Okay, this is elegant (once the notion of a beat-path is understood).  Now, if there is a cycle, isn't there a majority beat-path from B to A?  Can the set of candidates, C[], be empty, so that it's simply B >> A?

Wow, I knew you were around back in the olden days, Markus.  I just didn't know it went back to the previous millennium.  And I did not know MO's participation also goes back to the 90s.  I only started in 2009 just after the Burlington IRV election.  A FairVote apologist in Burlington, Terry Bouricius (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_Bouricius), told me about the EM list.  (He has recently authored a new book plugging sortition: https://democracycreative.com/The-Trouble-With-Elections )

I am grateful for your work and I still think about how to encode the Schulze method into concise legislative language.  I can do it for MinMax, sorta do it for Ranked Pairs, but decently concise legislative language in English for Schulze is elusive.  If the language appears impenetrable to policy makers, it ain't gonna get anywhere in legislation.  That's one reason I decided that "straight-ahead Condorcet" with a "completion method" is the most likely sell.

https://legislature.vermont.gov/Documents/2024/Docs/BILLS/H-0424/H-0424%20As%20Introduced.pdf

That one is Condorcet-Plurality (because that was the simplest completion method), but I think next time around, I'll try to convince them to do Condorcet-TTR which is, for three significant candidates, identical to Condorcet-IRV.

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

"Imagination is more important than knowledge."

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Markus,

Thanks for the interesting link.

Quoting Mike Saari from March 1996:

What is the definition of the "Smith//Condorcet [EM]" method?

Chris B.

On 14/06/2024 12:50 am, Markus Schulze wrote:

On Thu, Jun 13, 2024 at 12:25 Chris Benham cbenhamau@yahoo.com.au wrote:

Probably Smith//MinMax(wv).

I don’t know what the Twins-Litmus-Test is, but of course RP(wv) meets a
number of criteria not met by MinMX(wv), &, as rare as it would be, a
failure of Condorcet-Loser would be an embarrassment, & maybe result in a
repeal.

Of course Smith//MinMax(wv), too, fails some criteria met by RP(wv). I
don’t know how embarrassing those failures would be, but arguably…

“Elect the candidate unbeaten among all of the strongest pairwise-defeats
that don’t contradict (form any cycles with) eachother.”

…is simpler to word & propose than Smith//MinMax(wv).

Schulze generalizes Condorcet very simply by allowing indirect beats to
be counted as well as direct ones. The definition is actually very
intuitive and easy to describe in words:

1. A candidate has a direct win over another candidate if the first
   candidate is ranked higher than the second by a majority of voters.
2. An indirect win or *chain *is a series of direct wins going from one
   candidate to another.
3. The strength of a direct win is equal to the number of votes for the
   candidate preferred by a majority of voters.
4. The strength of an indirect is equal to the strength of the weakest
   link in that chain (c.f. a chain is only as strong as its weakest link).
5. One candidate defeats another if the first candidate has a
   stronger chain going to the second candidate than vice-versa.

However, there's some real problems here. The biggest is that legislators
and voters are not competent or intelligent enough to follow simple
instructions. I give a 30% chance that, even if you hand them a prewritten
bill, the legislators will muck around with it and accidentally implement
Schulze(margins), i.e. turkey-winning Schulze; or Schulze(pairwise
opposition), i.e. Schulze with plurality failure.

Second, even if they didn't, I don't trust them enough to expect whatever
software lets them calculate the results will be thoroughly tested. "But
there's plenty of free, open-source, off-the-shelf implementations of
Schulze! It can't be that hard to just pick one and—" is exactly what I
used to say about IRV.

Finally, even if the legislators get it got it right, I don't really trust
voters to use it correctly. In particular, I'm starting to doubt that
voters have the intelligence or understanding needed to play good
strategies that elect the Condorcet winner in Schulze or RP, because
they're not immediately obvious. Maybe they can work it out if you make
the strategy blatantly obvious with implicit approval, but I doubt they
could otherwise. I'll send an email with more details soon.

On Thu, Jun 13, 2024 at 12:15 PM robert bristow-johnson <
rbj@audioimagination.com> wrote:

It's a stronger form of participation. It says that copying a set of voters
with the exact same preference shouldn't result in a worse outcome for all
of those voters.

On Thu, Jun 13, 2024 at 4:47 PM Michael Ossipoff email9648742@gmail.com
wrote:

...

That's WV not margins.

I do know and I did know how Schulze works.  But, conceptually, even the concepts above do not get encoded concisely into law with words.

For voters, the instructions are this: Rank the candidates in order from your most-preferred to least-preferred candidate.  Equal rankings are okay (this is not IRV).  Every candidate not ranked is considered ranked lower than any candidate who is ranked.  That's it.

For legislators, it ain't their job to "follow instructions".  It's their responsibility to closely examine and thoroughly understand the legislation that they are considering passing into law.

You see, even though there are special interest groups that do get away with pre-writing legislation that gets rubber-stamped by a legislature, I would certainly say that the legislators (and the Office of Legislative Counsel) are not doing their job if they don't thoroughly examine and edit such legislation.  I sure as fuk don't want FairVote nor RCVRC writing legislation that gets passed verbatim into law.

Uhm, in terms of tallying, I'm pretty sure that the Dominion software is well-tested.

One thing we do as election workers, on a day before the election (essentially the first day that we process mail-in ballots before the election) we test out the tabulator (and we practice) by starting up the election that it was pre-configured for, zeroing all the tallies, and processing about a couple dozen (maybe 30) ballots that we marked up and counted by hand.  Then we run them into the tabulator, then close the election day, which causes it to spit out the tallies on a strip of paper.  We, the Ward Clerk, the Inspectors of Election, and the City Clerk must all be satisfied that the tabulator counted those 25 or 30 ballots correctly.

In 2009, with the AccuVote machines we had, they did use free software that I think the city got from Cambridge MA (who have been doing STV since the 1940s).  It was this "ChoicePlus Pro -- Version 2.3.2 (c) 1993-2006 Voting Solutions" and someone had to write a piece of glue code that would take the matrix of filled-in ovals and turn it into something the ChoicePlus Pro could read.

But governments don't want fuss and they want to rely on reputable and reliable manufacturers and we think that Dominion is such.  Which is why they had to sue the fuck outa Faux News for besmirching their reputation.

In their "Democracy Suite EMS Results Tally & Reporting User Guide", in the chapter for RCV, they don't have an option for any Condorcet yet.  Just IRV and STV (WIGM) and something called "Points IRV" and options.  But I have no doubt that if a state passed some Condorcet into law, that they would have any problem adding that to their list of options.

It's the same damn ballot as IRV.  And the meaning of the ballot is the same:  Who's your favorite candidate?  Mark them #1.  Now, imagine that your favorite candidate was not running at all, from the group of remaining candidates, then who would be your choice?  Rank them #2.  etc.

If it's not a Score ballot, the meaning of the Ordinal ballot is the same whether it's IRV, Condorcet, Bucklin.  (Borda is a little iffy.)

I agree.  That's one reason that I am not particularly worried about MO's (or yours, if I recall correctly) alarmism about Condorcet-Plurality devolving immediately into strategic voting (I assume burial) if that were adopted.  I don't think it would, even though I understand some scenarios in which a strategy could have worked (I think the Alaska special election in 2022 is a good example) to a candidate's benefit.

Looking forward to it.  I thought both you and MO were slamming my suggestion (and effort, I actually did get a bill written as such) to adopt Condorcet-Plurality.  I never disputed that, if the polls indicated that the Plurality winner was different than the Condorcet winner (say, the Alaska 2002 special election), that a conceivable strategy would be for supporters of the plurality winner to bury the Condorcet winner and throw the election into a cycle.  But it would take a concerted effort of tens of thousands of voters to mark their ballots insincerely (like not rank Begich, even though they like Begich better than Palin).  And it could conceivably backfire and cause the election of their most hated candidate.

I am not wedded to Condorcet-Plurality.  I think maybe Condorcet-TTR might be okay.  Maybe even Condorcet-Bucklin.  But clear legislative language that says what it means and means what it says is far easier to sell to legislators than something that is cryptic and the have to trust the lobbyists who wrote the legislation that it doesn't have some sneaky flaw that makes them regret passing the bill.  That's why I am promoting two-method Condorcet.  Then, at least, the policy makers (and citizenry) can read directly the intent of the legislation and not suspect that there is some sneaky clause that advantages a particular interest group.

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

"Imagination is more important than knowledge."

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Hi,

I want to note: Markus has priority for the invention, but Woodall later named the
exact same thing "CDTT" ("Condorcet (doubly augmented gross) top tier" which is the
name I have used. (I know Chris remembers CDTT.)

A votes-only (or matrix-only) interpretation of Mike's SFC is not so extensive as
this. It would say that if there is no X >> Y for some Y, but there is Y >> Z,
then Z isn't elected.

Kevin
votingmethods.net

Markus Schulze markus.schulze8@gmail.com a écrit :

Some additional thoughts.

On 06/13/2024 9:16 PM EDT Closed Limelike Curves closed.limelike.curves@gmail.com wrote:

So I can see in the special election in Alaska that a burial strategy could be employed by the Peltola campaign to tell Peltola voters that they have to bury Begich and rank him lower than their sincere preference, essentially bullet vote for Peltola, which, if enough of them do it, would push the election into a cycle of which Peltola would win in the contingency method: plurality of first-choice votes.  Also I know that Bottom-Two Runoff IRV would also elect Peltola for the same basic reason.

Now, if RP wv were used, it seems to me that the candidate elected, in this 3-candidate case, would have the greatest sum of first and second choices, like Bucklin.  Or Approval where "approved" means top two rankings.  The reason is that sum is equal to the winning votes in the head-to-head runoff against the candidate not included in the sum.

So now, if I have to sell this to civilians and to policy makers (but not people like on this mailing list) I have to make a case why the this Condorcet-Bucklin method (some might call it "Condorcet-Approval") is a better choice than Condorcet-Plurality or Condorcet-TTR.

How do I sell this (say Ranked-Pairs wv) to a pedestrian voter or to a policy maker that is not as sophisticated as people on this mailing list?

Again, I have no worry about writing software to implement a method.  I don't think legislators want to have the software that someone else wrote to dictate to them what method to enact into law.  I think they want to dictate to the software implemented in voting systems the rules they think are correct.

I touched on this before.  Just wanna add that we should simply expect voters to vote in a manner that they perceive to be in their best political interest.  It might not be in their best political interest, but they think it is.  Then we don't wanna be like Borda and say "My system is only intended for honest men."  We should not bet on voters voting sincerely, if they are convinced that their insincere vote is a better bet.  This is why Duverger's law works in FPTP.  Voters are discouraged from voting for their favorite candidate if they think their 2nd-favorite candidate has a far better chance of defeating their least-favorite candidate.  This is why voters "waste" their vote.  Is wasting one's vote the only "sincere" vote?

But if a voter does not comprehend how some tactic or strategy other than sincerity would better promote their political interests, then that leaves sincerity in representing one's preference as the only motivation.  And the meaning of the ballot is the same in Condorcet as in IRV (which is why we can use the same cast vote records to compare how the two methods would do in a particular election).  Then the voting tactic is simply:  Who's your favorite candidate?  Mark them #1.  Now, imagine that your favorite candidate was not running at all, from the group of remaining candidates, then who would be your choice?  Rank them #2.  etc.

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

"Imagination is more important than knowledge."

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