[EM] Legality of "inverting" ballots by Condorcet.

[Buddha Buck]

At 02:27 PM 07-05-2001 -0400, you wrote:
>Mr. Schulze wrote in part-
>
>Due to Condorcet, when one "eliminates" a proposition of
>an opinion then one still has an opinion. Therefore, it
>is clear that "eliminating" can only mean "inverting".
>---
>D- As usual, I must note that changing ballots is a major election felony in
>most countries.

Irrelevant for at least two reasons.

First, it is a major election felony to physically change a legally cast 
ballot, or to falsely report the contents of a legally cast 
ballot.  Neither of those things are happening here.  What is being 
described is a procedure for tallying ballots cast to determine a winner, 
not a procedure for physically modifying the ballots themselves.

Second, even if physical modifications of the ballots were necessary (which 
they are not), it is --highly- unlikely that a jurisdiction adopting this 
procedure would not also legislate an exception to the felony ballot 
tampering laws for people modifying the ballots in the manner prescribed by 
the election law.  If they did not add such an exception, then every 
election conducted under those laws would be suspect because either a) the 
legally mandated procedure was not properly followed, or b) election 
officials feloniously tampered with the ballots.

>Would Condorcet have been convicted of committing an election law felony ???

Nope, because if his procedure had been adopted, a) it wouldn't have 
required physical modification of the ballots, or falsification of the 
ballot tallies, and b) the law would have been on his side, because he 
would have been following legal election procedure.

>Since Condorcet *relative* votes may produce a circular tie, then some other
>tiebreaker should be used instead of *inverting* ANY votes.

What tie breaker would you recommend?  At least Condorcet was honest about 
the need to discount the wishes of a majority of the voters for the 
purposes of breaking the tie.

>The standard example-
>
>34 ABC
>33 BCA
>32 CAB
>99
>
>66 A B 33
>67 B C 32
>65 C A 34
>
>A whole lot of votes would need to be *inverted* --- circa one-third.

Yup, and the vote would have been reported something like:

-----------------
In the election of City Alderman for the 3rd district, 99 legal ballots 
were cast:

34: Anderson > Blake > Cleveland
33: Blake > Cleveland > Anderson
32: Cleveland > Anderson > Blake

The original ballots and tally sheets will be available for public 
inspection in the office of the Board of Elections upon official 
certification of the election results.  Official representatives of the 
candidates may inspect the ballots and tally sheets in the office of the 
Board of Elections immediately, and may file legal challenges to the 
ballots and ballot counts on or before November 30th.  After all legal 
challenges to the ballots are concluded, the Chairman of the Board of 
Elections will certify the election no earlier than December 5th.

Uncertified final results are:

No candidate was preferred by a majority of ballots over all other 
candidates.  Therefore, pursuant to City Public Election Law 104-3(f), a 
list of pairwise victories was compiled:

66:33 Anderson over Blake
67:32 Blake over Cleveland
65:34 Cleveland over Anderson

and the pairwise victory with the smallest margin of victory (Cleveland 
over Anderson, 65:34) was inverted, yielding:

66:33 Anderson over Blake
67:32 Blake over Cleveland
(34:65) Anderson over Cleveland) (*)

*Note: Vote tallies in parenthesis (e.g: (34:65)) indicates that the 
victory was inverted.

With the modified table of victories, Anderson defeats both Blake and 
Cleveland by majorites.

Therefore, according to these uncertified election results, Anderson shall 
be the City Alderman for the 3rd district
-------------------
Or some such.   Please point out the election fraud in such a report.

Later
   Buddha