Dear All,

There is science and there is politics. And I believe the latter is getting in the way of the former. And if the science was clearer, I also believe it might open up a better prospect for the politics.
The question of which candidates to elect and which candidates to eliminate/exclude applies to all election methods. None of them have a rational exclusion count, and consequently none of them have a fully rational election count. (It is possible to have a symmetrical election count to an exclusion count: that is my system.)
The fatal flaw of all these "tweaks" is that they are tweaks or ad hoc after-thoughts. It is that unscientific thinking which also makes the ad hoc additional member system or Mixed Member Proportional, the HOW NOT TO DO IT of election methods.

Regards,
Richard Lung.

On 7 Jul 2021, at 3:58 am, Susan Simmons suzerainsimmons@outlook.com wrote:

It appears that this IRV Tweak satisfies independence from Smith dominated alternatives.(ISDA)

Sent from my MetroPCS 4G LTE Android Device

-------- Original message --------
From: Susan Simmons suzerainsimmons@outlook.com
Date: 7/6/21 4:03 PM (GMT-08:00)
To: Daniel Carrera dcarrera@gmail.com, election-methods@lists.electorama.com
Cc: election-methods@lists.electorama.com
Subject: Re: [EM] Best IRV Tweak

We're all amateurs!

You're right ... a Smith candidate cannot be eliminated without suffering a pairwise defeat from another of the remaining candidates, which perforce must be a Smith candidate since Smith candidates cannot be pairwise defeated by non-Smith candidates. When one door shuts another one opens.

Good on you! I didn't even think to ask the question .... so we have a method that is conceptually and operationally simple, while also seamlessly Smith compliant.

It fails mono-raise, but no worse than IRV.

It seems to be clone independent ... if X has little support against Y, then the same will be true for a clone of X, etc.

Compare Yee diagrams. IRV's are chaotic, unlike those of Condorcet methods (including this one) which are composed of ideal convex Voronoi polygons.

IRV uses ranked preference ballots to simulate Hare style runoffs ...this tweak uses the same ballots to simulate a thorough round robin style tournament ... much more thorough than would be practical without the ranked preference ballots.

For example without ranked ballots a round robin contest among ten candidates would require 45 trips to the polls. No wonder there is no tradition of round robin tournaments in the context of public elections.

In the context of sports tournaments it's hard to imagine an analog of runoff without head to head contests because runoff has only one head to head contest ... the final round that takes place after all of the other contestants have been eliminated by a more superficial criterion.

Sent from my MetroPCS 4G LTE Android Device

-------- Original message --------
From: Daniel Carrera dcarrera@gmail.com
Date: 7/6/21 2:21 PM (GMT-08:00)
To: Susan Simmons suzerainsimmons@outlook.com
Cc: election-methods@lists.electorama.com
Subject: Re: [EM] Best IRV Tweak

I'm just an amateur, but I think your method is also Smith efficient. During an elimination round it is possible that the candidate with fewest votes in a head-to-head contest is in the Smith set, but only by losing a head-to-head contest against another candidate in the Smith set.

Daniel

Election-Methods mailing list - see https://electorama.com/em for list info

On Wed, Jul 7, 2021 at 12:11 PM Susan Simmons suzerainsimmons@outlook.com
wrote:

Can also be called "Maximin"... I think... To me it looks like a mirror of
Minimax (using votes instead of margins): The winner is the candidate whose
lowest number of votes is higher. Maybe there is a subtle difference that I
haven't detected yet, BRGL = maximin. Though that's not how I would choose
to explain it to the public. The usual definition is clearer, especially to
someone who already knows IRV: "remove the candidate with fewest votes in
any pairwise contest and repeat".

Entirely aside from the issue of getting IRV advocates to accept a
Condorcet method... if I could waive a magic wand and get any method I want
implemented by a government... I think I'd still pick BRGL because its
simplicity creates transparency. I love RP but I want as many people as
possible to be able to grab the tally from each precinct and work out the
winner with a pencil.

It's proabably too late for Robert B-J to shift from BTR-IRV to BRDL in his

Is it too late? I thought the discussion was postponed till next year.

Daniel.

On Wed, Jul 7, 2021 at 2:11 PM Daniel Carrera dcarrera@gmail.com wrote:

Ugh... after I hit "send" I realized that this is wrong. In an election
where voters are not required to do a full ranking, it is possible that
removing the candidate with the fewest votes 'X' also removes the pairwise
contest with the next-lowest number of votes:

5 --- A > B
2 --- A > C
3 --- B > A
4 --- B > C
1 --- C > A
6 --- C > B

The "maximin" winner is B but the BRGL winner is A. So nevermind.

Daniel.

On 7/7/21 7:47 PM, Richard Lung wrote:

I agree that a method must live or die by the strength of its
properties, and not much else. If a method appears to be intuitive but
returns rotten winners, too bad for that method.

So why then Condorcet-IRV tweaks? Two reasons. The first is that they
seem to be the only known methods that pass both Smith and DMTBR, which
is useful when you want max resistance to strategy and still be
Condorcet. And the second is that legislators used to IRV unfortunately
impose a "must look not too different from IRV" criterion.

I'd wish that were not so, so that we could just advocate Ranked Pairs
and be done with it. But if people are concerned about DH3 (or FairVote
uses its possibility to say their method is better), then DMTBR it is.
And if the politicians need simple methods - or need IRV-likes - then
that's what we'll have to find.

But: that a method lives or dies by its properties is completely neutral
to the origins of that method. So even a quick and dirty hack can have
great property compliance. It's just less likely to be the case than if
the method was properly planned ahead of time to pass the right properties.

-km

In some sense all "tweaks" are quite ok. If we want the method to be Condorcet compliant, and it is, any such method probably works quite well in practice.

I mean that in most typical large real life elections there is a Condorcet winner, and with sincere votes all Condorcet compliant methods pick the same winner. And if there is no Condorcet winner, the method probably picks a reasonably good candidate anyway. In addition to this there could be also some (rational and/or irrational) strategic voting. But also after considering these problems, differences between different Condorcet methods might still be minimal in practice.

The conclusion might thus be: any Condorcet compliant method is likely to work quite well in practical real life elections, and is likely to meet our (practical) requirements quite well. Also finer tuning is possible, but in light of what I wrote above, that might be more for artistic reasons than for practical reasons :-) . So, the question is: can we say that all Condorcet compliant methods are quite good in practice, and therefore having to "tweak" because of external requirements is quite ok? (assuming that Condorcet compliance is among our requirements in the first place)

BR, Juho