[EM] The Coming California Single Seat Election

[Dave Ketchum]

On Sat, 16 Aug 2003 10:29:30 -0700 (PDT) Alex Small wrote:

> Donald Davison said:
> 
>>I think both Approval and Condorect would fail this election.
>>
>>Approval would have a leading candidate, but without a majority of the
>>voters.
>>

No reason to demand a majority for Approval.  The original design of this 
election was Plurality with no demand for a majority.

> 
> Not necessarily.  The field will probably narrow to a half-dozen or so
> contenders in the next few weeks.  Most people would vote for one or a few
> of those contenders (we can debate later the optimal number to approve)
> plus their favorite porn star, child actor, widow of Frank Zappa,
> thong-selling software engineer, smokers' rights advocate, etc.  The
> fringe candidates would become irrelevant, and it would be a race between
> 
> 1)  a shamelss social climber
> 2)  an actor with no qualifications
> 3)  a smut peddler who cares
> 4)  an unremarkable lieutenant governor
> 5)  a conservative state senator who's too smart to win
> 
> Put me down for 1, 3, and 5.  Plus the smokers' rights advocate and
> thong-selling software engineer.
> 
> 
>>Condorect will need about ten thousand pairings, most of which will have
>>too few lower choices in order to yield valid results.
>>

Statement makes no sense.  If I bullet vote for T, I have voted against 
the other 134.  Could be some of them are so unattractive that there are 
no votes for them - 0/7999999 can be a valid result for such a candidate, 
and does not become invalid by being unattractive to that candidate.

Matrix is n**2 entries - 135x135 = 18,225 elements, which is manageable 
(diagonal is zeros, but cheaper to do the complete matrix with those zeros).

> 
> I don't know what you mean by "most of which will have too few lower
> choices to yield valid results."
> 
> The ballot would NOT require voters to separately vote on ten thousand
> pairwise contests.  The ballot would look just like an IRV ballot, where
> voters would rank either all of the 135 candidates or as many as they want
> to rank, truncating the rest (I'm still not sure whether I'd rank Frank
> Zappa's widow above or below the baseball commissioner).
> 
> However, unlike an IRV ballot, the data storage would be much easier. 
> Normally I don't think IRV's data storage requirements are anything to
> harp on (I used to think that way, but I've been dissuaded).  But in this
> case the data storage requirement would be of the order 3*10^42 tallies. 
> Most of those would be zero, so it would actually be more efficient to
> store each ballot separately.  By contrast, with Condorcet the voting
> machine would use each ballot to add to 9045 separate tallies, much less
> than storing 8 million separate ballots in memory, and then separately
> addressing each one to do the statewide count.


9045?  I see counts for A>B and B>A as separate tallies.

If actually doing IRV, a bit of optimizing would be in order - store each 
pattern used (CA does not have enough voters to use them all) together 
with a count of how many times that pattern was used.

> 
> So the simplicity advantage definitely goes to Condorcet here.  Now,
> simplicity is not the only advantage to consider, but you're the one who
> harped on ten thousand pairwise contests, so to the extent that simplicity
> does matter to you Condorcet or Approval should be superior to IRV.  Now,
> if you want to argue that other normative factors outweigh simplicity
> that's fine, we can have a lively debate.  But please don't try to suggest
> thta IRV would be simpler than Approval or Condorcet in a race with 135
> candidates.
> 
> 
>>There's very good chance that the so called `Condorect Winner' will be
>>the Pluralty Winner.
>>
PROVIDED Plurality did well, it could pick the Condorcet winner - PROVIDED 
we expected Plurality to dependably do so well, we could quit trying to 
define and promote something better.
> 
> It may turn out that the Terminator will be preferred to all others by a
> majority of Californians, and that he will get the most first-place votes.
>  He's currently consuming publicity the way a black hole consumes dust and
> radiation in its vicinity, so he might beat up on the other candidates
> like a robot beating a liquid metal monster.  In that scenario he'd also
> probably be the IRV winner.
> 

As I said before for Approval, Condorcet would not promise a majority 
winner.  Neither should IRV, for it should be more obvious than usual that 
they cannot deliver what most of us understand by "majority".

Still, if CA did ranked ballots, AND the winner had a majority, it could 
be bragged of as a true majority since it would not have Plurality's 
spoiler problem.

> 
> 
> Alex
> 
> P.S.  The black hole analogy is particularly apt because black holes
> destroy information, at least according to my friends who study black hole
> thermodynamics.

-- 
davek at clarityconnect.com  http://www.clarityconnect.com/webpages3/davek
  Dave Ketchum   108 Halstead Ave, Owego, NY  13827-1708   607-687-5026
            Do to no one what you would not want done to you.
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