[EM] VoteFair representation ranking recommended for Czech Green Party

[Peter Zbornik]

Hello,

thanks for the information.
It seems a bit unusual to keep switching methods.
I don't understand how proportionality is achieved.
I would appreciate if Votefair ranking would have some mathematical
description and at least well described and discussed in some peer-reviewed
paper.
According to the description votefair ranking looks like STV.

I also have some concerns about the vote-counting.
We would need to make sure that the vote counting cannot not be manipulated
and that the count is independently verifiable.
Is the vote-counting program possible to install on a computer?
Is it open source?
Is the count implementable by a reasonably skilled programator?

Peter

On Wed, Apr 28, 2010 at 10:20 PM, <VoteFair at solutionscreative.com> wrote:

> To Peter Zbornik, per your request for a proportional election method for
> the Czech Green party:
>
> I recommend that you use VoteFair representation ranking to achieve your
> goal of fairness in electing your Green Party's council members.
>
> VoteFair representation ranking has these characteristics:
>
> * It is relatively easy to explain and understand.  (It is explained
> below.)
>
> * Reliable software to do the calculations (and optionally the balloting)
> is
> available for free at VoteFair.org.
>
> * Drafts of statutes to implement it already exist, and I can modify those
> for your situation.
>
> * It has been successfully used in a similarly adversarial election of
> directors.
>
> * Most importantly, it produces fair results when a group is split into a
> few different sub-groups.
>
> Here is a testimonial from Allan Barber who coordinated the use of VoteFair
> representation ranking for electing directors of the San Francisco Bay Area
> Curling Club:
>
> "Our club is extremely pleased with multiple aspects of the VoteFair
> system.
> The ability to vote online meant an extremely high voter turnout,
> approximately 70-75%!  Equally as important are the concepts underlying the
> VoteFair system.  Using a comparison system instead of the more common
> method of voting for a single candidate we came out knowing that we had
> voted in the candidates our club members preferred to have in the seats.
> Not only were there a number of good candidates, which could have split a
> conventional vote to the point of electing a non-preferred candidate, but
> our club is essentially split between 2 facilities and some candidates were
> known better in one or other of the facilities.  VoteFair [ranking] gave us
> the ability to balance that out transparently.  Thanks!"
>
> Verbally I was told that everyone in the club -- except the people who did
> not get re-elected -- liked the results.
>
> Before explaining the method, please consider that the reason your group's
> voters are "dishonest" is that the current voting rules allow a voter to
> vote strategically in a way that gives that voter (or that voter's
> subgroup)
> increased (compared to other voters) influence over the results.  A
> well-designed voting method does not allow the results to be influenced by
> strategic voting.  In other words, widespread strategic voting reveals that
> the voting method, not the voters, are flawed.
>
> Regarding strategic voting, range voting is vulnerable to strategic voting
> by using an approval-like approach where the approved candidates are given
> the highest score and the disapproved candidates are given the lowest
> score.
> (I presume the re-weighted version has the same basic weakness.)  IRV and
> (all versions of) STV also are well-known to be vulnerable to strategic
> voting.  These reasons alone are enough to disqualify them for use in your
> situation.  The fact that they do not necessarily elect a Condorcet winner
> is yet another flaw.
>
> As you recognize, the Condorcet criteria is important for electing your
> president.  You want to ensure that he/she is pairwise preferred over each
> of the other candidates.
>
> To achieve the Condorcet portion (but not yet the proportional portion) of
> the outcome, I recommend using the Condorcet-Kemeny method.  For a simple
> description of the method, here is the first paragraph of its description
> in
> the "Condorcet method" Wikipedia article
> (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet_method#Kemeny-Young_method):
>
> "[This] method considers every possible sequence of choices in terms of
> which choice might be most popular, which choice might be second-most
> popular, and so on down to which choice might be least popular. Each such
> sequence is associated with a Kemeny score that is equal to the sum of the
> pairwise counts that apply to the specified sequence. The sequence with the
> highest score is identified as the overall ranking, from most popular to
> least popular."
>
> Of course you would have to add a description of pairwise counting, but
> Wikipedia and other sources (indicated below) provide simple and clear
> descriptions of pairwise counting.
>
> The second paragraph provides a visual way to think of the Condorcet-Kemeny
> method:
>
> "When the pairwise counts are arranged in a matrix in which the choices
> appear in sequence from most popular (top and left) to least popular
> (bottom
> and right), the winning Kemeny score equals the sum of the counts in the
> upper-right, triangular half of the matrix (shown here in bold on a green
> background)."
>
> A disadvantage of the Condorcet-Kemeny method (emphasized by Markus
> Schulze)
> is that it is difficult to write software to calculate the results quickly,
> and it is difficult to write the code that handles cases of circular
> ambiguity and multiple highest Kemeny scores.  Yet this software-writing
> disadvantage disappears by using the software at VoteFair.org; I've already
> resolved those software-writing challenges.  Anyone can use that
> server-based software for free.  During the last 10 years it has been used
> for hundreds of real-life polls and surveys and dozens of (non-government)
> elections, so it is fully debugged.
>
> In your situation, the Condorcet-Kemeny method would be used to identify
> which candidate is most popular.  That person would be elected president.
>
> Now I'll describe VoteFair representation ranking.  It would be used to
> fill
> the second seat, which in your case would be the vice president.  (There
> has
> been some debate about whether the president and vice president should be
> elected separately from the other council members, but I suggest keeping
> the
> process simple; the approach I'm recommending will produce fair results.)
>
> The core of VoteFair representation ranking is to reduce the influence of
> the voters who just elected the winner of the first seat.  Those voters,
> who
> clearly constitute a majority (because they elected the president), would
> have their collective influence reduced to the degree that they exceed a
> majority (50 percent of the voters).  For example, in a simplistic case, if
> 60 percent of the voters favor the about-to-be-president as their first
> choice, then their collective influence would be scaled back to what can be
> thought of as 10 percent (the amount beyond 50 percent), so that the
> remaining 40 percent of the voters can (to the extent they are in agreement
> with one another) elect their first choice as the vice president.
>
> To prevent strategic voting (such as by marking an obscure candidate as the
> first choice), there is an adjustment for identifying which voters account
> for the winning of the first seat (the presidency in this case).  It is a
> two-step process.  First, all the voters who ranked the new president as
> their first choice would have their ballots ignored temporarily, and the
> most popular candidate (based on the remaining ballots and the remaining
> candidates, and using the Condorcet-Kemeny method) would be calculated.
> This person we'll call the "alternative winner."  As the second step, the
> ballots identified for reduced influence (for filling the second seat) are
> the ones in which the new president is ranked higher than the "alternative
> winner."  With this approach, a voter cannot strongly favor the new
> president and also strongly oppose the likely winner of the second seat.
>  In
> fact, if there is a strategic way to vote under this method, I don't know
> what it is.
>
> A recent example of how well VoteFair representation ranking works occurred
> in a poll for American Idol contestants.  The results are at this URL:
> http://www.votefair.org/results-43200-51085-40733.html
> In this poll, the majority of voters were fans of Clay Aiken (which caused
> him to be ranked as most popular) and those voters insincerely ranked Adam
> Lambert very low, so that Adam Lambert was seventh out of twelve according
> to Condorcet-Kemeny calculations.  Yet VoteFair representation ranking
> reveals that Adam Lambert is actually second-most popular -- or second-most
> "representative."
>
> (Clarification: The word "popular" has two different interpretations, where
> one refers to how many people approve of the choice and the other refers to
> how strongly people like the choice.  As an example, TV stations basically
> only care about how many people watch the show, not how much the viewers
> like the show -- beyond what it takes for them to choose to watch it.)
>
> After identifying (via Condorcet-Kemeny) the most
> popular-and-representative
> candidate (your president), and after identifying (via VoteFair
> representation ranking) the second-most representative candidate (your vice
> president), the third-seat winner is identified using the Condorcet-Kemeny
> method among the remaining candidates (and all the ballots).  The fourth
> candidate uses VoteFair representation ranking where the just-elected
> choice
> is the the third-most representative choice.  And so on.  This process
> (which is executed using a single mouse click) would identify the top five
> or seven most-representative candidates as your council members (with the
> top-ranked ones also being designated as president and vice president).
>
> I've just explained VoteFair representation ranking.  Do you think your
> Green-party members will understand this method?
>
> An even clearer explanation of VoteFair representation ranking is in my
> book
> titled "Ending The Hidden Unfairness In U.S. Elections."  It can be read
> online (free) using Google books; just search for "Richard Fobes".  Chapter
> 15 is the one that describes VoteFair representation ranking.  Chapter 12
> clearly describes VoteFair popularity ranking, which is mathematically
> equivalent to the Condorcet-Kemeny method (which I was unaware of when I
> created the method).  (If there are any access limits on these chapters,
> please let me know and I can resolve that.)
>
> Another resource is Wikipedia.  The Condorcet-Kemeny method is described in
> the "Kemeny-Young method" article.  Currently I cannot write a Wikipedia
> article that explains VoteFair representation ranking because the method
> hasn't been published in an academic publication, and because I am its
> originator.  However, if the Czech Green party chooses this method and
> someone else expands the "VoteFair ranking" article (which now just
> redirects to the Condorcet-Kemeny article), I would be happy to refine the
> article to include a description of VoteFair representation ranking (and
> other components of VoteFair ranking, which also includes party-based
> proportionality methods).
>
> Yet another description of what is mathematically equivalent to the
> Condorcet-Kemeny method appears in my how-to book on creative problem
> solving, which is titled "The Creative Problem Solver's Toolbox."  The book
> has been translated into Czech, so you might find that there is a
> Czech-language description of that method in the Czech edition.  (I haven't
> seen the Czech edition.)
>
> As for ballots, your voters could vote online using the interactive ballots
> at VoteFair.org, but duplicates would have to be removed (probably based on
> randomly assigned ID numbers).  For this purpose consider that the VoteFair
> site can handle high levels of voting traffic, presumably even if all 400
> ballots are cast within the same minute.  Or you can collect digital data
> from 1-2-3 ballots (also known by the redundant phrase "preferential
> ballots") from some other source, and I can write code that converts its
> output into VoteFair XML importable code.  I don't know of any open-source
> software that reads paper ballots, but if you find such software, we can
> similarly import it into the VoteFair XML format.
>
> Perhaps a more viable option would be to digitally photograph all the paper
> ballots, distribute those photographs to two or three groups of members,
> and
> each group can have 5 or 10 people manually enter the preference
> information, with the groups using separate/independent VoteFair election
> IDs.  If the results are different between the groups, the errors
> (intentional or not) can be tracked down (especially if two of three groups
> get the same result).  When you create the paper ballots, I suggest using
> the layout that is used in the interactive ballots; otherwise you will be
> tempted to ask voters to write numbers, and those numbers are often
> illegible.
>
> The VoteFair site does have a limit of 12 choices (per question).  On my
> computer I can handle more choices.  However, I find that voters are
> overwhelmed if they have to rank more than 12 choices -- even though they
> can rank multiple candidates at the same preference level.  If this
> limitation is a problem, there are other alternatives, one of which is to
> use an informal approval-voting process to dismiss candidates who do not
> have significant support.
>
> I have not yet answered all your questions, but at this point I have a
> question.  Is this approach of interest to you?  If so, I would be happy to
> assist you in developing a proposal to your group, and then making it
> happen.
>
> As the author of a how-to book on creative problem solving that has been
> published in nine languages, I'll point out that unfair voting methods are
> the cause of many of the world's biggest problems.  Helping your group
> would
> create a path for others to follow as we take democracy to higher levels of
> fairness.
>
> Richard Fobes
>
>
>
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