[EM] Need IRV examples; voting show

[James Gilmour]

Bart wrote:
> The issue is that H wins BOTH precincts, but still loses the combined
> election.  That's the definition of consistency as applied to voting
> systems.

That may be the definition, but it has no relevance in the real world of real
elections.


> It seems to me to be related to monotonicity violations.

I don't know about this suggestion.  I don't care much about monotonicity
violations - there are MUCH more serious problems in real public elections.


> I think the question is not so much whether the individual precinct
> results are relevant, as what it says about the rationality of the
> voting system in use.

I agree, but it still irrelevant in the real world.


> 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 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.

James

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