[EM] Poll for favorite single-winner voting system with OpaVote

[robert bristow-johnson]

an important value of a voting system is that, although it may be laborious, it ought to be able to be hand counted or hand verified.

in an election that is city wide or county or state wide, it doesn't bother me at all that machines are used to scan ballots.  i am a big advocate for optical scan ballots and a big detractor of purely electronic voting (paperless, touch screen).  optical scan naturally has a paper backup, and, unlike the punch card systems (infamous in the Florida 2000 election), there is no danger of the physical instrument of the ballot (the card) getting misaligned so that when the voter *thinks* they are punching a hole for Candidate A, the hole for B actually gets punched because of the misalignment with the jig.  and once the card is pulled out and placed in the ballot box, there is no hope of ever recovering the intent of the voter.

in a governmental election, every ballot should be paper or cardboard, have the candidates names printed on the same instrument that the voter marks.  then these ballots can be examined later in a recount or any other test of election integrity.  i think it's obvious what voting mechanism is most suited to that.

please keep in mind that while IRV would be doable by hand, it is not practically precinct summable, so, if you were counting IRV by hand, you would literally be handling and rehandling ballots, placing them on different piles when, according to the IRV rules, a candidate is eliminated and the ballots that were primarily for that candidate are transferred to the piles of the next choice candidates.

it *is* curious that we are having a multichoice election regarding which multichoice election method is best.  and being a ranked ballot, the method that this poll is decided has to be either Condorcet, Bucklin, IRV, or Borda (or a variant of Borda).  we could (as we have in comparing IRV to plurality) also decide this election based on the plurality of first choices.  so, if possible, we should report the results based on these various methods.  if there is a Condorcet cycle, then there should be a report on how different Condorcet methods have selected the winner.

it *is* ironic:  "let's vote on how we're gonna vote."  if it were a choice between two alternatives, the method that we vote here would be clear.  and this is why i am such a Condorcet advocate, deciding this multi-alternative choice in such a way as to be consistent with the template of the two-alternative choice can only be done with a Condorcet method.  but someone made the decision to use a ranked-choice ballot (for which i am grateful).  it will be curious on how the different methods pick the winner.  they might all agree.

--

r b-j                  rbj at audioimagination.com

"Imagination is more important than knowledge."

-----Original Message-----
From: "Matthew Welland" [matt at kiatoa.com]
Date: 10/10/2011 11:50
To: "Kristofer Munsterhjelm" <km_elmet at lavabit.com>
Subject: Re: [EM] Poll for favorite single-winner voting system with OpaVote

            
I consider it very bad to have to use a computer at all. Any system that requires a computer to be easy to use gets a zero vote from me. 

In this system I hope the items I left off the ballot were given a "zero" value? The range thing where a no vote was not the same as a zero vote gets a zero vote from me. Also, in this system how do I give two or more candidates equal ranking?  

----- Original message ----- 
> matt welland wrote: 
> > <cue grumpy old man voice> 
> > So I gave the opavote thing (nicely done site BTW) a try and had the 
> > same experience I do with every ranked vote system. Choice overload and 
> > decision freeze up. I literally hate ranking and I hope to <insert 
> > deity of choice> these things don't take over. 
> >  
> > Given how many people love the ranked systems I wonder if there is a 
> > cultural or age thing at play here, that or I'm just more time starved 
> > or dumber than ya'll but ... (I'll say it again) I HATE ranking.  
>  
> Do you think you'd find it more palatable if it consisted of the machine  
> asking you "do you prefer this candidate to that candidate" a bunch of  
> times? It could do so in about n lg n questions, which would be around 
> 87. 
>  
> Real world elections would probably only involve 5-10 "real chance"  
> candidates, as well, not 20. 
>  
> > BTW, my response to complex decision making are not entirely out of the 
> > "normal" range: 
> >  
> > http://www.wealthinformatics.com/2011/06/29/too-many-choices-save-cost-money/
>  
> True. The economic system tends to give lots and lots of different  
> choices, too, because to differentiate is a way that a company may  
> extract profit beyond what it would in perfect competition. (The logic  
> behind this is that if the product was so different that there were  
> essentially no other providers of it, then the producer could price as  
> if it were a monopoly, which would give it privilege to set the price as  
> far high as it wanted.) 
>