On 10/1/15 1:33 PM, Sennet Williams wrote:

yes, Sand you might well consider doing that.

might i suggest reading up in Wikipedia (maybe start at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-member_district#Comparison_of_single-member_district_election_methods
) and http://wiki.electorama.com/wiki/Special:AllPages .

Ranked-Choice Voting (that which we do with a Ranked-Order Ballot) is
not the same as IRV despite what apologists at FairVote would suggest.

while IRV may be better than simple plurality voting, it has problems
and has, at least once, failed seriously in a governmental election
(Burlington Vermont Mayoral 2009) which led to its repeal.

there are better methods than IRV, and every time IRV fails, it sullies
not just IRV but all methods of ranked voting because sometimes ignorant
voters and dishonest advocates conflate "IRV" with ranked voting.  same
ballot (or nearly the same), but different methods of evaluating or
tabulating the ballots to discern whom the majority choice of the
electorate really is.

this has to do with the number of ranking levels available on a ballot
with finite area on paper.  3 ranking levels when there are 20+
candidates is a problem.  a voter might well find out after the election
that they "threw away their vote" because none of the candidates they
ranked ended up being one of the top contenders.

because you cannot have infinite area on a paper ballot (and i am still
for the killing of trees to leave a paper trail for election integrity),
the only solution to keep the number of candidates from outstripping the
number of ranking levels are reasonable ballot-access laws.  if your
ballot has, say, 5 levels of ranking, then the ballot access laws (the
number of petition signatures needed to get on the ballot) should be
sufficiently strict to prevent, in a typical election year, more than 5
candidates (plus one write-in) on the ballot.

--

r b-j                  rbj@audioimagination.com

"Imagination is more important than knowledge."

On Mon, 2015-10-05 at 17:05 -0400, robert bristow-johnson wrote:

It seems like a least a few countries have not been deterred from using
massive ballot papers.  Google Image search came in very handy.  Look
for the images in the following web pages.

http://www.abc.net.au/local/stories/2013/08/23/3832651.htm

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2067282/Egypt-votes--woodpecker-pen-tractor-banana-Symbols-ballot-paper-represent-candidates-help-illiterate.html

http://easternblot.net/2012/09/12/dutch-elections/

http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/why-all-our-top-parties-are-doing-voters-a-disservice-by-cramming-the-european-parliament-ballot-papers-with-the-names-of-no-hope-candidates/

I get the feeling there are several more countries that could be added
to the above list.

Thanks,
Gervase.

I just note that there can be also simple ballots like in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_list (see the picture). If one wants to expand that to ranked ballots with high number of candidates, one could simply allow the voter to write multiple numbers in the ballot instead of only one. One could thus cast a ranked vote by writing few numbers, e.g. "23 74 74 5 234 321".

The ballot could be as small as in the picture and still allow ranking of e.g. 5 candidates.

Juho

How did the 2009 Burlington Vermont Mayoral "fail"? It was one of the rare
cases where it didn't elect the Condorcet winner, but unlike plurality, at
least it didn't elect the Condorcet loser out of the three strongest
candidates. IRV in this case gave a more representative result than would
have been the case with plurality. And in almost all cases IRV does this.

On Tue, Oct 6, 2015 at 8:05 AM, robert bristow-johnson <
rbj@audioimagination.com> wrote:

On 10/09/2015 10:00 AM, Juho Laatu wrote:

Schulze also uses a similar ballot format in his proposal for STV-MMP,
e.g. http://m-schulze.9mail.de/schulze5.pdf page 6. The open list
article you linked to shows that it's possible to read number input
since e.g. the Finnish ballot has the voter write down the candidate
numbers of those he votes for, so having the voter fill out numbered
rankings shouldn't be a problem.

That gives two possible ways of setting up the ballot, now that I think
about it. The first would be like Schulze's, where the voter writes down
an 1 next to first place, 2 next to second, etc. The second would be a
table which says (using ASCII art here)

Ranking              Candidate number
to be filled in
+------------------+ +---------------+
| 1st rank (best)  | |              |
+------------------+ +---------------+
| 2nd rank        | |              |
+------------------+ +---------------+
| 3rd rank        | |              |

---======
=========(more rows come here)=========

---======
| 20th rank        | |              |
+------------------+ +---------------+

where one assumes very few voters will rank beyond 20th rank. This could
be 40th or 80th depending on how many rows fit on the paper.

The dual approach (where candidate numbers are filled in) could be
better in the sense that the candidate numbers could have check digits
or be augmented by some other error-detecting code, and they could also
avoid ambiguous digits like 1 and 7. If the ballots are read by machine,
the machines could flag ballots they can't read for manual inspection.
On the other hand, having to look up candidate numbers is another step
of indirection for the voter and could make voting more of a hassle,
thus reducing turnout.

For equal rank, it'd be possible to expand the table like this:

Ranking            Candidate numbers for this rank
to be filled in
+-----------------+ +----------------+----------------+----------------+
| 1st rank (best) | |                |                |                |
+-----------------+ +----------------+----------------+----------------+
| 2nd rank        | |                |                |                |
+-----------------+ +----------------+----------------+----------------+

.. etc., the idea being that the voter would fill in every candidate
he'd rank first in the cells of the first row. It is less intuitive,
though. People who are serious about accessibility might want to have
"expensive pencil" type single-purpose (not Turing-complete) voting
machines for printing to this format.

MJ or discrete rated systems could have a multi-page ballot where each
page corresponds to a different grade or rating, and the voter writes
down the candidate IDs for each page. For approval, there's just one
page. Continuous rated systems would pretty much have to use something
like Schulze's format, but instead of filling in numbers, would have
something to the effect of:

"Place a mark on the line corresponding to the rating you want to give.
Further to the right is better."

Candidate 1  worst |-------------------------------------------| best

Candidate 2  worst |-------------------------------------------| best

Candidate 3  worst |-------------------------------------------| best

Candidate 4  worst |-------------------------------------------| best
...
Candidate n  worst |-------------------------------------------| best

On 10/09/2015 10:08 AM, Clinton Mead wrote:

I'd say it didn't go far enough. IRV works like a patch on Plurality
that lets it discard fringe parties that can't win anyway. But when you
get multiple large parties, the patch isn't sufficient and weird
behavior like center squeeze happens.

But that's me :-)

Perhaps there's a more strategic explanation for the repeal itself. IRV
clearly wouldn't have pleased the Plurality supporters; they'd have
preferred seeing Wright win. And IRV wouldn't have pleased those who
found its outcome counterintuitive in the other direction; they'd have
preferred seeing Montroll win. IRV might have held against either side,
but it couldn't hold against both at the same time.

I'd like to emphasize that I'm speculating, though. I don't live in
Burlington; someone who does would probably know the situation better
than I do.

In order to avoid any misunderstandings I note that currently one should write the number of exactly one candidate in the ballot in Finland. One could make especially party internal proportionality better in such open list system by allowing ranked votes. One could achieve good party internal proportionality already with a very simple ballots that would allow ranking only e.g three candidates.

I used the candidate number option to demonstrate that very simple ballots may be sufficient.

In an election with say 200 candidates it may be too tedious to rank all the candidates. One party could have tens of candidates, and already that could be too much to the voters. If one tries to improve the existing Finnish system, one could take the approach that votes will by default support one of the parties. It could be natural that ranking would be allowed only within that one party. The voter would thus vote e.g. 123 127 125, where all those candidates belong to the same party. This would mean that this party gets one vote, and within that party the voter may influence which candidates will be elected more efficiently than with a bullet vote. This means something like "STV within each party". From the voter point of view it is important that already a simple vote (bullet vote or three ranked candidates) automatically supports all the candidates of that party (the party inherits the full vote in case none of those three will be elected).

(An alternative would be use of party numbers. Vote "123 127 125 100" would go to party "100" if none of the three candidates (123, 127, 125) will not be elected. This approach would be however quite complex and prone to mistakes when voting. That's why the "STV within each party" approach could work better (in an election with very high number of candidates).)

All elections where voters write the numbers (or names) in the ballot have this problem. Some voters will write the numbers in a hurry, and some votes must can not be read because of this. In Finland the governments tries to remind people to write the numbers carefully, and gives advice on what kind of numbers people should use to avoid any problems. I believe the number of votes lost due to this problem is however quite low, and therefore this problem is not serious.

In FInland I guess people typically remember the number of their favourite candidate. In addition list of candidates and their numbers is available in the voting booth. Writing more than one number would mean that people generally do not remember all the numbers but would need to check from the candidate list in the voting booth. No big problem, but this would make the voting process somewhat slower. Nowadays people use maybe 10 seconds to vote (inside the booth). Maybe 20 seconds could be more typical for ranking three candidates. Voters would be allowed to write only one number, and that would make voting as fast as it is now. Many voters might do so.

This approach would delay also the vote counting process. Instead of collecting the ballots (with one number each) into piles, one would have to record the few numbers of each ballot into a computer.

Yes, but I tend to think that it is not very important to allow equal ranking. People may toss a coin if they can not otherwise decide which one of the candidates is better. Allowing equal ranking would be good since it makes it possible to cast such a vote when the voter feels like having two or more equally good candidates. But on the other hand the complexity of the ballot and voting process might increase.

I note that this format (and also a format where people are allowed to write the rating of the candidate next to the name) could be used also by ranked methods. Some people might like the idea of quickly drawing a mark at some point on the line (see your ballot format image above) without thinking too much about the exact ordering of the candidates. My point here is that this format is good in the sense that it would allow raking of maybe even 100 candidates in less than 30 seconds.

Juho

On 10/9/15 4:00 AM, Juho Laatu wrote:

and a machine is gonna scan that?

--

r b-j                  rbj@audioimagination.com

"Imagination is more important than knowledge."

On 10/9/15 6:28 AM, Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote:

Score Voting (a.k.a. Range Voting).  Warren Smith will like it.  it's
what judges at the winter Olympics use for figure skating (and some
other events).  but my question continues to be: "how highly do you
score your second choice?"  and third choice?

(Condorcet is better.)

--

r b-j                  rbj@audioimagination.com

"Imagination is more important than knowledge."