Election security under IRV

rb-j

@rob said in Election security under IRV:

I'm very confused about your idea of majority rule / one-person-one-vote.

Well, this is why it's good to read the paper. It's not just me.

You've said clearly that "majority rule" doesn't even make sense in a preferential ballot situation.

What, exactly, did I say clearly? I don't remember ever saying that "majority rule doesn't even make sense in a preferential ballot situation."

I don't even know what "one person one vote" means.... to me, casting one ballot is one vote.

So, if the vote represented on your ballot counted more (had more "punch") than the vote represented on my ballot and we're both a single person?

In 2000, 48.4% of American voters marked their ballots that Al Gore was preferred over George W. Bush while 47.9% marked their ballots to the contrary. Yet George W. Bush was elected to office. Did the greater number of voters preferring Gore have votes that counted as much as those from the fewer number of voters preferring Bush?

In 2016, 48.2% of American voters marked their ballots that Hillary Clinton was preferred over Donald Trump while 46.1% marked their ballots to the contrary. Yet Donald Trump was elected to office. Did the greater number of voters preferring Clinton have votes that counted as much as those from the fewer number of voters preferring Trump?

In 2009, 45.2% of Burlington voters marked their ballots tat Andy Montroll was preferred over Bob Kiss while 38.7% marked their ballots to the contrary. Yet Bob Kiss was elected to office. Did the greater number of voters preferring Montroll have votes that counted as much as those from the fewer number of voters preferring Kiss?

RCV has been challenged on that basis and passed.

... and repealed and passed again.

But I don't see how Condorcet methods magically get around that.

Of course there's Arrow and Gibbard and Gibbard–Satterthwaite, so even with Condorcet there can be circumstances where you simply cannot achieve majority rule without a contradiction. But that's when a Condorcet winner does not exist, a cycle.

When the Condorcet winner exists (so far, it looks pretty close to 100% of the time ranked ballots are used) and the Condorcet winner is elected, then majority rule is achieved and there is no sense that some voters' votes counted more than others.

Punishing voters for voting sincerely and incentivizing tactical voting? Can you even show me an example of an attempt at that under Hare RCV?

Remember there is a little difference between tactical voting (like compromising) and strategic voting (like burying). Incentivizing tactical voting happens when voters are punished for voting sincerely. That happened in Burlington in 2009. It always happens when an election is spoiled.

Violating majority rule and one-person-one-vote (they sorta go together) leads to a cascade of failures. It leads to a spoiled election and that leads to punishing some group of voters for voting sincerely and that incentivizes tactical voting which leads to tactical voting (the tactic being compromizing) in future elections.

If it was realistically possible, I'm sure someone on Twitter would telling people to vote in a particular way to game an IRV vote. I've never seen it.

That's strategic voting. I have never seen an attempt at burial (which doesn't work with Later-No-Harm, but would work with Borda). But I did see a legitimate strategic voting where two competing candidates endorsed each other publically. "Vote for me first, but rank this particular opponent of mine second."

Are they just whispering it among themselves offline?

With FPTP, people often whisper among themselves to "don't throw away your vote" and to compromize and vote for the major-party candidate best situated to beat the major-party candidate one loaths. This happens in elections that follow elections that were perceived as spoiled.

Now IRV in Burlington did demonstrate the spoiler effect in 2009 and people who voted for Kurt Wright found out that they actually caused the election of the candidate they disliked the most, simply by voting for the candidate they sincerely liked. How does that affect them in the next election?

Sorry, I'm not buying it.

Fortunately, you're not in the Vermont legislature nor Secretary of State's office (nor running for either).

losing process transparency.

Again, it's transparent enough for me but I'm not going to go down any more conspiracy theory rabbit holes. And I am working to make it more transparent by making easy ways people can re-run the tabulations

That's opaque. It's not transparent.

or analyze things in incredibly open, trouble free and sharable ways.

We cannot expect schlubs to read and understand some C++ code that someone puts on github. This is not transparent to them.

You're a coder, right? Why don't you help with that effort?

Last year I told Nicolaus Tideman I would try to write C code implementing Ranked-Pairs (using margins). Haven't done it yet. Someone somewhere has implemented Schulze, which is quite complicated.

rb-j

@rob said in Election security under IRV:

Your idea of "fucked up" is different from mine.

My idea of "fucked up" is

failing to elect the majority candidate after "guaranteeing a majority candidate is elected".
failing to protect against the spoiler effect after promising that "IRV eliminates the spoiler effect"
punishing voters who mark their favorite candidate as #1 after assuring everyone that they can "vote their hopes, not their fears".

And it got repealed mostly because Wright and his voters were pissed off that he didn't win.

There was a lotta misinformation flowing around. Especially from the GOP. I know. I was here. Considering post 2016, does that surprize you?

There was certainly a sense that Dems were robbed and that was spelled out at the time. Problem is that the Dems (including me) did not want to repeal IRV, but we had trouble defending it. The GOP just went hard with their "we were robbed" and "elect the candidate with the most votes" drivel. It still exists today (see VT guv's statement on H.744).

But if Wright had won, that would have been a bigger fuck up, as I'm sure you know.

With ranked ballots, we would know. Without ranked ballots it would appear that Wright had more support than anyone else. We had other spoiled elections in Vermont.

BTW, in my research on Burlington, I found these words from you, that I do agree with, am I correct that you've changed your mind in the years since? (or is there some other misunderstand I have about your position?)

You want simple? Here are the simple facts:1) A preference voting system like IRV is by far a much fairer method to use than the "simple" winner-take-all plurality system in the case when there are more than two viable candidates;2) This means that more voters were happy and/or comfortable with the prospect of Kiss as mayor than they would have been with any of the other candidates assuming the post;3) This is because IRV corrects the biggest flaw and frustration of the old plurality system: the spoiler problem. Hey, if you still don't get it, then just vote the old way and don't specify your second, third, etc. preferences. Under the IRV system, you still retain the right to only vote for your first choice. But don't you dare pretend that forcing others to vote their fears rather than their hopes is not a "problem." With all due respect, "Webber," what don't you get about any of the above?

I'd like to know where that came from. I do not use "winner-take-all" as a term for FPTP. Any single-winner election is "winner-take-all". I don't think those words are mine. But I yield to evidence. Maybe I was quoting someone else??

@rb-j Nobody is disputing that Condorcet is a noble goal to strive for. I think what @rob and I are both saying is that it's a little bit of a pipe dream in today's political climate and we desperately need reform, like now. IRV is not as good as a Condorcet method, but it's better than FPTP, and I think we should take whatever we can get to save what's left of American democracy.

When the Condorcet winner exists (so far, it looks pretty close to 100% of the time ranked ballots are used) and the Condorcet winner is elected, then majority rule is achieved and there is no sense that some voters' votes counted more than others.

Great, looks like IRV achieves majority rule in 439/440 elections. Close enough for me.

Someone somewhere has implemented Schulze, which is quite complicated.

I have implemented Schulze (and Ranked Pairs). It can be done with a simple modification of the Floyd-Warshall algorithm

that incentivizes tactical voting which leads to tactical voting (the tactic being compromizing) in future elections.

You are just plain wrong about this point. Almost every single piece of published research about IRV concludes that its primary strength is its resistance to strategy. It has other flaws, but incentivizing tactical voting is not one of them.

If my tone sounds terse, it's because I have gone over these exact same points with you probably 4 or 5 times already over the past 18 months (basically each time your ban from /r/EndFPTP lifts) and it's very frustrating to say the same things over and over. It's clear you haven't read a single research paper I've ever sent you.

Pleading to the entire electoral reform community: can we PLEASE stop talking about Burlington 2009. Nothing productive ever comes out of the discussion once we go there; it's like Godwin's law for voting nerds.

rb-j

@andy-dienes said in Election security under IRV:

You are just plain wrong about this point. Almost every single piece of published research about IRV concludes that its primary strength is its resistance to strategy. It has other flaws, but incentivizing tactical voting is not one of them.

Again, learn the difference between strategic voting and tactical voting. It's kinda like the difference between military strategy and military tactics.

IRV in Burlington in 2009 incentivized the most common tactical voting (compromizing) by clearly punishing 1/6th of the electorate for voting sincerely. Since you aren't reading my paper, I'll restate it here:

Of the voters preferring Wright in the semifinal round, the largest group were 1510 voters who marked Montroll as their second choice and preferred Kiss not at all. As shown in Table 2, if 371 (less than one in four) or more of these voters had anticipated that their guy was not going to win and voted tactically, this voting tactic being “compromising”, they would have prevented the election of Bob Kiss, the candidate they disliked the most. (Or if 587 of those voters, along with 154 preferring only Wright, had just stayed home and not come to the polls at all, they would have prevented the election of the candidate they disliked the most.)

Except that Ranked-Choice Voting was used, this is hardly different than what happens with Progressive or Green Party voters who compromise and vote for the Democrat out of fear of helping elect the GOP candidate they loathe. IRV promised these voters that they could “Vote their hopes rather than vote their fears”.

But these conservative voters in Burlington found out otherwise: “In this liberal town I gotta choose between 'Liberal' or 'More-Liberal', because if I vote for the guy I really like then 'More-Liberal' gets elected!” That has got to make some people angry. Simply by marking their sincere favorite choice as #1, they literally caused the election of their most disliked candidate.

Recently former Vermont governor, presidential candidate, and longtime Burlington resident Howard Dean, in promoting re-adoption of Hare RCV, mistakenly claimed “you can still get your second choice vote.”[5] That promise was clearly not delivered to these 1510 Wright voters that disliked Kiss and that caused the election of Kiss simply by marking Wright as #1. Their first choice was defeated and their second-choice vote was not counted. If those second-choice votes had been counted, a different candidate for mayor would have been elected. The following year, Ranked-Choice Voting (then called “IRV”) was repealed in Burlington Vermont.

@rb-j said in Election security under IRV:

learn the difference between strategic voting and tactical voting.

Define the difference please, mathematically.

rob

@rb-j Apologies, it is really confusing as it has the name below the comment rather than above. I'll delete it from my comment above.

It's from here, but the person you were debating with I guess.

https://www.sevendaysvt.com/vermont/burlington-residents-seek-repeal-of-instant-runoff-voting/Content?oid=2177125

rob

@andy-dienes said in Election security under IRV:

Pleading to the entire electoral reform community: can we PLEASE stop talking about Burlington 2009.

I'll do my best. I am of course of the opinion that it is utterly tiny in the grand scheme of things. I know Burlington it is what convinced my friend (kinda) and fellow San Franciscan Rob Lanphier that IRV was so bad. I'm genuinely curious why so many people latch onto it and think it is anything more that a minor hiccup.

rob

@rb-j said in Election security under IRV:

(less than one in four) or more of these voters had anticipated that their guy was not going to win and voted tactically, this voting tactic being “compromising”, they would have prevented the election of Bob Kiss, the candidate they disliked the most.

An important question is how would they have anticipated that? Is it realistic to think that they might have? Just looking at it after the fact doesn't mean that that would be an effective tactic or strategy or whatever.

Another thing I'll add.... if the system discouraged voter from highly ranking candidates on the extremes.... there are worse things.

(gotta admit, I don't see a distinction between tactical and strategic here. The idea is that could rank the ballots in order of their true preference, or do otherwise if they think it increases the likelihood of a better outcome. That "otherwise" can be referred to as "strategically" or "tactically" or "insincerely".... quibbling over the difference isn't productive unless you just like quibbling)

I'm first to admit that a Condorcet method would have produced better results. Where we differ is expressed by @Andy-Dienes better than I could, and deserving of bold face at risk of sounding like I'm yelling:

Nobody is disputing that Condorcet is a noble goal to strive for. I think what [we] are both saying is that it's a little bit of a pipe dream in today's political climate and we desperately need reform, like now. IRV is not as good as a Condorcet method, but it's better than FPTP, and I think we should take whatever we can get to save what's left of American democracy.

I am curious if you are giving undue weight to this one IRV misfire, in a close election with only 9000 voters, simply because you live there and knew the candidates. Forgive my candidness, but my view is that, saying that this one such a Huge Big Deal, given what we've witnessed nationally over the last few years, is utterly ludicrous and just makes no sense.

(ok, I am swearing off talking about Burlington. Seriously I'm done!!!)

rb-j

@rob said in Election security under IRV:

it is really confusing as it has the name below the comment rather than above.

yes, and now they don't even have comments on stories (except those stories 7D posts on Facebook). thank you for finding the link and posting it. if you google my name with Burlington politics, you'll see me involved in city ward redistricting (I drew the map and today are drawing several others, one is likely to be adopted).

These were my comments. Note that I voted against Question 5, which called for the repeal of IRV. Despite that, the question was passed with a narrow margin. And now we have IRV again, but by a different name (which is evidence of disingenuity from FairVote and the Hare RCV promoters).

rb-j

@andy-dienes said in Election security under IRV:

@rb-j said in Election security under IRV:

learn the difference between strategic voting and tactical voting.

Define the difference please, mathematically.

May I assume you're the same as "[deleted]"?

(image deleted -- revealing online identity)

If you are (or if you're not), my suggestion is Wikipedia.

And my response will be the same as before:

rb-j

@rob said in Election security under IRV:

Nobody is disputing that Condorcet is a noble goal to strive for. I think what [we] are both saying is that it's a little bit of a pipe dream in today's political climate and we desperately need reform, like now. IRV is not as good as a Condorcet method, but it's better than FPTP, and I think we should take whatever we can get to save what's left of American democracy.

I am curious if you are giving undue weight to this one IRV misfire, in a close election with only 9000 voters, simply because you live there and knew the candidates. Forgive my candidness, but my view is that, saying that this one such a Huge Big Deal, given what we've witnessed nationally over the last few years, is utterly ludicrous and just makes no sense.

(ok, I am swearing off talking about Burlington. Seriously I'm done!!!)

I'm gonna respond to this later. And I'm, sure as hell, not done talking about Burlington 2009.

@rb-j Yes, that was me. I delete & rotate my account every few months for online privacy.

Social choice theory is a mathematical topic, and as a mathematician I like to use formal definitions, conjectures, theorems, and proofs. Otherwise it is way too easy to just spin wheels forever arguing about semantics, because nobody agrees on what it means to be "tactical" vs what it means to be "strategic."

I know what I would consider, mathematically, to be a "strategic" vote. There are a number of terms related to strategic voting. These might be like

Incentive-compatibility
Rationality
Manipulability
(In)sincere preference

These are all basically synonyms, although I can give you a formal definition for some particular model if desired. There are indeed different types of manipulations and strategy resistances as well, some examples might be "resistant to manipulation by coalitions" or "resistant to manipulation by boundedly-rational agents" or "sincerity is a Bayes-Nash equilibrium" (this last property is enjoyed by Approval, for example).

You seem to be suggesting that "tactical" voting is tangibly different from "strategic" voting. What I am asking you to do is to elaborate on that in more mathematical detail so that I can actually have something to work off of. Otherwise you'll just be yelling at clouds.

Jack Waugh

No matter what reason there may be to distinguish between tactics and strategy in voting, the main point related to either one is that if you as the voter are exercising the power the system gives you, you cannot do so based on your preferences alone, but have to take into account your estimate of the stances of the other voters. This is a consequence of the Gibbard theorem. For a system to be ethical, it must accord equal power to the voters.

Anyway, all this is off topic of election security.

@jack-waugh said in Election security under IRV:

you cannot do so based on your preferences alone, but have to take into account your estimate of the stances of the other voters [...] For a system to be ethical, it must accord equal power to the voters.

And thus, for a system to be ethical, it must only allow two candidates ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Sass

@jack-waugh Anonymity of votes used to be sacred in election security because of fears over voter coercion and vote selling. However, modern data has demonstrated that fear to be overblown.

Today, voters have internet-connected cameras as a commodity, yet vote-by-mail has remained (when executed correctly) the most secure form of voting in the US. Why? Because it costs more per vote to coerce or buy voters than it does to just campaign. It's not economically scalable, and also scaled decentralized attacks are almost impossible to keep secret.

Now, there is a counter argument that allowing for the possibility of a single voter to be coerced by a domestic abuser is ethically unacceptable. That debate is more philosophical -- it's a risk vs benefits analysis at its core. However, it seems most relevant people seem to believe the benefits outweigh the risks in this case so far, though that could change as IRV shifts to even higher-profile elections.

In my opinion, I say release the ballot data, at least for now. Though, that does not solve the problem of making IRV susceptible to scaled election attacks. Good luck getting every precinct to create a hundred different piles of matching ballots for each race and then reporting all of that info to the public in a secure way with no mistakes during a hand recount. Practically speaking, tabulation will be centralized to single point of failure, like the entire state of Maine already does.

rob

This post is deleted!

rob

@sass said in Election security under IRV:

In my opinion, I say release the ballot data, at least for now. Though, that does not solve the problem of making IRV susceptible to scaled election attacks.

Are you saying it is significantly more susceptible to such attacks than any other ranked or rated system?

@sass said in Election security under IRV:

Practically speaking, tabulation will be centralized to single point of failure, like the entire state of Maine already does.

I have not seen anyone else complaining about this being a security issue. That doesn't mean it isn't, but ... it just makes me suspicious that you have another bias against IRV and this sort of fits the narrative. And maybe that isn't it, I just would like to see if anyone else, such as election security experts, is concerned about this. Any links or anything?

@rb-j said in Election security under IRV:

(which is evidence of disingenuity from FairVote and the Hare RCV promoters).

"Ranked choice" seems to me to be a reasonable attempt to communicate to the public that 1) RCV/IRV is not actually "instant" (which is lame, but reality), and 2) it just communicates what seems most significant to voters. I understood San Francisco to have used the term first in 2005 ( https://web.archive.org/web/20081202040611/http://fairvote.org/media/irv/sanfrancisco/RCVCandidateGuide04.pdf ), and I'm just not convinced it was to hide its connection to IRV, especially not to any future failure in Burlington. Most people here that I have talked to have no idea how the tabulation works and really don't care, they just know that they rank the candidates on the ballot and they don't have to vote insincerely. I'd expect that if it changed to a Condorcet system, "runoff based" or not, they'd care less than they cared when it was increased from being able to rank 3 to being able to rank 10. (which was not very much)

Score changed its name from Range, and FPTP and Choose-one and plurality are all used for the same thing. (I think "choose one" is the best, FPTP is just confusing and meaningless, while regular people don't seem to know what "plurality" means)

The good news is we can turn it to our advantage if we want to be pragmatic. Instead of calling Condorcet "Condorcet", just call it a more sophisticated variation of RCV. It might help reduce potential resistance to Condorcet by just treating it as a minor upgrade from RCV-Hare.

@rb-j said in Election security under IRV:

And I'm, sure as hell, not done talking about Burlington 2009.

Ok. Seems like a poor strategy, but hey, maybe it's a good tactic.

(in all seriousness, on strategy vs. tactic, it'd be great if you just explained what you meant relative to voting, rather than equating it to military stuff which to many -- including myself -- is just completely different. I still don't know what you mean, and I'm pretty sure I'm not stupid. Just tell us.)

Jack Waugh

@sass said in Election security under IRV:

Good luck getting every precinct to create a hundred different piles of matching ballots for each race and then reporting all of that info to the public in a secure way with no mistakes during a hand recount.

I guess Rob's vision here is that in the first count (as distinct from a hand recount), the precinct will have the voters cast their ballots through scanners, and a system set up and tested in advance by IT people will publish the data, without necessarily doing matching (although it could). So then anyone with IT skills and a computer and an Internet connection could replicate the tally. I don't know whether this would convince the "stop the steal" crowd that the count is accurate. I'm not sure whether anything could. But I think Score would come closer to convincing them than any preferential system, because it's really trivial to sum by the precincts. The ballots could be sorted by hand and counted with CPU-free, photocell-free, mechanical counting machines, pile by pile, and several machines could replicate the count, and several witnesses from different ideologies could make sure everything is on the up-and-up with respect to the sorting.

Jack Waugh

@sass said in Election security under IRV:

like the entire state of Maine already does.

Just to reiterate that the original of that quote was in italics.

Jack Waugh

@rob said in Election security under IRV:

Choose-one

Choose-one is bad when it is combined with plurality in a single-winner election. But choose-one does not have to be bad in Choice of Representation (advocated for the Wisconsin legislature on Facebook by Jim Mueller of Wisconsin). The way that would work is each citizen chooses her representative, all the representatives take office in the legislature, and they vote on legislation with the proxy power of those who chose them.

That's why I don't abbreviate FPtP to "choose one".