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

[Juho Laatu]

> On 22 Oct 2015, at 01:23, robert bristow-johnson <rbj at audioimagination.com> wrote:
> 
> 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.

Lots of information, yes. But it could be enough to distribute that info to those with interest to monitor the process (parties etc.). My biggest concerns are maybe in the area of voter privacy, vote buying and coercion, if the votes can be seen by anyone and they are as informative as ranked votes can be in elections with large number of candidates.

Some more techniques to avoid the risks involved in vote transport could be to
1) carry the votes to the central counting location as original paper ballots by multiple people from all parties (or maybe just seal them and let one person carry them)
2) count the final results so that each polling station listens to the commands of the central station (to eliminate some candidate etc.) and provide new intermediate results as responses to these commands

> 
> 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...

... which seems to be quite a lot in some cases

> 
> and with Condorcet the summable numbers would be
> 
>     C-1
>   2 SUM{ n }  =  (C-1) C
>     n=1

This is manageable even in elections with 100 candidates. That is however usually not even needed since in single-winner elections there are usually far fewer candidates.

> 
> 
> 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.

The space requirements of STV ballots can often be minimized by storing the content of each vote (and not even trying to sum them up). Summing them in piles where each possible ranking has its own pile does really help much in providing privacy of the votes.

> 
> 
> ...
> 
>> 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.

Yes, STV / IRV is quite random and also not strategy free in single-winner elections. Condorcet criterion is a good standard for many if not almost all single-winner elections. Incumbent parties might favour IRV also because it favours large parties.

Juho



> 
> 
> -- 
> 
> r b-j                  rbj at audioimagination.com
> 
> "Imagination is more important than knowledge."
> 
> 
> 
> ----
> Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info