On 2024-08-07 04:11, robert bristow-johnson wrote:

I agree. It's surprising that Venezuela has such a good reporting system
if the authorities want to rig the elections anyway, though!

It's also unfortunate that I haven't found any suitable summable analogs
of the resistant set for strategy resistance. I have some ideas of where
I should look, but nothing concrete has come of it. Maybe it will turn
out that the strongest manipulation resistance can only be achieved by
giving up summability. But perhaps it doesn't matter. Perhaps RP is good
enough :)

Thank you for letting the politicians know, in any case!

-km

Kristofer,

I support and trust the progressive pro-worker and pro-poor government
of Venezuela.  What "international observers"??  A large number of
countries recognise the result of the 2024 Venezuela presidential
election, and most of those that don't (especially those outside of
"Natostan", a word coined by Brazillan independent journalist and author
Pepe Escobar) are holding off recognition until they get more
information (for example Brazil).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_reactions_to_the_2024_Venezuelan_presidential_election

It has been my understanding that since the accscention of  Hugo Chavez
(1954 - 2013) to the Presidency, elections in Venezuela have been very
clean.

https://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/cybersecurity-expert-on-fraud-claims-and-voting-safeguards-in-venezuelas-presidential-election/

https://peoplesdispatch.org/2024/08/02/without-evidence-the-us-declares-edmundo-gonzalez-winner-of-venezuelas-presidential-elections/

Why do you "agree"?

I've long regarded people running around with their hair on fire yelling
about "precinct summability" to be simply a propaganda furphy against
Hare RCV, the good single-winner method that currently has the most
traction as a reform proposal.

Why is determining which candidate has the fewest top-preference votes
inherently more problematic than determining which candidate has the
most top-preference votes?

At each polling station you have observers representing the candidates.
They all have cameras, phones and pocket calculators. I don't see any
reason why there should be anything "opaque" about the process.

Here Venezuelan President Maduro speaks for himself (in Spanish with
English subtitles):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpHlR-CYSss&t=3734s

If you want to watch the rest of that long video, I suggest doing so at
higher-than-normal speed.

Chris B.

On 8/08/2024 8:20 pm, Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote:

On 2024-08-08 20:23, Chris Benham wrote:

It shouldn't be, and I agree that a method that elects, at random,
someone who isn't the Plurality loser would be summable.

However, IRV doesn't just require one to determine the Plurality loser.
If you want to get the IRV winner non-interactively, you need the first
preference counts for every sub-election, and that requires exponential
space.

Summability implies, at least for low orders, that errors are in some
sense manageable. You can subtract an erroneous count and add another;
and if you have access to every count but one corrupted instance, you
can make a reasonable judgement about the outcome of the election if
it's not too close.

But if you don't have summability, then that becomes much harder.
Suppose that an erroneous contribution to the count leads X to be
eliminated instead of Y. Then you can't easily know what impact that has
on the election winner because the elimination of X can lead the
elimination process on a very different path of eliminations than if Y
were eliminated.

Even if you later find the true count for the district that were in
error, that doesn't necessarily help you; all you know is that Y should
have been eliminated instead of X. But the counts for the sub-election
{A, B, Y} need not have much relation to the counts for {A, B, X}.

So having all the data lets you correct for errors and check
counterfactuals/what-ifs without having to rerun the whole process. And
low-order polynomial summability makes it easy to keep and investigate
all the data that the method uses to determine the outcome.

-km

...

That's fine.  You may regard us as such.

That it currently has the most traction is agreed (if we leave out FPTP, of course).  That it is "good" or "the good ... method" is not agreed to.

It's not.  It's equally problematic.  Considering only the top-preference votes, instead of considering the entire ballot (which effectively occurs only in the IRV final round) is the same mistake that FPTP makes.

The entire purpose of RCV is to consider voters' contingency choices when the candidate of their (first) choice cannot be elected.  E.g.:

“You get to vote for your real favorite candidate as your first choice, and then you get a series of backup choices,” says Deb Otis, director of research and policy at FairVote, a nonpartisan organization which advocates for ranked-choice voting. “If your top choice is eliminated, your vote [goes to] your backup choice, and so your voice is still heard.”

It's a falsehood.  We all know that.  Anyone who marked their "real favorite candidate as [their] first choice" and that candidate loses in the final IRV round, that voter will never have their vote go to any backup choice and that voter's contingency vote will not be heard.

Most of the time it doesn't make any difference, the outcome of the election will remain unchanged even if those losers in the final round get to have their second or third-choice votes counted.  But we know that, in two U.S. elections in the 21st century, it did make a difference.  Those voters would have been better off not voting (as their first choice) for their favorite candidate and they would have been better off voting tactically.

Doesn't matter if you have observers at each polling place observing if it's Hare RCV.  The most we will learn at the polling places are the first-choice tallies.  So then we will know how the IRV first round goes (or if there was an outright majority winner).  But if there are additional rounds, it's opaque and without the redundancy necessary to double-check the government's round-by-round tabulation.

The part of the process where the voter inserts their ballot into the machine must be opaque in order to protect the secrecy of the vote of that voter.  But at the end of the day, at that particular polling place, to have transparency we need the tallies (sufficient to sum with other polling places and determine who won the election) printed out at that polling place and displayed for all to see.

Now Venezuela does that (it's also FPTP).  So those tallies were actually observed and recorded by entities that are not the Venezuelan government.  Those tallies, BTW, show Maduro losing by a nearly 2 to 1 margin.

The problem is that the government displayed no breakdown of vote tallies nationwide.  They just made up numbers that show Maduro winning and shown nothing else about how they came up with those numbers.  If there was no tallies displayed at the polling places, no one would be the wiser.

But how they got to their nationwide totals is opaque.  If they had shown a breakdown of the tallies from each city and jurisdiction inside the country, those tallies could be compared to the tallies that had already been observed and recorded at the polling places immediately after the polls closed.

It's horseshit, Chris.  The Carter Center is much more trustworthy than the Maduro government.  Trump speaks for himself, too.  Does that make it anymore credible?

Like Trump (a dictator wannabee) Maduro uses hours-long speeches to bore us to death so that blatant falsehoods buried therein are obfuscated amidst the blather.

--

r b-j . _ . _ . _ . _ rbj@audioimagination.com

"Imagination is more important than knowledge."

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Chris: I agree with you that the importance of precinct summability is
often exaggerated. If you tallied all results on election night, using
two-way communication, this would fix the problem if you've received all
ballots by election night (since you can post round-by-round results). That
said, it's not useless, because lots of US states don't do that. The main
issue is whether states will in practice actually adopt practices required
for safe IRV elections. So far, they haven't.

On Sun, Aug 11, 2024 at 11:45 AM robert bristow-johnson <
rbj@audioimagination.com> wrote:

The two-way communication is not transparent and skeptics (or conspiracy nuts) will claim that the two-way communication is not secure.

Either way it's unnecessary if you have Precinct Summability.

Hare RCV (IRV) will never be as transparent nor as secure as Condorcet RCV when the number of candidates exceeds 3 because it lacks Precinct Summability.  All other things equal, there will always be a difference in degree of transparency and to the degree of security/integrity of the election.  Condorcet will always (4+ candidates) have a property of transparency that Hare lacks and will always have a property of security/integrity that Hare lacks.

FairVote and RCVRC do not help.  The difference between misinformation and disinformation is whether they're drinking the Kool-Aid or they're serving the Kool-Aid.  FairVote and RCVRC are serving the Kool-Aid.

I'm sticking to my story: Precinct Summability exposed the Venezuelan election as stolen.  It didn't prevent it, but that's because of the strength and corruption of the government over the opposition.  And, in principle, if they didn't have precinct summability and kept the tabulation of the vote completely opaque (because, say, they required all the ballot data to be opaquely transported from polling places to the central tabulation location), then they could have stolen the election and none of us would be the wiser.

--

r b-j . _ . _ . _ . _ rbj@audioimagination.com

"Imagination is more important than knowledge."

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Aside from the general usefulness/importance of summability, in this
specific case the Venezuelan system's summability does not make a
difference in exposing the election as stolen. The (real) winner got, like,
70% of the votes? In such a situation, you don't need the method to be
summable, it being majoritarian is enough. Similarly, if there's a
non-summable Condorcet method but election results have no Condorcet cycle,
we can still verify the winner with summable information. Of course cycles
do happen sometimes, so the question remains if this would be transparent
enough or not.

Perhaps a better way to do presidential elections - I don't know, giving it
up for debate - would be to do an actual, manual 2nd voting round with two
or three candidates from the Smith set (only if there's a top cycle, of
course). One-round summable methods' vulnerability is quite a disadvantage,
but two summable rounds might do the trick in this respect.

wt., 13 sie 2024, 04:55 użytkownik robert bristow-johnson <
rbj@audioimagination.com> napisał:

On 2024-08-13 17:23, Filip Ejlak wrote:

That could well be a good idea, at least for the "noise" sort of cycle
that has been observed so far. The 2021 Minneapolis Ward 2 election
seems to have been mostly up to random noise:
https://electowiki.org/wiki/2021_Minneapolis_Ward_2_city_council_election

and focusing on the Smith set for a runoff would have made clear if
there were any real differences in voter opinion between the three.

I do know that some jurisdictions (particularly American) really don't
like runoffs, so that may count against it. And if the political system
evolves (due to supporting a wider range of opinions), then it's
possible that cycles could start happening more often.

-km

It doesn't really matter whether it's secure or not. All that matters is
whether it's possible to verify whether this insecurity affected the
result, based only on the precinct results. RCV is round-by-round
verifiable: in each round, you can post the vote totals for that round, and
verify the outcome was correctly calculated by adding up all the precinct
results.

But like I said, that requires having all ballots there on election
day, and two-way communication can also be kind of a pain in the ass. I'm
willing to accept those, but this is a real cost.

I think we really need to be much more careful about precinct-summability.
If we're not careful, we're going to hit a massive wall as soon as we talk
about multi-winner systems, which usually aren't precinct-summable.
Precinct verifiability is enough. In theory, it might be possible to drop
the need for precinct verifiability, if you have some kind of end-to-end
auditable procedure? But I don't know, since I'm not an election security
expert or cryptographer, and nobody has adequately implemented
E2E-auditable voting to my knowledge.

On Mon, Aug 12, 2024 at 7:55 PM robert bristow-johnson <
rbj@audioimagination.com> wrote: