[Election-Methods] A Better Version of IRV? (Terry Bouricius)

Tue Jul 8 12:48:40 PDT 2008

> Date: Tue, 8 Jul 2008 09:36:27 -0400
> From: "Terry Bouricius" <terryb at burlingtontelecom.net>
>
> Dear Kathy Dopp,
>
> Please stop referring to your report on IRV as "peer-reviewed." That is an
> absolutely false statement.

I referred to it as "peer-reviewed" because it was referred to as
"peer-reviewed" by an engineer who has been on more than one of the
IEEE voting system standards groups and because at least half a dozen
PhD computer scientists who are voting system experts reviewed it and
I took virtually all of their suggestions. In addition, Warren Smith
and Abd ul Lomax Rahman from this list contributed heavily.

>
> Peer-reviewed as used in the social sciences (and hard sciences too)
> typically means a blind review process where a journal editor sends a
> draft article to several reviewers whose identity is unknown to the author
> and vice versa.  Typically good journals require that the author at least
> address the weaknesses noted by the reviewers; authors who refuse
> sometimes find their article rejected instead of published.

I did try to address all of the weaknesses which were pointed out to
me by anyone, and I did respond to virtually every point of every
review I was given, as well as doing extensive research and reading on
the topic.

>
> You selectively took comments from a few people who agreed with your
> opinions and derisively dismissed those from experts who pointed out
> errors

That is flatly incorrect. It is BTW delusional to imagine that you (or
anyone) could know all about a research and writing process which you
were not privy to and never asked me about.

(such as your miss-understanding of Arrow's use of the Pareto
> Improvement Criterion.)

There is no mention of Arrow's Pareto criterion in the paper
currently. Perhaps you are referring to an early version of my report?
 I essentially dropped discussion of Arrow's theorem from the paper
after realizing that most of the proofs I read of it were bogus and/or
ill-defined and that to thoroughly understand Arrow's theorem I would
have to read Arrow's original book and spend months reading everything
written on it since then, much of it mathematical nonsense, from what
I could gather after reading some of what was written on it.  It
hardly seemed to be worth that kind of effort.

> Your report has so many errors of fact and
> analysis that any legitimate  journal would require substantial re-writing
> before even considering it.

Terry.  People who have no facts to back up their claims often make
unsubstantiated statements like this without any details. I try to
live by a simple principle: "To be terrific, be specific."  You have
not given one instance of any "errors of fact and analysis" in my
paper, let alone "so many... that any legitimate journal would require
substantial re-writing."

Cheers,

Kathy
>
> Terry Bouricius
>
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Kathy Dopp" <kathy.dopp at gmail.com>
> To: <election-methods at lists.electorama.com>
> Sent: Monday, July 07, 2008 7:31 PM
> Subject: Re: [Election-Methods] A Better Version of IRV?
>
>
>> Date: Sun, 06 Jul 2008 23:36:32 +0000 (GMT)
>> From: fsimmons at pcc.edu
>> Subject: [Election-Methods] A Better Version of IRV?
>> To: election-methods at lists.electorama.com
>> Message-ID: <e4afed032228c.48715700 at pcc.edu>
>> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
>>
>> There is a lot of momentum behind IRV.  If we cannot stop it, are there
>> some tweaks that would make it more liveable?
>
> Hi Forest.
>
> I think we can stop that madness.  I believe that the LWV, US will no
> longer be seriously considering supporting IRV since my writing a
> report on IRV's flaws - and that other State LWV groups and other
> State legislators where IRV was being considered are stopping their
> push for it.
>
> However, to answer your "if" question ...
>
>> Someone has suggested that a candidate withdrawal option would go a long
>> way towards ameliorating the damage.
>> Here's another suggestion, inspired by what we have learned from
>> Australia's worst problems with their version of IRV:
>> Since IRV satisfies Later No Harm, why not complete the incompletely
>> ranked ballots with the help of the rankings of the ballot's favorite
>> candidate?
>
> But that would still leave the problem of having to count IRV
> elections centrally and alot of the other worst flaws of IRV
> (including its lack of fairness, cost, tendency to promote secret
> electronic vote counting, etc.  Please peruse my report when you have
> a chance (It is only 11 pages plus appendices and endnotes and is
> well-organized to make it easy to read.):
>
> http://electionarchive.org/ucvAnalysis/US/RCV-IRV/InstantRunoffVotingFlaws.pdf
>
>> The unranked candidates would be ranked below the ranked candidates in
>> the order of the ballot of the favorite.
>
> While that might be a slight improvement, the better idea would be the
> one suggested in my paper (I heard it first from Charlie Strauss) that
> also fixes some of the counting problems of IRV elections. I.e. Let
> all the candidates (before election day) pick their own ranked choices
> of other candidates - and not the voters.  This system has many
> advantages over IRV including:
>
> 1.  gives the minor party candidates more political power
>
> 2.  simpler ballots that do not confuse voters - i.e. voters only need
> vote for their top choice
>
> 3.  The RCV ballots can be counted and summed much more easily because
> all the ballots of voters who voted for an eliminated candidate are
> counted the same way - no need for individual ballot examination and
> sorting, etc.  I.e. Only the voters' first choices are needed to be
> summed for each precinct and reported to the central facility as
> always, to know who wins.
>
> 4. Much much easier to manually count and audit.
>
>
>
>> If the candidates were allowed to specify their rankings after they got
>> the partial results, this might be a valuable improvement.
>
> Having the candidates only rank "incompletely ranked" ballots would be
> an election nightmare, but having candidates rank all the other
> candidates and having voters only give their first choice, would work
> better than IRV, but I still think other voting methods are available
> that are superior.
>
> I believe that my email contacts with the LWV and with US Election
> Officials and others who have now been apprised of my report on the
> "17 flaws and 3 benefits of IRV" will have the effect of stopping IRV
> from creating very additional serious problems with US elections.
>
> Look at the mess in San Francisco and WA now.  Most election officials
> will not want to emulate those messes.
>
> The push for manual audits to verify the accuracy of machine counts,
> will make IRV virtually impossible to implement.  Election integrity
> advocates, once they understand all the problems IRV causes, will
> oppose it.
>
> It is amazing to me that anyone would consider supporting IRV when it
> does not even solve the spoiler problem except in one case, and there
> are an amount of possibly subtotals that could be used to count votes
> for each precinct equal to the sum from i = 0 to N-1 of N!/i! where N
> is the number of candidates.
>
> The only reason some people supported IRV initially is because it is a
> very seductive idea until one actually sits down and thinks about all
> the implications of using it.
>
> If you know any legislator or election official who is contemplating
> using IRV, simply attach a copy of my peer-reviewed report on the "17
> flaws and 3 benefits of IRV" to them.  Since I wrote this paper, I
> personally know of at least two US States where legislators have
> changed their minds about supporting IRV and are no longer supporting
> IRV.  If we get my peer-reviewed report on IRV out to all the
> decision-makers, I feel certain we can avert another mess similar to
> the 2002 HAVA bill.
>
> As usual the group Common Cause is causing problems with US election
> systems while raising money to allegedly solve the election problems
> because Common Cause has officially endorsed IRV just like Common
> Cause was instrumental in pushing through the HAVA bill in 2002.  The
> leadership of Common Cause never seems to adequately think about the
> election reform positions they take prior to taking them and yet are
> very slow to drop their bad positions once they take them. Sigh.
>
> Kathy
> ----
> Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
>
>
>
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> End of Election-Methods Digest, Vol 49, Issue 13
> ************************************************
>

-- 

Kathy Dopp

The material expressed herein is the informed product of the author
Kathy Dopp's fact-finding and investigative efforts. Dopp is a
Mathematician, Expert in election audit mathematics and procedures; in
exit poll discrepancy analysis; and can be reached at

P.O. Box 680192
Park City, UT 84068
phone 435-658-4657

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