[EM] Need IRV examples; voting show

[James Gilmour]

> James Gilmour wrote:
> >
> > [...]  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?
>
> Freedom of information, public accountability, etc.  One example of
> where it was used was Florida in 2000-2001, where several news
> organizations were able to examine the presidential ballots and
> eventually discount claims that a selective recount would have changed
> the outcome.

I appreciate that US and UK practice are very different in these matters, but I
still don't see how publishing irrelevant information enhances public
accountability, etc.

With regard to freedom of information, it is illegal in the UK to publish any
information that could have been obtained ONLY from the inspection of a ballot
paper.  So when we comment on the voters' preferences in an STV-PR (Choice
multiple seat) election, we are careful always to refer to the patterns of
transfers that can be seen in the published Results Sheet, even if we have been
privileged observers in the counting hall and have seen the actual patterns of
preferences on many ballot papers.

All the candidates and their agents can inspect anything and everything during a
UK public election count and can challenge the result in the courts if they are
still unhappy.

Suppose, in a two-horse race, candidate A has more votes than candidate B in six
out of ten precincts, while B has more votes than A in the other four precincts.
However, despite equal allocation of electors to precincts, there is a
differential turnout (not uncommon) such that B gains 60% of the votes across the
city while A has only 40%.  What would be the point of publishing the precinct
"results"?  They are totally irrelevant, and potentially confusing.  Of course,
the political parties, professional psephologists and some academics would be
extremely pleased to have such information.  But we do not run elections for any
of them.  Elections are for Electors.  And the only thing that matters to them is
how many votes the candidates got city-wide and who won.


>
> Also, I don't consider information pointing to the defectiveness of an
> election or electoral system to be irrelevant.

I don't see how the precinct by precinct information would help here.  The only
defects that matter are those that directly affect the result, ie on a city-wide
basis.


> > > 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.
>
> I didn't say that approval ballots necessarily contained more
> information than ranked ballots, I said that approval ballots contained
> information not present in ranked ballots, and that the information on
> an approval ballot is less prone to being used in a haphazard way.

I don't want to play semantics, but surely if (as you said) "approval ballots
contain information not present in ranked ballots", the ranked ballots must
contain less information than the approval ballots?  Or do you mean that they
contain similar amounts of information, but that it is different?  (That it is
different is, of course, self-evident.)

I fail to see how the information a ranked ballot will be used in a more haphazard
(random) way.  No matter how many times ballot papers are recounted under the IRV
rules I have used for many years, you will always obtain the same result.  So
there should be nothing haphazard about it.


> With ranked ballots, there is no way to determine who is acceptable or
> not acceptable, except for the first and last preferences.

Maybe, but that is not the purpose of the election.  The purpose of a single seat
election is to identify the one candidate who is most representative of those who
vote.  That seems to me to be quite different from sorting the candidates into
"acceptable" and "not acceptable".  And before anyone rushes back - yes, I do
recognise the defects in IRV in achieving that objective.


>
> > 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.
>
> Only if you insist on finer granularity than acceptable/not acceptable.

Sorry, but to me "acceptable/not acceptable" says nothing about the strengths of
the preferences, and it was you who claimed "strength of preference" information
was present in approval ballots.  In my analysis there is no information about
"strengths of preferences" in either Approval or IRV ballots.  In Approval, the
voter sorts the candidates into two sets - we know nothing about the 'distance'
between those two sets.  In IRV, the voter ranks the candidates (so far as he or
she wishes) so we may know more about their relative positions - but again we know
nothing about the 'distances' between successive preferences.  (This is a
fascinating subject, but it far removed from any voting system that we could
implement in practice.  For the moment I'll be happy to achieve reform that will
deal with the major defects in our voting systems and I'll leave it to others,
long after me, to worry about differential strengths of preferences.)


> And I don't buy your interpretation of "one and only one vote"-- I don't
> believe the phrase was ever intended to apply to voting methods other
> than first-past-the-post, in the context of people actually voting
> multiple times for the same candidate.

This is a convenient interpretation which appears to be favoured by many advocates
of Approval Voting.  The definition I have long been familiar with is not
conveniently truncated in this way.


>
> > > 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.
>
> If that's true, it's also violated in every other method except
> Plurality.  It's especially bad in IRV, where one voter may have votes
> counted for several candidates, while another has only one choice
> counted.

There may be some problem with the rules you've seen for counting IRV ballots, but
in the rules I've used for many years, it is just impossible for any voter to have
his or her vote counted for several candidates and so secure more than one vote.
With IRV, the voter has one vote.  That vote is transferable, but the whole of
that one vote counts towards the election of only one candidate.  If the voter's
most preferred candidate ceases to be a candidate, because he or she is excluded,
then the one vote is transferred to one other candidate and counts exclusively
towards the election of that one candidate.  I think this demonstrates "one
person, one vote" throughout the entire process.



> With Approval everyone gets exactly one vote per candidate, and the vote
> may be to "approve" or "not approve."

Yes, but "one vote per candidate" is somewhat different from "one vote per
elector".


> And as has been pointed out, with
> approval any individual voter can vote in such a way as to cancel out
> any other voter.

Surely, this feature is not to Approval?


>
> > > 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.
>
> At least we agree on something, although it didn't sound so bad back
> when I was an IRV supporter.  At the very least, it could be improved by
> letting second preferences be voted as in approval voting-- in other
> words one first choice and any number of second choices.  Not an ideal
> system, but probably an improvement over two-round runoff, and maybe IRV
> depending on your criteria.  Certainly better than SV as it stands.

The only sensible changes to the Supplementary Vote are to allow the voters to
mark as many preferences as they wish and to remove the restriction on using the
preferences as transferable votes in the count.

James

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