I joined the board of the Equal Vote Coalition in January 2025:

That's quite interesting.

I have mixed feelings about Equal Vote Coalition.  I am jealous of the name and the domain name.  I think that name belongs strictly to Condorcet advocacy.

I still consider EVC to be STAR advocates.  I don't consider STAR (or any cardinal method) to be "equal votes".  I also consider STAR or Score to have absolutely zero chance of ever being adopted for governmental elections.  And while Score is simple in concept, STAR, being a hybrid, is a little bit contrived.

We really should concentrate on reforming RCV to be Condorcet consistent.  That's what EVC should be doing.  Personally, I don't understand how or where EVC is getting their money to operate and support as many employees as they do.

About "Ranked Robin" that's seems to me to be a Sass invention and I don't understand why they tepidly promote that instead of just Condorcet RCV in general.  I have become convinced that for Condorcet RCV to ever be adopted in legislation, it will have to be either

1. BTR-IRV which requires only a small change to the existing IRV language or
2. a Two-method "straight ahead" Condorcet method.  Probably either Condorcet-Plurality or Condorcet-TTR.

The reason I came to this position was from discussions with friendly legislators and legislative counsel here in Vermont.  We need for "The law should say what it means and mean what it says."  The Two-method straight-ahead Condorcet is simply that.  Any other Condorcet-consistent method seems to obscure what it's doing.  What we want the law to do is to insure that if more voters mark their ballots that Candidate A is preferred to Candidate B, that Candidate B is not elected.  That's the only way that ensures that our votes are valued equally (as in "Equal Vote Coalition") and for the election to not be spoiled and for voters to not be punished for voting sincerely (which disincentives tactical voting).

And I am completely in disagreement with Sara Wolk about conceding the label "Ranked-Choice Voting" to only the Hare method.  Borda, Bucklin, and Condorcet are also RCV.  We must not allow FairVote to appropriate the term "RCV" to mean only IRV.

For no good reason.  I guess it's their child, as ugly as it is.

That's good.

I had shown before that with the assumption that if a voter's preference is A>B>C, they're gonna mark their STAR ballot A:5, B:1, C:0 because that will best accomplish their political goal in nearly all circumstances.  They want A elected and for that to happen, A has to get into the Automatic Runoff.  If A gets into the Runoff, then A is already ranked higher than anyone else and their vote in the final runoff is for A.  But if A can't get into the final runoff, then it's a choice between B and C and then scoring B just 1 level above C is sufficient for their entire vote to be for B.  Scoring B any higher only makes it more difficult to get their favorite, A, into the final runoff, so ostensibly there is no reason to score B higher than 1.

But I also shown that with that scoring regime, STAR would make the same mistake that Hare IRV makes regarding the Center Squeeze.  At least with numbers proportional to Burlington 2009 or Alaska August 2022.  The Condorcet winner exists and would not be elected.  If someone were to respond that this wouldn't happen if some voters scored B higher than 1, that may be true.  But why would any A proponents do that?  You would have to convince them that they need to harm the likelihood for A to get into the final runoff (which harms A's chance to be elected) in order to prevent the candidate they hate, C, from being elected.  But that is the tactic of "compromising" that is exactly what we're trying to get away from.  We do not want to make voters forsake their most favorite candidate in order to prevent their least favorite candidate from winning.

--

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

"Imagination is more important than knowledge."

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On 2025-04-03 21:58, robert bristow-johnson wrote:

What do you think of minmax? One possible way to put it is "in the
absence of a Condorcet winner, elect the candidate who would need the
fewest additional top votes to become one".

It has the disadvantage of not being Smith, and perhaps the standard of
judgement could be considered arbitrary, but that phrasing is pretty simple.

(This works because an A-top ballot increases the pairwise strength of A
vs everybody else. So the candidate who needs the fewest such votes is
the one whose worst defeat is the least worst.)

As for the others, I would much prefer C-TTR to C-Plurality; I suspect
the latter would be too easy to manipulate.

-km

czw., 3 kwi 2025 o 22:51 Kristofer Munsterhjelm km-elmet@munsterhjelm.no
napisał(a):

What do you think of minmax? One possible way to put it is "in the

For me, among tournament methods there are two options:
(1) Copeland -- easiest to explain, "a candidate with the most victories
wins". There is no need to justify the mechanism (because everyone knows it
works this way in sports tournaments and that's convincing enough), there's
even no need to explain what is the Condorcet winner, why it sometimes may
not exist, etc., ...
(2) ... and if we are not afraid of explaining all this stuff, then we can
go for Ranked Pairs as well, since it's only a bit harder to explain than
Minmax, but much easier to justify axiomatically. For RP, you just say:
"Construct the final classification by considering pairwise victories one
by one, starting from the strongest ones. If A defeats B, then A is higher
than B in the classification. Omit a victory if considering it would create
a contradiction with the ones considered so far".

Personally, I like the second option most. That's really not rocket
science, if someone is interested and doesn't get it immediately, a
simple example illustrating it would be enough. The D'Hondt method for
parliamentary elections is much less intuitive and harder to explain, but
somehow it is widely used. IMO, implementing Condorcet is hard not because
of the conceptual complexity, but just because it would revolutionize the
political scene so much that it would never be safe for a ruling party.

Btw, I also do not see any advantages of BTR-IRV, except for "being
IRV-ish" --- and IRV is not that popular for it to make sense. If we care
about no axioms except for CW or Smith, I'd rather go for BTR-Plurality (so
BTR-IRV, but without all this "recalculating scores" stuff --- which
immediately restricts the audience to people familiar with IRV and is
pretty pointless in elections with a CW). This would be also superior to
Condorcet-Plurality / TTR, I guess.

Best,
Grzegorz

I'm changing the title of the sub-thread.

Is that language sufficiently procedural.  Like spelling out the step of exactly how to count the votes and declare the winner?

Remember that it's only in 0.5% of the RCV election that this opportunity to manipulate would exist.  For me, thinking about legislative language, it's about persuading legislators (and voters) that the law is reasonable and reflects their collective vote.  They're not going to like any obscurity or opacity.  They may suspect something sneaky that benefit some group (like "liberals") might be slipped in underneath obscure language.  Anti-RCV people already suspect that.

I have a document of templates for legislative language here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1DGvs2F_YoKcbl2SXzCcfm3nEMkO0zCbR/view .  Even though the legislative language they came up with is different: https://legislature.vermont.gov/Documents/2024/Docs/BILLS/H-0424/H-0424%20As%20Introduced.pdf I still consider the templates sufficient to explain clearly the essential components of the law.

Anyway, using the template, how compact can you get the Minimax or Copeland language to look?  And, to the pedestrian voter (or legislator), how to we persuade them that this law is transparent and that it truly reflects the voters' collective will?

Condorcet-Plurality is in the template.  Condorcet-TTR wouldn't be much worse:

All elections of [office] shall be by ballot, using a system of ranked-choice voting without a separate runoff election. The presiding election officer shall implement a ranked-choice voting protocol according to these guidelines:
(1) The ballot shall give voters the option of ranking candidates in order of preference. Lower ordinal preference shall be considered higher rank and the candidate marked as first preference is considered ranked highest. Equal ranking of candidates shall be allowed. Any candidate not marked with a preference shall be considered as ranked lower than every candidate marked with a preference.
(2) If a candidate receives a majority (over 50 percent) of first preferences, that candidate is elected.
(3) If no candidate receives a majority of first preferences, a Condorcet-consistent retabulation shall be performed by the presiding election officer. The retabulation shall examine every possible pairing of candidates. Given N as the number of candidates, then the number of possible pairings of candidates is N(N-1)/2. In each pair, if the number of ballots marked ranking a selected candidate over the other candidate exceeds the number of ballots marked to the contrary, then the other candidate is declared defeated. After all candidate pairings are examined, the candidate who remains not declared defeated is the Condorcet winner and is elected.
(4) If no Condorcet winner exists in subdivision (3), then the prevailing candidate of the pair involving the two candidates having the most first preferences is elected.
(5) The [governing jurisdiction] may adopt additional regulations consistent with this subsection to implement these standards.

So, in subdivision (4), how would the language look like for Minimax?

For a single-method system like Ranked Pairs, how would subdivisions (3) and (4) be replaced?

--

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

"Imagination is more important than knowledge."

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On 2025-04-04 17:34, robert bristow-johnson wrote:

No, that's the disadvantage. I guess you could make a verification
process at the end that verifies that candidate A's score is n by adding
(n-1) first preferences, counting again, seeing that A is not a CW, then
adding n first preferences and confirming that A is now a CW. But it
feels pretty ugly.

Center squeezes don't occur that often with IRV, either, but when they
do, it's pretty damaging. My concern with C-Plurality is that the way to
strategize is so transparent, compared to something that's either more
IRV-like or thoroughly pairwise, that it would tempt people to use
strategy more often.

I could be wrong, of course; but it would suck if I were right.

Copeland should be pretty easy:

(3) If no candidate receives a majority of first preferences
[...language omitted, same as above...] In each pair, if the number of
ballots marked ranking a selected candidate over the other exceeds the
number of ballots marked to the contrary, then add one to the selected
candidate's tournament victory count.

(4) The candidate with the highest tournament victory count is elected.
In the case of a tie, then the tied candidate having the most first
preferences is elected. (alternatively: prevailing candidate of the pair
involving the two tied candidates having the most first preferences is
elected.)

Copeland,Plurality is somewhat better than Condorcet-Plurality because
it passes Smith. The Plurality tiebreak must choose between candidates
in the Smith set, as they all have higher Copeland scores than
candidates outside it. So if, e.g. a burial spree goes wrong, you don't
get a candidate who's pairwise beaten by a lot of other candidates
elected just because he has a high first preference count.

Still, it's somewhat limited, because if there are three strong
candidates and one of them engineers a cycle, then the Copeland set will
contain the three candidates who are part of the cycle. So it's not very
decisive in that respect.

As for minmax, you could write out an algorithm, but the problem is that
it wouldn't look anything like the phrasing. E.g.

• If no candidate receives a majority of first preferences ... mark each
  candidate's worst victory margin as undefined.
• Examine each pair of candidates. Let the pair's margin be the number
  of voters who marked a ranking preferring the first candidate over the
  other, subtracted by the number of voters who marked a ranking
  preferring the second candidate to the first. If the first candidate's
  worst victory margin is undefined or greater than the pair's margin,
  update the first candidate's worst victory magnitude to equal the pair's
  margin.
• The candidate with the highest worst victory magnitude is elected.

The intuition of the algorithm is more like "the candidate who survives
the best/takes the least beating no matter who he's paired up with wins".

(I wonder how computationally complex methods are defined in legislative
language where they are used... for instance, it would be a nightmare to
write down a hand-count algorithmic procedure for Meek STV.)

-km