In 35 years of promotion of a ranked-method & heavy spending, what does
FairVote have to show for it? Two states & some cities. That isn’t success,
for 35 years.

If they’d been instead offering Approval there’d likely be a lot more
success.

…& don’t forget that Condorcet, too, has a very computationally-intensive &
computationally-demanding count, with the consequent loss of transparency,
& difficulty of security-auditing for count-fraud.

On Sat, Mar 16, 2024 at 14:23 robert bristow-johnson <
rbj@audioimagination.com> wrote:

It's better than nothing, but FV needs to be more honest about failures.

The repeal effort in Alaska in 2024 is grossly underestimated by the IRV happy-talkers just as the repeal effort in Burlington was underestimated in 2009 and 2010.  There is evidence of that in the postings I made to this list in those years.

I predict that RCV in Alaska will be repealed in November, we'll see.

That we don't know.  Fargo and St. Louis are the only governments using Approval.  And it doesn't take away the pressure on voters to vote tactically whenever there are 3 or more candidates.

We talked about this before, Michael, when I posted.  Because of Precinct Summability and the decentralization of the tabulation (that does not exist with Hare IRV), there is no practical bottleneck of computational burden (like there is with Hare IRV that first requires the centralization of all individual ballot data).

When the ballot is inserted into the ballot machine, the ballot is scanned and if the ballot is accepted as not spoiled (Dominion is quite a pain in the ass about this), then tallies are immediately incremented, as they are now with FPTP.  That will take all of a millisecond.  When the election day ends and polls close, all there needs is to print out the tallies for that polling place.  Then they are securely published and no one is gonna be able to "... find, uh, 11780 .. votes."

If they're counted by hand, if C is the number of candidates, then IRV may require up to C-1 passes through the ballot pile.  Condorcet will require C(C-1)/2 passes with the ballot pile.  Laborious, but straight-forward.  And if the precinct is so large that this manual tabulation is unfeasible, then they just need tabulators, no matter what the method is.

It's not at all the same problem as with IRV, where, other than 1st-choice votes, no one knows what's inside the tabulators or ballot bags that we haul from each polling place to City Hall in the evening.  But with FPTP and Condorcet (and Approval and Score, I will concede), the only opaque section of the path lies solely in the tabulators (human or machine) at the polling place.

Nope, that's a falsehood.  Condorcet is Precinct Summable and those tallies add up and the original tallies come right outa the same machine that the ballots go into, just like FPTP.  There are no intermediate steps that are opaque.  It's not at all the same problem as with Hare RCV.

If we have Precinct Summability the "transparency, & difficulty of security-auditing for count-fraud" is the same as we have now with FPTP.

But without Precinct Summability, there is a serious loss and I am trying to persuade policy makers in our state of that fact.  So far I got two state reps and two state senators to understand this.  This bill (which is not going anywhere) was inspired by me: https://legislature.vermont.gov/bill/status/2024/H.424

But, unfortunately, S.32 (Hare) is doing better, but is getting hung up a little in the House Gov Ops.

--

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

"Imagination is more important than knowledge."

.
.
.

That’s true: The major computational demand, the exhaustive pairwise-count,
is a local precincts-job, & the pairwise totals can be incremented as the
ballots are read.

But there are just a lot more totals, & so there’s undeniably more to the
local counts than with Approval. A lot more totals to audit. With 20
candidates, 380 instead of 20.

…& it requires finding & comparing each pair of candidates’ rank-positions
on each ballot, instead of just a simple plain count like Approval.

So, in more than one way, it’s a much bigger & more complicated count than
Approval.

On Sat, Mar 16, 2024 at 15:58 robert bristow-johnson <
rbj@audioimagination.com> wrote:

Cardinal methods also avoid spoilers when there's no Condorcet winner.

On Sat, Mar 16, 2024 at 2:23 PM robert bristow-johnson <
rbj@audioimagination.com> wrote:

Every method does this. With 3 candidates all Condorcet methods can
encourage burial.

BTW, I posted at r/EndFPTP a derived scenario that shows how STAR fails to

I don't see how that's a failure. There's two possibilities here:

1. If the votes are honest, I don't see what the problem is. The three
   candidates are neck-and-neck and there's not much reason to prefer any.
2. If the votes are strategic, this seems like terrible strategy on the
   part of each group. Why wouldn't you give the center candidate more than 0
   stars?

On Sat, Mar 16, 2024 at 11:52 AM robert bristow-johnson <
rbj@audioimagination.com> wrote:

On Sat, Mar 16, 2024 at 18:12 Closed Limelike Curves <
closed.limelike.curves@gmail.com> wrote:

No, the best Condorcet methods strongly deter burial, in two separate ways:

1. They meet Mutual-Defense
2. Additionally, they’re strongly autodeterent.

When I wrote “Mutual-Defense” I meant “Minimal-Defense”.

On Sat, Mar 16, 2024 at 20:49 Michael Ossipoff email9648742@gmail.com
wrote:

On 2024-03-16 23:57, robert bristow-johnson wrote:

I've got Mike plonked, so I don't see his posts, but I would like to add
this:

• If a lack of summability is not a problem, then BTR-IRV isn't that
  much more complex than IRV. And at the cost of slightly more complexity
  than that, Benham can preserve IRV's strategy resistance and do away
  with most of its exit incentive.

If computers do the counting, then relatively laborious steps aren't any
problem, as long as the public understands why they're there. BTR-IRV's
safeguarding step follows directly from your concept that "if more
people prefer A to B than vice versa, then B must not be elected".

• If, on the other hand, lack of summability is a problem, then that
  disqualifies IRV outright and we're done.

It would seem to me that the only reason one would accept IRV and reject
Condorcet-IRV would be if there's a manual count and the initial O(n^2)
Condorcet matrix calculation is considered too laborious. Or for
marketing reasons.

As for Approval, my position hasn't really changed: it is able to pass
so many criteria by offloading the burden of voting onto the voter
himself and by classifying a large swath of different ballots as all
"honest" (in the rank-consistent sense). Not only strategic voters have
to play the strategy game, but honest voters too[1]: just determining
which honest vote to submit requires strategy! With ranking, on the
other hand, it's easy: there's only one rank-consistent honest ballot,
so if you don't want to play the game, just submit that ballot. No
manual DSV needed.

(See also Forest's explanation of my point at
http://lists.electorama.com/pipermail/election-methods-electorama.com/2016-October/000717.html.)

-km

[1] Both honest voters in the rank-consistent sense and in the von
Neumann-Morgenstern sense.

Only if there is a cycle involved.  Either the election was in a cycle in the first place or if the burial strategy is to push the election into a cycle.

If there never ever were any cycles, then Condorcet does not fail.  No spoiler, no incentive to vote other than sincerely.  If you (the voter) lose, it's because you're in the minority.  If your hated candidate wins, it's because no other candidate is favored by more voters than this hated candidate.

The Center candidate is the Condorcet Winner and STAR only compares relative rankings in the runoff.  So like IRV, if the Condorcet Winner gets into the final runoff, the Condorcet Winner will always beat anyone else there.

The voters supporting Center but who liked Left better than Right would have done better (like get their candidate elected) by burying Left.  (But at least 6 of them, had 4 of them buried Left, they would cause Right to win.)  So, by even by scoring Left at merely 1, they actually betrayed their favorite candidate.

The voters supporting Right and who liked Center better than Left (this would be normal) would have done better (like preventing Left from winning) by scoring Center a little higher than they did.  Had 2 or 3 or 6 of them scored Center higher, enough for 6 points, then Left would be defeated.  But then they have to betray their favorite candidate and the promise of STAR is that you don't have to do that.  Now, what was hard for the Right voters in Burlington to accept was that their candidate was never going to win in any pairwise comparison and that their candidate was the spoiler. But that was actually the case.  Alaska was a little different.  Peltola was always in the lead and there was no "come from behind" victory as occasionally happens with IRV.

NO VOTER should have to strategize.  But I explained that if your preference is A>B>C, why without sophisticated consideration of the possibilities it makes perfect sense to score your ballot A:5, B:1, C:0.  Makes simple sense, particularly with STAR (and assuming only 3 significant candidates).  The problem is when it's a close 3-way race, then, whether it's STAR or IRV, then tactical voting might serve a voter's political interests better than sincere voting.  We should prevent that burden of tactical voting whenever we can.  (And we can with the ranked ballot as long as there is always a Condorcet Winner.)

I modeled this after real votes in Burlington 2009.  There were 1289 Right voters (outa 3294) that bullet-voted for Right.  There were even 568 Left voters (outa 2981) that bullet-voted for Left.  That's what they did.

Now, unlike STAR, IRV would not have helped the Center voters with any burying strategy.  The problem with both STAR or IRV is with the Right voters who were told that they can throw their full support behind Right and not get burned by it.  That was clearly not true in Burlington 2009 nor in Alaska 2022 with IRV and I don't think STAR would have done better.

--

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

"Imagination is more important than knowledge."

.
.
.

Hi Kristofer,

I have a detailed reply below.  In short, I'm still pretty sure Michael
Ossipoff is worth listening to every so often (even though many of his
emails are thoughtless stream-of-consciousness that would get him banned in
most places, and I haven't ruled that out if it becomes clear he's driving
people away).  Credible voter models show that approval voting and
Condorcet consistency are practically compatible, even if they aren't
strictly compatible.  A system that "computers can count, even if people
can't" is not viable in our lifetimes, because people are more complicated
than computers.

More inline....

On Sun, Mar 17, 2024 at 4:28 AM Kristofer Munsterhjelm km_elmet@t-online.de
wrote:

That's too bad.  Michael is frequently annoying, but he's frequently
correct.  This mailing list was started in large part because of a
mailing-list conversation I had with Michael in 1995, where he was being
obnoxious on another list.  I thought I'd be able to show that he was a
crank.  Turns out he taught me about center squeeze.  You should consider
unplonking him.

Having volunteered as a poll worker for the first time in a city that uses
RCV for some elections, it changed my perspective on election security.  I
appreciated how much process there was, but also how much of the process
was shrugged off when it was a little inconvenient.

There weren't any RCV races in the March 5 election here, so I didn't have
to perform any tech support for RCV, but having voted in many RCV races, I
could see what a goat rodeo that can become for poll workers.  My hunch is
that the more complicated the election, the easier it would be to have
steps of the process shrugged off as poll workers get frazzled as the day
wears on.

I think "summability" is really just shorthand for "vaguely makes sense for
someone who really really cares about the end result to keep track of the
election in real time".  Strict Condorcet methods are admittedly difficult
on this count.  Approval is drop-dead simple on this count.

I've become convinced (by simulations and gradual persuasion over the past
decade or so) that approval is good enough.

If computers do the counting, then relatively laborious steps aren't any

I think that's an easy thing for those of us who are good with computers to
say.  Computers are taking over the world, but there's a limit to how much
people trust computers and the people who write the software for
computers.  Many people "trust" computers only as far as they can throw a
datacenter.  Granted, it's possible to wire up many computers in a small
box that most healthy adults can throw and call that a "datacenter", but
I'm talking about the brick-and-mortar datacenters often placed near power
generation plants.  Most people have given up the fight, and welcome our
robot overlords, but our robot overlords don't really care if we understand
elections, and may prefer to do away with elections and take control
themselves.  :-)

In seriousness, I'm guessing this mailing list skews heavily "math
literate" in addition to skewing heavily "computer literate", and I think
that those of us that are literate in those way have a hard time relating
to people that aren't as literate in those areas:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/math-hard-easy-teaching-instruction/2021/06/25/4fbec7ac-d46b-11eb-ae54-515e2f63d37d_story.html

I'm supportive of BTR-IRV, but I'll concede that summability and reporting
results in an easy-to-understand form (in real time) is a big problem.  I
think it's important for voters (on election night) to be able to see a
television reporter say "Results from the precincts on the southwest side
of town were just reported, and CandB took the lead over CandA.  Let's turn
it over to our analysts at the elections desk to explain what happened!"
The pre-election polling and exit polling should provide a reasonably
understandable explanation.  I fear we're due for a lot of election fraud
if most people don't understand what happened (and honestly, having lived
in San Francisco since 2011 and seen how some close elections have turned
out, it wouldn't surprise me at all if there's some consequential electoral
fraud here).

It would seem to me that the only reason one would accept IRV and reject

Why not both?  I think that both FairVote and the Center for Election
Science spent years marketing against "nerds" that understand the
importance of the Condorcet winner criterion
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet_winner_criterion, so Condorcet
advocates went through some tough times as those two organizations gained
traction.  Thankfully, both organizations have gotten more careful about
their anti-Condorcet rhetoric, and both organizations have new leadership.
equal.vote is mildly pro Condorcet, but only mildly so, and maybe only
because they know I'll call them out if they get too overt marketing
against the Condorcet winner criterion.  They endorse "Ranked Robin
https://electowiki.org/wiki/Ranked_Robin", which ... I won't get into
here.

In the 1990s and 2000s (and perhaps even much of the 2010s), I would have
wholeheartedly endorsed this position.  I've been persuaded that Approval
is fine.  People understand "approval ratings" (or at least, they think
they do).  When we had a close RCV election here in San Francisco (the 2018
mayoral special election
https://electowiki.org/wiki/2018_San_Francisco_mayoral_special_election),
the pre-election polls were useless.  That bothered me a lot.  I preferred
the winner, but it was really obvious that in a city where there were
parties competitive with the Democratic Party (who seemingly preferred the
winner of the 2018, since she was the "establishment" candidate), an RCV
election that was close as our 2018 election would have been a complete
fiasco.

We may want to make a point of figuring out a seemingly fair way of seeding
an arbitrary number of candidates in pairwise bracket, since there are a
lot of people that find those fun:
https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/bracket-challenge/?contestid=32#brackets/fullbracket

(See also Forest's explanation of my point at

I hear you, and I read what Forest wrote.  Ultimately, I think it's
important for most voters to vaguely know what the election is going to
look like in order to be comfortable using the system.  I don't think most
folks here in the SF Bay Area really understand RCV.  The topic frequently
comes up on the nightly news, for example here:
https://www.ktvu.com/news/lawsuit-filed-to-overturn-oakland-mayoral-election

My fear is that RCV makes fraud easier, because few people truly understand
what's going on under the hood, and the founders of FairVote don't help
educate; they obfuscate.  I'm hopeful that FairVote will get over their
nasty case of "founder's syndrome" soon, so that they will become better
partners in electoral reform efforts.

[1] Both honest voters in the rank-consistent sense and in the von

Could you explain what you mean by this?

Rob