Hello folks,
Nic Tideman emailed me a few days ago, asking me this question.
The Burlington 2009 Hare RCV failure can happen when there is a close 3-way race.
I sure as hell do not know unless we can get the records of the individual ballot data for 188,582 ballots. Does anyone know where to get it?
bestest,
r b-j
@andy-dienes said in New method (I think?): Hare-squared:
@rb-j said in New method (I think?): Hare-squared:
Why not just solve the problem with simple Condorcet? Or with BTR?
Those would be great. I don't think anyone (of us) is arguing that a Condorcet check doesn't improve a method. It does.
But it's not productive to rail against IRV.
Yes, it is. The correct time to rail is right now, with the experience in Vermont and now with the newly experienced difficulties of Maine and NYC with administering RCV elections and getting timely results.
Now is the time to be learning object lessons while the objects remain visibly presented. We need to learn from failures, rather than ignoring or denying (or forgetting) the failures. That's not how you learn from failure.
It's better than FPTP.
So what? FPTP is better than Autocracy. Or sortition. Big fat hairy deeel.
My approval set of election reforms is { LiterallyAnythingProportional, LiterallyAnythingConcorcet, Approval, STAR, IRV }
I'm trying to get some reform done and not damage the cause by ignoring, denying, or forgetting failure of the reform we advocate.
@rob said in New method (I think?): Hare-squared:
@rb-j said in New method (I think?): Hare-squared:
The point is 1510 voters (out of 8976) found out that, merely by voting for their favorite candidate, they actually caused the election of their least-favorite candidate
An important question is whether they could have known.
You collectively learn that with a history of usage and with spoiled elections. I don't wanna wait for another spoiled election to happen in order to start noticing.
Because after the fact seeing that you could have done something different is a bit different than, at the time of voting, having a clear insincere strategy.
But that's always the case with spoiled elections. It's after the election is spoiled that voters learn that maybe they shoulda voted their fears instead of their hopes. From the paper:
When an election is apparently spoiled, many of the voters who voted for the ostensible spoiler suffer voter regret for their choice when they learn of the outcome of the election and they realize that they aided the candidate they preferred least to win by “throwing away their vote” or “wasting their vote” on their favorite candidate rather than voting for the candidate best situated to beat their least-preferred candidate.
This leads to tactical voting in future elections, where the voting tactic is called “compromising”. This tactical voting is not a nefarious strategy to throw or game an election but is an undesired burden that minor party and independent voters carry, which pressures them to vote for the major party candidate that they dislike the least. They are voting their fears and not their hopes and this has the effect of advantaging the two major parties. This reflects “Duverger’s Law” which states that plurality rule (First-Past-The-Post or FPTP) elections, with the traditional mark-only-one ballots, promote a twoparty political system, and third party or independent candidates will not have a level playing field in such elections. Voters who want to vote for these third party or independent candidates are discouraged from doing so, out of fear of helping elect the major party candidate they dislike the most.
I know @Andy-Dienes would like to stop discussing Burlington, and I have mixed feelings on that. I do think making it out to be a complete disaster is overstating it. To me it was an example of "the Hare effect" being not applied strongly enough to best deal with that very close election, which was a 1/340 situation.
What I will continue to do (and am doing now) is testing various minor alterations of Hare (bottom-2 runoff, of course, but also others) against Burlington ballots.
Why bother? Why not just solve the problem with simple Condorcet? Or with BTR?
@andy-dienes this is not just about Center-Squeeze. This is more general than that.
It's about "Vote your hopes, not your fears."
Center-Squeeze was just a way for RCV to violate that promise.
But FPTP also does. I just want you to admit that this promise we RCV advocates make, saying why RCV is better than FPTP, was actually violated by Hare RCV in no uncertain terms (because we have possession of the ranked-ballot data and know who the contingency choices were). At least with FPTP we have to speculate that the election was spoiled. Ain't no speculation with RCV and public records.
@andy-dienes said in New method (I think?): Hare-squared:
@rb-j said in New method (I think?): Hare-squared:
The fact that there always exists a simple majority between two candidates (unless they tie)
not if voters truncate their rankings
Which is why I advocate that ballot access law be strong enough so that there aren't more than 5 or 6 candidates who are on the ballot. But if there are, say, a dozen candidates one the ballot, there should be at least 5 or 6 ranking levels. And if there are more ranking levels, then precincts should algorithmically choose the 5 or 6 leading candidates in that precinct, and publish pairwise defeats for the pairings of the top 5 or 6. Precinct summability does not mean that the paper tape printout of summable tallies is 10 feet long. It has to be practical, feasible. 20 or 30 summable tallies is about that practical limit.
And a good and fair social choice system should not incentize you from expressing your preference in any manner other than sincere
Agreed, and IRV is one of the very best methods at incentivizing sincere rankings.
But it's not the best, is it? And it's not about the ranked ballots but are about the rules of the game, which can be fairly and safely examined. And courageously examined.
It has other flaws yes, but strategic manipulability is not really one of them.
The point is 1510 voters (out of 8976) found out that, merely by voting for their favorite candidate, they actually caused the election of their least-favorite candidate. Just like Nader voters that got W elected, that incentivizes these voters to vote for the major party candidate that is best situated to beat the candidate that they loathe.
@rob said in New method (I think?): Hare-squared:
@rb-j said in New method (I think?): Hare-squared:
As far as I understand, this is expressed with the maxim "One person, one vote".
Yeah that is a very vague saying. I get the concept, but many people interpret it very literally, such as saying that ranking or approving doesn't qualify simply because they are doing more than checking a single box.
I understand that, and it's essentially where we RCV advocates disagree with detractors who insist on FPTP.
What they don't want to understand is the notion of the Single-Transferable Vote. It's one vote, but it gets shifted around in such a manner that best benefits the political interest of the enfranchised person who is voting. They get only one vote.
The difference between the Hare advocates and the Condorcet folks are that the former says that some of us cannot transfer our vote from our higher-ranked candidate, that was just eliminated, to the contingency candidate of our choosing as expressed on our ballots. The Condorcet advocates say we can. When you promote your product saying *"You can vote for the candidate you really want and need not choose between the lesser of evils. If your favorite candidate cannot win election, then your vote counts for your second choice." Howard Dean (whom I was fortunate enough to introduce to a big crowd in NH in 2004) made that claim ignorant of the fact that it's demonstrated false in the experience of his very own home town.
When you make that claim (which is Property 4 in this), you should mean it.
In order to allow voters to vote their hopes instead of their fears, the election should not punish (or disincentivize) voters from voting their hopes. It does that by actually preventing the spoiler effect (an oft advertized feature of RCV). And it does that by making sure that the majority candidate is elected and not blocked from election because of the spoiler.
I've used the example of people voting for a number (say an office temperature or the amount of monthly dues) and choosing the median, which is as close to everyone having "equal voting power" as anything I can imagine.
The median helps block the effect of exaggeration of one's preference in order to unfairly increase the effect of one's expression of their preference.
But so does One-person-one-vote. Unlike Score Voting or Borda RCV, it doesn't matter if I prefer A enthusiastically and you prefer B only tepidly, your vote for B should count just as much as my vote for A.
The median thing is a mathematical tool to prevent outliers from changing the measure of how the middle of the spectrum affects a composite measured property (like median income vs. mean) or in social choice.
I tend to think Condorcet systems most closely approach that in elections with human candidates and a single winner.
And that cannot be satisfied outside of Majority Rule: If a simple majority of voters agree that Candidate A is a better choice for office than Candidate B, then Candidate B is not elected.
I've never been big on the use of the word "majority" when there are more than two candidates. Especially if combined with the word "support", which seems so artificially binary.
Between two candidates there is an unambiguous notion of majority support if we agree that every voter's expression of support (that's what a vote is) is counted equally.
The fact that there always exists a simple majority between two candidates (unless they tie) is misconstrued by naive (or disingenuous) RCV advocates to claim that RCV is "guaranteed to elect the majority-supported candidate" because it boils the election down to two candidates in the final round, in which there is always a simple majority.
Of course that Hare final-round pair of candidates is not the only way to pair two candidates and examine which one is supported more than the other. Everyone, other than the Condorcet loser, is a "majority candidate".
If I vote for someone over another person, that is no indication that I "like" them in any everyday sense of the word, only that I prefer them over someone else.
That's correct. And that preference of yours counts just as much as my preference for the "someone else". Doesn't matter how much more I prefer my candidate vs. how much you prefer yours. Our votes should count equally.
I agree that Condorcet is best (it seems to meet my idea of "game theoretically stable," which is important to me but not necessarily a priority for others), but I just don't like using the concept of "majority."
Simple majority and Absolute majority have dictionary definitions that are reasonably concise.
And again, I refer back to the "voting for a number" thing.... my vote might pull the vote from 69.2 degrees to 69.3 degrees, when I preferred 72 degrees.
And a good and fair social choice system should not incentize you from expressing your preference in any manner other than sincere. Express your sincere preference and rely on the method to respect your preference, as a person holding equal rights and equal franchise, equally as much as any other person's preference.
That can be perfectly fair and equitable, but the word "majority" doesn't in any way apply.
That's right. And if we were voting for an alternative that is an ordered quantity, Score Voting using median score rather than plurality score, seems very fair and equitable to me. Maybe use this for a public vote on the city's budget cap or tax-base percentile. But not people or maps or discrete alternative plans that are not an ordered quantity. Then the only fair thing is valuing each voter's vote equally.
Yes. You are exactly correct, @rob.
Besides RCV, I am involved in a sorta complex multi-directional "discussion" in Vermont about the nation's most successful third party, about the effect of party crossover in primaries, and of the value of the "open primary" (not to be confused with what California, Washington, or Alaska are doing, where there is no party primary).
Someone is systemically taking undeserved advantage of someone else. And there is a lotta disingenuity tossed around. It's:
the Center Squeeze of Hare RCV and who, in Vermont, benefits and who loses.
"clone" party crashing another party's primary.
single-member vs. two-member vs. mixed different-sized districts in a legislative body (how well constituents are served by each) and the political effect of switching one to another - who benefits and who loses (and remember, elections are a zero-sum game),
And I'm drawing maps for ward redistricting in Burlington and we're getting in crunch time. Big decisions being made soon about what map the voters will get to see on the ballot next town-meeting day. And some, not-entirely-transparent reasons for preventing voters from seeing more than one plan.
So I'm kinda grumpy. I'm sorry.
@andy-dienes said in New method (I think?): Hare-squared:
You can have a race with 3 or more competitive candidates with FPTP. It happens all of the time
No, it doesn't. It happens sometimes, but given how many more FPTP elections than IRV that's not saying much.
Sure it does. Nothing about FPTP that stops anyone from having an election with more than 2 candidates. The problem is electing the correct candidate. FPTP sometimes fails to do that. And so does Hare IRV.
But what good is using a ranked ballot if you ignore the content of the ranked ballot and elect a candidate that does not have majority support.?
Placebo effect is real and important.
So you're promoting dispensing placebos instead of medicine that actually has physiological effect?
Even just feeling like you get to express your true opinion is important, even if the rest of the rankings were entirely thrown away.
And when the election results are reported and you discover that you were robbed from having your candidate (or your second-choice candidate) elected because the method ignored the second-choice votes of 1/6th of the electorate, despite the promise that it does not, I don't think you'll be "just feeling like you get to express your true [vote]".
I would also prefer the ability to rank candidates on the ballot with choose-one too, even if it just elects the one with the most first-place votes.
This is so stupid and irresponsible. And disingenuous.
Big fucking deal! FPTP can make a similar claim: *Selects a better candidate than choosing the candidate selected by sortition or selected by military support."
yeah, and if I lived in a country where the winner was chosen by military bureaucracy I would prefer FPTP a hell of a lot more.
But FPTP ain't good enough, is it, Andy?
@andy-dienes said in New method (I think?): Hare-squared:
IRV, even in Burlington
allowed there to be a race with 3 competitive candidates (any one of whom easily could have won with small changes in public opinion). In FPTP this is almost unheard of
That's bullshit. You can have a race with 3 or more competitive candidates with FPTP. It happens all of the time. This issue is preventing the election of a candidate without majority support of the electorate. FPTP often fails to do that. And IRV failed to do that "even in Burlington".
Provided a ballot format which allowed voters to express richer preference than a single name
Fine, no one is disputing the value of the ranked ballot (well, opponents of RCV do, like these guys). But what good is using a ranked ballot if you ignore the content of the ranked ballot and elect a candidate that does not have majority support.?
Selected a better winner than choosing the candidate with the most first-place votes would have
Big fucking deal! FPTP can make a similar claim: *Selects a better candidate than choosing the candidate selected by sortition or selected by military support."
IRV can and does ignore the express preferences that voters put on their ranked ballots and can and does elect the non-majoritarian candidate as a result. This means that the fewer voters that saw their candidate elected had cast votes that had more juice, more power, than the larger number of voters that had cast votes for the majority candidate.
Now, can we please stop bringing up Burlington.
Denial ain't just a river in Egypt.
And you cannot get past the problem of lack of process transparency because Hare IRV is not precinct summable. And also, because Hare is not precinct summable, you cannot get past the problem of election night results for statewide or large city betraying the label Instant Runoff Voting.
And do you want the Write-In option to be meaningful? What if, for a statewide race (like what happened with Lisa Murkowsky in 2010 FPTP), that Combined Write-In actually wins an RCV election? How are you gonna deal with that?
With Hare it's a terrible fucking mess. With Condorcet, all you need to do is split each precinct into two sub-precincts, separate the Murkowsky write-ins from the others, tabulate both sets of ballots separately with the tabulator machines (clearing the counters in between) and then ADD the results for each pairing, except for the Write-In category). You can do this decentralized on the same evening of the election.
@rob said in New method (I think?): Hare-squared:
I don't know what you consider "making voters equal in power."
As far as I understand, this is expressed with the maxim "One person, one vote". And that cannot be satisfied outside of Majority Rule: If a simple majority of voters agree that Candidate A is a better choice for office than Candidate B, then Candidate B is not elected.
But I think it is an important one for providing insight into IRV, including @sass and @rb-j 's arguments against IRV (which I think are WAY too strong, and are blocking progress)
When a reform fails to do precisely what it purports to do, the thing to do is reform the reform. Reforming reform does not block progress, it diverts the direction of the progress from a direction that is not entirely progressive to another that is.
Remember RCV proponents promote RCV saying that RCV:
For a literal "Executive Summary", read this letter I sent last spring to the governor of Vermont. (I was not successful, BTW.)
as well as FairVote's arguments against Condorcet (which is very flawed, but I have found challenging to explain why in a way they can't wriggle away from).
I would be interested in hearing what they say to you to "wriggle away". I've had multiple email conversations with Rob Richie about this and all he does and can do is deny that the facts are a problem (with nothing to support the reasoning for his denial) and dismisses the necessity to adjust course. It's simple denial and relying on their established position an momentum. He cannot wriggle away from the facts. He can only ignore and deny or poo-poo the facts.
I think FairVote's position against Condorcet is along the lines of
"Our current RCV method (Hare) already has momentum that we don't want to damage by conceding it's not the best thing ever since sliced bread."
"We hear enough complaining about how RCV or IRV is too complicated. Condorcet RCV is even more complicated and harder to sell to skeptical voters and policy makers."
"What are they complaining about? IRV and Condorcet elect the same candidate 99.8% of the time. IRV only once did not elect the Condorcet winner. Just once. Likely to not happen again very soon."
"Whenever the Condorcet winner is not elected with IRV it's because the Condorcet candidate did not have enough base support. So the Condorcet candidate deserves to lose."
In Burlington 2009, 2005 of voters for Kurt Wright had their candidate defeated (which means their vote could no longer help their top choice) but did not get their vote counting for their next choice. 495 of the 2005 voters were not harmed because of that, because their next choice was elected. But 1510 voters that marked a different candidate for their next choice were denied their vote counting for their next choice, despite the claim.
And if their second-choice vote had counted, a different candidate would have been elected.
They actually caused the election of their least favorite candidate by marking their favorite as #1.
"Vote your hopes, not your fears." or "RCV allows you to always vote for the candidate you like best without worry of wasting your vote." These 1510 voters for Kurt Wright found out differently.
@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.
@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:
@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).
@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.
@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??
@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.
@rob said in Election security under IRV:
I don't doubt that, but you can't expect it to start with a state legislature, it will start with a smaller locality.
Depends on how big your state is.
Regardless it is a chicken and egg problem. Legislatures are orders of magnitude less likely to adopt things that aren't already proven in practice.
Yes, and they pay attention when some thing demonstrates failure in practice.
I think we can get there (i.e. condorcet, regardless of ballot type), but need to do it one step at a time.
What steps precede the step of going from Hare to Condorcet?
RCV first, then better RCV, is a very reasonable plan.
Yah. We had IRV first. Then it fucked up. Then it got repealed. Now it's readopted in Burlington without acknowledging anything about 2009. And without that small bit of introspection, nothing will get fixed. Denial is not reform.
In the case of my home town (San Francisco), they started with RCV Hare but with only 3 rankings. It took many years before we got up to a dozen (but the legislation was written such that they could upgrade it at the discretion of the election official, rather than having to change the legislation) To me that is the exact "baby steps" approach that can work.
When you had only 3 rankings (and a dozen candidates), this was pointed to by RCV opponents as "voter disenfranchisement". And, in a sense, these RCV opponents were correct in that claim. But you would never have gotten that fixed if the RCV proponents simply ignored that problem as anything to worry about.