[EM] Need IRV examples; voting show

[James Gilmour]

Bart had been digging the archive and found this exchange:
> > Bart had written:
> > > For example, instead of precincts, suppose the division is between
> > > walk-in and absentee votes, or between election-night and recount
> > > results.  Imagine candidate A being declared the winner, with a recount
> > > turning up additional votes supporting A, thereby causing A to lose.  I
> > > think this would undermine public acceptance of the outcome, especially
> > > given the recent hysteria surrounding the U.S. electoral college.  The
> > > answer might be to keep all preliminary results secret, but I'd be more
> > > comfortable if that weren't necessary.
> >

I had replied:
> > I think you describe two quite different scenarios here.
> > It may be current practice in the USA to declare walk-in and absentee votes
> > separately, but I would suggest there is no possible justification
> for it.  All
> > the votes, however cast, count towards one single result to produced
> one single
> > winner.  How the respective candidate totals were made up is
> completely irrelevant
> > to that result.  Of course, the political parties, professional
> psephologists and
> > interested academics would all like precinct by precinct information, and much
> > more, but none of that is of any relevance to the result.  So why
> should any of it
> > be made public?
> >
> > I do agree that your recount scenario could cause problems.  But
> going back to the
> > original dataset which produced this "problem", isn't the answer to adopt
> > Condorcet's rules?  That option is not available to us in the UK
> because we must
> > be able to count public elections manually (except in approved pilots of "new"
> > technology), and so Condorcet is impractical.


Bart wrote (29 Nov)
> Or the answer could be to adopt approval voting, especially if the only
> practical alternative is IRV.

But there are some other serious problems with Approval.


> If you acknowledge that voter rankings
> will be utilized in such a haphazard way that you would prefer to keep
> information about subsets of the vote secret, wouldn't it be better to
> avoid collecting information you can't use reliably?

I do not acknowledge that voter rankings will be utilised "in such a haphazard
way", unless "haphazard" means something very different your side of the pond.
There is nothing haphazard about the situation I described.  Publishing "results"
precinct by precinct is just totally irrelevant when all that matters is the
city-wide totals.  It is not a question of keeping them secret.  Rather the
question is why on earth would you want to publish such irrelevant information?

I never recommend collecting such information.  Of course, in a non-preferential
voting system, it is possible to count the votes locally at each precinct and
remit only the totals to the central "counting" station.  That would be more
difficult with a preferential voting system, but not impossible.

It is not allowed in the UK.  Here all the ballot papers that have to be counted
must be taken to one central counting station.  At the central counting station,
the "returns", ie the marked electors' roll, the counterfoils of issued ballot
papers and the unused ballot papers, are reconciled polling station by polling
station, but there is only one count and only one set of figures.


> In return,
> approval ballots contain information not present in ranked ballots,
> namely an indication of the voters' strength of preference.

I don't buy that.  In Approval each voter just sorts the candidates into two
sets - acceptable and not acceptable.  That seems to me to be LESS information
than on a typical ranked ballot.  If you really want information about "strength
of preference" you will have to introduce some system that allows each voter to
weight his or her preferences as they wish.  Then you must normalise those
weightings if you want to ensure that each voter has one vote and only one vote.
And of course, in normalising the weights, you will throw away a significant part
of the information about the differences in the strengths of preference BETWEEN
voters.


>
> In computer models conducted by Merrill and others, approval voting
> produced results more in line with Condorcet's method than did IRV,
> especially when there are many candidates.

Maybe, but that does not remove the serious defect in Approval.  One person, one
vote is violated.


> This is even more true when
> the IRV variant is a restricted one, such as the "supplemental vote"
> method used in London (where the voter is only allowed a first and
> second choice).

The Supplemental Vote is highly defective and should NEVER be used.  It will
usually disenfranchise a large proportion of those who vote.  In the London
Mayoral election, 22% of the second preferences were discarded because they were
not cast of either of the two front-runners.  Many of us campaigned against the
use of the Supplemental Vote, but our Government had political reasons for its
choice - they thought it would help their candidate to win.  They were wrong!!

James

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