[EM] IRV vs Plurality (Dave Ketchum)

[Abd ul-Rahman Lomax]

At 10:41 AM 1/16/2010, Kathy Dopp wrote:
>To count IRV by sorting piles of ballots requires  far fewer piles
>than 9 but also to do decentralized as you suggest would require
>everyone in the entire country in all precincts sitting around waiting
>for all the late-counted ballots to be ready and waiting for the total
>results to be tabulated centrally somewhere so they could sort the
>ballots for the next round - totally undoable practically.

No, it's doable. Quite doable. That's what they do in Australia. Each 
counting group reports its results to the central tabulation office, 
by phone, at least it used to be. Then the central office, when it 
has received all of these (or perhaps enough of them to be 
confident), and only if a majority has not been found, transmits the 
results back to the counting group, and it does its elimination(s) 
and then reports the next tallies.

How many rounds does it take? And how long is taken for each round? 
Each time there is an elimination, a pile is eliminated, and if they 
do it right, which I'd guess they do, they will keep the new ballot 
separate for a little while, so each "pile" is really two or more 
piles, laid out so that one can tell in which round the new votes 
came in. And if there is an error, they then don't have to resort the 
whole bloody mess. Or they could insert a marker paper, so that the 
latest additions are on top and the separation easily found.

Meanwhile, they aren't twiddling their thumbs. They might recount and 
recheck each pile, looking for sorting or summing errors.

It can work, Kathy. How well is another story. If IRV were really a 
better method than, say, top two runoff, or a single-ballot summable 
method, it m might be worth it.


>Of course the number of tallies to make IRV/STV precinct-summable
>grows exponentially as the number of candidates grows and is equal to
>more than the total number of voters who vote in each precinct most of
>the time with a larger number of candidates.

STV has other benefits that could make it worthwhile. I believe there 
are better methods yet, that would be precinct summable, so it could 
be moot, but there is an argument for the vote transfers in STV that 
doesn't apply to single-winner.

> > each state, each little government would be responsible to confirm their
> > precinct totals on the map and everybody gets to look at it.  what's
> > particularly insecure about that?
>
>I don't think you yet understand the counting process for IRV/STV. Why
>not create a set of 200 ballots for one precinct with a mixture of all
>15 unique ballot combinations on them for three candidates and try
>counting them so you can fully understand the process.

Cruel.