Election security under IRV
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@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.
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@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.
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@rb-j said in Election security under IRV:
learn the difference between strategic voting and tactical voting.
Define the difference please, mathematically.
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@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.
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@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. -
@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!!!)
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@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).
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@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:
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@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.
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@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.
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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.
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@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)_/¯
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@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.
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@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.)
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@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.
Approval-ordered Llull (letter grades) [10], Score // Llull [9], Score, STAR, Approval, other rated Condorcet [8]; equal-ranked Condorcet [4]; strictly-ranked Condorcet [3]; everything else [0].
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@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.
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@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".
Approval-ordered Llull (letter grades) [10], Score // Llull [9], Score, STAR, Approval, other rated Condorcet [8]; equal-ranked Condorcet [4]; strictly-ranked Condorcet [3]; everything else [0].
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@jack-waugh Ok, but "first past the post" is non-sensical. I know it us supposed to be a horse racing metaphor, but I have yet to hear an explanation for how it applies, that makes any sense at all. For one thing, there is no "finish line" to be crossed in voting, other than the scores of other candidates.
Even if you accept that the "first past the post" simply means "the candidate that gets the highest score," still, it should apply equally to Score and Approval.
As for "choose one" potentially getting confused with its usage for multiple winner elections, when I use it, I have already assumed the context is that we are speaking of single winner races.
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@jack-waugh said in Election security under IRV:
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.
To be clear, in a perfect world we'd use a condorcet method where each precinct could submit a pairwise matrix and that would be good enough to determine the outcome 100% of the time.
Technically not all Condorcet methods this is true for, but at least it is true if there is a Condorcet winner.
But yeah, the main point I was making is that, as long as they publish the full ballot data within a reasonable period of time (which the vast majority do), any attempt to cheat in the ways suggested would probably result in someone going to jail. I have not seen a reasonable way someone could do this effectively and avoid having it be detected
If the concern is not cheating, but just some random mistakes along the way, ok, different thing. I tend to think those tend to cancel out. Better voting machines help, paper trail helps, etc. I think any desire for absolute perfection in this regard is outweighed by the massive problems caused by the choose-one method. I mean, we are literally watching democracy fall apart in front of our eyes.
What is happening here, within this communicty, is that some of us are trying to fight two enemies (choose-one and RCV-Hare), which is simply bound to fail. I'd rather join forces with the RCV-Hare folks and defeat the true enemy, choose-one.
