I consider Condorcet to be precinct summable with no more than N^2 number of tallies.  I think 16 tallies for 4 candidates is feasible.  Even 25 tallies for 5 candidates.

The N(N-1)/2 pairwise comparison are done as the ballot is scanned by the tabulator machine.  That part is opaque, but the rest of it is completely transparent and the complexity is small.

Unlike IRV has been, Condorcet RCV can have election results on election night.

Hand-counting Condorcet is processing the pile of ballots N(N-1)/2 times.  Hand-counting IRV is processing the pile of ballots N-1 times.

But, this is only at the tabulator level.  When the ballot is inserted into the tabulator.

No different than we have now with FPTP.  That part of the data trail is opaque to protect the Secret Ballot.  But the rest of it can be transparent with Condorcet RCV, as it already is with FPTP.

Pick a precinct and hand count it.  Not much worse than IRV.

Results are summable.  Not so with IRV.

This is pretty transparent.

--

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

"Imagination is more important than knowledge."

.
.
.

It’s necessary to  count N(N-1) pairwise vote-totals.  …2 for each pair.

What if there are lot of candidates?

The trick-software could be in the part that initially increments the
N(N-1) vote-totals, even if that’s immediately done at the  voting-machine.

The only thing that the voter checked for accuracy was his ranking. There’s
no guarantee that the pairwise  vote-totals were incremented honesty.

So a handcount-audit would require doing the whole exhaustive
pairwise-count, from the raw rankings.

25 candidates? 600 pairwise  vote-totals to count.

Of course there’d be an effort for security, but, undeniably, it would be
easier & more able to be counted-on with approvals.

To maximize count-security, of course it’s Approval.

It’s getting late ⏰, so I’d best continue this topic in the morning.

In. Vermont it’s 6:00 a.m.  I hope you’re getting up early, & not staying
late !

On Sat, May 18, 2024 at 01:06 robert bristow-johnson <
rbj@audioimagination.com> wrote:

It could be argued that, if the pairwise-count software is in each
voting-terminal, then it would be more work for the tampered. But it would
also be more work for count-security to make sure that there isn’t
tampering.

Besides, what if the terminals arrive from the manufacturer with the
fraud-code already in them, well concealed?

If that sounds far-fetched, then I remind you that a voting-machine
manufacturer (Diebold?) promised to “deliver” the election to Dubya (& then
did so).

Look at Harpers Magazine for immediately after Dubya’s two elections. The
report mountains of evidence for big count-fraud in each of those 2
elections.

Anyway, isn’t computer-security always an ongoing touch-&-go battle between
security & wrongdoers?  …with the wrongdoers sometimes winning?

On Sat, May 18, 2024 at 02:08 Michael Ossipoff email9648742@gmail.com
wrote:

I have to hand it to you, Mike. You’ve kept that tinfoil hat nice and shiny
for almost a quarter century. Do you also think “the ES&S machines” cost
Amy McGrath the 2020 Senate election in Kentucky? Those claims are equally
sound.
On Sat, May 18, 2024 at 8:39 PM Michael Ossipoff email9648742@gmail.com
wrote:

On 2024-05-16 08:04, Michael Ossipoff wrote:

This makes it very hard to reason about or define any relative
properties about Approval, though, because it kicks the can down the
road to the voter instead.

This is perhaps a bit exaggerated, but to show a point: does Approval
really pass clone independence? Suppose more candidates of a wing show
up, which embolden people to be more discerning than just approving
what's acceptable. Then the winner changes.

Is "Approval"[1] really FBC, or monotone? If it converges to the
Condorcet winner, then nope, because you can't have FBC and Condorcet.
If it converges to the essential set, then nope, because the essential
set is nonmonotone.

By saying "don't sweat it, people will do what they will do, there's no
objective meaning to the ballot except what the voters like", voter
behavior becomes so much more intermixed with the method. And then, for
criteria to compare apples to apples, they should take this intermixing
into account. Not being legalistic shouldn't let Approval off the hook.

But how?

What I want is to have each method equally on the hook for what its
behavior implies. To paraphrase a reply I made to rb-j: if the winner of
an election can change when non-winners drop out, we don't really care
if the method passes IIA as such. It's a nice thing to have in a
box-ticking way, but that's it.

If a method wants to open up the can of worms to say "nope, this method
isn't meant to be used in isolation, it's supposed to be used with
/whatever/ internal way of going from utilities to the types of
expression the ballot accepts", then okay, let's take it at face value.
Let's ask the questions that matter. Can this make someone lose if some
of the honest voters like the candidate more? Can it make a non-winner
change who the winner is?

For ranking, this is easy, courtesy of the "legalism". For Approval, not
so much.

-km

[1] or rather, the method induced by iterating Approval or by combining
Approval with one or more thresholding strategies implicitly chosen by a
voter.

In a way Approval isn't a voting method, it's more like a voting
"anti-method".

Voting methods have some algorithm.  They try to reduce the need for
strategy, hopefully make some attempt to resist strategy, and (normally
and hopefully)  give the voter the option of expressing their full
strict ranking of the candidates.

Approval has no algorithm. It invites "strategy" and more-or-less relies
on it to give a reasonable result.  Rather than give the voter a way of
expressing their full sincere rankings, it confines the voter to
choosing a set of candidates whose members they wish to uniformly and
indiscriminately help versus the non-members.

It ensures "honest voting" by severely curtailing voter expression.

It's based on the assumption that voters only care about the effect of
their votes on who wins and enjoy compromise-compression strategising. 
Obviously a huge improvement on the FPP "anti-method" but nonetheless
understandably difficult for some people to get enthusiastic about.

There would still be some incentive for dishonest polls, trying to scare
voters into approving unneeded Compromise candidates to guard against
some Greater Evil.  But it is a great benefit that a rational voter can
at least never be conned into not approving their sincere favourite
(along with any other candidates they prefer to their Compromise candidate).

So "over the course of a few elections"  Approval would strongly tend to
"zero in" on the Condorcet winner.  That is great, but the Condorcet
supporter might well ask: "Why should we have to wait that long?".

Approval is a huge bang-for-buck contender, mainly by being almost no
"buck".

Chris B.

On 26/05/2024 7:20 pm, Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote:

On Sun, May 26, 2024 at 10:20 Chris Benham cbenhamau@yahoo.com.au wrote:

???

Approval has an algorithm: “Sum the approvals”.

Is it much simpler, & more easily & securely computed algorithm?
Absolutely!!

They try to reduce the need for

You’re referring to the rank-methods. Yes, as I said, their goal is to
allow you to merely state your sincere preference-ordering, & then do it
all for you, sheltering & isolating you from the choice that you’d have to
make without that complicated, computer-dependent & humungously
computation-intensive automatic-machine that is a rank-method.

I’ve agreed that wv Condorcet would be desirable for public political
elections were it not for the problems that I’ve specified.

See above.

It invites "strategy" and more-or-less relies

No, some ways of choosing whom to approve don’t involve strategy, & are
completely sincere. I discussed them in my long posts about how to vote in
Approval.

Approve everyone  that you like.

Approve all the acceptable candidates & none of the unacceptable ones.

That latter way of approving is how I’d approve in a public political
Approval election. No strategy. Just sincere expression regarding
acceptability.

But yes,  some of the other ways of approving are strategic. Admittedly,
Approval doesn’t do it all for you.

Rather than give the voter a way of

…an alternative wording of Approval’s best descriptive definition:

“Approval let’s each voter rate each candidate as approved or not approved.”

Approval doesn’t curtail any currently-available voter-expression. It
improves voter-expression to allow & count preference & merit differences
among a set of more than 2 candidates.

Does it provide for expression of all of your pairwise preferences? No. It
isn’t a rank-method. It doesn’t take all of your preferences, but it lets
you choose which ones are the more important ones.

The added expressivity of rank-methods comes at too high a price (…here. I
can’t speak for Australia or Norway.)

…as can be said just as much for any method. But with any method, there’s
voting intended for expression or pure principle.

and enjoy compromise-compression strategising.

I don’t know what compromise-compression is. Enjoy? Approval voting is
easy, as I’ve described. It can but needn’t be strategic.

…especially people who have been led to expect rankings. That’s why it’s
good that RP(wv) & MinMax(wv) are available as alternative proposals for
people who insist on rankings.

Yes—a big improvement l.

Of course. For improvement, the sooner the better.

But, for one thing, enacted sooner, Approval could bring better results
before Condorcet does…because Condorcet can’t do much till it’s enacted.
Two U.S. cities have enacted Approval. Zero have enacted Condorcet.

For another thing, with count-fraud, it might not do any good to have
theoretically better method.

It seems to me that, in every one of our EM polls, Approval has chosen the
CW. …without any waiting.

Better to trust the voters to use Approval well, than to trust every
count-participant to not accept a few bucks from someone in return for
doing count-fraud.

Don’t underestimate the bang. It would bring a huge difference.

If that's the case, the voters would be irrational; adding a clone to an
approval election doesn't change the optimal strategy. If the voters are
individually irrational then all bets are off for any voting system. So
yes, it's definitely clone-independent under any sensible model of
strategic voting. Sadly not IIA, but nothing is under strategy. (Also, I
think the Bipartisan Set, as a set, is cloneproof.)

Is "Approval"[1] really FBC, or monotone? If it converges to the

First, I'd argue you can, because majority-strength Condorcet seems like a
more reasonable definition of a Condorcet winner under strategic voting:
you can't determine from the ballots whether Alice or Bob would win a
paired-matchup if a substantial number of voters refuse to disclose which
they prefer. (With honest voting, tied-ranks should never occur; they form
a set of measure 0. Tied ranks don't really indicate indifference;
they indicate a voter is strategically pleading the 5th, and we can make
rational inferences from their refusal to disclose which candidate they
prefer.)

However, you can't have FBC and ballot Condorcet, i.e. always elect the
"apparent" Condorcet winner as calculated by naively assuming all the
ballots are honest. I think that's fine. If the Condorcet winner is
different from the "apparent" Condorcet winner on the ballots, I think we
should elect the actual Condorcet winner, rather than the fake Condorcet
winner.

If it converges to the essential set, then nope, because the essential

The bipartisan set itself is monotone
https://doi.org/10.1006/game.1993.1010 (it's the probabilities of a
maximal lottery that aren't).

By saying "don't sweat it, people will do what they will do, there's no

I agree. I think we should be putting a lot more effort into identifying
results about the Poisson game equilibria of various voting
systems, because the Poisson game models like Myerson-Weber are the most
realistic models we have of voter behavior—or more precisely, voters are
probably using some mix of Poisson game strategy (they want to cast the
tiebreaking vote), level strategy (goal of showing support for a
candidate), and sincere voting.

One very important fact: I'm not aware of a single "Condorcet" method that
satisfies the Condorcet criterion under the Poisson game model. Monroe
proved none of the common defeat-dropping methods or Nanson's method
satisfy it. The idea of any Condorcet-Smith hybrids satisfying it strikes
me as dubious when IRV doesn't and parties have an incentive to squeeze out
the Condorcet winner.

What I want is to have each method equally on the hook for what its

I care about it (in a non-box-ticking way): satisfying IIA makes spoiler
effects *less likely, *so long as some voters are honest.

On Sun, May 26, 2024 at 2:50 AM Kristofer Munsterhjelm km_elmet@t-online.de
wrote: