers. Or the counting is done at each precinct, centrally directed, and it is far more complex than precinct summable methods. Approval, very simple. Bucklin all ranks can be counted and reported as sums. Range the same. IRV. Arrggh. No. Real life elections in the U.S.? Major delays. When an error is
Re: [EM] IRV vs Plurality (Dave Ketchum)
Abd has repeated an erroneous statement about Nicolaus Tideman's assessment of voting methods. Abd wrote: snipFairVote has really poisoned the air, citing Tideman, for example, when criticising other methods but never mentioning that Tideman considers IRV unacceptable. snip Tideman does NOT consider IRV unacceptable (If you ask him, I believe he will say he favors it in real world implementations). To set the record straight, I will paste the rebuttal I sent to this list when Warren Smith made the same mistake last year. Terry Bouricius On page 238 [in his book _Collective Decisions and Voting_]Tideman has a chart with five categories summarizing his analysis of methods... First is Not supportable which includes Borda, Range, Dodgson, Copeland, Coombs and Est. centrality. The next category is Arguably inferior to maxmin which includes Condorcet, Simp. Dodgson, Nanson, Bucklin, Black, Young, and Wt. Condorcet. The third category is Supportable if ranking is infeasible which includes Plurality, Approval, and Two-ballot majority. The fourth category is Supportable if a matrix is uncalculable which includes only Alternative vote [IRV] The last category is Supportable if a matrix of majorities is calculable which includes Maxmin, Ranked Pairs, Schulze, Alt. Schwartz and Alt. Smith. Warren [now Abd] is assuming that a matrix is always calculable and thus the supportable category that includes only IRV is in fact null. However, that is not what Tideman is arguing (or why would he create the category if it was always empty)? Elsewhere he discusses the practical limitations of voting methods used for public elections including ease of voter acceptance and argues that a hypothetical improvement of a system that requires complexities such as matrices may be impractical in large scale elections. He writes on page 240 If it is feasible to require voters to rank options, then much more sophisticated processing is possible. However, it is conceivable that it would be feasible to require voters to rank options but not feasible to require vote-processors to produce a matrix of majorities. In this event the Alternative vote is supportable. - Original Message - From: Abd ul-Rahman Lomax a...@lomaxdesign.com To: robert bristow-johnson r...@audioimagination.com; EM Methods election-methods@lists.electorama.com Sent: Wednesday, January 20, 2010 11:54 AM Subject: Re: [EM] IRV vs Plurality (Dave Ketchum) At 02:31 PM 1/16/2010, robert bristow-johnson wrote: and FairVote.org will point to experts that strongly advocate IRV. big fat hairy deel. They will. Anecdotal. Look, a lot of experts follow the EM list. Have been for a long time. Very few who aren't politically committed in some way, such as Terry Bouricius, who is actually more of a politician than an expert on voting systems, will defend IRV here. I can only think of Chris Benham, who is from Australia, and we all know what that means. He's upside-down. (Seriously, Chris is quite knowledgeable, but he's pretty isolated. IRV has been considered unacceptable by experts since the 19th century, I found criticism from political scientists from that century. It was not adopted in Australia because it was an ideal system, it was adopted because it saved the day for a party in power, eliminating the spoiler effect, defanging minor parties and thus eventually killing them.) whether it's here or on the Burlington blog or longer ago at the Fairvote site (that i have since gotten tired of), i have never appealed to authority in evaluating or advocating any method. It's just a fact, and it's relevant, whether you appeal to it or not. FairVote has really poisoned the air, citing Tideman, for example, when criticising other methods but never mentioning that Tideman considers IRV unacceptable. I'm thinking over the opposition material. It might look rabid to someone who isn't aware of the problems, but i think i *am* aware of the salient problems. You are only aware of some of the problems, not enough to realize that IRV may actually be worse than plurality in some situations. Which happen to be most of the implementations, i.e., nonpartisan elections. but despite that, i support the goals that we had in adopting IRV. i still don't support correcting IRV by reverting back to FPTP, given that is the choice presented (the reverted rules would include a delayed-runoff for less than 40%). The only problem with the 40% is that it's the wrong margin to be looking for. Or it's inadequate. 40%/39% is very different, runoff required, than 40%/30%, which is probably an unrecoverable margin. Depends. In particular, it depends on data which isn't on the primary ballot. Hence, make the primary ballot a preferential ballot, but simply use a better method to analyze it. Or, at least, allow additional approvals in the primary. Count All the Votes. Look, Robert, if you can't get behind that slogan, you will continue to irritate both the election integrity
Re: [EM] IRV vs Plurality ( Kristofer Munsterhjelm )
At 01:13 PM 1/20/2010, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote: At 09:09 AM 1/17/2010, Chris Benham wrote: Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote (17 Jan 2010): To me, it seems that the method becomes Approval-like when (number of graduations) is less than (number of candidates). When that is the case, you *have* to rate some candidates equal, unless you opt not to rate them at all. Sure. However, in practical methods in the near future, not rating them at all is equivalent to bottom-rating. And all methods on the table equal-rank candidates not ranked. In my view, preventing voters from equal ranking is preventing voters from expressing valuable information. However, not allowing them to rank when they have a significant preference also conceals valuable information. There is a compromise, such that information that the voter cannot express is of minimal significance. That won't make much of a difference when the number of candidates is huge (100 or so), but then, rating 100 candidates would be a pain. Unless I can just lump them as I like. Bucklin, one of the early elections, had something like 100 candidates. People got excited about a method that would allow sincere voting without a spoiler effect and the method apparently worked. Three-rank ballot, probably. That means four ranks when we count bottom. Very simple to vote on 100 candidates. 1. Vote for favorite first rank. 2. Vote for any others first rank if you have difficulty deciding between them, i.e., what is really being done is defining a favorite *class* of candidates roughly equal in value. 3. Vote for any candidates you'd be happy to see election (not just merely not unhappy), but not favored, in second rank. 4. Vote for any candidates you would prefer to a runoff being held, in the last rank. Any rank may also be empty, and that conveys information about preference strength. 5. Don't recognize the candidate? Probably you don't vote for the candidate. Don't like the candidate, wouldn't want your vote to avoid a runoff? Don't vote for the candidate. A rough equivalent of this ballot and voting approach would be Range4, with the value of 1 missing, you can't vote it. And range analysis could then be done. If the value of 1 is inserted as a Disapproved but better than worst category, then you'd get true range analysis, and if there is a significant difference between the Range winner and the Bucklin winner, I'd suggest a runoff might be held. Contrary to the immediate reaction of many voting systems students, the Range winner, in a real runoff, if the data is accurate, has a natural advantage. It's because of differential turnout. I'd say it would be better to just have plain yes/no Approval for a first round, then pick the 5-10 most approved for a second round (using Range, Condorcet, whatever). Or use minmax approval or PAV or somesuch, as long as it homes in on the likely winners of a full vote. While 5-10 for the next round sounds good, it normally would also eliminated one of the major advantages of runoff voting: closer examination of the candidates remaining. *If the top two are well chosen*, it's beneficial to have only two on the ballot. However, there are other possibilities. As an example, the candidates could be listed on the ballot in order of range ranking, so voters have the information from the previous ballot to guide them and may then vote as strategically as they like. Strategic voting in range is an expression of sincere preference strength in relevant races, that's been overlooked. It never involves preference reversal. If somehow the wrong candidate makes it into the top two (quite unlikely with a good choice algorithm, though the possibility certainly increases with many, many candidates), write-in votes can be allowed in the runoff. If there is a missing candidate with significant preference strength, a write-in can win a runoff, and it's happened. It won't happen unless there is sincere and significant preference strength, and the vast majority of the time, the write-ins will be irrelevant, and if the runoff method is spoiler-free, like Bucklin as a simple example, no problem. Vote for your write-in and still cast an effective vote in the real election. Simply using plain Approval to reduce the field to the top x point scorers who then compete in the final round seems unsatifactory to me because of the Rich Party incentive (clone problem) for parties to field x candidates; and because of the tempting Push-over (turkey raising) strategy incentive. Sure. However, Rich Party and Turkey Raising don't work with approval methods, beyond the communication advantages rich parties may have through greater media access. Bucklin seems to me to be a much-neglected approval method, with real implementation history, that behaves like approval, and whenever an election is close with more than two candidates, all ranks will be added in, so it *is* approval; but the
Re: [EM] IRV vs Plurality (Dave Ketchum)
Sent from my iPhone On Jan 20, 2010, at 1:35 PM, Terry Bouricius ter...@burlingtontelecom.net wrote: Abd has repeated an erroneous statement about Nicolaus Tideman's assessment of voting methods. Abd wrote: snipFairVote has really poisoned the air, citing Tideman, for example, when criticising other methods but never mentioning that Tideman considers IRV unacceptable. snip Tideman does NOT consider IRV unacceptable. I won't say that again unless I confirm it. I was repeating what I'd seen, with quotes, so I'm not exactly retracting yet, but I sure will check it out. Thanks, Terry. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] IRV vs Plurality (back to the pile count controversy)
On Jan 20, 2010, at 11:23 AM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
Variation on previous post. Silly time!
At 02:31 PM 1/16/2010, robert bristow-johnson wrote:
On Jan 16, 2010, at 12:05 PM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
Robert, your slip is showing.
what slip? i don't have nuttin' under me kilt.
We already knew that.
you do? you keep saying that you can see it.
Silly hat, Off.
Robert, if you want to be effective in public debate,
what makes you think i'm not effective? do you actually think you
were effective?
i won't slap on the argumentum verbosium and explode the debate
about a single testable issue (like how many piles one needs if there
are 3 candidates) into pages and pages, that when i responded, my
post was rejected by the list server as too large.
I'd suggest avoiding setting up an immediate victory by the other
side by feeding him or her lines like that.
you're the one feeding lines. who brought up the slip showing in
the first place? how does one respond when facing: Your slip is
showing, now onto a verbose response that does not speak to the core
factual issues at all.
you and Kathy had no victory (if that is the way you like looking
at it). where it is about fact (derived or historically supported)
regarding the focussed issue, you haven't done anything to touch it.
the fact is, transmitting the content (to a central counting
location) of *every ballot* is the transfer of a finite amount of
information. that is even *more* general than sorting to piles and
transmitting the tallies for piles.
but breaking it down to piles regarding every conceivable permutation
of candidate preference is *still* breaking it down to a finite
number of piles. for 3 candidates, that number is 9. if you or
Kathy say it's 15, then you're wrong (and it's your slip that's
showing). for 4 candidates the number of necessary piles is 40. for
N candidates, the number of piles necessary, P(N) is
N-1
P(N) = SUM{ N!/n! }
n=1
not
N-1
P(N) = SUM{ N!/n! }
n=0
which is appears to be the formula you and Kathy continue to insist
is correct. and whether Kathy has an MS in Mathematics or not,
whether you do or not, this error is demonstrable. you and Kathy
continue to insist that there is a consequential difference between
ranking all candidates and ranking all but 1 and leaving one
candidate unranked and i continue to say there is no consequential
difference. this is a difference of falsifiable claims that form a
dichotomy.we can test which claim is correct.
In person, face-to-face, people would fall over laughing, and
whatever value there was in your position would be lost.
you've never used humor to make a point? or to make clear the
lameness of an irrelevant reference?
whether one responds to an irrelevant distraction with humor or not
changes nothing regarding the core issues.
certainly if a ridiculously large number of candidates are on the
ballot, manually separating ballots into piles (without grouping
together minor or non-credible candidates) is not practical. even
with 4 salient candidates, 40 piles gets pretty nasty for sorting by
*hand*. but 40 is still a pretty small number for a computer and a
modern network.
a national election with 3 credible candidates can easily be
precinct summable with 9 salient piles and 31 less important
piles. it doesn't matter if it is IRV, Condorcet, Borda or what.
the issue of summing pile count is not dependent on what tabulation
method is used (and what, *i* think, should be what the debate is
about).
neither you nor Kathy have shown *any* problem of precinct
summability regarding IRV or any other ranked-ballot method.
not that i am a defender of IRV. but, you haven't laid a hand on it
regarding precinct summability. IRV has a few pathologies, which i
think i understand better than either you or Kathy, simply from the
lame and partisan arguments (and wholly verbose) i read coming from
that direction.
even though *now* Kathy seems to be paying some attention to
Condorcet, before this last week, i haven't noticed any such
attention about that from her. it was always just how bad IRV is,
and that it's worse than any other method, including FPTP. and when
she (or you) says that, then i am convinced that she (or you) are
simply anti-IRV partisans that don't really consider what the
*commonly* *known* problems are that associated with the traditional
FPTP (or even 2-round with runoff) methods for which motivated us to
adopt IRV in the first place.
so, before pointing out that someone's slip is showing, it might be
safer to adjust where one's own fig leaf is hanging.
--
r b-j r...@audioimagination.com
Imagination is more important than knowledge.
Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] IRV vs Plurality
okay, Abd ul, i once got suckered into responding to a big long thing you made in response to me. you probably seen it, but the list hasn't because it exceeded some size limit. so i'm gonna snip at the first place to respond and i'll ask that the next issue area get its separate email thread (we might even spawn new subject lines). i just can't deal with size explosion to this degree. On Jan 17, 2010, at 12:53 AM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote: At 01:44 AM 1/15/2010, robert bristow-johnson wrote: but the problem with considering *more* than pure ranking (Range) is that it requires too much information from the voter. and the problem with *less* (Approval or FPTP) is that it obtains too little information from the voter. There is a common error here, which is to assume that Range requires too much information from the voter. well, it does force the voter to consider the questions oh, i hate this guy 28% more than i hate the other guy, so how do i rate each candidate in range? the range rating values are a superset of the adjacent integer rankings from a ranked-order ballot like one for Condorcet, IRV, Borda. in the ranked-order ballot, all the voter has to decide is who she would vote for in adjacent candidates: ABC. she doesn't have to decide how much more she likes B over C than how much A is over B. one is a quick set of qualitative decisions. the other makes it a quantitative issue, and that's when a lot of us get out our dartboard. i don't think making threshold decision based on the precise sum of a bunch of noisy numbers (which is what Range is when we use our dartboards to score a candidate) does much other than to add the means of the noisy numbers and a sum of zero-mean random numbers which throws a little bit of dice into the mix before using the threshold comparison and determining the winner. so it requires thinking that we wouldn't have to do otherwise. if we don't feel like thinking that seriously, it becomes a big noisy threshold on the means of stable ranks. that's sorta like Borda and does become the equivalent if people's evaluations of candidates sorta linear. First of all, Approval is Range, simply the most basic Range method. it's Range with 1-bit binary values. So what you have is a contradiction: Range requires both too much and too little information. Surely it depends on the specific Range implementation. yes it does. of course the answer is (if i may appeal to an audio image) that what we *normally* mean when we say Range is were the sliders for each candidate are either continuous or have many discrete values (say 10 or 100). a two-position slider is what we call a switch. requires one bit of information. that's getting qualitatively different. either you are at the minimum number of levels (or bits of information in the slider position) or you're not. perhaps a 3-position slider can be Actively Disapprove, no opinion - neutral, and Actively Approve perhaps a 4-position slider can be Actively Disapprove, no opinion - neutral, and Actively Approve and Hey, I really like this guy! perhaps a 5-position slider can be This guy is crap, Actively Disapprove, no opinion - neutral, and Actively Approve and Hey, I really like this guy! we can continue on like this with more discrete levels and all we'll get are gradations of the above. it's all a matter of degree. but the 2-position slider is a 1-bit piece of information: No,Yes, that's the minimum a voter has to judge. that's qualitatively different. here's why: with the multi-level (3 or more), then order has to be considered with candidates that you approve or disapprove. but the multi-level or continuous slider (3+) requires *more* than just ordering information (who is preferred to whom?), it requires *spacing* information. like i hate candidate D worse than i hate C whom i dislike more than B whom i like less than A. you have to decide that D is twice as badder than C than C is badder than B or some other value judgement. what if you just don't feel like making such a precise judgement? then you get your dartboard. -- r b-j r...@audioimagination.com Imagination is more important than knowledge. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] IRV vs Plurality (Dave Ketchum) (Kathy Dopp)
robert bristow-johnson wrote: On Jan 16, 2010, at 5:02 PM, Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote: robert bristow-johnson wrote: On Jan 16, 2010, at 3:41 PM, Kathy Dopp wrote: Exactly as I tried to point out to you, you were either disallowing voters to rank only two candidates or to rank all three. no, it has nothing at all to do with allowing or disallowing the voters to I see I was correct and you are disallowing voters to rank only two candidates and have, as Abd ul also pointed out to you, left 3 choose 2 or 6 possible choices out of your list. because all unmarked candidates are tied for last place, when there is only one unmarked candidate, there is *no* consequential difference between leaving that candidate unmarked or marking that candidate last. Is that true in IRV? Consider a vote of the sort: A B where A and B are eliminated. Then this would be an empty vote, I think, and so be removed from the count, whereas if it had been A B C it would count as one point for C. now lemme see, if there are three candidates, how are two of them eliminated before the IRV final round? Ah, I see. The only way for that to happen is if both B and C tie for last, in which case A wins by default. Thus it only matters if there are more than three candidates, i.e. when both ABC and AB votes are truncated. think about it little bit, Kristofer, it *is* a useful fiction to leave the 2 bottom candidates (of 5) out of consideration (so one can get a grip of what happened in Burlington VT in 2009), but once you've done that (and you're considering only what happens between the remaining 3), the 9 numbers that are the only tallies you need to consider *any* counting scenario, IRV, Condorcet, Plurality of 1st choice, tallies for 1st or 2nd choice (some people in Burlington have suggested that as the number to use to determine the weakest candidate to eliminate in an IRV round), whatever, are: 1332 MKW 767 MWK 455 M 2043 KMW 371 KWM 568 K 1513 WMK 495 WKM 1289 W with exactly those three candidates in consideration, what consequential difference would it make in IRV (or any other rule of tabulation) if the [1332 MKW] pile was split into two piles; [MKW] and [MK] that totaled 1332? those 9 numbers could certainly be determined in individual precincts and meaningfully summed at City Hall or the campaign headquarters of either candidate. I'm not sure if it would be equivalent in Borda, however. Some ways of extending Borda to incomplete (truncated) ballots suggest that you give the last candidate 1 point, the next to last 2, etc, so that for A B B gets one point and A two, whereas for A B C A gets three. It would also make a difference if the election method in question uses no opinion the way Warren's Range extension does: that no opinion is to provide no information at all (alters neither the numerator nor denominator of the average). Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] IRV vs Plurality
robert bristow-johnson wrote: we can continue on like this with more discrete levels and all we'll get are gradations of the above. it's all a matter of degree. but the 2-position slider is a 1-bit piece of information: No,Yes, that's the minimum a voter has to judge. that's qualitatively different. here's why: with the multi-level (3 or more), then order has to be considered with candidates that you approve or disapprove. but the multi-level or continuous slider (3+) requires *more* than just ordering information (who is preferred to whom?), it requires *spacing* information. like i hate candidate D worse than i hate C whom i dislike more than B whom i like less than A. you have to decide that D is twice as badder than C than C is badder than B or some other value judgement. what if you just don't feel like making such a precise judgement? then you get your dartboard. To me, it seems that the method becomes Approval-like when (number of graduations) is less than (number of candidates). When that is the case, you *have* to rate some candidates equal, unless you opt not to rate them at all. That won't make much of a difference when the number of candidates is huge (100 or so), but then, rating 100 candidates would be a pain. I'd say it would be better to just have plain yes/no Approval for a first round, then pick the 5-10 most approved for a second round (using Range, Condorcet, whatever). Or use minmax approval or PAV or somesuch, as long as it homes in on the likely winners of a full vote. I guess that if you (hypothetically speaking) like Range, you could argue that while there's a dartboard effect, the noise is unbiased and so will cancel itself out given enough voters: the voters may not hit exactly at the satisfaction point, but close enough. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] IRV vs Plurality
For the record, I like approval voting and think it would be among the best, if not the best, first step as an alternative voting method to plurality. However, I also think Condorcet is OK as long as voters are not required to rank all choices, to alleviate the point Abd ul mentions below somewhat. Really, the only methods I would object to are the fundamentally unfair ones like IRV/STV that treat voters' votes differentially and thus produce very undesirable election results and remove the rights of some voters to fully participate. Approval, if courts OK it, is by far the simplest to count, audit, explain to voters, etc. and is probably the best first step. Using IRV/STV as a first step may turn off people to alternative electoral methods for a very long time after they realize how deeply they've been misled on how it works, its effects, etc. I am now going to, for the most part, soon drop out of participation in this list again for the Spring semester at college. Kathy On Sun, Jan 17, 2010 at 12:53 AM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax a...@lomaxdesign.com wrote: At 01:44 AM 1/15/2010, robert bristow-johnson wrote: but the problem with considering *more* than pure ranking (Range) is that it requires too much information from the voter. and the problem with *less* (Approval or FPTP) is that it obtains too little information from the voter. There is a common error here, which is to assume that Range requires too much information from the voter. First of all, Approval is Range, simply the most basic Range method. So what you have is a contradiction: Range requires both too much and too little information. Surely it depends on the specific Range implementation. But there is a more fundamental error: that of requirement. Voters may vote in Approval, and Range, as they would vote in Plurality, if they want, and for most voters, this is a simple and powerful strategy. If they favor a frontrunner, and if there are only two frontrunners (the normal situation!), whatever else they would do would be moot for election purposes. But they could cast votes to show support, which has other salutary effects. That, in fact, is why Warren Smith calls Range an incubator for minor parties. It allows them to show their natural support, neither more nor less. The only issue about voting strategy arises in a real three-way race, which is not common. Most voters, however, would be reasonably served by a very simple strategy. Vote first for your favorite candidate, no strategy necessary or even useful. Then consider the frontrunners, however many there are, it's the set of candidates that you think have a prayer of winning, and vote for your favorite of them. (in Approval, that's it, in Range, it means vote max or maybe just short of max). Is your favorite one of the frontrunners?. Vote minimum rating (i.e., in Approval, don't vote at all for) the worst candidate, with no strategic considerations at all. Vote similarly for the worst frontrunner: minimum rating or just a tad higher if the system allows it. And then where do you vote for the rest of the candidates, the ones in the middle? Well, pay attention first to any remaining frontrunners. (In most elections, there aren't any left, but we are now talking about a situation where there are three or more, and we should remember that this is rare.) My own conclusion from study of the game theory involved is that possible expected improvement from seriously optimizing Range votes is small at best over simply voting sincere ratings, and as long as preference order isn't reversed, it's all likely to average out. At worst, from clear exaggeration in order to gain some strategic advantage, it's possible to cast a vote that will leave behind serious regret once you know the outcome. When you have ranked the frontrunners where it seems right, then fill in any remaining candidates you want to rate. If it gets crowded, equal rank a candidate being added with the one already ranked. Rating equals ranking with the option of equal ranking. Equal preference strength expression (i.e., if one spreads the candidates through the rating space evenly) is Borda count. If you don't like that, if it seems to be off, then fix it. Spread some ratings apart, which necessarily compresses some. Don't hesitate to equal rank if you have any difficulty deciding which of two candidates are better. The fact that you have difficulty is a clear indication that you don't have a strong preference! I would not spend a lot of time actually doing the ranking/rating. The hard part is learning enough about the candidates to have a foundation for opinions. So if I don't have enough information to do that, I don't have strong preferences! and so voting is easy, if I simply express that. I can spread my vote over the full range if I think that my intuition might be valuable (it can be! -- but it may also be vulnerable to media manipulation). My choice. Range
Re: [EM] IRV vs Plurality
At 03:01 AM 1/17/2010, robert bristow-johnson wrote: On Jan 17, 2010, at 12:53 AM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote: There is a common error here, which is to assume that Range requires too much information from the voter. well, it does force the voter to consider the questions oh, i hate this guy 28% more than i hate the other guy, so how do i rate each candidate in range? the range rating values are a superset of the adjacent integer rankings from a ranked-order ballot like one for Condorcet, IRV, Borda. Part of the problem is the way in which Range has been presented. It isn't really rating candidates, though that can be part of the process. It's *voting.* The simplest way to describe Range, and to think about it, is that it is Approval Voting with fractional votes allowed. Not required. There is a whole debate among students of Range about using average vote rather than sum of votes. The difference is that with sum of votes, we have a traditional Approval voting system, which always uses sum of votes. Not average vote. (Average vote is meaningless, really, unless the ballot asks for Yes or No or Approve/Disapprove for each candidate). Average vote doesn't consider majority at all. Naturally, I support sum of votes, and though average vote is interesting (in terms of understanding the future of a candidate), it isn't *voting*, which in it's basic form, is seeking for a majority of voters to vote for a candidate for the candidate to win. Is voting 1/100 vote for a candidate voting for a candidate? I would try to make ballot instructions make it clear that the voter is casting fractional votes, and probably shouldn't vote for a candidate at all if the voter isn't willing to support the candidate against others. That makes the decision much easier. in the ranked-order ballot, all the voter has to decide is who she would vote for in adjacent candidates: ABC. she doesn't have to decide how much more she likes B over C than how much A is over B. one is a quick set of qualitative decisions. the other makes it a quantitative issue, and that's when a lot of us get out our dartboard. Sure. But you don't have to make those quantitative decisions if you don't want to. It's optional, and, in fact, I prefer that voters not cast fractional votes unless they are easy for them to decide. i don't think making threshold decision based on the precise sum of a bunch of noisy numbers (which is what Range is when we use our dartboards to score a candidate) does much other than to add the means of the noisy numbers and a sum of zero-mean random numbers which throws a little bit of dice into the mix before using the threshold comparison and determining the winner. The numbers can be noisy, but surely you know that adding certain kinds of noise can improve the accuracy of a feedback system! They aren't actually noise, they are noisy. The averages provide information, and the very fact of the existence of fractional votes -- even just one! -- improves the utility of the system, that's been shown. so it requires thinking that we wouldn't have to do otherwise. if we don't feel like thinking that seriously, it becomes a big noisy threshold on the means of stable ranks. that's sorta like Borda and does become the equivalent if people's evaluations of candidates sorta linear. First of all, Approval is Range, simply the most basic Range method. it's Range with 1-bit binary values. Yup. Range 1, I call it, which means that there are two possible votes, generally with one being the default. Approval voting is Plurality voting, with the *option* of voting for more than one. Most voters, under normal conditions in the U.S., don't need to do it! So what you have is a contradiction: Range requires both too much and too little information. Surely it depends on the specific Range implementation. yes it does. of course the answer is (if i may appeal to an audio image) that what we *normally* mean when we say Range is were the sliders for each candidate are either continuous or have many discrete values (say 10 or 100). Only Smith considers a continuous slider, and I prefer, simply, to consider that what separates Range from Approval is the ability to cast fractional votes. Freedom from the voter. Sure: if you have freedom you have more choices and, gosh, you might even be tempted to *think*! Tell me, do you want voters to think or do you think of voting systems as a device that extracts information from voters without them thinking about it? And making actual decisions? a two-position slider is what we call a switch. requires one bit of information. that's getting qualitatively different. either you are at the minimum number of levels (or bits of information in the slider position) or you're not. And all the switches are off by default. So, don't want to do much work? First option: don't vote at all! Leave it to others who know more and care more. And this
Re: [EM] IRV vs Plurality (Dave Ketchum)
Cutting to the chase, the fundamental error has been to assume that write-in or so-called inconsequential candidates can be batch- eliminated before having results from the whole election. No precinct knows what can be eliminated until it has the results from other precincts for the first round. Further a method must accomodate not just a most-common scenario but also all possible scenarios. Runoff voting in general encourages candidate counts to increase. Cf. San Francisco. We are talking about the matrix size necessary to fully canvass an IRV election centrally from initial data provided by each precinct. That initial data might categorize all write-candidates into a single pile, but the risk is that if reports from other precincts indicate possible significance, it would be necessary to ask the precincts to tabulate the write-in pile. If you did this with so-called minor candidates, you'd see a lawsuit, which is less likely with write-ins. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] IRV vs Plurality (Dave Ketchum)
On Jan 15, 2010, at 10:51 PM, Kathy Dopp wrote: Message: 3 Date: Fri, 15 Jan 2010 22:05:58 -0500 From: Dave Ketchum da...@clarityconnect.com To: Juho juho4...@yahoo.co.uk On Jan 15, 2010, at 7:46 PM, Juho wrote: On Jan 14, 2010, at 2:13 AM, Dave Ketchum wrote: On Jan 13, 2010, at 4:49 AM, Juho wrote: On Jan 13, 2010, at 9:14 AM, robert bristow-johnson wrote: it still is a curiosity to me how, historically, some leaders and proponents of election reform thunked up the idea to have a ranked-order ballot and then took that good idea and married it to the IRV protocol. with the 200 year old Condorcet idea in existence, why would they do that? 1) The basic idea of IRV is in some sense natural. It is like a street fight. The weakest players are regularly kicked out and they must give up. I'm not saying that this would lead to good results but at least this game is understandable to most people. Condorcet on the other hand is more like a mathematical equation, Yet Condorcet is simple to count and precinct-summable, monotonic, and treats all voters' votes equally, unlike IRV/STV which is virtually impossible to manually count, requires a mind-boggling number of piles and subpiles to count it and requires that all late-counted ballots are ready to count centrally, or the entire long tedious process has to be restarted. and the details of the most complex Condorcet variants may be too much for most voters. Here I'm not saying that each voter (and not even each legislator) should understand all the details of their voting system. The basic Condorcet winner rule is however a simple enough principle to be explained to all. But it may be that IRV is easier to market (to the legislators and voters) from this point of view. The organization promoting IRV/STV is very well-funded and invests a lot of capital into highly misleading local advertising campaigns in order to promote its adoption. I could send this list some information on that if anyone is interested. I don't think that any group promoting a fair, equitable, auditable alternative method like Condorcet or others has put forth such a well-funded campaign have they? When there is a CW in Condorcet, the CW has won in comparison with each other candidate. While a few may like X or Z enough better to have given such top ranking, the fact that all the voters together prefer the CW over each other should count, and does with Condorcet. Else there is a cycle in Condorcet. Perhaps the following Minimum Margins Method Condorcet variant should be used to establish Condorcet's preferability over other methods. Then let other variants compete with this one before finally deciding which to use. Minimum Margins Method: Consider the cycle, such as ABCA, and the margins that create it, such as 60A30B, 40B20C, 21C20A. Delete the weakest margins as many times as needed to destroy the cycle - in this case A becoming the CW (note that if one CA voter had voted AC in this election, A would have become CW with no cycle). Great idea. Is this Dave Ketchum speaking above? Very simple and logically coherent plan. Thanks for sharing. Could it be possible that this plan would ever not work? (I.e. same margins?) I did this, though suspecting the idea already has a variant name. The adoption is intentionally two steps: 1. Use this variant to easily prove there is a Condorcet variant ready to compete against such as IRV. 2. If there is a better variant, even though likely more complex, let it compete against this one. Same margins is a possibility requiring a response be attended to before actual use. At proposal time the possibility needs mentioning - I see nothing more needed at that time (probably delete them one at a time in some specified order). When I see this kind of scenarios I'm always tempted to ask the question if it is necessary to limit the scope to the top cycle members or if one can allow also the others win (when the cyclic opinions in the top cycle are strong). I find also that approach to be a working solution for many election types (although many have indicated that they disagree with this). Note that this method breaks the cycle at the point where the smallest number of ballots being voted differently would have broken the cycle. Note that weaker candidates are unlikely to get enough votes to be part of a cycle - being weak they get few high rank votes. Yes, one could certainly say that this allows the top cycle to prevail by breaking the weakest link where weakest is defined as the smallest margin in this case. This minimum margins method is so logically correct and fair. 2) IRV is easier to count manually. Condorcet gets quite tedious Whomever said this obviously hasn't ever counted any IRV or STV elections manually in a contest with a substantial number of candidates and voters. Condorcet is orders of magnitude simpler to count than is IRV because there can never be more than n x n
Re: [EM] IRV vs Plurality (Dave Ketchum)
On Jan 16, 2010, at 5:51 AM, Kathy Dopp wrote: On Jan 14, 2010, at 2:13 AM, Dave Ketchum wrote: On Jan 13, 2010, at 4:49 AM, Juho wrote: 2) IRV is easier to count manually. Condorcet gets quite tedious to count manually when the number of candidates and voters goes up. One can use some tricks and shortcuts to speed up manual Condorcet is SO much easier and quicker and simpler to count than IRV if one simply tallies one n x n matrix for each precinct and sums the corresponding positions for all the precincts. No need to wait for all the absentee and provisional ballots, no need for centralized counting, no need to sort and resort ballots into dozens of piles of ballots, or even worse with STV keep track of which portion of which ballot goes into which pile (tearing or cutting up the ballots would help in that manual counting nightmare.) Condorcet counting but IRV probably still beats it from this point of view. Manual counting was the only way to count for a long time. Nowadays we have computers and Condorcet tabulation should thus be no problem at all (at least in places where computers are available). But this is one reason why IRV has taken an early lead. When an election district has only one polling place, life is simple. Yes. Another point against IRV/STV is no scalability of manual counting. Condorcet is infinitely scalable since it is as simple to manually count dozens or hundreds of precincts as it is to count one, without moving all the ballots to one central location. When talking about history and the early lead of IRV I referred to the times when both ballot reading and recording as well as summing up the results to piles or matrixes and all the way up to declaring the final results was manual, i.e. before the time of computers. It seems that I assumed that telephone or telegraph was already invented when I referred at some point also to the option of local counting of IRV results with only centralized control of that counting process (=advice from the central counting office on which candidates to eliminate next etc.). IRV has at least a tradition of being counted manually in this way. I'm not aware of any similar Condorcet tradition in large elections. I believe already Ramon Llull had a simple sequential calculation method but one would need some enhancements to that method if one wants to cover the most popular Condorcent methods. The problem that I expected in Condorcet (variants that require more info than what the Llull process uses) is the size of the matrix and the possible need to have some explicit matrix (or several, e.g. on paper) where the results are collected when the ballots are read one by one. In IRV it is possible to put the ballots in different piles since IRV takes into account only the top (non-eliminated) candidate of each ballot at one point in time during the counting process. In Condorcet, if one wants to count the full matrix, each ballot influences multiple entries in the matrix, so the ballots themselves can not be used as tools to mark the number of points in some entry in the matrix (unless doing the whole process sequentially, counting one part of the matrix at each round). From counting verification point of view the explicit physical ballots may be easier to track during the counting process than numeric values (or ticks) in the matrix. I believe a typical manual IRV counting process uses at most as many piles as there are candidates a one point in time (each counter having his/her own piles is not a problem since the piles are physically summable) while a Condorcet counting process might use n*n matrix entries. (jumping to another topic) From voting security point of view the summability of Condorcet results offers better protection of voter privacy since individual votes can not be identified any more after they have been once included in the matrix (that contains sufficient information for most Condorcet methods to calculate the final results in some central location). In IRV it is more practical to store the actual ballots, not e.g. the number of votes per each permutation of candidates, so the individual votes may be visible to all the verifiers, maybe also to all in Internet. Juho Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] IRV vs Plurality
At 09:47 AM 1/15/2010, Kathy Dopp wrote: Your steady stream of false claims about me in your recent emails show us much more about yourself than reveal anything about me. To those with eyes, most everything we write reveals much about us. However, Kathy, I suggest you let others defend you; correct factual errors, if they matter, but don't get caught in the personal conflicts, behave as the professional you are. As an expert in your field, you will always encounter ignorant objections and attacks. I think it was important for you to point out that you are non-partisan in your work, and I also don't believe that you are partisan on the issue of voting systems, beyond what your expertise has led you to understand, you are partisan on issues that make maintaining election integrity more difficult. And you have become, therefore, somewhat of an advocate of not adopting or of dropping such systems. But that kind of partisanship is common with experts. To apply this to a question that sometimes comes up, the issue of how important strong preferences are. Are strong preferences the result of expertise, or of fanaticism? Opponents of Range Voting, which respects expressed preference strength, often seem to assume that those with strong preferences are partisan fanatics. But is this a sane assumption, is it true, on average? The same line of thinking causes people to assume that there is something wrong with low turnout in runoff elections, because those who vote are those who care enough to take the trouble to vote. I can assume that those who care are not necessarily a fair sample of the entire electorate, so, indeed, they may make decisions that would not be made by the entire electorate, if you forced the latter to vote. (They do this in Australia, actually.) But which decisions are better for the society? By definition, those who don't care as much have less of a stake and less concern about the outcome, and, on average, they have less knowledge about the implications of each alternative. One of those expressing complaint about low turnout in runoffs notes that it allegedly favors Republicans. If that were true, I'd hasten to check out the Republican party. It would be a sign that it was the party of those with more knowledge! But it's not generally true; in some circumstances, though, the Republicans may be better organized, and perhaps this is even due to better funding. But the solution isn't to use voting systems that force everyone to vote, which merely makes results *even more* susceptible to manipulation by those with the most funding. The solution is to organize the people directly, for the people have resources that are even better than money, and more powerful, *if organized.* Poor people can generally turn out to vote, and it's even possible that they could find it easier. If you are out of a job and if you have a supportive community that will provide you with transportation, babysitting, etc. ... you can vote. But if you are indifferent to the options, in fact, no amount of encouragement to vote will help. There are voting systems that allow people to see the effect of their vote, even if they don't win, but mostly they are not on the table. Good voting systems don't just determine winners, though that's the primary purpose. They also collect and provide accurate information as to public preferences, guiding future elections and campaigns, and because collecting that information is cheap if it's part of an election process, and if the information collected is the kind that would allow predictions of future voting behavior, a great deal of general social benefit can be generated quite aside from the benefit of making decisions. And this is another reason why we should collect preference strength data, because raw preference, simple preference order, does not allow us to make predictions with high confidence. An AB preference that is so small that tomorrow it might be BA is quite different from a strong preference! -- which takes an earthquake, so to speak, to reverse. Suppose a candidate loses an election with a very poor showing in first preference votes (which may be the only votes on a plurality ballot). But suppose this candidate is not only every voter's second choice, but the preference strength of the voters of someone else over this candidate is low. With support and better campaigning, that compromise candidate would be quite likely to win a rematch. And would, indeed, quite possibly, be a much better choice, uniting the community. Hence if you asked me about the best voting method, I'd propose a Range ballot, of moderate resolution. Range ballots can be analysed as preferential, ranked ballots, with equal ranking allowed. If there is an explicit approval cutoff, they can be used to provide Yes/No information, to determine if a majority actually supports an outcome, which is highly useful and fits
Re: [EM] IRV vs Plurality (Dave Ketchum)
On Jan 16, 2010, at 12:05 PM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
At 11:22 AM 1/15/2010, robert bristow-johnson wrote:
(about a voting security expert)
you are in the rabid anti-IRV party.
Robert, your slip is showing.
what slip? i don't have nuttin' under me kilt.
Experts in various fields tend to be strongly against IRV.
Political activists who are working for IRV tend to see strong
opposition as rabid. You want to see rabid opposition, you'll
have to look elsewhere, though.
and FairVote.org will point to experts that strongly advocate IRV.
big fat hairy deel.
whether it's here or on the Burlington blog or longer ago at the
Fairvote site (that i have since gotten tired of), i have never
appealed to authority in evaluating or advocating any method.
I'm thinking over the opposition material. It might look rabid to
someone who isn't aware of the problems,
but i think i *am* aware of the salient problems. but despite that,
i support the goals that we had in adopting IRV. i still don't
support correcting IRV by reverting back to FPTP, given that is the
choice presented (the reverted rules would include a delayed-runoff
for less than 40%). and voting security concerns have been
persuasive. even with IRV, with a reasonably small number of
credible candidates (and assuming the worse case, that write-in is
always the same person, without yet checking), there are a finite
number of ranking permutations, and there can be a ballot for each.
continued below...
On Jan 16, 2010, at 10:41 AM, Kathy Dopp wrote:
On Sat, Jan 16, 2010 at 2:06 AM, robert bristow-johnson
r...@audioimagination.com wrote:
On Jan 15, 2010, at 11:34 PM, Jonathan Lundell wrote:
On Jan 15, 2010, at 7:51 PM, Kathy Dopp wrote:
Imagine sending all your ballots nationwide to DC for manual
counting
to check the outcome of a Presidential election. We'll simply
let the
GW administration, for instance, count the results in his own IRV
election!
That's something of a non sequitur. Anyone with all the ballot files
(every state, for example, or anyone else) could do the count.
and, in fact, it can be decentralized to the extent it is now.
each state
could have their central place, and in turn, each county, each
precinct.
the entire tree could be a public record on the internet that has
links to
child nodes or parent node. with 3 credible candidates there are
9 piles to
have to maintain. each precinct sorts the ballots into one of 9
piles and
counts it and puts the 9 numbers up in this public place on the web.
everyone can check their own node to see that it isn't
misreported. i do
not see why, physically, it would be more vulnerable to attack by the
government in power that what is presently the case. it's a
factor of 9/2
a typo, i meant to say 9/3. IRV has 9 piles, FPTP has 3.
more numbers to keep secure with that ranked ballot.
I was talking about IRV voting. Where do you get 9 piles from?
it's 3!/0! + 3!/2! = 6 + 3
(9 would be the number of Condorcet tallies for 3 candidates,
no, that would be 6. for N candidates, i think there would be
N-1
SUM{ N!/n! } - N!/1!
n=0
... piles if only relative ranking is salient.
the second term of the summation (in the case of N=3, it's the number
of permutations of ranking 2 candidates out of a pool of 3), counts a
superfluous permutation because when only one candidate is unranked,
it's equivalent to ranking him last. but we have to account for the
case where 2 or more candidates are unranked (and tied for last).
*not* the
number of ballot piles for either Condorcet - which does not require
ballot sorting to hand count - and *not* the number of ballot piles
for IRV voting.
doesn't matter if you don't worry about someone ranking their
favorite candidate 2 and no one a 1. there are a finite number
of meaningfully different ranking permutations and you need only 1
pile for each. if N is 3, that number is 9.
If you want to make IRV precinct-summable for 3 candidates, it
requires 3*2 + 3*2 + 3 = 15 separate tallies.
the middle term of 3*2, you don't need.
To count IRV by sorting piles of ballots requires far fewer piles
than 9 but also to do decentralized as you suggest would require
everyone in the entire country in all precincts sitting around waiting
for all the late-counted ballots to be ready and waiting for the total
results to be tabulated centrally somewhere so they could sort the
ballots for the next round - totally undoable practically.
if it makes a difference to the election outcome (like it's damn
close), isn't sorting and counting late ballots going to be necessary
anyway?
Of course the number of tallies to make IRV/STV precinct-summable
grows exponentially as the number of candidates grows and is equal to
more than the total number of voters who vote in each precinct most of
the time with a larger number of candidates.
it depends on who we expect
Re: [EM] IRV vs Plurality (Dave Ketchum)
At 02:06 AM 1/16/2010, robert bristow-johnson wrote: On Jan 15, 2010, at 11:34 PM, Jonathan Lundell wrote: On Jan 15, 2010, at 7:51 PM, Kathy Dopp wrote: Imagine sending all your ballots nationwide to DC for manual counting to check the outcome of a Presidential election. We'll simply let the GW administration, for instance, count the results in his own IRV election! That's something of a non sequitur. Anyone with all the ballot files (every state, for example, or anyone else) could do the count. and, in fact, it can be decentralized to the extent it is now. It *can* be. Is it practical? Depends. Is it complicated? Yes. Is it vulnerable such that a small error somewhere compounds through the process, creating a necessity to recount elsewhere. Yes. Does this actually happen? Yes. IRV creates many opportunities for close decisions, because each round involves finding the lowest vote-getter so that this candidate can be eliminated. This decision then affects the next round of counting, so if an error is found that flips one of these decision, *all subsequent counting* can be invalid. This particular sensitivity is unique to sequential elimination, and it is why voting security experts are practically united in opposing IRV. Some of them are aware that there are better methods, even better in other ways, that don't have this problem. each state could have their central place, and in turn, each county, each precinct. the entire tree could be a public record on the internet that has links to child nodes or parent node. with 3 credible candidates there are 9 piles to have to maintain. Nine? Three candidates, to be able to report all the votes for usage in central processing, there are 15 piles, even if we strike, at the outset, all write-ins, provisionally, or other minor candidates with no hope: A B C AB AC BA BC CA CB ABC ACB BAC BCA CAB CBA spoiled and, in fact, for the one or two rank ballots above, most jurisdictions would need to report write-ins or minor candidates at least in first rank, before elimination. So we'd add: exhausted, which might be sorted as to first rank on the exhausted ballot. Total 17, actually, with only three candidates. And if there are more than three, how do we know which ones to count? We have to sort them all. Note that three candidates is the simplest IRV election requiring rounds, unless there is a two-candidate election with a lot of write-in votes. It's common to lump all write-ins together, and write-ins are normally only reported in first rank with IRV (because they are irrelevant after elimination), but ... should it happen that all the write-in votes collectively are enough to shift an elimination sequence that might affect the overall results, then they would have to go back and break down the write-ins. Notice that this adds another set of piles. Is this a three-rank ballot, or is it four? If an error was made somewhere else, they have to back up and resort to the pile before considering that erroneous report. Do you have any idea how much work this is? Basically, how would you do it? You would pretty much have to go back to the beginning, and resort, though you'd use batch elimination of all previously eliminated candidates. Sorting a ballot with all these votes on them is a tedious process, compared to just counting all the votes, and it's easy to make mistakes. You will, I'd guess, argue that the third rank votes are irrelevant, since we are going to ignore all other possibilities. But in an election method, we can't ignore them, we must be able to distinguish between ABW and ABC, where the write-in is W. It's true that ABW gets classified into AB after the initial elimination, but that counting must be done, creating, at least, a pile for Other as first preference. Or, say, Minor as first preference. And then, sometimes, if this single pile had enough votes in it in other jurisdictions, so that elimination can't be done in batch mode as mathematically irrelevant, you'd have to further sort... It's a mess, Robert. They do it in Australia, by hand, so, sure, it can be done. They also, if I'm correct, don't allow write-ins. They do it centrally, so each voting district only maintains as many piles as candidates. For a long time, Australia didn't publish much of the election data, so we really don't know much about those elections. I'm not up on the latest each precinct sorts the ballots into one of 9 piles and counts it and puts the 9 numbers up in this public place on the web. everyone can check their own node to see that it isn't misreported. i do not see why, physically, it would be more vulnerable to attack by the government in power that what is presently the case. it's a factor of 9/2 more numbers to keep secure with that ranked ballot. More. Simplifying assumptions have been made which make this look more practical. each state, each little government would be
Re: [EM] IRV vs Plurality (Dave Ketchum)
On Jan 16, 2010, at 3:00 PM, Kathy Dopp wrote:
On Sat, Jan 16, 2010 at 2:30 PM, robert bristow-johnson
r...@audioimagination.com wrote:
I was talking about IRV voting. Where do you get 9 piles from?
it's 3!/0! + 3!/2! = 6 + 3
OK. If you prefer to write the formula that way, you're still
incorrect.
It is 3!/0! + 3!/1! + 3!/2! = 15 unique vote combinations in IRV, but
that is also *not* the same as the number of piles you'll need to sort
into to count IRV, which is less. I haven't and don't plan to, figure
out that formula but do know that the answer is less than 9 for three
candidates when counting IRV manually, so I am still uncertain what
your 9 relates to.
(9 would be the number of Condorcet tallies for 3 candidates,
no, that would be 6. for N candidates, i think there would be
Condorcet can always be counted by an n x n matrix where n is the
number of candidates. However you are correct that the diagonal has no
entries so 9 - 3 agrees with your six.
However, your fundamental formula below is incorrect for Condorcet and
for IRV and will not give correct answers for Condorcet except maybe
in the case of two and three candidates (your formula is also overly
complex and easily simplified but does not seem to apply to anything.
For instance, storing all the ballot choices for Condorcet can be done
for four candidates, as always, in a 4 x 4 matix with 4 diagonal
entries blank or used to store other useful items such as the number
of ballots cast, number of spoiled ballots, or whatever.
Again, I suggest you sit down and actually try to count some sample
ballots in either Condorcet or IRV. That would help anyone to go from
the theory to practice.
N-1
SUM{ N!/n! } - N!/1!
n=0
... piles if only relative ranking is salient.
Your formula would be correct for the number of tallies for IRV if you
delete the second expression that you subtract, but is not correct for
anything to do with Condorcet in general.
the second term of the summation (in the case of N=3, it's the
number of
permutations of ranking 2 candidates out of a pool of 3), counts a
superfluous permutation because when only one candidate is
unranked, it's
equivalent to ranking him last. but we have to account for the
case where 2
or more candidates are unranked (and tied for last).
Don't know what you're talking about.
consider Burlington 2009 with the inconsequential candidates Simpson
and write-in eliminated and very real (but otherwise last)
candidate Dan Smith eliminated. that least Wright, Montroll, and
Kiss. with only those three left, these are the pile counts of the
only salient permutations of marked ballots:
1332 MKW
767 MWK
455 M
2043 KMW
371 KWM
568 K
1513 WMK
495 WKM
1289 W
now, Kathy, ask yourself why there are no piles marked just MK or
MW or KM or KW or WM or WK? (those are the 6 piles you want to
enumerate in your 15.)
All your formulas are incorrect.
and, since you don't understand your opponent's argument, then your
evaluation of it is authoritative.
sigh
--
r b-j r...@audioimagination.com
Imagination is more important than knowledge.
Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] IRV vs Plurality (Dave Ketchum)
On Sat, Jan 16, 2010 at 2:54 PM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax a...@lomaxdesign.com 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
Re: [EM] IRV vs Plurality (Dave Ketchum) (Kathy Dopp)
Message: 2 Date: Sat, 16 Jan 2010 15:14:23 -0500 From: robert bristow-johnson r...@audioimagination.com To: EM Methods election-methods@lists.electorama.com Subject: Re: [EM] IRV vs Plurality (Dave Ketchum) Don't know what you're talking about. consider Burlington 2009 with the inconsequential candidates Simpson and write-in eliminated and very real (but otherwise last) candidate Dan Smith eliminated. that least Wright, Montroll, and Kiss. with only those three left, these are the pile counts of the only salient permutations of marked ballots: 1332 MKW 767 MWK 455 M 2043 KMW 371 KWM 568 K 1513 WMK 495 WKM 1289 W now, Kathy, ask yourself why there are no piles marked just MK or MW or KM or KW or WM or WK? (those are the 6 piles you want to enumerate in your 15.) Robert, Your slip is showing again. Exactly as I tried to point out to you, you were either disallowing voters to rank only two candidates or to rank all three. I see I was correct and you are disallowing voters to rank only two candidates and have, as Abd ul also pointed out to you, left 3 choose 2 or 6 possible choices out of your list. Unfortunately for your system of disallowing voters to rank only two choices, US courts would rule that any such ballots where voters rank only two choices as legal votes that must be counted, so you cannot have a voting system in the US which disallows those choices. All your formulas are incorrect. and, since you don't understand your opponent's argument, then your evaluation of it is authoritative. Robert I just proved you wrong, as did Abd ul earlier. So please try again if you think your other formula is correct, because mathematically provably both your formulas are obviously incorrect to any election methods expert on this list or any mathematician or probabilist, not just to me. Reality is a really nice place Robert. I invite you sincerely to join us in the real world. -- 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
Re: [EM] IRV vs Plurality (Dave Ketchum) (Kathy Dopp)
On Jan 16, 2010, at 3:41 PM, Kathy Dopp wrote: Message: 2 Date: Sat, 16 Jan 2010 15:14:23 -0500 From: robert bristow-johnson r...@audioimagination.com To: EM Methods election-methods@lists.electorama.com Subject: Re: [EM] IRV vs Plurality (Dave Ketchum) Don't know what you're talking about. consider Burlington 2009 with the inconsequential candidates Simpson and write-in eliminated and very real (but otherwise last) candidate Dan Smith eliminated. that least Wright, Montroll, and Kiss. with only those three left, these are the pile counts of the only salient permutations of marked ballots: 1332 MKW 767 MWK 455 M 2043 KMW 371 KWM 568 K 1513 WMK 495 WKM 1289 W now, Kathy, ask yourself why there are no piles marked just MK or MW or KM or KW or WM or WK? (those are the 6 piles you want to enumerate in your 15.) Robert, Your slip is showing again. no slip nor nuttin' else under me kilt. want me to show you? Exactly as I tried to point out to you, you were either disallowing voters to rank only two candidates or to rank all three. no, it has nothing at all to do with allowing or disallowing the voters to I see I was correct and you are disallowing voters to rank only two candidates and have, as Abd ul also pointed out to you, left 3 choose 2 or 6 possible choices out of your list. because all unmarked candidates are tied for last place, when there is only one unmarked candidate, there is *no* consequential difference between leaving that candidate unmarked or marking that candidate last. Unfortunately for your system of disallowing voters to rank only two choices, US courts would rule that any such ballots where voters rank only two choices as legal votes that must be counted, so you cannot have a voting system in the US which disallows those choices. All your formulas are incorrect. and, since you don't understand your opponent's argument, then your evaluation of it is authoritative. Robert I just proved you wrong, as did Abd ul earlier. So please try again if you think your other formula is correct, because mathematically provably both your formulas are obviously incorrect to any election methods expert on this list or any mathematician or probabilist, not just to me. Reality is a really nice place Robert. I invite you sincerely to join us in the real world. Kathy, come to the USENET newsgroup comp.dsp someday. i'm quite used to analyzing and sometimes deconstructing arguments. you haven't made a dent. -- r b-j r...@audioimagination.com Imagination is more important than knowledge. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] IRV vs Plurality (Dave Ketchum)
On Sat, Jan 16, 2010 at 4:17 PM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax a...@lomaxdesign.com wrote: It may depends on what office(s) are being elected. States are free, supposedly, to select their electors by any method they choose. STV is actually a decent method for that. This election would be state-wide. But it ain't gonna happen unless some negotations and arrangements are successful. There is a way to get from here to there, but it must address the problem that the majority party in each state will see that the all-or-nothing assignment of electors state by state helps it, and that this is somewhat balanced and somewhat fair when disparity, the loss of representation in the electoral college by all-or-nothing, balances out. So a Democratic state, for example, if it decides to generously divide up its electors fairly, will quite accurately perceive that it will be helping the Republican to win, and perhaps unfairly, if there is no reciprocation. There is a way around this through conditional implementations that only divide the electors when this actually will produce a fair result based on overall proportional representation in the electoral college. Otherwise it reverts to all-or-nothing, or something in between. I love that idea Abd ul. It is a far better idea than trying to create a nationwide popular vote compact IMO for exactly the reasoning you mention below and the incredible legal finagling that could result from a close popular vote in all 50 states given the completely different election systems each state uses. I wish the creators of the popular vote compact (that IMO will never pass in enough states) had taken that approach instead, which I would think also has a better political chance of being endorsed in enough states. I strongly dislike basing the national result on direct popular vote, for two reasons, one of which is the election integrity problem. Ideally, the electoral college would return to its intended role, where electors could cast their votes *independently,* and were elected based on the trust of the public in them *personally*. If you want to only vote for a Green elector, fine. But let your elector cast his or her vote in the College according to what will produce the best result in the end, as seen by that person. Choose well. Part of the problem with the present system is that we are electing rubber-stamps, then we are surprised when rubber-stamp elections don't go well! Today only NE and I think NB have allocated their electors proportionally to the vote in their states. -- 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
Re: [EM] IRV vs Plurality (Dave Ketchum)
Kathy Dopp wrote: On Sat, Jan 16, 2010 at 2:54 PM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax a...@lomaxdesign.com 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. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] IRV vs Plurality (Dave Ketchum) (Kathy Dopp)
robert bristow-johnson wrote: On Jan 16, 2010, at 3:41 PM, Kathy Dopp wrote: Exactly as I tried to point out to you, you were either disallowing voters to rank only two candidates or to rank all three. no, it has nothing at all to do with allowing or disallowing the voters to I see I was correct and you are disallowing voters to rank only two candidates and have, as Abd ul also pointed out to you, left 3 choose 2 or 6 possible choices out of your list. because all unmarked candidates are tied for last place, when there is only one unmarked candidate, there is *no* consequential difference between leaving that candidate unmarked or marking that candidate last. Is that true in IRV? Consider a vote of the sort: A B where A and B are eliminated. Then this would be an empty vote, I think, and so be removed from the count, whereas if it had been A B C it would count as one point for C. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] IRV vs Plurality (Dave Ketchum)
Kristofer, I don't know about Condorcet auditing because I haven't tried to figure it out yet, but its mathematics seems to be much simpler than IRV/STV since only n(n-1) counts are necessary to report for each audit unit (precinct or whatever.) and I'm sure the fact that Condorcet counts fit so nicely into an nxn matrix would probably help the numeric algorithms. I would need to figure out how what the upper margin error bounds for all candidate pairs for one Condorcet audit unit (precinct or other publicly reported) matrix are, given the reported vote counts and number of ballots cast in each. Once that is done, I think figuring out several methods would come simply. It seems very do-able to me, but it would take me who knows how many days or weeks or even months of studying the problem to figure out exactly. As soon as Condorcet methods are adopted for a public federal, or perhaps even state-level election, I would definitely not oppose implementation of the Condorcet method with the minimum margin method of resolving cycles and would be happy to try to develop the post-election auditing mathematics for it. Kathy On Sat, Jan 16, 2010 at 4:55 PM, Kristofer Munsterhjelm km-el...@broadpark.no wrote: Kathy Dopp wrote: On Sat, Jan 16, 2010 at 2:54 PM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax a...@lomaxdesign.com 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. -- 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
Re: [EM] IRV vs Plurality (Dave Ketchum) (Kathy Dopp)
On Jan 16, 2010, at 5:02 PM, Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote: robert bristow-johnson wrote: On Jan 16, 2010, at 3:41 PM, Kathy Dopp wrote: Exactly as I tried to point out to you, you were either disallowing voters to rank only two candidates or to rank all three. no, it has nothing at all to do with allowing or disallowing the voters to I see I was correct and you are disallowing voters to rank only two candidates and have, as Abd ul also pointed out to you, left 3 choose 2 or 6 possible choices out of your list. because all unmarked candidates are tied for last place, when there is only one unmarked candidate, there is *no* consequential difference between leaving that candidate unmarked or marking that candidate last. Is that true in IRV? Consider a vote of the sort: A B where A and B are eliminated. Then this would be an empty vote, I think, and so be removed from the count, whereas if it had been A B C it would count as one point for C. now lemme see, if there are three candidates, how are two of them eliminated before the IRV final round? and what counts in the IRV final round? let's say that it's A eliminated before the IRV final round. it doesn't matter if B is 1st or 2nd, if B ranked above (or is the only candidate left that's marked), it counts as a vote for B in the final round. doesn't matter if C is marked below B or not marked at all. think about it little bit, Kristofer, it *is* a useful fiction to leave the 2 bottom candidates (of 5) out of consideration (so one can get a grip of what happened in Burlington VT in 2009), but once you've done that (and you're considering only what happens between the remaining 3), the 9 numbers that are the only tallies you need to consider *any* counting scenario, IRV, Condorcet, Plurality of 1st choice, tallies for 1st or 2nd choice (some people in Burlington have suggested that as the number to use to determine the weakest candidate to eliminate in an IRV round), whatever, are: 1332 MKW 767 MWK 455 M 2043 KMW 371 KWM 568 K 1513 WMK 495 WKM 1289 W with exactly those three candidates in consideration, what consequential difference would it make in IRV (or any other rule of tabulation) if the [1332 MKW] pile was split into two piles; [MKW] and [MK] that totaled 1332? those 9 numbers could certainly be determined in individual precincts and meaningfully summed at City Hall or the campaign headquarters of either candidate. -- r b-j r...@audioimagination.com Imagination is more important than knowledge. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] IRV vs Plurality
Date: Sat, 16 Jan 2010 18:40:09 -0500 From: robert bristow-johnson r...@audioimagination.com To: EM Methods election-methods@lists.electorama.com Subject: Re: [EM] IRV vs Plurality unlike you, Kathy, i'm a lifelong student. and, at 54, i've also Hey Yet ANOTHER (count them) WRONG FANTASY about me that you've cooked up inside your own head. I have another lesson for you that you will probably ignore, like all the rest. If you want to know the facts about someone else ASK THEM. I.e. If ideas pop into your head about someone, your ideas may or may *not* be correct, and the way to check the reality of your own imagination is to ASK the other person about whom you continually fabricate new fantasies or imaginary ideas about. I am currently a Ph.D. student in political science after getting a master's degree in mathematics. I went back to college to get a Ph.D. after getting tired of having Ph.D. professors replicate my work on post-election auditing without citing my work and were incompetently misleading people on how to do post-election audits. seen a few things and dealt with systems of significant complexity (and gotten paid for it). one of my favorite contributions i like to make to the scholarly pile is to cut through unnecessary complexity and boil something down to the kernel of the issue. for audio signal processing geeks, an example that's public-domain is http:// www.musicdsp.org/files/EQ-Coefficients.pdf which has later become http://www.musicdsp.org/files/Audio-EQ-Cookbook.txt and has about 6900 references on the web and 1000 in Google Scholar (none that i know of are negative references). i dunno how many hits i get in Google Scholar, far less than a real academic. i just checked and it's 9 more hits than you get Kathy. Well I guess you are one-up in that regard then in the little pissing contest you're having between yourself and your imaginary fabrications about myself then. Congratulations. it's *you* that do not get it, Kathy. neither quantitative nor qualitatively. ha ha. Thanks for the laugh. and you're not very forthright, either. you said earlier that you Another hopelessly inaccurate fantasy. Try to get this through your head. I do not live inside your head or inside your imagination. I am living out here, in the real world which is not restrained to your own imagination. If you want to expand your own world, try learning about the world as others experience it rather than trying to project your tiny illogical imagination where just because people oppose IRV/STV you imagine that they are advocates of FPTP and other hopelessly illogical ideas out in a spew of nonsense and nastiness. Try to get this through your head too. It is *not* necessary to belittle others, have a pissing contest with others, or put others down in a derogatory fashion in order to build yourself up. We can all rise together. Try to get this through your head. I am **not** remotely like you are and every time you add to the list of negative fabrications about me that you've spewed, you reveal what is inside your imagination, not one iota about me. For instance, when I make an error, I almost immediately notice it and correct it and immediately publicly admit it, just like I did today. I can learn from anyone, even when the vast majority of what they say is utter nonsense, as I did today from you. I do not live inside your head or inside your imagination. I am very very very different than you are, despite your repeatedly accusing me of being like you are by projecting what is inside your head rather than asking me. weren't attached to any partisan party (and given your definition, you meant like Dems and GOPs and Progs). i've just been to http:// kathydopp.com . it says you're a Greenie. you implied earlier that you had no party affiliation (and here i was only accusing you of being a rabid anti-IRV partisan) and that was not true. your TWO MORE FALSE claims about me (You never cease.) 1. I specifically said that I was affiliated with a party and asked you to guess which one. 2. I am no longer affiliated with the Green party, but another party. Sorry that page is out of date. credibility just took a nasty hit. now we're gonna have to verify *every* claim you make that isn't ostensibly taken for granted. Try to imagine this. I am **not** like you are. I am no longer going to bother reading any more of your emails with their plethora of fabrications and fantasies and delusional claims asserting that illogical, obviously incorrect formulas are not so. It is a waste of my time. I can only hope that you have learned something from this exchange, despite your showing no evidence of that. Perhaps you can sleep on it and figure it out while you sleep or in ensuing days, and become wise enough someday to ask questions to verify your imagination and actually consider and think reflectively about what others are trying to help you understand. Kathy Dopp Town
Re: [EM] IRV vs Plurality
On Jan 16, 2010, at 5:17 PM, Kathy Dopp wrote: Try to get this through your head too. It is *not* necessary to belittle others, have a pissing contest with others, or put others down in a derogatory fashion in order to build yourself up. Indeed. Try to get this through your head. I am **not** remotely like you are and every time you add to the list of negative fabrications about me that you've spewed, you reveal what is inside your imagination, not one iota about me. … I am no longer going to bother reading any more of your emails with their plethora of fabrications and fantasies and delusional claims asserting that illogical, obviously incorrect formulas are not so. It is a waste of my time. It's a hard lesson to learn, though. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] IRV vs Plurality
On Jan 16, 2010, at 8:43 PM, Jonathan Lundell wrote: On Jan 16, 2010, at 5:17 PM, Kathy Dopp wrote: Try to get this through your head too. It is *not* necessary to belittle others, have a pissing contest with others, or put others down in a derogatory fashion in order to build yourself up. Indeed. then let the facts speak for themselves, Jonathan. let each person's words speak for themselves. i stand by every factual and mathematical statement made. Kathy (and those who stand with her, if any) are demonstrably wrong. and it is Kathy who is projecting (and resorting the Rovian and Limbaughian tactic of accusing the other of exactly the recalcitrance they are guilty of, in an effort to divert attention from the fact they are doing it and to position themselves in a clean and elevated place to judge). i'm comfortable with the facts, the maths, and my statements about them. and my earlier judgements about character, interests, objectivity, and veracity have only been confirmed in front of all. Try to get this through your head. I am **not** remotely like you are and every time you add to the list of negative fabrications about me that you've spewed, you reveal what is inside your imagination, not one iota about me. the facts speak louder than your words, Kathy. and your previous words speak louder than your defenses do now. you'll need to own them. … I am no longer going to bother reading any more of your emails with their plethora of fabrications and fantasies and delusional claims asserting that illogical, obviously incorrect formulas are not so. It is a waste of my time. It's a hard lesson to learn, though. care to be specific? -- r b-j r...@audioimagination.com Imagination is more important than knowledge. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] IRV vs Plurality
On Fri, Jan 15, 2010 at 1:44 AM, robert bristow-johnson r...@audioimagination.com wrote: Kathy may make mistakes, but I'd be astonished to find her lying. she's pretty partisan (as am i), now i don't even remember what she said that i found so hard to believe. Really!!?? Since I've never contributed or participated with *any* campaign and my work has been completely nonpartisan, since you claim *again* to be able to read my mind better than I can, what political party do I belong to and am I so partisan with? I did go to a particular political party convention that I was a member of in order to give a presentation on the evidence consistent with election tampering in the 2004 presidential contest. Let's see if your internal imagination can even guess which political party that was?? Your deep confusion of your own imagination and reality is truly astonishing Robert. Many adults learn to recognize the difference between imagination and reality and recognize that other individuals know more about themselves and their own positions than the imaginationer and do what is called reality checking by asking questions to check whether what we imagine is real or not. It is a skill you obviously need to develop. People who resort to making repeated (this is at least the 3rd or forth time in just two days) false personal attacks Robert, do so because they have nothing to back themselves up on the factual side of an argument. Your steady stream of false claims about me in your recent emails show us much more about yourself than reveal anything about me. -- 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
Re: [EM] IRV vs Plurality
On Jan 15, 2010, at 9:47 AM, Kathy Dopp wrote: On Fri, Jan 15, 2010 at 1:44 AM, robert bristow-johnson r...@audioimagination.com wrote: Kathy may make mistakes, but I'd be astonished to find her lying. she's pretty partisan (as am i), now i don't even remember what she said that i found so hard to believe. Really!!?? Since I've never contributed or participated with *any* campaign and my work has been completely nonpartisan, you're *very* partisan about the IRV vs. Plurality/Deleayed_runoff debate. you are s anti-IRV that you have absolutely no recognition of the *well* *known* problems regarding Plurality in a multiparty, multi-candidate election. you are so anti-IRV that you partisan doesn't have to mean Dem vs GOP (or Prog vs. Libertarian whatever). your unbending, not completely thoughtful (or at least thought out) positions (actually it position, singular) about this is precisely what identifies you as a bulldog. a partisan bulldog. that's what you are. since you claim *again* to be able to read my mind better than I can, what political party do I belong to and am I so partisan with? see above. you are in the rabid anti-IRV party. it's someone else, but are tea-baggers partisan? they're not Dem or GOP. at least they claim not. I did go to a particular political party convention pf... Your deep confusion of your own imagination and reality is truly astonishing Robert. yes it is. whatever you say. you complain about IRV. i do too, you ignore it. you complain about IRV, i offer plausible resolution to what we all recognize as problematic, but since it isn't the simplistic reversion to the old-fashioned FPTP that so heavily favors the two-party system, you ignore and infer that i am an IRV partisan (i think Terry wishes i *was*, but he has known for months that i am highly critical of it). but i continue to recognize the reasons we ditched FPTP and adopted IRV in the first place (for just the mayoral race). *those* are totally legit reasons and you have shown no acknowledgment of any of it. you have made several factually incorrect statements, and when the content of those factually incorrect statements started being about me, my positions, and what i have said, i started to become incredulous. NO ONE, reading this list or anything i said at FairVote (hell, i was arguing with Rob Richie himself) or in the local Burlington blogs, can credibly claim that i think that IRV is the solution. but IRV is still better than FPTP for the multiparty, multi-candidate context. but, if for a partisan bulldog, it's hard to listen. -- r b-j r...@audioimagination.com Imagination is more important than knowledge. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] IRV vs Plurality
Oh. OK. I thought you were using the word partisan in the typical sense of political party adherent which I am not. OK. I agree that I am a strong adherent of voting rights so naturally oppose IRV/STV as removing the rights of voters to participate in the final decision-making process, removing the rights of voters to cast a vote that positively affects the chances of candidates to win, eviscerates the rights of voters to check the accuracy of the election outcomes, etc. Fine. I am a partisan bulldog for the rights of voters to have a fair voting method, to be able to verify that the vote counting process is accurate, and the rights of the voters to participate in the selection of who represents them. However, I fight against any scheme that violates those rights, esp. where others seem not to recognize the threats, not just against the threat of IRV/STV which is only one such threat. So most people would not use the word partisan to characterize my volunteer efforts, and not in the negative sense that you characterize them, but OK, thanks for teaching me a new meaning for the word partisan. Kathy On Fri, Jan 15, 2010 at 11:22 AM, robert bristow-johnson r...@audioimagination.com wrote: On Jan 15, 2010, at 9:47 AM, Kathy Dopp wrote: On Fri, Jan 15, 2010 at 1:44 AM, robert bristow-johnson r...@audioimagination.com wrote: Kathy may make mistakes, but I'd be astonished to find her lying. she's pretty partisan (as am i), now i don't even remember what she said that i found so hard to believe. Really!!?? Since I've never contributed or participated with *any* campaign and my work has been completely nonpartisan, you're *very* partisan about the IRV vs. Plurality/Deleayed_runoff debate. you are s anti-IRV that you have absolutely no recognition of the *well* *known* problems regarding Plurality in a multiparty, multi-candidate election. you are so anti-IRV that you partisan doesn't have to mean Dem vs GOP (or Prog vs. Libertarian whatever). your unbending, not completely thoughtful (or at least thought out) positions (actually it position, singular) about this is precisely what identifies you as a bulldog. a partisan bulldog. that's what you are. since you claim *again* to be able to read my mind better than I can, what political party do I belong to and am I so partisan with? see above. you are in the rabid anti-IRV party. it's someone else, but are tea-baggers partisan? they're not Dem or GOP. at least they claim not. I did go to a particular political party convention pf... Your deep confusion of your own imagination and reality is truly astonishing Robert. yes it is. whatever you say. you complain about IRV. i do too, you ignore it. you complain about IRV, i offer plausible resolution to what we all recognize as problematic, but since it isn't the simplistic reversion to the old-fashioned FPTP that so heavily favors the two-party system, you ignore and infer that i am an IRV partisan (i think Terry wishes i *was*, but he has known for months that i am highly critical of it). but i continue to recognize the reasons we ditched FPTP and adopted IRV in the first place (for just the mayoral race). *those* are totally legit reasons and you have shown no acknowledgment of any of it. you have made several factually incorrect statements, and when the content of those factually incorrect statements started being about me, my positions, and what i have said, i started to become incredulous. NO ONE, reading this list or anything i said at FairVote (hell, i was arguing with Rob Richie himself) or in the local Burlington blogs, can credibly claim that i think that IRV is the solution. but IRV is still better than FPTP for the multiparty, multi-candidate context. but, if for a partisan bulldog, it's hard to listen. -- r b-j ...@audioimagination.com Imagination is more important than knowledge. -- 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
Re: [EM] IRV vs Plurality
At 10:51 PM 1/14/2010, Jonathan Lundell wrote: On Jan 14, 2010, at 7:17 PM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote: Again, as I mentioned, the Condorcet Criterion looks good, it's intuitively satisfying. Unfortunately, it depends on pure rank order, neglecting preference strength. Just for the record: for many of us that's an advantage. Sure. Those who don't trust voters and who imagine that Range voting is susceptible to damage from Strategic Voting (which is a misnomer because the term originally referred to votes which reversed preference order, and Range never encourages that, period), are going to think that allowing voters to present a maximally accurate preference profile is harmful. With no evidence that it *actually* is. All evidence I've seen that claims to show it has been based on preposterous assumptions. Such as the assumption that voters who voted 100% A and 99% B are somehow going to be screwed by a minority of voters who voted 0% and 100% B. Pure ranked methods can't distinguish at all between a trivial or barely perceptible preference and a deep and important one. So the fix these people propose is: don't allow voters to express their true feelings! However, rank order methods which allow equal ranking do provide a partial fix, but then the same people will scream that voters are again being STRATEGIC if, on the one hand, they use equal preference if they really have a preference, or, on the other, they don't equal rank if they really approve both candidates equally but don't equal rank them. Can't win with these people. It was noticed long ago that there was no single sincere Approval vote, but rather a class of such votes, being all voting patterns that do not violate rank-order by reversing sincere rank. This is how the major disagreement arose between whether or not Approval was vulnerable to strategic voting, with Brams originally claiming that it was strategy-free and then others arguing that it was highly vulnerable, which is assumed to be a bad thing. Approval strategy involves the voters estimating the need for compromise, and according to that estimation, they lower their approval cutoff. In other words, it's a compromise, and all compromises are strategic in the sense that if the voter knew nothing about the other voters and had any significant preference at all, the voter would simply vote the preference. But they are not strategic in that the vote, as writ, indicates a sincere division of the candidates into two groups: approved and not-approved. Or not approved-yet. In approval voting as a repeated ballot method (an excellent application), voters in the first round would bullet vote, or only add approvals that were so close to the first preference that the voter prefers to get it over with than start out with a bullet vote. In other words, approval voting in rounds results in a sliding down of approval cutoff (plus the possible introduction of new candidates in some repeated balloting methods, or the simplifying process of candidate withdrawals), which makes repeated ballot approval incorporate sincere personal utility estimates. The point I was making was that there exist circumstances where, if we know the true situation with the voters, forget voting methods entirely!, we will not choose the Condorcet winner, and, this is very important: Neither will the voters choose that, once they know. In some of the examples proposed, we can safely assume that the voters will unanimously approve the choice of other than what the initial majority preference was. All it takes is a weak majority preference and a strong minority one, within certain normal limits. This is a conclusive proof, if you look at those situations, that the Condorcet winner can not only be suboptimal, it can be highly so. But this has nothing to do with core support, which is a bogus criterion made up by FairVote to try to find some kind of silver lining in the massive cloud that surrounds IRV. Unfortunately, the silver lining doesn't exist for IRV outside of a certain situation: 2-party system, no-hope third parties who can only spoil elections at most, and there IRV protects the major parties and largely screws the minor ones in the long term. Did you ever wonder why Australia ended up using IRV? Try looking at the history! But, of course, FairVote has convinced quite a few minor party leaders that it will be Good For Them because it allows their members to express their sincere preference. But that good is accomplished through polls, in fact, and is better handled by Fusion Voting anyway, which gives actual clout to a third party, which retains the ability to spoil elections if it decides that's better than tolerating the major party snubbing them. Third party strength is also better measured by donations to the party, which might be better spent in other ways than useless campaigning. However, that campaigning expense isn't wasted
Re: [EM] IRV vs Plurality
On Jan 15, 2010, at 7:46 PM, Juho wrote: On Jan 14, 2010, at 2:13 AM, Dave Ketchum wrote: On Jan 13, 2010, at 4:49 AM, Juho wrote: On Jan 13, 2010, at 9:14 AM, robert bristow-johnson wrote: it still is a curiosity to me how, historically, some leaders and proponents of election reform thunked up the idea to have a ranked-order ballot and then took that good idea and married it to the IRV protocol. with the 200 year old Condorcet idea in existence, why would they do that? 1) The basic idea of IRV is in some sense natural. It is like a street fight. The weakest players are regularly kicked out and they must give up. I'm not saying that this would lead to good results but at least this game is understandable to most people. Condorcet on the other hand is more like a mathematical equation, and the details of the most complex Condorcet variants may be too much for most voters. Here I'm not saying that each voter (and not even each legislator) should understand all the details of their voting system. The basic Condorcet winner rule is however a simple enough principle to be explained to all. But it may be that IRV is easier to market (to the legislators and voters) from this point of view. When there is a CW in Condorcet, the CW has won in comparison with each other candidate. While a few may like X or Z enough better to have given such top ranking, the fact that all the voters together prefer the CW over each other should count, and does with Condorcet. Else there is a cycle in Condorcet. Perhaps the following Minimum Margins Method Condorcet variant should be used to establish Condorcet's preferability over other methods. Then let other variants compete with this one before finally deciding which to use. Minimum Margins Method: Consider the cycle, such as ABCA, and the margins that create it, such as 60A30B, 40B20C, 21C20A. Delete the weakest margins as many times as needed to destroy the cycle - in this case A becoming the CW (note that if one CA voter had voted AC in this election, A would have become CW with no cycle). When I see this kind of scenarios I'm always tempted to ask the question if it is necessary to limit the scope to the top cycle members or if one can allow also the others win (when the cyclic opinions in the top cycle are strong). I find also that approach to be a working solution for many election types (although many have indicated that they disagree with this). Note that this method breaks the cycle at the point where the smallest number of ballots being voted differently would have broken the cycle. Note that weaker candidates are unlikely to get enough votes to be part of a cycle - being weak they get few high rank votes. 2) IRV is easier to count manually. Condorcet gets quite tedious to count manually when the number of candidates and voters goes up. One can use some tricks and shortcuts to speed up manual Condorcet counting but IRV probably still beats it from this point of view. Manual counting was the only way to count for a long time. Nowadays we have computers and Condorcet tabulation should thus be no problem at all (at least in places where computers are available). But this is one reason why IRV has taken an early lead. When an election district has only one polling place, life is simple. When the district is a state or city, life is more complex for each method. With IRV you first want top ranks from all the ballots in the district. If there is no majority winner all the ballots for the worst loser must be scanned for all the polling places for whom those voters ranked next. Repeat until winner gets decided. With Condorcet each ballot gets scanned one time and its content added into an N*N array, with such arrays summed for the whole district. Maybe scanning and other ballot checking can be done only once. After that IRV requires either central counting or central control of the distributed counting process. How the counters go about their job is hard to define. My point was that after a losing candidate is identified, ballots ranking that candidate high are the ones whose content must be findable in IRV - matters not if you must go back to the actual ballot, or someplace else which can provide THAT information. 3) Large parties are typically in a key role when electoral reforms are made. Election method experts within those parties may well have found out that IRV tends to favour large parties. In addition to trying to improve the society the best way they can, political parties and people within them also tend to think that they are the ones who are right and therefore the society would benefit of just them being in power and getting more votes and more seats. The parties and their representatives may also have other more selfish drivers behind their interest to grab as large share of the power as possible
Re: [EM] IRV vs Plurality (Dave Ketchum)
Message: 3 Date: Fri, 15 Jan 2010 22:05:58 -0500 From: Dave Ketchum da...@clarityconnect.com To: Juho juho4...@yahoo.co.uk On Jan 15, 2010, at 7:46 PM, Juho wrote: On Jan 14, 2010, at 2:13 AM, Dave Ketchum wrote: On Jan 13, 2010, at 4:49 AM, Juho wrote: On Jan 13, 2010, at 9:14 AM, robert bristow-johnson wrote: it still is a curiosity to me how, historically, some leaders and proponents of election reform thunked up the idea to have a ranked-order ballot and then took that good idea and married it to the IRV protocol. with the 200 year old Condorcet idea in existence, why would they do that? 1) The basic idea of IRV is in some sense natural. It is like a street fight. The weakest players are regularly kicked out and they must give up. I'm not saying that this would lead to good results but at least this game is understandable to most people. Condorcet on the other hand is more like a mathematical equation, Yet Condorcet is simple to count and precinct-summable, monotonic, and treats all voters' votes equally, unlike IRV/STV which is virtually impossible to manually count, requires a mind-boggling number of piles and subpiles to count it and requires that all late-counted ballots are ready to count centrally, or the entire long tedious process has to be restarted. and the details of the most complex Condorcet variants may be too much for most voters. Here I'm not saying that each voter (and not even each legislator) should understand all the details of their voting system. The basic Condorcet winner rule is however a simple enough principle to be explained to all. But it may be that IRV is easier to market (to the legislators and voters) from this point of view. The organization promoting IRV/STV is very well-funded and invests a lot of capital into highly misleading local advertising campaigns in order to promote its adoption. I could send this list some information on that if anyone is interested. I don't think that any group promoting a fair, equitable, auditable alternative method like Condorcet or others has put forth such a well-funded campaign have they? When there is a CW in Condorcet, the CW has won in comparison with each other candidate. While a few may like X or Z enough better to have given such top ranking, the fact that all the voters together prefer the CW over each other should count, and does with Condorcet. Else there is a cycle in Condorcet. Perhaps the following Minimum Margins Method Condorcet variant should be used to establish Condorcet's preferability over other methods. Then let other variants compete with this one before finally deciding which to use. Minimum Margins Method: Consider the cycle, such as ABCA, and the margins that create it, such as 60A30B, 40B20C, 21C20A. Delete the weakest margins as many times as needed to destroy the cycle - in this case A becoming the CW (note that if one CA voter had voted AC in this election, A would have become CW with no cycle). Great idea. Is this Dave Ketchum speaking above? Very simple and logically coherent plan. Thanks for sharing. Could it be possible that this plan would ever not work? (I.e. same margins?) When I see this kind of scenarios I'm always tempted to ask the question if it is necessary to limit the scope to the top cycle members or if one can allow also the others win (when the cyclic opinions in the top cycle are strong). I find also that approach to be a working solution for many election types (although many have indicated that they disagree with this). Note that this method breaks the cycle at the point where the smallest number of ballots being voted differently would have broken the cycle. Note that weaker candidates are unlikely to get enough votes to be part of a cycle - being weak they get few high rank votes. Yes, one could certainly say that this allows the top cycle to prevail by breaking the weakest link where weakest is defined as the smallest margin in this case. This minimum margins method is so logically correct and fair. 2) IRV is easier to count manually. Condorcet gets quite tedious Whomever said this obviously hasn't ever counted any IRV or STV elections manually in a contest with a substantial number of candidates and voters. Condorcet is orders of magnitude simpler to count than is IRV because there can never be more than n x n tallies to tally in each precinct and those tallies are precinct-summable, whereas IRV requires tallying n*(n-1)*(n-2) + n(n-1) +n tallies for each precinct even if the voter is only allowed to rank three choices - a huge number of tallies as the number of candidates grows large and a much larger amount as the number of allowed rankings goes up - for each precinct, at least if the method is made precinct-summable rather than using a huge number of sorting piles which I haven't yet derived the formulas for and have no plans to do so. The reason it takes cities over a month to manually count
Re: [EM] IRV vs Plurality (Dave Ketchum)
On Jan 15, 2010, at 7:51 PM, Kathy Dopp wrote: Imagine sending all your ballots nationwide to DC for manual counting to check the outcome of a Presidential election. We'll simply let the GW administration, for instance, count the results in his own IRV election! That's something of a non sequitur. Anyone with all the ballot files (every state, for example, or anyone else) could do the count. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] IRV vs Plurality (Dave Ketchum)
On Jan 15, 2010, at 11:34 PM, Jonathan Lundell wrote: On Jan 15, 2010, at 7:51 PM, Kathy Dopp wrote: Imagine sending all your ballots nationwide to DC for manual counting to check the outcome of a Presidential election. We'll simply let the GW administration, for instance, count the results in his own IRV election! That's something of a non sequitur. Anyone with all the ballot files (every state, for example, or anyone else) could do the count. and, in fact, it can be decentralized to the extent it is now. each state could have their central place, and in turn, each county, each precinct. the entire tree could be a public record on the internet that has links to child nodes or parent node. with 3 credible candidates there are 9 piles to have to maintain. each precinct sorts the ballots into one of 9 piles and counts it and puts the 9 numbers up in this public place on the web. everyone can check their own node to see that it isn't misreported. i do not see why, physically, it would be more vulnerable to attack by the government in power that what is presently the case. it's a factor of 9/2 more numbers to keep secure with that ranked ballot. each state, each little government would be responsible to confirm their precinct totals on the map and everybody gets to look at it. what's particularly insecure about that? -- r b-j r...@audioimagination.com Imagination is more important than knowledge. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] IRV vs Plurality
Date: Wed, 13 Jan 2010 22:24:53 -0500 From: Abd ul-Rahman Lomax a...@lomaxdesign.com To: robert bristow-johnson r...@audioimagination.com, EM Methods election-methods@lists.electorama.com At 02:14 AM 1/13/2010, robert bristow-johnson wrote: IRV/STV is fundamentally unfair because a large group of persons whose first choice loses, never has their 2nd choice counted, only if they don't mark their 2nd choice. IRV promoters should do due diligence to understand how IRV works. There are several scenarios where voters' marked 2nd choices are never counted, even when their first choice loses, and this is what makes IRV/STV such a fundamentally unfair system that tends to elect extreme right or left candidates while eliminating the majority favored candidates. Cases when voters' 2nd choices are never counted include: 1. 2nd and later choices eliminated prior to 1st choice, and the most important case 2. the very large group of voters whose 1st choice makes it to the final counting round and then loses The above will *always* happen in all IRV/STV elections. In particular, #1 above occurs anytime that there are a number of candidates that is greater by one (1) than the number of ballot positions. This fundamental inequity is what causes nonmonotonicity, elimination of majority-favorite candidates, and the fact that commonly IRV/STV does not find majority winners because so many voters' ballots are exhausted prior to the final counting round, thus involuntarily excluding a large number of voters from participating in making the final decision as to who is elected. I truly cannot imagine a worse voting method than IRV/STV which fails more of Arrow's fairness criteria than plurality voting does. Kathy No. Damn it, I wish people would make more effort to understand the scope of the problem! Robert, I expect you to say Ooops! I vote for A and for B as a second choice. In the first round of IRV counting, B is eliminated. My second choice is never counted, because my first choice, A, was still standing when B was eliminated. That's the effect of the Later-No-Harm compliance of IRV, and a simple example of the destruction LNH wreaks. It doesn't matter if B is the Condorcet winner by a landslide, if B is the second choice of every voter, with vastly higher satisfaction overall if elected, that first preference vote, to the FairVote activists and anyone who drinks their Kool-Aid, is sacrosanct. Even if a first preference vote is with very low or even absent preference strength. Try to equal rank in first preference, or any preference, and you know what the IRV counting rules will do, don't you. Tell me why the system throws that information out? It has an obvious meaning! It means that the voter is claiming to be equally satisfied by the election of either candidate! IRV with equal ranking allowed would be a much better method; basically it would be Approval voting in first round, or later rounds. But Bucklin is more straightforward and far easier to understand. The elimination algorithm of IRV is just plain weird and chaotic, take a look at those Yee diagrams. It looks simple. It is far from simple. otherwise, that's certainly not true. Well, Robert has a golden opportunity now. He can recognize that he can be certain about a thing and be dead wrong. That is extraordinarily valuable! Take the opportunity, Robert, I promise you that the pain, if there is even any, will be transient, and, in the long run, you'll even be happy you made the mistake. (unfair is subjective, but the latter half is untrue for voters who mark a 2nd choice with 3 credible candidates. or do you mean that if they vote for the 2 biggest losers, their 3rd or 4th choice that *does* count in the final round isn't their 2nd choice so it's unfair?) IRV is screwed up, but you still have made no case that the weird pathologies of IRV are worse than the widely known pathologies of plurality in a multi-party or multi-candidate context. The original comment was quite correct (but, yes, unfair is subjective unless qualified, but, indeed, it could be qualified with reasonable fairness criteria). Suppose there are three credible candidates, we'll call them A, B, and C. No, the example given isn't what's being talked about. The statement is literally true. Except by op-scan ballot images that show those second choice votes, they are literally never counted. With hand counting, they would never be counted. I think you'd better review how IRV works! When a candidate is eliminated, votes for that candidate are not counted from that point on, and if they haven't been counted before that, they are never counted. So with IRV, it is quite clearly true that it's possible that every single voter votes for a candidate, casts a vote for a candidate, and the candidate is not elected. You may think that's fair, but I don't. When that happens, not every vote was counted and my slogan is Count
Re: [EM] IRV vs Plurality
On Jan 14, 2010, at 11:03 AM, Kathy Dopp wrote: Date: Wed, 13 Jan 2010 22:24:53 -0500 From: Abd ul-Rahman Lomax a...@lomaxdesign.com To: robert bristow-johnson r...@audioimagination.com, EM Methods election-methods@lists.electorama.com At 02:14 AM 1/13/2010, robert bristow-johnson wrote: IRV/STV is fundamentally unfair because a large group of persons whose first choice loses, never has their 2nd choice counted, only if they don't mark their 2nd choice. IRV promoters should do due diligence to understand how IRV works. listen, Kathy, in case you haven't noticed, i've been pretty critical of IRV also (in case you're labeling me as an IRV promoter). and i understand exactly how IRV (as it had been enacted in Burlington) works. your criticism notwithstanding. There are several scenarios where voters' marked 2nd choices are never counted, even when their first choice loses, if their 1st choice loses at some time before the final round, their 2nd choice is promoted to 1st choice and is not removed until after *it* loses. but for it to lose, it is counted and, by the dumb IRV rules, is considered to come up short. do you mean their 2nd choice is not counted because their first choice loses in the final round? that goes without saying, but that's the dumb IRV rules. that is an *arbitrary* threshold imposed upon IRV, that 1st choices count and *anything* below the 1st choice makes *no* difference until it gets bumped off and every other choice gets bumped up. and this is what makes IRV/STV such a fundamentally unfair system that tends to elect extreme right or left candidates while eliminating the majority favored candidates. it tends to elect the candidate from the larger subgroup (in Burlington, Prog vs. Dem) of the larger group (left vs. right). if the fringes were smaller than the center, it would elect the center candidate. but, at least if you use the mayoral vote as a measure, in Burlington Vermont, there are more Progs than Dems. but the elimination criterion is faulty in IRV, I KNOW THAT (next time you call me an IRV proponent, i am going to remind you that you don't read). considering the big 3 (after write-in, Simpson, and Smith are out of the picture), IRV simple-mindedly identified Montroll as the biggest loser and promoted the Wright or Kiss votes on the Montroll 1st ballots. there are more Dems in Burlington that align with Progs than GOPs. but what would have happened if the rules were different? what would have happened if the tabulation algorithm considered eliminating (for the time being) either Wright or Kiss? we know what would happen. but then, one might ask, by what reasonable measure would we eliminate Wright or Kiss over Montroll? i heard one guy suggest that they should count *both* 1st and 2nd choices for evaluating which candidate is the weakest and eliminated. but that's just another made-up threshold that someone pulled out of their butt. in a sense, Condorcet considers *every* case of elimination, and draws an inference about who the winner is. no arbitrary thresholds. Cases when voters' 2nd choices are never counted include: 1. 2nd and later choices eliminated prior to 1st choice, and the most important case if their 1st choice survives and counts, how is it that Plurality supporters can complain? with Plurality, the same vote survives to count and their 2nd-choices wouldn't have even been recorded. 2. the very large group of voters whose 1st choice makes it to the final counting round and then loses so their 1st choice beats their 2nd choice. why would they complain about that? or, are you complaining that their 1st choice lost to someone who was worse than their 2nd choice? we know about that. sometimes it's a pathology and that pathology actually happened in Burlington in 2009. in case you didn't notice, i brought that up several times. the result is that the GOP Prog-haters in Burlington are gonna have to be considering strategic voting (compromising) in 2012, assuming IRV survives. The above will *always* happen in all IRV/STV elections. In particular, #1 above occurs anytime that there are a number of candidates that is greater by one (1) than the number of ballot positions. that wasn't the case in Burlington with 5 candidates, one of which was completely inconsequential and did not campaign at all. This fundamental inequity is what causes nonmonotonicity, Yawn. non-monotonicity for the non-Condorcet candidate. that guy should lose anyway. elimination of majority-favorite candidates, and the fact that commonly IRV/STV does not find majority winners because so many voters' ballots are exhausted prior to the final counting round, thus involuntarily excluding a large number of voters from participating in making the final decision as to who is elected. but Kathy, the solution to that is Condorcet and you
Re: [EM] IRV vs Plurality
On Jan 13, 2010, at 8:26 PM, Jonathan Lundell wrote: On Jan 13, 2010, at 5:02 PM, robert bristow-johnson wrote: On Jan 13, 2010, at 7:57 PM, Jonathan Lundell wrote: This seems to me to be a claim that is at best not self-evident (in the sense that Pareto or anti-dictatorship, say, are). While I'm not a fan of cardinal-utility voting systems, it seems entirely possible to make a utility argument or rationale against the *necessity* of electing the CW in all cases. That is, as a thought experiment, if we could somehow divine a workable electorate-wide utility function, it's at least arguable that the utility winner would legitimately trump the Condorcet winner, if different, while you couldn't make a similar argument wrt Pareto or dictatorship. how would you define that utility function metric in a democracy? would the candidates arm-wrestle? take a written exam? flip a coin? what, other than majority preference of the electorate, can be such a metric in a democracy? I don't think you can, and that's a big problem for Range, it seem to me. But we're talking about utility for the voter, not arm-strength of the candidates. I guess I didn't understand that the utility function was for the individual voter. Yes, that *is* Range voting. And if the value is restricted to binary, it's Approval voting. Especially if you add up the values of a candidate for all voters (maybe we should add their square-roots, I dunno). we have a choice of candidates. only one candidate can be elected (single winner). the best candidate means that this candidate is better than any other candidate. if we define better than the other candidate as preferred by more voters than prefer the other candidate (it's a dichotomy, the alternative is to give it to the *less* preferred candidate, unless we make them arm wrestle, or take a written exam or something other criterion without votes), then the Condorcet candidate is better than every other candidate. I guess I still haven't heard a good justification for why the Condorcet winner, if one exists, should *ever* be rejected as the elected winner. -- r b-j r...@audioimagination.com Imagination is more important than knowledge. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] IRV vs Plurality
On Jan 14, 2010, at 9:34 AM, robert bristow-johnson wrote: do you mean their 2nd choice is not counted because their first choice loses in the final round? that goes without saying, but that's the dumb IRV rules. that is an *arbitrary* threshold imposed upon IRV, that 1st choices count and *anything* below the 1st choice makes *no* difference until it gets bumped off and every other choice gets bumped up. … but then, one might ask, by what reasonable measure would we eliminate Wright or Kiss over Montroll? i heard one guy suggest that they should count *both* 1st and 2nd choices for evaluating which candidate is the weakest and eliminated. but that's just another made-up threshold that someone pulled out of their butt. Looking only at the current top rank is necessary to preserve later-no-harm. You may not like it, but it's not arbitrary. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] IRV vs Plurality
On Jan 13, 2010, at 3:15 PM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote: At 09:30 AM 1/13/2010, Terry Bouricius wrote: It has been argued that IRV tends to reduce negative campaigning, or makes campaigns overly bland (depending on your stance), because in addition to seeking first choices, candidates want to reach out to the supporters of other candidates. It's been argued, for sure, but it's never been shown. and the IRV detractors make the same claim, but tout it as a bad thing. they want *real* campaigns, complete with sparks or mud or fecal matter flying in all directions. not any of this namby-pamby love-fest bullshit. :-) hell, if the Tea-Baggers have their way, we'll be bringing our guns to the debates. However, with Condorcet rules, it is possible for a candidate to win in a crowded field while receiving no first choices at all. Horrors! The candidate must really be bad, not even his or her mother votes for him, nor, indeed, does the candidate vote for himself or herself. I love these objections to voting methods that are based on utterly preposterous scenarios and expected knee-jerk responses to them. i've never considered that a persuasive argument at all for IRV against Condorcet. a few months ago when i was taking on Rob Richie about it at FairVote.org, i was calling that the winner as warm bucket of spit argument. Andy Montroll *did* come in third, in terms of 1st-choice votes in 2009 (if he came in any higher, he would win IRV). but his base was just fine and we don't look at it that way in a traditional two-person race (then why should we for multi- candidate races?). a candidate's hard-core base is something we think about in terms of campaign strategy, getting out the vote, etc. but when it comes to the election, the votes for that candidate from the hard-core base count *no* *more* than the votes for that candidate from voters who just happen to like that candidate better than the opponent. why should it be any different for IRV/Condorcet? However, there is a legitimate point here, let's look at it. There haven't been any real-world high-stakes elections to know for certain what effect this might have, but it would seem reasonable to expect candidates to avoid taking stands on controversial issues. i don't agree with that. a statement put forth with absolutely no empirical data backing it up. No, actually, at least not more than happens at present, where candidates try to avoid opposing the positions of large blocks of the public, and will attempt to present themselves differently to different interest groups, whenever they think they can get away with it. The problem is that if you make yourself as bland as possible, you will lose your support base, those highly motivated to turn out and vote for you, work for your election as a volunteer, contribute funds to help you gain name recognition, etc. Fatal under most realistic voting systems, including Range, IRV, etc. i agree with that. Candidates would have an incentive to campaign just using a vacant theme of I promise to listen to YOU. This is supposed to be new and only hypothetical? Sorry, Terry, I vote against candidates like that, and I think I'm not alone. I'll vote for a candidate whom I *actually trust* to listen to the constiuents, but not one who will not disclose his or her own position, because I can't trust the latter to vote intelligently and honestly. I don't want a rubber stamp in a legislature or office, I want someone who will not only listen, but make reasonably decent decisions as well, *after* having listened. Someone who won't tell me what they think, who avoids revealing personal positions, that's a very big negative for me. Unfortunately, the present systems encourage exactly this. IRV seems to strike a reasonable balance between appealing for a strong core of supporters (the only requirement in a plurality election with many candidates) and also developing broad appeal as an alternate choice. The problem is that a political expedient is mistaken for a desirable quality. And it's just plain bullshit. IRV favors extremists, not centrists. And not *real* centrists. I'm afraid that Terry is reasoning backwards. He's long worked for IRV, so he is making up reasons why it's a good method, a reasonable balance, even though anyone who has studied voting systems without this kind of activist bias knows that IRV performs far from reasonably. and for me, Terry, it just doesn't trump the principles: 1. If a majority (not just a mere plurality) of voters agree that candidate A is better than candidate B, then candidate B should not be elected. 2. The relative merit of candidates A and B is not affected by the presence of a third candidate C. If a majority (not just a mere plurality) of voters agree that candidate A is better than B, whether candidate C enters the race or
Re: [EM] IRV vs Plurality
On Thu, Jan 14, 2010 at 12:34 PM, robert bristow-johnson r...@audioimagination.com wrote: I'm glad to hear you don't support IRV/STV methods. There are several scenarios where voters' marked 2nd choices are never counted, even when their first choice loses, if their 1st choice loses at some time before the final round, their 2nd choice is promoted to 1st choice and is not removed until after *it* loses. but for it to lose, it is counted and, by the dumb IRV rules, is considered to come up short. No. As Abd ul pointed out your claim is true only when the voter's 2nd choice has not already been eliminated as happens *very* frequently in IRV when a majority-favorite candidate is eliminated before the final counting round or when any voters' 2nd choice candidates are eliminated prior to his first choice being eliminated. This is the main reason why the IRV/STV counting method is so fundamentally unfair - because it does not treat all voters' ballots equally. It seems funny to me that you call candidates it. do you mean their 2nd choice is not counted because their first choice loses in the final round? Yes, that too is a major reason why a majority of voters may prefer a candidate who is eliminated early on in IRV/STV methods. that goes without saying, but that's the dumb IRV rules. that is an *arbitrary* threshold imposed upon IRV, that 1st choices count and *anything* below the 1st choice makes *no* difference until it gets bumped off and every other choice gets bumped up. and this is what makes IRV/STV such a fundamentally unfair system that tends to elect extreme right or left candidates while eliminating the majority favored candidates. it tends to elect the candidate from the larger subgroup (in Burlington, Prog vs. Dem) of the larger group (left vs. right). Yes. I agree. If there had been more extreme rightists, the rightist candidate would have won over the majority-favorite centrist Democrat in Burlington and the Progressive candidate would have been the spoiler instead of the Republican candidate. if the fringes were smaller than the center, it would elect the center candidate. but, at least The majority of voters favored the centrist candidate who was eliminated, typical IRV/STV style. I think you are referring to first choice votes only. if you use the mayoral vote as a measure, in Burlington Vermont, there are more Progs than Dems. Again, you are considering first choice votes only, which would have been far different if voters in Burlington had not been falsely misled by Fair Vote propaganda into thinking that it was safe for them to vote their conscience or vote sincerely which is certainly a recipe for a majority of voters to get their least desired outcome in IRV/STV methods. but the elimination criterion is faulty in IRV, I KNOW THAT (next time you call me an IRV proponent, i am going to remind you that you don't read). Really!! So you expect me to memorize all your emails from weeks ago and in your illogical mind if I fail to memorize all *your* emails, that means that I don't read!! Well it's no wonder then that you don't understand how IRV/STV work then and have to be repeatedly told how it works by Abd ul and myself. 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
Re: [EM] IRV vs Plurality
Kathy, You need to learn the terminology for election experts to understand you. You can't use the term majority-favorite to when you mean Condorcet-winner. They mean different things, and your statements below are confusing (and false), simply because you are using terms incorrectly. For the record, I am indeed a supporter of Condorcet methods, and would support their adoption. However, I think IRV is sufficiently superior to plurality voting to also deserve active support...And ultimately I think IRV is more achievable for public elections than Condorcet methods, simply because Americans are familiar with and accepting of traditional runoff systems (TTR), which suffer all of the same non-monotonicity, and other shortcomings as IRV that Kathy focuses on. Terry Bouricius - Original Message - From: Kathy Dopp kathy.d...@gmail.com To: robert bristow-johnson r...@audioimagination.com Cc: election-methods@lists.electorama.com Sent: Thursday, January 14, 2010 1:17 PM Subject: Re: [EM] IRV vs Plurality On Thu, Jan 14, 2010 at 12:34 PM, robert bristow-johnson r...@audioimagination.com wrote: I'm glad to hear you don't support IRV/STV methods. There are several scenarios where voters' marked 2nd choices are never counted, even when their first choice loses, if their 1st choice loses at some time before the final round, their 2nd choice is promoted to 1st choice and is not removed until after *it* loses. but for it to lose, it is counted and, by the dumb IRV rules, is considered to come up short. No. As Abd ul pointed out your claim is true only when the voter's 2nd choice has not already been eliminated as happens *very* frequently in IRV when a majority-favorite candidate is eliminated before the final counting round or when any voters' 2nd choice candidates are eliminated prior to his first choice being eliminated. This is the main reason why the IRV/STV counting method is so fundamentally unfair - because it does not treat all voters' ballots equally. It seems funny to me that you call candidates it. do you mean their 2nd choice is not counted because their first choice loses in the final round? Yes, that too is a major reason why a majority of voters may prefer a candidate who is eliminated early on in IRV/STV methods. that goes without saying, but that's the dumb IRV rules. that is an *arbitrary* threshold imposed upon IRV, that 1st choices count and *anything* below the 1st choice makes *no* difference until it gets bumped off and every other choice gets bumped up. and this is what makes IRV/STV such a fundamentally unfair system that tends to elect extreme right or left candidates while eliminating the majority favored candidates. it tends to elect the candidate from the larger subgroup (in Burlington, Prog vs. Dem) of the larger group (left vs. right). Yes. I agree. If there had been more extreme rightists, the rightist candidate would have won over the majority-favorite centrist Democrat in Burlington and the Progressive candidate would have been the spoiler instead of the Republican candidate. if the fringes were smaller than the center, it would elect the center candidate. but, at least The majority of voters favored the centrist candidate who was eliminated, typical IRV/STV style. I think you are referring to first choice votes only. if you use the mayoral vote as a measure, in Burlington Vermont, there are more Progs than Dems. Again, you are considering first choice votes only, which would have been far different if voters in Burlington had not been falsely misled by Fair Vote propaganda into thinking that it was safe for them to vote their conscience or vote sincerely which is certainly a recipe for a majority of voters to get their least desired outcome in IRV/STV methods. but the elimination criterion is faulty in IRV, I KNOW THAT (next time you call me an IRV proponent, i am going to remind you that you don't read). Really!! So you expect me to memorize all your emails from weeks ago and in your illogical mind if I fail to memorize all *your* emails, that means that I don't read!! Well it's no wonder then that you don't understand how IRV/STV work then and have to be repeatedly told how it works by Abd ul and myself. 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 Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] IRV vs Plurality
On Jan 14, 2010, at 1:12 PM, Jonathan Lundell wrote: We know that we can't have a system with all the properties that we might independently desire. Consequently, we compare systems overall, looking not just at their list of properties met and unmet, but at the implications for voter behavior, nomination, campaigns, and so on. Those implications have been widely discussed on this list, and I won't try to repeat those discussions. Suffice it to say that to elevate a single criterion, CW or LNH or other, to the sole criterion by which we judge methods just doesn't cut it. with a single winner election (like mayor or some other executive, or a single representative) with the arbitrary assumption pleasing the majority is better than pleasing the minority, i don't understand what other arbitrary value trumps that of electing the Condorcet winner if such exists. pathologies can happen in a cycle, but, as i have wondered aloud here before, i wonder how often it would really happen for a Condorcet cycle to occur in real elections. simply, if a Condorcet winner exists, and your election authority elevates to office someone else, that elected person is rejected by a majority of the electorate. what other democratic value papers over that flaw? LNH? monotonicity? like the popular vote is the gold standard we use to judge how well the Electoral College does, it seems to me that the Condocet criterion is the gold standard to use to judge how well some other method works. in both cases it seems logical to ditch the experimental method and just use the gold standard. -- r b-j r...@audioimagination.com Imagination is more important than knowledge. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] IRV vs Plurality
oops. forgot to finish a sentence. On Jan 14, 2010, at 1:12 PM, Jonathan Lundell wrote: We know that we can't have a system with all the properties that we might independently desire. Consequently, we compare systems overall, looking not just at their list of properties met and unmet, but at the implications for voter behavior, nomination, campaigns, and so on. Those implications have been widely discussed on this list, and I won't try to repeat those discussions. Suffice it to say that to elevate a single criterion, CW or LNH or other, to the sole criterion by which we judge methods just doesn't cut it. with a single winner election (like mayor or some other executive, or a single representative), the elected candidate should be considered better or superior to every other, any other, candidate propped up against him/her. if it's not about democracy, then we can think up other tests of merit, like a written civil-service like exam. or age or years of experience. or we could get Machiavellian about it and give it to the candidate with more guns and fighters. or we could have them arm wrestle or throw darts. but, i cannot imagine, in a democracy, a criterion for better other than preferred by more voters than voters who prefer the other candidate. with the arbitrary assumption pleasing the majority is better than pleasing the minority, i don't understand what other arbitrary value trumps that of electing the Condorcet winner if such exists. pathologies can happen in a cycle, but, as i have wondered aloud here before, i wonder how often it would really happen for a Condorcet cycle to occur in real elections. simply, if a Condorcet winner exists, and your election authority elevates to office someone else, that elected person is rejected by a majority of the electorate. what other democratic value papers over that flaw? LNH? monotonicity? like the popular vote is the gold standard we use to judge how well the Electoral College does, it seems to me that the Condocet criterion is the gold standard to use to judge how well some other method works. in both cases it seems logical to ditch the experimental method and just use the gold standard. -- r b-j r...@audioimagination.com Imagination is more important than knowledge. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] IRV vs Plurality
On Thu, Jan 14, 2010 at 1:44 PM, robert bristow-johnson r...@audioimagination.com wrote: On Jan 14, 2010, at 1:17 PM, Kathy Dopp wrote: On Thu, Jan 14, 2010 at 12:34 PM, robert bristow-johnson r...@audioimagination.com wrote: I'm glad to hear you don't support IRV/STV methods. not over Condorcet. i dunno what else you could have drawn from either my posts here or at the FairVote.org site where i took on Rob Ritchie *several* times (and i've seen you there, too). My entire life's focus is not in following all election methods debates. There are several scenarios where voters' marked 2nd choices are never counted, even when their first choice loses, if their 1st choice loses at some time before the final round, their 2nd choice is promoted to 1st choice and is not removed until after *it* loses. but for it to lose, it is counted and, by the dumb IRV rules, is considered to come up short. No. As Abd ul pointed out your claim is true only when the voter's 2nd choice has not already been eliminated as happens *very* frequently in IRV when a majority-favorite candidate is eliminated before the final counting round or when any voters' 2nd choice candidates are eliminated prior to his first choice being eliminated. This is the main reason why the IRV/STV counting method is so fundamentally unfair - because it does not treat all voters' ballots equally. It seems funny to me that you call candidates it. i call the vote or ranking it. It loses is what you said, clearly referring to candidates that voters rank. Reread to see. The majority of voters favored the centrist candidate who was eliminated, typical IRV/STV style. that happened in Burlington in 2009 (but not in 2006). that failure is what has been my sole concern about this whole thing for 10 months. Great. if you use the mayoral vote as a measure, in Burlington Vermont, there are more Progs than Dems. Again, you are considering first choice votes only, which would have been far different if voters in Burlington had not been falsely misled by Fair Vote propaganda into thinking that it was safe for them to vote their conscience or vote sincerely which is certainly a recipe for a majority of voters to get their least desired outcome in IRV/STV methods. but the elimination criterion is faulty in IRV, I KNOW THAT (next time you call me an IRV proponent, i am going to remind you that you don't read). Reread. Unlike you stating You don't read as if you have all-seeing ability to know that I never read, I **never** said You are an IRV proponent. Please try to stop confusing your own imagination with reality and notice what I actually wrote and what you actually have ability to know, when responding to emails. about this, Kathy, i don't believe your veracity at all. since March of 2009 (when Burlington IRV failed to elect the Condorcet winner and all sorts OK Robert, I guess I won't argue anymore with your claim that you know that I don't read even though you have never once met me in person and know zero about what I spend my time doing. Fine, you believe that you have Godlike abilities to know all and see all about what I do with my time inside your own imagination at least. It's clear. repeatedly, i keep wondering why folks like you pass over Condorcet, that in folks like me who don't read you mean? Or exactly what slurr are you now hurling at me since you obviously never asked me whether or not I support the Condorcet method, you seem to rely once again on your own imagination to proclaim what my position is, which you obviously imagine you know better than I do. In my own imagination, I **do** support the Condorcet method, although I don't know how to solve the Condorcet cycles or how often, if ever, they might occur. However, I see that once again you are certain that you know more about myself, what I do, and my own positions, than I do via your own imagination, which it seems, you feel no need to verify with any outside facts. but my position here has *never* been as a proponent of IRV, but a proponent of Condorcet and the ranked ballot. i've said multiple times that IRV transferred the burden of having to vote strategically from the majority (in Burlington, that would be the liberal that would have to split their votes between Prog and Dem) to the minority (in Burlington that would be the GOP Prog-haters that discovered that their primary vote for their favorite candidate was instrumental in electing the candidate they least preferred). GREAT. Well we agree on many things, even if I think you are slightly delusional for thinking you know so much more about me than I do re. my not reading and my positions on election methods. Kathy -- r b-j ...@audioimagination.com Imagination is more important than knowledge. -- Kathy Dopp Town of Colonie, NY 12304 phone 518-952-4030 cell 518-505-0220 http://utahcountvotes.org
Re: [EM] IRV vs Plurality
Response to Robert's statement... I guess I still haven't heard a good justification for why the Condorcet winner, if one exists, should *ever* be rejected as the elected winner. ... Imagine this scenario. .. A highly polarized electorate with a three candidate race. Only two candidates are seen by the media and the public as viable, with 49% favoring candidate A and 46% favoring B, and 5% favoring C slightly over A. Most voters don't know much about C, but C has carefully avoided alienating any constituency by only stressing his likeability, rather than issues. However while the supporters of both A and B don't think much of C they rank C second because they subscribe to the anybody but X notion. The A supporters all rank ACB, while the B supporters all rank BCA and the C voters all rank CAB 49 ACB 46 BCA 5 CAB In a traditional runoff or IRV, A would win over B, after C's elimination by 54 to 46. I think that is a reasonable expression of the public will though not the only possible one. With Condorcet, C would defeat A by 51 to 49 and C would defeat B by 54 to 46 Thus C is the Condorcet winner. It is certainly justifiable to argue that C is the rightful winner. But it is not unreasonable to say that C is not the rightful winner, since 95% of the voters are highly dissatisfied with C being elected. This is where the Range voting utility advocates enter the fray. My point is merely that the Condorcet-winner criterion is desirable in most cases, but not the only legitimate, nor ultimate criterion. Terry Bouricius Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] IRV vs Plurality
On Jan 14, 2010, at 11:00 AM, robert bristow-johnson wrote: simply, if a Condorcet winner exists, and your election authority elevates to office someone else, that elected person is rejected by a majority of the electorate. what other democratic value papers over that flaw? LNH? monotonicity? Terry covered pretty much what I have to say on the subject. like the popular vote is the gold standard we use to judge how well the Electoral College does, it seems to me that the Condocet criterion is the gold standard to use to judge how well some other method works. in both cases it seems logical to ditch the experimental method and just use the gold standard. But it's not (the gold standard) as things stand now. Sure, we should ditch the EC and move to national IRV ;-). But with the EC in place, a candidate will (justifiably) campaign for electoral votes. In 2008, it was a waste of funds for McCain to campaign in (say) New York, Massachusetts or California, so he didn't bother to compete for a bigger share of the popular vote, which presumably he could have gotten by spending some campaign cash. Obama, on the other hand, was motivated to spend at least *some* time campaigning in those states, if for no other reason but that they were a good *source* of funds for him. Regardless, you'll recall that the big fuss in 2000 wasn't really over the popular vs electoral vote, mainly, I think, because most people understood (from campaign coverage) that the electoral vote was what counted. To be clear, I repeat: I don't think that's the way it should be. But we must interpret voter and candidate behavior in the context of the existing rules. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
