I don't understand this craziness of advocating outdated election "systems"
like IRV, either.

Everyone agrees it's obsolete junk; why keep pushing mediocrity when so
many better options exist?

On Thu, Jul 12, 2018 at 9:37 PM, Sennet Williams wrote:

---------------------------- Original Message ----------------------------

Subject: [EM] IRV / RCv advances

From: "Sennet Williams" sennetwilliams@yahoo.com

Date: Thu, July 12, 2018 9:37 pm

To: "Election-Methods@lists.electorama.com" Election-Methods@lists.electorama.com

american female mayor of SF: thanks to RCV.4-Jesse Arreguin is the first latino mayor of Berkeley, thanks to RCV.5-Jean Quan was the first asian mayor of Oakland, thanks to RCV.6-Libby Schaaf, Oakland's new mayor, was elected thanks to RCV.

you know that Ranked Pairs is not the same as IRV although both RP and IRV are, strictly
speaking, RCV.
but, unfortunately, IRV was presented by FairVote as the only way to tally a Ranked-Choice Vote ballot in the past, but at least they called it "IRV".� now they have appropriated the term "RCV" and use that label to repackage the same IRV (under a
different name since "IRV" has gotten a little bit stained, particularly after Burlington 2009) with a different label that might seem more attractive.
I would hope that everywhere that this topic comes up in the mainstream media that we can hear someone saying:

"Ranked-Choice Voting - GOOD ;� Plurality Voting -� BAD"� �(fine, Rob Richie and i agree about that.)� but then we need to hear:

"Ranked-Pairs -� GOOD ; Instant Runoff Voting (or STV or Hare or AV or whatever is the name in vogue at some particular place in spacetime) - BAD"
�
we can introduce RCV to voters and to governments without having to define it solely in terms of IRV.� IRV is
the second worst way of realizing RCV (Borda is, i think, the worst, and i haven't formed an opinion about Bucklin).� A Condorcet-compliant method the only correct way to implement RCV.� (and I still think that RP is simpler to implement and simpler to sell than Schulze, sorry
Marcus.� �and RP and Schulze agree on any election with a Smith Set of 3 or smaller and while i think a cycle will almost never happen, a cycle with a Smith Set bigger than 3 will truly never happen in a governmental election with decent ballot access requirements so we may as well sell
the simpler RP.)
I am truly disappointed that, in the public discussion, only IRV is suggested for RCV as if they are the same thing.� They are not.� IRV is a crappy way of doing RCV.� Why not just do it the right way?
I believe that more than two viable parties is a
good thing and we want to level the playing field between what is now the two major parties and, what are now, minor parties.� And I want Independents to have a level playing field.� So when an election happens when there are 3 or more viable candidates (in which anyone of the 3 are
plausible winners), my fear is what happened in Burlington Vermont in 2009 will happen again somewhere, people will get pissed, RCV is repealed, and election reform is set back another generation.� We lost IRV in 2010 and it will be 2030 before enough people die and enough new people come into
Vermont that the memory of this failure will start to dissipate.� THEN maybe we can have another stab at RCV.� I hope then, we'll do it right.
In the meantime, I wish all other jurisdictions will at least be able to consider Ranked Pairs (along with STV or IRV) and choose
wisely.
Screwups in reform sets reform back.� Sometimes permanently.� We need to learn from mistakes and these IRV proponents are not learning from the mistakes.
�

--

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

"Imagination is more important than knowledge."

�
�
�
�

It is ironic that the world seems to have this electoral reform battle
of the big-enders versus the little-enders (from Gullivers Travels).
That is to say the collectivist Europeans and their outliers, back a
proportional count with party lists - such as sabotages individual
choice, without a ranked choice for voters. While the good ole US of A
does not forget individual representation with a ranked choice, but
forgets equality of representation with a proportional count. The only
exception is Cambridge Mass. using STV, and one or two minor cases of
STV in Minnesota, I believe.
One EM member says STV is BAD. As the ignored inventor of FAB STV, I
know the limitations of traditional STV but essentially it is on the
right lines, laid down by the original inventors, Carl Andrae and Thomas
Hare, namely the quota-preferential method, as the Aussies pithily
describe its essence.

As for ranked pairing, my understanding is that it is not an independent
method at all, but a means of cross-referencing a ranked choice
electoral system. As previously mentioned to this email group, I wrote a
supplemetary chapter on this, in my book FAB STV: Four Averages Binomial
Single Transferable Vote.

from
Richard Lung.

On 13/07/2018 02:37, Sennet Williams wrote:

On 2018-07-13 08:53, Richard Lung wrote:

If you mean Ranked Pairs, that is a method of its own. It goes like this:

1. Construct a pairwise matrix (call it d) from the set of ranked
   ballots. Usually this is defined as c[x, y] = number of voters who
   preferred x to y, and d[x, y] = c[x, y] if c[x, y] > c[y, x], otherwise
   d[x, y] = 0. (wv) Margins is also possible; see below.

2. Make a list of pairwise contests and sort it from greatest value of
   d, to least value of d. A pairwise contest entry is of the form "X over
   Y" and has strength equal to d[x, y].
   E.g. if d[a, b] = 100 and d[b, c] = 80, then "A over B" comes before "B
   over C".

3. Go down the list and affirm a pairwise contest unless it would
   contradict what has already been affirmed. "Affirming X over Y" means
   that the final outcome must rank X over Y.

4. Return the candidate who has nobody affirmed over him; he is the winner.

Strictly speaking, what I've described above is MAM (without
tiebreakers). Ranked Pairs "proper" uses margins (d[x, y] = c[x, y] if
c[x, y] > c[y, x], otherwise d[x, y] = c[x, y] - c[y, x]).

An example instance of step 3 could go like:

If the list is:
40: A over B
34: B over C
30: C over A
0: B over A
0: C over B
0: A over C

Then step three proceeds this way:
Affirm A over B: A must be higher ranked than B in the outcome
Affirm B over C: B must be higher ranked than C in the outcome
C over A: Impossible because we've affirmed A over B and B over C,
which means we indirectly have A over C, and C over A would contradict it.
B over A: Contradicts A over B
C over B: contradicts B over C
Affirm A over C: A must be higher ranked than C in the outcome (though
we already knew that).

And then the outcome is: A first, B second, C third. A is the winner.

---------------------------- Original Message ----------------------------

Subject: Re: [EM] IRV / RCv advances

From: "Richard Lung" voting@ukscientists.com

Date: Fri, July 13, 2018 2:53 am

To: "Sennet Williams" sennetwilliams@yahoo.com

Cc: "Election-Methods@lists.electorama.com" Election-Methods@lists.electorama.com

i was referring to the Tideman Ranked-Pairs method, which is a Condorcet compliant method of RCV.

�
�

�
Richard, I think i found this e-book at�https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/806030 .
�
There are a couple of observations (or criticisms, sorry about that):

1. RCV advocates have trouble convincing people that just insist that a ranked-ballot is too
   complicated.� No matter how the ranked-ballot election is tallied, they complain that instructions which are anything more than "Mark your choice with an 'X'." is too complicated.� I really disagree, but that is a reality that we voting-reform advocates have to deal
   with.�
2. I do think that Score Voting (I like that term for it, rather than "Range Voting") is too complicated and that both Score Voting and Approval Voting are inherently presenting voters with a tactical decision, which is: What do they do with their 2nd-choice
   candidate?� I want to remove any pressure for tactical decisions.� And when it comes to a binary decision ("Do we elect A or B?"), I fundamentally want each voter's vote count equally.� This is one basic reason I'm for Condorcet.
3. IRV (or STV or, nowadays,
   "RCV") advocates say to me that "Condorcet" is too complicated.� I disagree emphatically in the case of no cycle in which I think that Condorcet is far simpler than IRV.� All Condorcet simply says is "If more voters mark their ballots preferring Candidate A
   over Candidate B than voters marking their ballots to the contrary, then Candidate B is not elected."� That's all it says and, with one-person-one-vote as an electoral dogma, I cannot see how anyone can disagree with that.� The only thing that makes Condorcet appear
   complicated is: "What to do in the case of a cycle?" and Ranked-Pairs is the simplest meaningful rule to answer to that.
4. Even looking at your online book that I note above, I cannot figure out what FAB-STV is.� With study, maybe I can figure it out.� But because of
   its inherent complexity, selling this method to a legislature or a voting public appears to me to be dead-in-the-water.� If it's complicated, it will never-ever-ever be adopted for governmental use, and that is because we want elections to be transparent to the public.� The public needs
   to know exactly how and why some particular candidate won the election, and it must not be obfuscated behind an opaque or hard-to-understand algorithm for tallying votes and picking the winner.
5. There are several reasons why STV is a problem and I doubt, once I understand what FAB-STV
   is, that these problems will be surmounted.� e.g. Is FAB-STV precinct summable?� Or do all of the ballots (or electronic facsimiles of the ballots) have to be transferred from the precincts to a central location where the tabulation is done and after each round, votes are transferred from
   one pile to another according to the FAB-STV rules?� If that problem doesn't go away, there will always be election integrity advocates (as well as conspiracy theorists) that will suspect that maybe some monkey business happens when the ballots are transferred from the precincts to the central
   location, or maybe the code at the central location got hacked, and there is no immediate way to check that out.� Precinct summability is an important safeguard that the resistors to change (those who support keep First-Past-The-Post) will use to beat over our heads.� And with today's STV
   (and I assume also with FAB-STV) they can still bonk us over the head with that.
6. Lastly, I am not (yet) venturing into the multi-winner election problem.� I realize that with multi-winner elections (often multi-seat legislative districts or city councils with large districts or
   at-large councilors), that STV might be the simplest way to get to proportional representation (PR).� And despite the precinct-summability problem, STV might be preferable to other methods (but it seems to me that the ranking that happens from Ranked-Pairs might work for multi-winner).�
   So when I say "STV --> BAD", I mean that principally for single-winner elections.

--

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

"Imagination is more important than knowledge."

�
�
�
�

I took ranked pairs to mean Condorcet pairing. No?

Richard Lung.

On 13/07/2018 17:37, Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote:

On 2018-07-13 20:56, Richard Lung wrote:

Not quite. Perhaps the terms can be a bit confusing.

The Condorcet criterion is a voting method criterion that says "if there
exists a candidate who would win a two candidate runoff against any
other candidate, based on the ballot preferences, then that candidate
must win". In other words, if there exists a candidate A, so that for
any other candidate B, more voters prefer A to B than B to A, then A
must win.

A Condorcet method is a method that satisfies that criterion. These can
use pairwise matrices (what I called c and d in my description of Ranked
Pairs), but they don't need to. For instance, the Borda analog of IRV
(where you repeatedly eliminate the candidate with the lowest Borda
score) is a Condorcet method although no pairwise matrices are needed to
calculate who wins.

A pairwise method could be the same as a Condorcet method, or could be a
Condorcet method that explicitly uses a pairwise matrix.

Ranked Pairs is a Condorcet method that uses an election's associated
pairwise matrix to determine the winner of that election. Schulze is
another (as is Minmax, Copeland, River, etc...)

So Ranked Pairs is not a class of methods, but a particular method - or
two methods if you consider the version proposed by Nicolaus Tideman
(with margins definition of d) as a different method than the version
proposed by Steve Eppley (with wv definition of d).

I called d the pairwise matrix in my description of Ranked Pairs, but
it's probably more accurate to call c the pairwise matrix (or Condorcet
matrix). When doing precinct counts, the election authority would get
different c matrices from each precinct, sum them up element-wise, and
then convert to d when running Ranked Pairs (or Schulze, Minmax,
Copeland, River, or what method it might use).

In promoting RCV, you can't just credit it in cases where the outcome would
have been the same given plurality / first past the post.

I can't speak for the others in this list, but London Breed was the front
runner and would have won in a traditional FPTP/plurality election.  She
nearly lost due to RCV and effectively spoke out against it when saying it
was the method we are stuck with.  You can make the claim that it was
"thanks to RCV" due to the fact that SF previously would have had a
separate run off election between her and the next top candidate (would
have been Leno or Kim), which she could have lost, but none of Breed's
supporters are saying "thanks to RCV".  So it is hard to argue that this is
good press to anyone beyond those who were already fans of RCV.  And that
causes me to question all the others in the list.

Living in SF, I can say that many people who filled out ballots correctly
really didn't understand how it worked.  Education on this stuff is tough.
The press didn't feel positive.

As a side note on this specific election with regards to RCV, it made me
question if we should still have a separate runoff when less than some
amount (maybe 2%) separates the candidates after all rounds.  When after
RCV it was still so tight of an election, the community may have been
better served (even if the outcome was the same) to get a week or two of
campaigning and a chance to choose solely between these two candidates.

On Thu, Jul 12, 2018 at 11:53 PM Richard Lung voting@ukscientists.com
wrote:

On 2018-07-14 02:04, Christopher Colosi wrote:

That's a problem with many ranked vote methods, and moving to
multiwinner will make it worse still. I suppose voters in places like
the NZ counties that use Meek just trust the method without entirely
knowing how it works, but such trust would have to depend on results. In
that respect, STV has it easier than IRV because it's more clear that it
has an effect: a proportional council looks very different from a
two-party-controlled one.

Warren makes a related argument that although you'd expect IRV to
dominate top-two because IRV has many rounds and top-two has just two,
in practice, the IRV winner tends to coincide with the Plurality winner
more often than the top-two winner coincides with the Plurality winner:
http://rangevoting.org/TTRvsIRVrevdata.html

Being a Condorcet fellow, I'd suggest a runoff between the IRV winner
and whoever most voters prefer to the IRV winner, if that candidate
either beats the IRV winner pairwise or is within, say 2% of doing so.
But I don't suppose the election authorities would be all that
interested in doing so if IRV has been marketed as a cost-saving measure
("get the results of a runoff without having to actually hold a runoff!").

(I would prefer the runoff to be between the CW if there is one and he's
not the IRV winner, otherwise as above, but that might just be too complex.)