Why leave out the November 2022 election where Peltola was the Condorcet
winner against Begich?

On Wed, Dec 4, 2024 at 4:46 PM robert bristow-johnson <
rbj@audioimagination.com> wrote:

--
Greg Dennis, Ph.D. :: Policy Director
Voter Choice Massachusetts

e :: greg.dennis@voterchoicema.org
p :: 617.835.9161
w :: voterchoicema.org https://www.voterchoicema.org/

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Because rb-j is an intellectually dishonest crank who doesn’t want to be
confused by facts after he’s made up his mind

On Thu, Dec 5, 2024 at 12:35 AM Greg Dennis greg.dennis@voterchoicema.org
wrote:

FairVote has recently updated its messaging guidance to explicitly change
the verbiage from “eliminate” to “reduce”

On Thu, Dec 5, 2024 at 7:55 AM John T Whelan john.whelan@astro.rit.edu
wrote:

Correct, it's been "demonstrated twice now" ... out of around 700 IRV
elections, or less than 0.3% of the time. Coincidentally, that number (2)
is the same number of elections in which there has been no Condorcet
winner. With those numbers, I get about equally worked up about the
prospect of either ... which is to say barely at all. I find it suspect and
just plain odd to see someone like RB-J get so bothered by such vanishingly
rare events.

Moreover, the fact that Peltola won the November 2022 election further
undercuts the concern that IRV may elect an "extremist
https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/3711206-the-flaw-in-ranked-choice-voting-rewarding-extremists/."
The idea that Peltola, a clear moderate
https://alaskapublic.org/2024/03/28/peltolas-votes-show-shes-one-of-the-least-loyal-democrats-in-the-u-s-house/
who
endorsed a Republican
https://theweek.com/2022-election/1017771/alaska-gop-sen-lisa-murkowski-and-democratic-rep-mary-peltola-endorse-each
for Senate, was an "extremist" should have been laughable on its face. That
she went on to be the Condorcet winner a few months later and then the most
popular Alaskan politician
https://www.dataforprogress.org/blog/2024/3/14/rep-peltola-is-the-most-popular-politician-in-alaska-she-still-faces-a-tight-race
was
just further proof.

And that's before we look at what's happened to the state legislature.
While RB-J is obsessed with whether IRV elects the mathematical compromise
candidate in every single election, a bipartisan compromise coalition has
now captured both houses
https://alaskapublic.org/2024/11/07/coalition-lawmakers-say-theyre-confident-bipartisan-alaska-house-majority-will-hold/
of the Alaska state house under Top-4 IRV. He's looking at a forest and
only seeing one tree.

In light of these positive results, the motivation for RB-J's rant is hard
to decipher. Perhaps it's an obsession with theories on chalkboards over
functioning political realities. Or perhaps he just signed up for "Team
Condorcet" long ago, and has a sport-fan-like mentality that means he must
put down the "competition" when they "win." But for anyone genuinely
interested in seeing compromise candidates and coalitions being elected,
the example of Alaska should be earning praise, not rants.

• Greg

On Thu, Dec 5, 2024 at 8:46 AM Michael Garman michael.garman@rankthevote.us
wrote:

--
Greg Dennis, Ph.D. :: Policy Director
Voter Choice Massachusetts

e :: greg.dennis@voterchoicema.org
p :: 617.835.9161
w :: voterchoicema.org https://www.voterchoicema.org/

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What, specifically, in my post is an oversimplification?

Consider the election was less than 3 months after the special election in August.  Same three major candidates, same campaigns, same election cycle.  But in the "do over" voters have information from the first election and, for 99.9% of the voters that the information is incomplete (leading to false conclusions), they use that information to inform their do over vote in November 2022.

Now what are most naive voters gonna think after August?  They will mistakenly think (from reported tallies of the August election result) that Begich was a weak candidate and they will jump ship.  Indeed, Palin went on the campaign trail telling Alaskans that Begich should drop out "get out of [her] way" so that she could beat Peltola in November.  When exactly the opposite was correct; Palin couldn't beat Peltola head-to-head.  But Begich could.  Palin needed to drop out and get out of Begich's way.

But what really happened was that other Begich voters jumped ship (betrayed their favorite) and marked Peltola #1 in the November election (because they were petrified of Palin just as decent Republicans are, along with me, petrified of Trump).  That net transfer from Begich to Peltola changes the number of voters ranking between these two and that put Peltola ahead of Begich, head-to-head, in November 2022.

Begich's margin over Peltola was slightly less in 2024 and the percentage margin was less than half in 2024 than it was in 2022.

That's right and that can happen whenever there is a close 3-way race.  IRV does fine if the would be spoiler is not in the final round.  But when it fails, it's always the loser in the final round that is the spoiler.

And voters voting for the loser in the final round never get their second-choice votes counted.  These Palin voters had a reason for marking Begich (or a very few, Peltola) as #2.  They were assured that if they couldn't get their first-choice candidate elected, that they're vote would count for their second-choice, if they marked a second-choice.  But that's a false promise in any IRV election having 3 or more candidates and more than 1 round.

But if we didn't have 3 or more candidates in an election, we would have no need for RCV and FPTP would do just fine.  So in promoting this reform, it's necessary to consider what the risk of failure is, not with the entire set (700+ U.S. RCV elections), but with those elections where the reform actually does something different than what existed before.

More than half of all single-winner RCV elections in the U.S. had 2 or fewer candidates.  In the earlier days it was 300 out of 500.  It's only when there are 3 or more candidates that RCV can possibly exhibit the fruits of its reform.  Of those election, it's only in the "come-from-behind" elections that demonstrate that RCV actually did something different.  There used to be about 15 of those elections.  I think I read somewhere (FairVote, perhaps) that this number is now about 25.  The Burlington 2009 election is one example, but the Alaska 2022 election is not.

Those are the only trials where the proponents of reform can point to them and say that their promoted reform actually did its reform.  Then the portion of failure is hardly "vanishingly small".  Because when RCV actually does any good, that portion of success is also vanishingly small.

Me too, in spades.

It's just that elections, even election in Vermont where I live, do not exist to elect to office the candidate Robert Bristow-Johnson would rather see elected.

So, particularly in the context of voting reform, I object just as much if it's the candidate that I like who is the beneficiary of a spoiled election.  But for sure, most other people on the Left will not have the introspection to see that when it's their own who benefitted from an RCV election, whether it was spoiled or not.  That's where the intellectual dishonesty really resides.

Just imagine if the numbers with the three top candidates were mirror imaged and it was the candidate on the Left who was the spoiler and the candidate on the Right who was the beneficiary of the spoiled election.  Would these "intellectually honest" IRV proponents be singing the same tune, when it's their side that was screwed?

--

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

"Imagination is more important than knowledge."

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Well, I was waiting the better part of a day to hear from John how my "original statement, is something of an oversimplification."  More often the accusation is that I am unnecessarily complicating matters.

Unraveling a knot that someone else had tied can be complicated.  But the principle is extremely simple:

1. In a modern and righteous democracy, human beings with the same status, that is enfranchised citizens and of voting age, must be treated equally, otherwise we have a form of apartheid that explicitly treats persons of some class worse than others.  Incumbent to that official equality, our votes must count equally.  If our votes don't count equally, then I want my vote to count more than yours.

2. In a single winner election, where there is no proportionality to be had, for our votes to count equally, the only way to make that happen is for the majority to rule in elections.  For that to happen, then if more voters mark their ballots preferring Candidate A over Candidate B than the number of voters marking their ballots to the contrary, then Candidate B is not elected.  If Candidate B were to be elected, that would mean that the fewer voters preferring Candidate B had cast votes that had greater value and counted more than those votes from the greater number of voters preferring Candidate A.

3. A majority must mean more than half of a set.  A "simple majority" is more than half of votes cast, excluding abstentions.  When there are 3 or more candidates, there might not be a majority, but between 2 candidates there is always a simple majority unless they tie.  This simple fact is often misconstrued by IRV advocates that IRV elections "guarantee a majority winner" because they boil the field of candidates in an election down to two candidates in which, between only those two, there is always a simple majority.

Indeed, in Greg's website, https://voterchoicema.org/ , it says right on the front page: "Ranked-Choice Voting - This commonsense change gives Massachusetts voters a stronger voice when we cast our ballots, and guarantee that our elected leaders are supported by a true majority."

That's an objectively false statement.  A technical falsehood.  Right on the outside on the product packaging.  A blatant falsehood.  Yet I am the one who is accused of being "intellectually dishonest".

To be honest, we gotta compare apples to apples.  If RCV is claiming an advantage over FPTP, we have to have the same semantic rule applying to both methods to compare them honestly.  We can't move the goalpost on RCV from its position for FPTP.  And One-Person-One-Vote (or the equality of our vote) must mean that we're counting persons.  Voters.  Bodies.  (Not marks on a bunch of ballots.)  The percentage of the vote that the winner gets is:

(number of voters for the winner)/(total number of non-abstaining voters)

If that ratio is more than half, the winner got a majority of the vote.  If that ratio is not more than 50%, the winner did not get a majority.  Not any kind of majority.

With FPTP, suppose we have an election with 3 candidates and 100 voters.  45 voted for Candidate A, 40 for Candidate B, and 15 for Candidate C.  We don't allow FPTP advocates to claim that A got any kind of majority.  Candidate A got a plurality, 45%, of the vote.  Because more voters voted for a loser in the race than the number of voters voting for the winner, the winner did not get a majority.

We don't let Candidate A claim that they got a majority of the vote by limiting "the vote" to be the 85 voters who voted for either A or B and excluding the 15 C voters from the denominator.

To be intellectually honest, you have to accept the same criterion for "majority support" with RCV.  Otherwise you're moving the goalposts from the position you placed for FPTP to an easier position for RCV.

To make this crystal clear: you have an election that uses some given election method.  You have a total number of V voters all casting ballots.  There are several different races on the ballot and not every voter will vote in every race.

Now focus on a particular single-winner race.  That set of V voters can be divided into 3 groups:

1. Voters that the method counts as voting for the winner.
2. Voters that voted for a candidate, but the method does not count them as voting for the winner.
3. Voters that abstained from voting for any candidate in that particular race.

Every voter that cast a ballot is in exactly one of those disjoint groups.  Now, the voters in group 1 are considered happy voters.  The voters in group 2 are considered unhappy voters.  And the voters in group 3 don't give a shit.

Now, we will say that it is equivalent that a voter stayed home and didn't vote at all to the case that this voter came in and cast a completely blank ballot.  Let's say that those two cases are to be considered equivalent.

We will also say that what a voter did in some other race has no bearing on what the voter did in the race under consideration.  So that if a voter abstained in a particular race because they cast a completely blank ballot is, within the scope of that race, equivalent to that they abstained in that race but perhaps voted in some other races.  It should not make any difference to how we count the votes for this particular race under consideration.

Then this means "majority" is "simple majority".  More than half of the votes cast and not including abstentions.

The percentage of the vote that a winning candidate got is the ratio of the voters in group 1 divided by the sum of voters in group 1 and group 2.  If that ratio exceeds 50%, then the winner got a simple majority the vote.  If that ration does not exceed 50%, then the "elected leader" was NOT "supported by a true majority."

Now do you see how RCV advocates like FairVote or their satellites (like Better Ballot [your state here]) are not telling the truth when they say that "For a candidate to win in an RCV election, they must get over 50% of the vote."  Do you see how that is a falsehood?  I used Burlington 2009 as a concrete example.

Because in a 3 or more candidate race, "the vote" is the union of the two sets: everyone who voted for the winner and everyone who voted for a loser.  The number of elements of the first set goes into the numerator and the sum of the numbers of the two sets goes into the denominator.  But FairVote and friends want to claim that it is a smaller subset that goes into the denominator.  They exclude the "exhausted ballots" from the count going into the denominator.  But we don't do that for FPTP, why should we do it for RCV or any other method?

If we applied this RCV reasoning to FPTP, then even FPTP can guarantee that the plurality winner got a majority of the vote.  Given the subset of voters that voted for one of the top two vote getters, then the winner got more than 50% of the vote in that subset of voters.  Big fat hairy deal.

If we don't let FPTP get away with that claim, why should we let Hare RCV (or Condorcet RCV or any other method) get away with that claim?

This leads to the concise result that: If more voters voted for any loser in a race than the number of voters who voted for the winner, that winner did not get a majority of the vote, by any voting method.  Not any kind of "majority".

--

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

"Imagination is more important than knowledge."

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So, in the previous post, I was sorta picking on Greg's organization in Massachusetts for posting an objective falsehood on their front page.  Now it's Michael's turn (or that of his organization).

On the front page https://rankthevote.us/ they say:

This is true.  This is why I support Ranked-Choice Voting, but not IRV.  But I doubt Michael is willing to admit that "ensures" is an overstatement or overrating the product they are selling.  "Ensure" means the same as guarantee and IRV does not guarantee that the candidate with broadest support get to govern.  This assurance, of course, has been disproven in Burlington 2009 and Alaska August 2022.  So then, in these elections, there were a large component of voters (17% in Burlington, 18% in Alaska) that would have been better served by "holding their nose" and voting for their lesser evil candidate.  But they are promised here that they don't have to hold their noses, and the consequence of that trust was that their vote literally caused the election of their most disliked candidate.

This is true but it's about the ranked ballot.  Just because voters are allowed to rank their candidates, including backup rankings, does not mean that the method used to count the votes and identify the winner will serve their political interests in doing so.

This has actually be shown to be false in both Burlington and Alaska.  IRV did not consolidate the GOP vote in Alaska.  It did not resolve the split vote among the majority of Republicans.  In Burlington, RCV did not consolidate the "non-Progressive" vote (the Democrats and Republicans).  In both cases, the weaker of the two candidates were advanced to the final IRV round and lost, where if the stronger of the two candidates went into the final IRV round, they would have defeated the candidate that IRV ended up electing.

It's a subjective claim.  I would like to believe it's true, but when IRV fails, as it did in Alaska August 2022 and Burlington 2009, there was widespread and acrimonious division and negativity.

Further on this page https://rankthevote.wpengine.com/?page_id=10#howrcv

There are several falsehoods in these claims.

That's false.  If a voter's favorite (1st-choic)e candidate is the loser i the final round, their next (2nd-choice) vote is never counted.  In Alaska 2022, 20% of the entire electorate (1 out of 5 voters) that voted for Sarah Palin and a second choice never had their 2nd-choice vote counted.  In Burlington 2009, 22% of the electorate (2 out of 9 voters) that voted for Kurt Wright and a second choice never had their 2nd-choice vote counted.

That's just a falsehood.  These 20% threw their vote away.  Now a small fraction of those voters were not harmed, because their second-choice vote (that was never counted) ended up for the IRV winner.  But the vastly larger portion of the voters for these two losing candidates were harmed because their vote that was thrown away would have changed the outcome of the election.

This is true.  It is essentially what IRV is.  But it sometimes harms RCV voters.

This is a lie.  Explicitly proven false, but they keep repeating it. This is the intellectual dishonesty that comes from Michael's organization.

This is also a lie.  Also explicitly proven false.  Sometimes no candidate gets the support of half of the voters.

So here is another lie coming from a different RCV organization.  I'll point you to an image rather than quote it.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1JNn0b1QxEuZBwPPaU-F6NliwbORqaZn_/view

Can you see the falsehood and the intellectual dishonesty in it?

Now Michael (or Greg or anyone), will you defend your accusation of my being "intellectually dishonest"?  You're going to have to be specific and objective about it.

Because I am saying that both of your organizations are explicitly and objectively intellectually dishonest.  Your organizations are lying and your organizations know that they are lying.  And they don't correct the inaccuracies.  But salesmen seldom correct inaccuracies that promote the product they are selling.

(Just FYI, in my professional venue, I go after the Monster Cable people that continue to lie about claims regarding their very expensive product.)

--

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

"Imagination is more important than knowledge."

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RCV (a.k.a. Instant Runoff) clearly failed in Alaska in 2024 too.  The Republican Party learned an important lesson from the fiasco in August 2022: RCV can easily spoil.  So in 2024, one of the two Republican candidates who qualified for the general election dropped out to avoid the possibility of being a spoiler.  And the one who didn't drop out -- Nick Begich -- had similarly pledged to drop out if another Republican finished ahead of him in the primary election.

A lesson they haven't yet learned is that the kind of pledge that Begich made -- to drop out if another Republican finished ahead of him in the primary election -- can lead to spoiling too, because the candidate who drops out might be the one who could win in the general election.  Suppose Begich had made that pledge ahead of the August 2022 election.  Then he would have dropped out to avoid the possibility of spoiling Sarah Palin's victory.  But it was Begich, not Palin, who a majority ranked over Democrat Mary Peltola in the August 2022 election.

(Peltola's majority over Palin was very narrow.  That means RCV came close to electing the extremist.)

In France in 2024 they didn't use RCV, but a similar dynamic led to similar pledges to drop out.  To avoid spoiling that would help the right-wing party win in the final round of elections, candidates of centrist & left-wing parties agreed to drop out if they finished no higher than third place in the penultimate round of voting, to avoid spoiling the other's chance of defeating the right-wing candidate.  That's the same mistake as in Begich's pledge to drop out if another Republican finished ahead of him in the primary election.  The candidate who finished third might be the one who can win, and in this case the candidate who ought to drop out is the one who finished second (or possibly even first).

It's also possible that RCV spoiled in the 2021 New York City Democratic mayoral primary election, which was won by Eric Adams.  It eliminated Maya Wiley after the penultimate round of counting, and then counted Wiley's votes for either Adams or Garcia.  It's possible that Garcia was a spoiler and that majorities ranked Wiley over Adams and Garcia. (I don't know NYC political dynamics, but assuming a subset of voters pay attention mainly to candidates' gender & race, Garcia voters in that subset would tend to prefer Wiley over Adams, and Adams voters in that subset would tend to prefer Wiley over Garcia.)  But NYC didn't publish the voters' rankings, so the possibility that Garcia was a spoiler can't be checked, except perhaps by a "freedom of information" request to compel publication. (I wonder whether hiding the voters' rankings is a lesson learned by proponents of RCV after the Instant Runoff fiasco in Burlington Vermont in 2009.  After that fiasco, they changed its name
from Instant Runoff to Ranked Choice Voting, so I also wonder whether the reason for the change of name was to try to hide its track record of spoiling.  And I wonder whether they say an RCV election didn't spoil whenever the evidence to check it is unavailable.)

We can expect the Democrats too will eventually learn the lesson that RCV is prone to spoiling.  After that, I expect only one Democrat and one Republican will run in RCV general elections, plus third party or independent candidates who can't win and might be spoilers.  That seems like the existing two-party system... which might explain why so many Democratic & Republican politicians support (or don't oppose) RCV.  It would still have the same terrible flaw that any voting method that counts only one majority (or one plurality) has: the majority (or plurality) that gets counted can often be a coalition of minorities on different issues.  That undermines majority rule, undermines politicians' incentive to support majority-preferred policies, prevents government policies from being stable, incites political polarization, and empowers extremists by making their supporters' votes needed by the rest of their coalition.

Another possibility we could hope for, but which seems unlikely because it would require the Democratic party or the Republican party to place country over party, is that one of the two "big tent" parties would learn to completely "stand down" (not nominate a candidate) in elections they might not win, so that a "moderate" independent candidate could run and defeat the "greater evil" without a spoiler on the ballot to split the coalition against the greater evil.  We saw examples of this "stand down" strategy in Utah in 2022 and in Nebraska in 2024, when the Democrats chose not to nominate candidates for U.S. Senate... that allowed the independent candidates who ran (Evan McMullin in Utah and Dan Osborn in Nebraska) to assemble larger anti-Republican coalitions than any Democratic candidates had assembled in those states.  If those states had been swing states instead of solid red states, it's a good bet that the independent candidates would have won.  But good luck
persuading the Democrats to stand down in a swing state or swing district, which would be the opposite of the "50 state strategy" that some of them advocate.  The "Democrats stand down" strategy makes sense not only in solid red states & districts where a Democrat would be a sure loser; it also makes sense in states & districts where the Democrat isn't a sure winner if election of the Republican would be catastrophic. (Two examples of catastrophes are Trump 2025 and single-party domination of all branches of a state government -- such as in Texas or Florida -- or all branches of the federal government.)  By a symmetric argument, the "Republicans stand down" strategy can make sense for Republicans in states & districts where an independent candidate has a better chance to defeat the Democrat than a Republican would have.

If the Democrats hadn't nominated a candidate for President in 2024, I think it's likely that No Labels would have been able to persuade Larry Hogan to run.  Hogan was the popular two-term "moderate" Never-Trump Republican former governor of solid blue Maryland, and it seems likely that he would have been a Condorcet winner in 2024.  He declined No Labels' invitation because he knew the Democrats would nominate a candidate (expected to be Biden), which would have given Hogan no chance to win and only a chance to be a spoiler.  But in a Hogan versus Trump election with no Democrat on the ballot to split the anti-Trump coalition, Hogan could have been able to assemble a winning coalition: in addition to "lesser of evil" votes from Democratic-leaning voters, Hogan would have been favored by swing voters, moderate Republican voters, and some of the voters who vote R only because they've been led to believe the D party is socialist or whatever. (I think the only real questions
about whether Hogan would have defeated Trump are whether too many Democratic-leaning voters would fail to vote for the "lesser of evils" and either abstain or "waste" their vote on a sure-loser third party spoiler, and whether donors would have adequately funded Hogan's independent campaign.)

Years ago, an advocate of Instant Runoff presented empirical statistics (from Australia, I think) that seemed to show Instant Runoff doesn't spoil much in practice and rarely defeats a Condorcet winner.  But those statistics are misleading, because they neglect potential candidates who are deterred from running either to avoid being a spoiler or because Instant Runoff would create the false impression that they're very unpopular.  It also ignores the effect of voter preference information that the parties gain when STV Proportional Representation elections are run alongside Instant Runoff... information that can be useful for predicting Instant Runoff spoiling and avoiding the spoiling by standing down or by a party nominating only one candidate.  Particularly noteworthy is Instant Runoff's deterrent effect against potential Condorcet winners who would lose and appear to be very unpopular given Instant Runoff because they would be sandwiched between two other candidates, one
of whom would be classified as a spoiler if the Condorcet winner chose to run & lose.  An Instant Runoff winner who's said to be a Condorcet winner based solely on the candidates who chose to run and the actual votes cast, but who would have lost pairwise to a potential candidate who didn't run, should not be deemed the sincere Condorcet winner.

Greg Dennis asks "why leave out the November 2022 election where RCV elected the Condorcet winner Peltola?"  Because we're not claiming RCV always defeats the Condorcet winner.  However, was Peltola really the sincere Condorcet winner in November 2022?  It's impossible to know for certain, because RCV may have deterred potential candidates from competing, or the primary election may have prevented potential candidates from competing in the general election.

By the way, my definition of "spoiler" is narrower than RBJ's definition.  He calls X a spoiler if X, by running, causes the winner to change from some Y to some Z.  I call X a spoiler if both of the following conditions hold: (1) X, by running, causes the winner to change from some Y to some Z.  (2) The number of voters whose order of preference has X > Y > Z exceeds the number of voters whose order of preference has X > Z > Y.  In other words, X is a spoiler if X, by running, causes the election of a "greater evil" of most of X's supporters.  We can also define a counterfactual spoiler: someone who would be a spoiler if s/he runs, but chooses not to run.  Similarly, we can define a counterfactual Condorcet winner: someone who would be the sincere Condorcet winner if s/he runs, but chooses not to run.

Spoiling (which violates the IIA criterion) isn't necessarily bad.  For instance, if Scissors by running changes the winner from Paper to Rock, the additional preference information gained when Scissors runs may suggest Rock is better than Paper.  In this case, we should hope Scissors isn't deterred from running.

The possibility of rock-paper-scissors preferences shows that some spoiling and violation of IIA is unavoidable for ANY plausibly democratic voting method. (That means any voting method that tends to reduce to majority rule when there are only two candidates.  Cardinal voting systems offer no escape from this tendency, because voters in the majority who prefer Paper over Rock have an obvious strategic incentive to vote the maximum for Paper and the minimum for Rock when only Paper & Rock are running, which is equivalent to majority rule.)

--Steve

On 12/5/2024 12:34 AM, Greg Dennis wrote: