[EM] Report on the 2006 Burlington Mayoral election.

[Kristofer Munsterhjelm]

Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
> Since Burlington has made ballot images available, and since we only 
> have, from summary results, part of the story of this election, I 
> decided to analyze the images. I'm writing this as I do the work, both 
> as a way to record what I find and to report it. I will interpret the 
> data elsewhere, so, unless I make mistakes, there shouldn't be any 
> controversy about this.
> 
> There are instructions that Burlington gives for loading the data into a 
> spreadsheet. The votes are contained in a series of .prm files. Each 
> record begins with a precinct and ballot number, but, I noticed, in some 
> cases these are duplicated, they could represent different counting 
> batches or some other unexplained anomaly.
> 
> In the Excel file I compiled, there were 9865 records, which agrees with 
> the total number of ballots as reported. Burlington reports 77 invalid 
> ballots.
> 
> I'm not going to report the IRV results, per se, those are available at 
> http://www.burlingtonvotes.org/20060307/2006%20Burlington%20Mayor%20Round.htm 
> 
> 
> I find 77 ballots with no choice at all; as far as the ballot images are 
> concerned, these are blank. (In an audit, it's not impossible for some 
> of these ballots to be found valid, it depends on rules. For example, no 
> ballots showed a blank first choice and then some later preference. 
> That's unlikely, this is a known and reasonably common error.)
> 
> This leaves 9788 ballots. The software they used was general-purpose STV 
> software, I believe it's open source, so the report mentions the Droop 
> quota, which is a simple majority of the valid ballots, if we assume 
> that even overvoted ballots are valid: so the software is seeking, until 
> it's found or all but two candidates are left, 4895 votes as a majority.
> 
> Under the Burlington rules, according to the instructions at 
> http://www.burlingtonvotes.org/20060307/manualverification.php , a 
> ballot with equal ranking (two or more candidates at the same rank) is 
> "exhausted" if more than one of the candidates is not eliminated when 
> that rank is reached. Quite a number of voters overvoted in first rank, 
> which will result in immediate exhaustion. I'm going to list all these 
> initially exhausted ballots

[snip]

> The candidate names, for reference, are this:
> .CANDIDATE C01, "Louie The Cowman Beaudin"
> .CANDIDATE C02, "Kevin J. Curley" (Republican)
> .CANDIDATE C03, "Bob Kiss" (Progressive)
> .CANDIDATE C04, "Hinda Miller" (Democrat)
> .CANDIDATE C05, "Loyal Ploof"
> .CANDIDATE C06, "Write-ins"

To my knowledge, Loyal Ploof is (Green).

Some more information on this data set, according to my election program:

Schulze returns C03 > C04 > C02 > C01 > C05 > C06. So does minmax, 
Borda, Vote For and Against (1, 0, 0..., -1), and Nauru Borda.
Plurality returns C03 > C04 > C02 > C01 > C06 > C05. So does Hare (IRV) 
and Carey.
Antiplurality returns C03 > C02 = C01 > C04 > C05 > C06.

All positional methods are whole.

The Condorcet matrix is

    0  1289   804  1161  2028  3290
5165     0  3397  3556  5136  5875
6961  5730     0  4763  7027  7351
6747  5545  3991     0  6790  7336
1869  1318   603   987     0  3094
  431   311   194   323   510     0

(row beats column), and the WV basis is thus:

    0     0  0     0  2028  3290
5165     0  0     0  5136  5875
6961  5730  0  4763  7027  7351
6747  5545  0     0  6790  7336
    0     0  0     0     0  3094
    0     0  0     0     0     0

which means that C03 is the CW.

(If my program has bugs, there will be errors in the above.)