[EM] IRV in Burlington VT

[Dave Ketchum]

Here I read serious thought from r b-j, and will only add a bit.

On Jan 9, 2010, at 5:15 PM, robert bristow-johnson wrote:
> On Jan 9, 2010, at 4:28 PM, Warren Smith wrote:
>> See this report on the Burlington 2009 IRV pathologies:
>> http://rangevoting.org/Burlington.html
>>
>> one of the co-authors, Anthony Gierzynski,
>> is a UVM professor who lives in Burlington.
>
> Prof. Gierzynski *works* in Burlington, but lives in Montpelier.  i  
> am not sure where he was living last March 3, but i doubt that his  
> stake in this election is direct.  his stake is professional and  
> scholarly.  but, as a non-resident, he doesn't have the same stake  
> that either i or Terry have.
>
>> The report refutes a lot of lies commonly told about IRV,
>> and concludes that this election
>> "singled out IRV & plurality as nearly-uniquely bad performers  
>> [among all
>> commonly-proposed election methods]."
>
> i might even agree with that
>
>> Given this experience, I would suggest that Burlington switch to a
>> method different from plurality and different from IRV.   Some  
>> obvious
>> contenders are approval and range voting.
>
> Warren, why is Condorcet not included?
>
> the problem with Approval voting is that it requires too little  
> information from the voters.
> and the problem with Range voting is that it requires too much.

I like that phrasing.
>
>
> if you support a particular candidate (let's say the Dem) but you  
> approve of two (say both the Dem and the Prog), you have a problem  
> with voting strategy with Approval.  maybe, depending on how other  
> folks vote, you can help your favorite against the candidate you  
> tepidly support, so you punch "Approve" for your fav only.  or,  
> maybe your fav is actually not in really in the running and the  
> election becomes a contest between your fallback candidate and the  
> guy you think is a piece of crap.  then "what to do, what to do?? oh  
> me oh my!" (the savvy voter must thing strategically.)  most people  
> will just approve the single candidate they support and, if nearly  
> all do that, there is no difference between Approval and Plurality.
>
> with Range voting, again if you support a particular candidate but  
> you sorta approve of two, you have a problem with voting strategy  
> again.  depending on what other people are doing, it may be best  
> (for your interests) to plop all of your points onto your fav.  but  
> what if it becomes a contest between your fallback and the piece of  
> crap candidate?  again "what to do, what to do?? oh me oh my!"
>
> the Ranked-Order Ballot extracts the correct amount of information  
> from the voter.  if the voter rankes A>B>C>D, the ballot makes no  
> assumption regarding how much more the voter likes A over B compared  
> to how much the voter likes B>C.  maybe the voter likes A and B  
> almost equally (but A just a little more) but thinks C is a piece of  
> crap.  or maybe both B and C are crappy, but B is a little more  
> tolerable than C.  the problem with Borda is that it assumes the  
> difference in preference are the same between adjacently ranked  
> candidates (an assumption not supported or refuted by the voter or  
> his ballot).
>
> the ranked-order ballot only asks the voter: if the election were  
> solely between A and B (or any other pair), who would the voter vote  
> for?  the problem with IRV is that it doesn't decide the election by  
> viewing the ballot information as such. instead IRV and the single  
> transferrable vote method looks at a voter's vote as a commodity to  
> be transferred from one preference to another based on the arbitrary  
> rule that only 1st-choice votes count when determining who the  
> biggest loser is and eliminating that "loser".  2nd-choice votes are  
> no better than last place in that evaluation.  i am a DSP algorithm  
> engineer; one of the things we hate the most (and are sometime  
> unavoidable) are arbitrarily-set thresholds, we know that bad shit  
> happens when the numbers just don't quite get to the threshold.   
> immediately, in 2005, when i read the IRV law i was signing, i  
> recognized that as a problem, but hoped it would elect the Condorcet  
> winner anyway (and it did in 2006).
>
> even though there is the *possibility* of a cycle (and thus a  
> *possible* strategy of some to try to throw a Condorcet election  
> into a cycle) the likelyhood is soooo low, because of political  
> alignment along the major axis of the political spectrum.  Nader  
> voters in 2000 were not likely to choose Bush for their 2nd-choice  
> over Gore.  even if voting strategists succeed in throwing a  
> Condorcet election into a cycle, they have no solid control in  
> advance about how that cycle will be resolved.  sounds like a  
> dangerous "strategy" and i doubt anyone will try it or be successful  
> doing so in reality.

To decide on a strategy effort is a difficult challenge:
      1.  What is expectable for vote counts with no strategy - note  
that what might be expectable could change if there is more than one  
strategy effort, perhaps having different goals.
      2.  What changes would lead to better vote counts.
      3.  What might be doable toward such better vote counts, with  
minimal risk of causing worse, considering the number of voters needed  
to cause success.

Cycles do involve political alignment.  In A>B >C>A a triangular  
relationship among the three positions is required, as is nearing  
equal strength among the three.
>
>
>> The difficulty is, that due to the fact that the world in
>> general and Burlington in particular, is inhabited by morons,
>
> some of us are morons, that is true.
>
>> the ballot issue probably is going to consist of exactly of the two
>> worst choices "(a) IRV or (b) go back to plurality?"
>> with no third choice being offered.
>
> no shit.  that's what i've been crying in the wilderness since last  
> March.  lately, where i've been crying is:
> http://7d.blogs.com/blurt/2009/12/burlington-residents-seek-repeal-of-instant-runoff-voting/comments/page/2/#comments 
>  .
>
>> Furthermore, without a decent voting system,
>> even HAVING an election with 3 or more choices, is rendered dubious  
>> and risky.
>
> no shit.  but, at least with IRV, we are not risking electing the  
> slightly unpopular GOP candidate in this town of liberals.  with the  
> old law (which requires a 40%+ plurality or it goes to runoff),  
> there is a greater risk of electing the unpopular GOP candidate,  
> which is why the GOPers are the biggest supporters of the repeal  
> question.
>
>> Ludicrous, isn't it?
>
> about as ludi as the Electoral College.

Here I choke.  Go back to the years in which it was born.  What better  
could you have proposed then than electing a committee (the EC) to  
look intelligently for qualified candidates to elect as Pres and VP?   
To have campaigns such as we have now would have been impractical.   
Now civilization has advanced and it would make sense to move to  
something new.
>
> --
>
> r b-j                  rbj at audioimagination.com
>
> "Imagination is more important than knowledge."