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

[robert bristow-johnson]

On 10/21/15 6:33 AM, Juho Laatu wrote:
>> 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.

publish every single ballot?  that would be messy.

with STV you could publish totals of every single way a ballot could be 
marked (the number of possible piles).  with C candidates that would be


    C-1
    SUM{ C!/n! }  =  floor( (e-1) C! ) - 1
    n=1

where e = 2.718281828...

and with Condorcet the summable numbers would be

      C-1
    2 SUM{ n }  =  (C-1) C
      n=1


i remember a few years ago working this out here on the list.  (when 
Warren first posted the above result for STV, i was quite skeptical that 
it was exact until i slugged through it myself.  for some reason Kathy 
Dopp apparently never accepted it.)  if the number of candidates is 
large, the number of STV piles grows as C! while the number of Condorcet 
subtotals grows as C^2.





...

> 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.
>


well, i agree with you that STV is probably the best simplest way to do 
multi-winner elections.  i don't think that Condorcet-like sorting would 
meet the "simplicity" criterion of policy makers (or the electorate) for 
multi-winner elections.  and while it might seem nice to just use the 
same STV method already in use for multi-winner to also use it for 1 
winner, i think Condorcet is so much better and conceptually simple that 
i still favor that over STV.


-- 

r b-j                  rbj at audioimagination.com

"Imagination is more important than knowledge."