[EM] Ballot design (new simple legal strategy to get IRV)

[Juho Laatu]

> On 21 Oct 2015, at 03:19, robert bristow-johnson <rbj at audioimagination.com> wrote:
> 
> On 10/10/15 7:06 PM, Juho Laatu wrote:


>> STV is unfortunately not as summable as e.g. Condorcet. One may lose also some privacy and introduce some risk of coercion and vote buying by recording and distributing ranked votes to the central authority (and who knows even publishing them). I have no good foolproof solution for that right now.
> 
> well, i think that is a permanent disadvantage to STV.  and IRV opponents used that as an issue, alluding to the possibility of something nefarious happening during transporting the voting data (like in a thumb drive or whatever physical instrument with data from all of the ballots) from the precinct to the central ballot-counting venue or something else nefarious happening at a single obscure point (in the code) at the central counting location (that some inside person could slip in).  this is why precinct-summability is a desirable property of a voting system.

One can reduce the risk of something happening to the votes during transport by introducing means to check that the information is the same at both ends. Summability helps, since you can see the sums at both ends, and the local sums can be directly summed further to the end results. If the votes are not summable, the simplest approach is to publish the votes. Then the local records can be compared with the records at the central counting location, and final results checked against all the published local votes. One could use also some other compressed results like publishing the results counted from the local ballots (as if the election was local) at both ends. This is of course not fool proof in the sense that the even if this can guarantee the safety of the transport quite well, counters at the central location could still modify the votes after publishing the local results and before counting the final results. But that's another story, and could be fought against by other means (like allowing the presence of representatives of all parties).

> i suppose that with STV, at each precinct, instead of posting vote totals as you would for FPTP or Condorcet, you would post totals for each possible way to mark the ballot.  but i don't think that candidate organization nor the media would want to use those results.

This is a working alternative way to sum up the votes if the number of candidates is small enough. I note that I joined this conversation by presenting ways to handle elections with numerous candidates. Having 100 candidates would make it unpractical to sum up the number of all possible candidate orderings, but with 5 candidates it would be easy.

> i think Condorcet is simpler than STV.  because it's precinct-summable and there isn't this kabuki dance of transferred votes.
> 
> and Condorcet is even simpler than FPTP with regard to burdening voters in multi-candidate elections with tactical voting (because of the ranked-choice ballot). normally the tactic ends up the "compromising" tactic, but voters should not have to put up with that.  this was the main reason we adopted STV in Burlington Vermont in the first place.  now we're stuck with it again.

Yes. I just note here that STV (in multi-winner elections) and IRV (in single-winner elections), although technically similar, have different benefits and problems in practical elections. Some of the problems of IRV get diluted (influencing only the last seats in some rather random way) when applied to electing multiple representatives.

Juho