Re: [EM] Defeat Strength
On 04.09.2022 21:56, Kevin Venzke wrote:
Hi,
I'm afraid that defeat strength is such a tangible concept that it inclines us to view it as
a finished product that we can now simply customize as we please. Or worse: That we are
duty-bound to measure it "accurately." We maximize some desired property, readily identified
within a single pairwise contest, and then apply the minmax algorithm to this ranking, and
expect it to result in a method whose properties have some kind of relationship to the
property we were maximizing, or properties that will at least be as good as the defeat
strength metric sounded.
I couldn't count how many times I had a nice idea, tried to use minmax or River with it,
and discovered some horrible basic flaw. Or just mediocre results.
Let's see if I can post to EM again :-) I was having some trouble with
t-online but it looks like I can at least receive mails again now.
Anyway. I guess there are two ways to answer this kind of question:
first, we could say "I want to maximize some combination of strategic
resistance and VSE" and find out where our indifference curve hits the
Pareto frontier. Or we could say "this concept is essential to
democracy as I imagine it and must be present no matter what" (e.g. that
majority rule must imply Condorcet).
I'd say that for defeat strength, I can't see any obvious second-type
argument that say, margins or wv naturally generalize democracy and so
must be present. Statistical models would disagree, too: if
bottom-ranking is considered to be the voter saying "I don't know where
to rank these candidates", that's a different thing to the voter
implicitly intending to bottom-rank every nonranked candidate.
I tend to personally favor wv, but that's partly due to convention,
partly due to strategy resistance.
(Now that I think about it, I guess there's a third category: that
algorithm feature X should be present because it seems natural to the
voters, or that Y shouldn't because it seems to arrive at a conclusion,
even if it's a correct one, as by magic, and so won't be considered
legitimate by the voters.
Again there would be two perspectives: a relative one where this much
strategy resistance or VSE can make up for an incomprehensible
algorithm, and an absolute one where there's some level of complexity
the voters simply won't accept.)
-km
It seems strange to me that many voters believe "one person, one vote" to
mean that their vote is simply their only (or first, in case of rankings)
preference, which cannot change, unless nobody has more than half of the
"votes", in which case there can be a runoff, instant or otherwise.
Martin Harper saw that mindset, and in response proposed a final step in
Approval, analogous to the one and only head-head step of IRV, to determine
which of the candidates got your actual vote:
The candidate that ends up with your actual vote is the unique candidate,
among those you marked as approved, that got the most total approval from
the other ballots.
This step merely confirms the winner without changing it ... so is
functionally superfluous... except for promoting the peace of mind of the
voters worried about the "actual votes", as opposed to approval counts.
If you combine Martin Harper's definition of "actual vote" with Michael
Ossipoff's basic approval strategy, you will find that the "actual"
Approval vote of a rational voter V with complete information, goes to the
same candidate that V would vote for in a Plurality election.
The functional advantage of Approval over Plurality is that it is
robust.... unlike Plurality it has a built in safety net ... many intuitive
strategies that do not depend on complete information are quite close to
optimal.
Think of Ossipoff's strategy: approve every candidate you like at least as
well as your most prudent Plurality choice X (sacrificing Favorite F for
Compromise C if you think that is neccessary for the best expected outcome).
You can see that Plurality is precarious compared to Approval, but (it
turns out that) with completely informed sophisticated voters, both methods
elect the same candidate.
Approving not only X, but also everybody you like more than X, is a
statistical safety net that tends to cancel out many judgment errors ...
inevitable errors in practice, because of degrees of misinformation and
strategical naïveté.
So in practice, the candidate approved by the most voters is the one that
well informed prudent voters would elect if they could only "choose one."
A better known, less demanding (in terms of information) Approval strategy
is to approve all candidates down to the one K most likely to win ...
inclusive, if you prefer K to the apparent runner up J.
If everybody uses this strategy the winner will either be the pairwise
choice between K and J, or somebody that defeats the projected winner K
pairwise ... someone with popularity underestimated by the public polls.
Someday, in the remote future, voters may be comfortable thinking of a
vote as (for example) a point representing an alternative in some
candidate/issue space. In that context, the winning position may be defined
as the one "most central" to the collection of votes (ballot points
submitted). One method of this type differs from another according to the
measure of "centrality."
What can we do to promote a broader view?
-Forest
On Tue, Sep 6, 2022, 1:19 PM Kristofer Munsterhjelm km_elmet@t-online.de
wrote:
On 04.09.2022 21:56, Kevin Venzke wrote:
Hi,
I'm afraid that defeat strength is such a tangible concept that it
inclines us to view it as
a finished product that we can now simply customize as we please. Or
worse: That we are
duty-bound to measure it "accurately." We maximize some desired
property, readily identified
within a single pairwise contest, and then apply the minmax algorithm to
this ranking, and
expect it to result in a method whose properties have some kind of
relationship to the
property we were maximizing, or properties that will at least be as good
as the defeat
strength metric sounded.
I couldn't count how many times I had a nice idea, tried to use minmax
or River with it,
and discovered some horrible basic flaw. Or just mediocre results.
Let's see if I can post to EM again :-) I was having some trouble with
t-online but it looks like I can at least receive mails again now.
Anyway. I guess there are two ways to answer this kind of question:
first, we could say "I want to maximize some combination of strategic
resistance and VSE" and find out where our indifference curve hits the
Pareto frontier. Or we could say "this concept is essential to
democracy as I imagine it and must be present no matter what" (e.g. that
majority rule must imply Condorcet).
I'd say that for defeat strength, I can't see any obvious second-type
argument that say, margins or wv naturally generalize democracy and so
must be present. Statistical models would disagree, too: if
bottom-ranking is considered to be the voter saying "I don't know where
to rank these candidates", that's a different thing to the voter
implicitly intending to bottom-rank every nonranked candidate.
I tend to personally favor wv, but that's partly due to convention,
partly due to strategy resistance.
(Now that I think about it, I guess there's a third category: that
algorithm feature X should be present because it seems natural to the
voters, or that Y shouldn't because it seems to arrive at a conclusion,
even if it's a correct one, as by magic, and so won't be considered
legitimate by the voters.
Again there would be two perspectives: a relative one where this much
strategy resistance or VSE can make up for an incomprehensible
algorithm, and an absolute one where there's some level of complexity
the voters simply won't accept.)
-km
Condorcet pairing
Suppose a preferential (non-binary) election, by 100 voters for three
candidates, A, B and C, contesting two seats, produces this result:
ABC
463420
A and B are elected on over one third of the votes each (by Droop quota).
Suppose, however, that this contest result is contested by Condorcet
pairing:
ABACBC
663456443466
A gets all C vote and C gets all A vote. But B is denied its
proportionate share of representation. A and C are the two-seat
Condorcet winners. They are implicitly elected each on single majorities
of over half the votes, 50+ votes each, from an electorate of 100
voters. At any rate, that is the minimum democratic threshold (even
Kenneth Arrow insists on). – Binary choice is “The tyranny of the
(single) majority.” (John Stuart Mill; Lani Guinier.)
For the sake of argument, consider the logic behind alternate pairings.
Each pairing is a provisional exclusion count, removing each candidate,
in turn, as a third preference. Thus the A-B pairing amounts to
A>B>C.The A-C pairing implies A>C>B. The B-C pairing implies B>C>A.
Condorcet pairing elects A and C on the contradiction that preferences
A>B>C and C>B>A are both correct.
On the basis of an original triple preference (non-binary) count, A>B>C
happens to be correct.
The question is: how does one arrive at such a preferential count? (That
is what I’ve been trying to explain, against some personal animosity.)
It depends on a multi-majority (proportional) count, as distinct from a
single majority count, summing a (multi-) preference vote, as distinct
from a binary choice.
Traditional single transferable vote is sufficiently robust to achieve
this, with its rational election count. STV does contain a residual
irrational element, in a sort of last past the post exclusion count. But
the exclusion count can be calculated on similar rational grounds, as
the election count. Thus, a binomial STV.
Regards,
Richard Lung.
On 06/09/2022 11:28, Colin Champion wrote:
Perhaps some people will be interested in another conclusion I came to
from reading Condorcet's Essai. He proposed a method of breaking
cycles which generated a lot of confusion until Peyton Young glossed
it as a garbled account of the Kemeny-Young method. His reading has
been widely accepted; Tideman (in his 2006 book) declared that
"Condorcet's intent is decoded to my satisfaction" by Young.
Condorcet described his method twice: forwards in the Preliminary
Discourse and backwards in the body of the work. Young only discusses
the backwards version. In both cases Condorcet starts from a list of
pairwise comparisons, sorted by margin. In the backwards version he
writes: "We will successively discard from the contradictory set the
preferences which have the smallest majority, and elect the candidate
preferred by those which remain". Presumably he stops discarding when
the residue is consistent; the flaw is that by this point there may
not be enough comparisons left to determine a unique winner. Young
noticed this and remarked that "It seems more likely that Condorcet
meant to reverse, rather than to delete the weakest proposition".
This is nonsense: no one writes "delete" when they mean "swap", and
Young's reading doesn't fit the forwards version.
The forwards statement is clearer: "We thus obtain the following
general rule, that whenever we are required to elect a candidate, we
must take in turn all the pairwise preferences which have majority
support, starting with the largest majorities, and make a decision
according to these initial preferences as soon as they imply one,
without worrying about the less probable later preferences." In other
words, given a list sorted in decreasing order of margin, take an
initial part which is small enough to be consistent but large enough
to determine a unique winner. This has a corresponding flaw, which is
that as you work through the list, you may be forced to include a
comparison which contradicts those already present before reaching the
point at which you have a winner. But there's nothing here which you
can interpret as meaning "swap" rather than something else.
It seems to me as clear as daylight that Condorcet had an incomplete
grasp of Tideman's Ranked Pairs. Tideman recognised the risk that a
new pair may contradict the ones already in the list, and he saw what
to do about it, namely throw it away.
CJC
Election-Methods mailing list - seehttps://electorama.com/em for list info
Hi Kristofer,
I'm afraid that defeat strength is such a tangible concept that it inclines us to view it as
a finished product that we can now simply customize as we please. Or worse: That we are
duty-bound to measure it "accurately." We maximize some desired property, readily identified
within a single pairwise contest, and then apply the minmax algorithm to this ranking, and
expect it to result in a method whose properties have some kind of relationship to the
property we were maximizing, or properties that will at least be as good as the defeat
strength metric sounded.
Anyway. I guess there are two ways to answer this kind of question:
first, we could say "I want to maximize some combination of strategic
resistance and VSE" and find out where our indifference curve hits the
Pareto frontier. Or we could say "this concept is essential to
democracy as I imagine it and must be present no matter what" (e.g. that
majority rule must imply Condorcet).
I like to keep as few as possible of the second type of opinion.
I'd say that for defeat strength, I can't see any obvious second-type
argument that say, margins or wv naturally generalize democracy and so
must be present.
Though, I think such an opinion could be possible. If you take specific method properties as
axiomatic you could significantly constrain the available choices.
Statistical models would disagree, too: if
bottom-ranking is considered to be the voter saying "I don't know where
to rank these candidates", that's a different thing to the voter
implicitly intending to bottom-rank every nonranked candidate.
From the standpoint of minimizing incentives, there is a similarity between these two: No
voter obtains a complaint or an incentive over preferences they didn't have. (This is where
symmetric completion hurts the performance, as we may yield to claims that are
hypothetical.) I'm not sure how to see a difference in implication between "I meant them to
be equal" or "I didn't know the relative order." Maybe an estimate of social utility
would vary based on how voted indifference is interpreted?
I tend to personally favor wv, but that's partly due to convention,
partly due to strategy resistance.
(Now that I think about it, I guess there's a third category: that
algorithm feature X should be present because it seems natural to the
voters, or that Y shouldn't because it seems to arrive at a conclusion,
even if it's a correct one, as by magic, and so won't be considered
legitimate by the voters.
Again there would be two perspectives: a relative one where this much
strategy resistance or VSE can make up for an incomprehensible
algorithm, and an absolute one where there's some level of complexity
the voters simply won't accept.)
"Marketability" I certainly acknowledge as a thing. Hopefully it doesn't force too many
decisions, and hopefully marketability isn't mistaken for more fundamental merit.
I'm not completely sure what is the accepted way to determine VSE. Is this the same as the
principle that a voter's zero info strategy is to submit a complete sincere ranking? I feel
like that principle lies more on the marketability side, since it shouldn't be a realistic
scenario.
Kevin
votingmethods.net
On 9/9/22 07:12, Kevin Venzke wrote:
Hi Kristofer,
I'm afraid that defeat strength is such a tangible concept that it inclines us to view it as
a finished product that we can now simply customize as we please. Or worse: That we are
duty-bound to measure it "accurately." We maximize some desired property, readily identified
within a single pairwise contest, and then apply the minmax algorithm to this ranking, and
expect it to result in a method whose properties have some kind of relationship to the
property we were maximizing, or properties that will at least be as good as the defeat
strength metric sounded.
Anyway. I guess there are two ways to answer this kind of question:
first, we could say "I want to maximize some combination of strategic
resistance and VSE" and find out where our indifference curve hits the
Pareto frontier. Or we could say "this concept is essential to
democracy as I imagine it and must be present no matter what" (e.g. that
majority rule must imply Condorcet).
I like to keep as few as possible of the second type of opinion.
I'd say that for defeat strength, I can't see any obvious second-type
argument that say, margins or wv naturally generalize democracy and so
must be present.
Though, I think such an opinion could be possible. If you take specific method properties as
axiomatic you could significantly constrain the available choices.
Statistical models would disagree, too: if
bottom-ranking is considered to be the voter saying "I don't know where
to rank these candidates", that's a different thing to the voter
implicitly intending to bottom-rank every nonranked candidate.
From the standpoint of minimizing incentives, there is a similarity between these two: No
voter obtains a complaint or an incentive over preferences they didn't have. (This is where
symmetric completion hurts the performance, as we may yield to claims that are
hypothetical.) I'm not sure how to see a difference in implication between "I meant them to
be equal" or "I didn't know the relative order." Maybe an estimate of social utility
would vary based on how voted indifference is interpreted?
For truncation in particular, I think equal last means that unranked
candidates provides information to the method that the voter desired
those candidates to be considered worse than everybody else, while "I
don't know" indicates that the voting method shouldn't care at all.
As an extreme example of the distinction, I once visited a web site
called "kitten duel" or something (it's no longer up), where the site
would show you two kitten pictures side by side and ask you which is
cutest. Suppose that there was such a kitten duel site with persistent
identities. Then if I visit it while logged in and choose the left
picture, that means I prefer the picture on the left to the right, but
it doesn't mean that I consider every other kitten picture to be
equal-ranked for worst. I just haven't been asked, so the method doesn't
know. It's the difference between my contribution to the Condorcet
matrix having 0 everywhere not explicitly 1, and having "?" or "N/A"
everywhere but in two cells.
I tend to personally favor wv, but that's partly due to convention,
partly due to strategy resistance.
(Now that I think about it, I guess there's a third category: that
algorithm feature X should be present because it seems natural to the
voters, or that Y shouldn't because it seems to arrive at a conclusion,
even if it's a correct one, as by magic, and so won't be considered
legitimate by the voters.
Again there would be two perspectives: a relative one where this much
strategy resistance or VSE can make up for an incomprehensible
algorithm, and an absolute one where there's some level of complexity
the voters simply won't accept.)
"Marketability" I certainly acknowledge as a thing. Hopefully it doesn't force too many
decisions, and hopefully marketability isn't mistaken for more fundamental merit.
I'm not completely sure what is the accepted way to determine VSE. Is this the same as the
principle that a voter's zero info strategy is to submit a complete sincere ranking? I feel
like that principle lies more on the marketability side, since it shouldn't be a realistic
scenario.
VSE is roughly speaking expected normalized honest performance under
some model. You create a number of synthetic voters whose utilities you
know, have them vote honestly, and check the utility of the winner
relative to random ballot (on the one hand) and the highest utility
candidate (on the other).
There's a trade-off between honest performance and strategic resistance
that creates a Pareto frontier - more of one leads to less of the other
if your methods are perfectly efficient.
For instance, Random Ballot is entirely strategy-proof but has a nonzero
probability of electing a candidate that everybody but a single voter
ranks last, and thus has pretty bad honest performance. On the other
hand, Borda tends to do well under honesty but has serious strategy
problems.
-km
As I understand it, the custom of treating truncation/abstention the same
as equal last rank is a practical expedient to ward off dark horse upsets.
On Fri, Sep 9, 2022, 2:31 AM Kristofer Munsterhjelm km_elmet@t-online.de
wrote:
On 9/9/22 07:12, Kevin Venzke wrote:
Hi Kristofer,
I'm afraid that defeat strength is such a tangible concept that it
inclines us to view it as
a finished product that we can now simply customize as we please. Or
worse: That we are
duty-bound to measure it "accurately." We maximize some desired
property, readily identified
within a single pairwise contest, and then apply the minmax algorithm
to this ranking, and
expect it to result in a method whose properties have some kind of
relationship to the
property we were maximizing, or properties that will at least be as
good as the defeat
strength metric sounded.
Anyway. I guess there are two ways to answer this kind of question:
first, we could say "I want to maximize some combination of strategic
resistance and VSE" and find out where our indifference curve hits the
Pareto frontier. Or we could say "this concept is essential to
democracy as I imagine it and must be present no matter what" (e.g. that
majority rule must imply Condorcet).
I like to keep as few as possible of the second type of opinion.
I'd say that for defeat strength, I can't see any obvious second-type
argument that say, margins or wv naturally generalize democracy and so
must be present.
Though, I think such an opinion could be possible. If you take specific
method properties as
axiomatic you could significantly constrain the available choices.
Statistical models would disagree, too: if
bottom-ranking is considered to be the voter saying "I don't know where
to rank these candidates", that's a different thing to the voter
implicitly intending to bottom-rank every nonranked candidate.
From the standpoint of minimizing incentives, there is a similarity
between these two: No
voter obtains a complaint or an incentive over preferences they didn't
have. (This is where
symmetric completion hurts the performance, as we may yield to claims
that are
hypothetical.) I'm not sure how to see a difference in implication
between "I meant them to
be equal" or "I didn't know the relative order." Maybe an estimate of
social utility
would vary based on how voted indifference is interpreted?
For truncation in particular, I think equal last means that unranked
candidates provides information to the method that the voter desired
those candidates to be considered worse than everybody else, while "I
don't know" indicates that the voting method shouldn't care at all.
As an extreme example of the distinction, I once visited a web site
called "kitten duel" or something (it's no longer up), where the site
would show you two kitten pictures side by side and ask you which is
cutest. Suppose that there was such a kitten duel site with persistent
identities. Then if I visit it while logged in and choose the left
picture, that means I prefer the picture on the left to the right, but
it doesn't mean that I consider every other kitten picture to be
equal-ranked for worst. I just haven't been asked, so the method doesn't
know. It's the difference between my contribution to the Condorcet
matrix having 0 everywhere not explicitly 1, and having "?" or "N/A"
everywhere but in two cells.
I tend to personally favor wv, but that's partly due to convention,
partly due to strategy resistance.
(Now that I think about it, I guess there's a third category: that
algorithm feature X should be present because it seems natural to the
voters, or that Y shouldn't because it seems to arrive at a conclusion,
even if it's a correct one, as by magic, and so won't be considered
legitimate by the voters.
Again there would be two perspectives: a relative one where this much
strategy resistance or VSE can make up for an incomprehensible
algorithm, and an absolute one where there's some level of complexity
the voters simply won't accept.)
"Marketability" I certainly acknowledge as a thing. Hopefully it doesn't
force too many
decisions, and hopefully marketability isn't mistaken for more
fundamental merit.
I'm not completely sure what is the accepted way to determine VSE. Is
this the same as the
principle that a voter's zero info strategy is to submit a complete
sincere ranking? I feel
like that principle lies more on the marketability side, since it
shouldn't be a realistic
scenario.
VSE is roughly speaking expected normalized honest performance under
some model. You create a number of synthetic voters whose utilities you
know, have them vote honestly, and check the utility of the winner
relative to random ballot (on the one hand) and the highest utility
candidate (on the other).
There's a trade-off between honest performance and strategic resistance
that creates a Pareto frontier - more of one leads to less of the other
if your methods are perfectly efficient.
For instance, Random Ballot is entirely strategy-proof but has a nonzero
probability of electing a candidate that everybody but a single voter
ranks last, and thus has pretty bad honest performance. On the other
hand, Borda tends to do well under honesty but has serious strategy
problems.
-km
Election-Methods mailing list - see https://electorama.com/em for list
info
On 09/09/2022 11:34 AM EDT Forest Simmons forest.simmons21@gmail.com wrote:
As I understand it, the custom of treating truncation/abstention the same as equal last rank is a practical expedient to ward off dark horse upsets.
But it's also just equivalent to the meaning of the ballot in a Hare RCV (or "IRV") election. Any unranked candidate is treated exactly as if they were ranked at the bottom level in the single transferable vote model. I would not like to see that meaning changed with an RCV election decided with different rules. In other words, I would not want to see the meaning of an unranked candidate to be changed so that somehow the unranked candidate is seen as preferred over any ranked candidate.
--
r b-j . _ . _ . _ . _ rbj@audioimagination.com
"Imagination is more important than knowledge."
.
.
.
I think I agree with Forest. It may be pragmatically wise to treat
unranked candidates as if they were equal last, but you can't force
voters to provide a meaningful ranking for candidates they don't know
much about, and might actually like if they knew more. Hence if
truncation is common, ranked voting methods won't perform as well as
you'd expect from theory.
CJC
On 09/09/2022 16:58, robert bristow-johnson wrote:
On 09/09/2022 11:34 AM EDT Forest Simmons forest.simmons21@gmail.com wrote:
As I understand it, the custom of treating truncation/abstention the same as equal last rank is a practical expedient to ward off dark horse upsets.
But it's also just equivalent to the meaning of the ballot in a Hare RCV (or "IRV") election. Any unranked candidate is treated exactly as if they were ranked at the bottom level in the single transferable vote model. I would not like to see that meaning changed with an RCV election decided with different rules. In other words, I would not want to see the meaning of an unranked candidate to be changed so that somehow the unranked candidate is seen as preferred over any ranked candidate.
--
r b-j . _ . _ . _ . _ rbj@audioimagination.com
"Imagination is more important than knowledge."
.
.
.
Election-Methods mailing list - see https://electorama.com/em for list info
In an STV-PR election (a.k.a. RCV), the voter's second and any subsequent preferences are contingency choices, to be used only in
the contingency that the voter's first choice candidate cannot be elected (because of lack of support) or has already been elected
to represent a full quota of voters (and so does not need the additional support).
Where a voter does not mark a preference against every candidate, that voter is telling the Returning Officer that he or she has no
preference among the unmarked candidates, and that if any choice has to be made among those candidates, he or she is happy to leave
that decision to those voters who do have preferences among those candidates. Unmarked preferences mean nothing more than "I have
opted out at this point and leave any further decisions to others".
James Gilmour
Edinburgh, Scotland
-----Original Message-----
From: Election-Methods [mailto:election-methods-bounces@lists.electorama.com] On Behalf Of robert bristow-johnson
Sent: 09 September 2022 16:59
To: EM election-methods@lists.electorama.com
Subject: Re: [EM] Defeat Strength
On 09/09/2022 11:34 AM EDT Forest Simmons forest.simmons21@gmail.com wrote:
As I understand it, the custom of treating truncation/abstention the same as equal last rank is a practical expedient to ward
off dark horse upsets.
But it's also just equivalent to the meaning of the ballot in a Hare RCV (or "IRV") election. Any unranked candidate is treated
exactly as if they were ranked at the bottom level in the single transferable vote model. I would not like to see that meaning
changed with an RCV election decided with different rules. In other words, I would not want to see the meaning of an unranked
candidate to be changed so that somehow the unranked candidate is seen as preferred over any ranked candidate.
r b-j . _ . _ . _ . _ rbj@audioimagination.com
Election-Methods mailing list - see https://electorama.com/em for list info
On 09/09/2022 12:16 PM EDT James Gilmour jamesgilmour@f2s.com wrote:
In an STV-PR election (a.k.a. RCV), the voter's second and any subsequent preferences are contingency choices, to be used only in
the contingency that the voter's first choice candidate cannot be elected (because of lack of support) or has already been elected
to represent a full quota of voters (and so does not need the additional support).
But James, we know that that is not always the case. Burlington 2009 and now, Alaska 2022, are counter-examples that disprove that.
In Burlington 2009, Kurt Wright voters were promised (as we all were promised) that if their first-choice cannot win, their second-choice vote is counted. Wright was defeated and those voters' second-choice votes were not counted. Had their second-choice votes been counted, a different candidate for mayor would have been elected.
Yesterday, the Alaska Division of Elections released the Cast Vote Records, and now we know this was repeated in Alaska last month. Sarah Palin voters were promised (as we all were promised) that if their first-choice cannot win, their second-choice vote is counted. Palin was defeated and those voters' second-choice votes were not counted. Had their second-choice votes been counted, a different candidate for U.S. Congress would have been elected.
These are cold hard facts supported by the public record that cannot be disputed.
Where a voter does not mark a preference against every candidate, that voter is telling the Returning Officer that he or she has no
preference among the unmarked candidates,
But that voter is expressing on their ballot that he or she does have a preference of any marked candidate over any of the unmarked candidates. That is equivalent to that all unmarked candidates are tied for last-choice preference on that ballot.
and that if any choice has to be made among those candidates, he or she is happy to leave
that decision to those voters who do have preferences among those candidates. Unmarked preferences mean nothing more than "I have
opted out at this point and leave any further decisions to others".
No. That's not true. Unmarked preferences mean "I prefer these candidates less than I prefer any candidates that I have marked".
--
r b-j . _ . _ . _ . _ rbj@audioimagination.com
"Imagination is more important than knowledge."
.
.
.