[EM] I could use some help with advocacy.

Wed Apr 14 12:52:13 PDT 2021

Thank you Rob and Richard.

I had a 10 minute interview with the Chair and Vice-Chair of the committee.  The legislature is extremely busy with covid issues and the hot issue for this committee right now is about pensions for state employees.  There are a couple of bills bringing RCV to state elections and those bills are on hold and not going anywhere at all, for the moment.

But the voters of the City of Burlington *did* pass the Charter Change returning RCV to Burlington after 11 years and uncorrected.  Same old Hare RCV that FairVote sells everyone else.  Because it's a Charter Change (which is like amending the city's constitution), this requires legislative process and approval.  We had other charter changes (some involving restrictions on gun possession) that were passed by voters and never approved of by the state government, but most of the time the state government endorses charter changes that win in the city election.

When this Charter Change becomes a bill and is introduced to the legislature, it will be directed to the Government Operations Committee.   That's when they will hear from me and that's when I could use some help in numbers.  I think you guys know what the issue is, FairVote has mostly succeeded at disingenuously conflating the ranked-ballot with the Hare method.  This is obvious when they ditched "IRV" after that label has lost cache and replaced it with the term "RCV" which sounds better and implies that **only** their method (Hare RCV) is the only way to deal with these ranked ballots.  Most people and most legislators bought into that conflation and do not understand that there are other ways of looking at the ranked ballots and implementing democracy.

I am promised by the Chair and Vice-Chair that they will read my paper and that I will be invited to address the committee.  My hope is that I will be able to present a short PowerPoint (essentially the same as here https://www.cctv.org/watch-tv/programs/burlington-ballot-item-forum-irv-discussion ) but I don't think that I will get that much time.

As soon as I find out more about when this Charter Change comes up, I will contact y'all and we can discuss what we can do.  But feel free to contact me or even post here on the list what you might be thinking about this and how best to advocate.

I wouldn't mind getting help from across the pond from folks like Juho or Markus or anyone else that might support reforming Hare STV.

Thank you.

-- robert

> On 04/13/2021 12:25 PM VoteFair <electionmethods at votefair.org> wrote:
> 
>  
> Robert, if I'm available I could join you on the Zoom call.
> 
> I would be extremely nervous, and prefer having a prepared statement to 
> read and/or prepared talking points, yet lately I've been getting 
> experience answering election-method questions via video.  In 
> particular, some weeks ago I got my feet wet by testifying in an Oregon 
> state Senate legislative committee meeting via video.
> 
> Although eventually I prefer the Condorcet-Kemeny method, currently I'm 
> advocating Ranked Choice Including Pairwise Elimination, aka "RCIPE" 
> pronounced "recipe."  That's what we're specifying for the Ranked Choice 
> Oregon ballot initiative.  Basically it inserts a "safety net" that 
> eliminates the Condorcet loser when there is one.  Of course it would 
> have prevented the Burlington failure.
> 
> Here in Oregon the fans of STAR voting are pushing the legislature for 
> their method, so in response I created the following comparison table 
> that compares IRV with STAR and RCIPE.  It should clarify my perspective 
> regarding the ambiguous term "RCV."
> 
> https://www.rankedchoiceoregon.org/comparison_table_rco_star_irv.pdf
> 
> Feel free to share this document if you think that's appropriate.
> 
> You have my email address, so contact me as needed.
> 
> Richard Fobes
> The VoteFair guy
> 
> 
> On 4/12/2021 9:34 AM, robert bristow-johnson wrote:
> > Hay, I know this is resurrecting a thread.  But I am about to talk with the Vermont House Government Operations Committee about RCV and what happened in Burlington 12 years ago.
> >
> > I am sending the legislators my paper: https://drive.google.com/file/d/14assN41UL7Mib9PpwsjM63ZT17k9admC/view?usp=sharing
> >
> > and, just for shits and grins, this 2004 Scientific American article that is coauthored by a Nobel laureate, Eric Maskin, that plugs doing it the Condorcet way.  https://drive.google.com/file/d/1m6qn6Y7PAQldKNeIH2Tal6AizF7XY2U4/view?usp=sharing
> >
> > Are there any scholars here that would like to, via Zoom, help out and appear before a legislative committee in the state of Vermont and testify?  Hopefully, you would be in favor or *some* Condorcet-compliant RCV but even if you're for Approval that would be okay.
> >
> > I could use some help to not appear that I am the only person in the world that thinks something was wrong in Burlington 2009 and that this something wrong can actually be fixed.  I think that I have the facts and arguments straight, but I need more people.
> >
> > thanks for any help.
> >
> > robert
> >

> On 04/12/2021 1:28 PM Rob Lanphier <roblan at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>  
> Hi Robert,
> 
> I may be able to help, and I'm certainly willing to recruit others.
> When is the next public hearing?  What's the timeline that you're
> working against?
> 
> Rob
> 
> On Mon, Apr 12, 2021 at 9:34 AM robert bristow-johnson
> <rbj at audioimagination.com> wrote:
> >
> > Hay, I know this is resurrecting a thread.  But I am about to talk with the Vermont House Government Operations Committee about RCV and what happened in Burlington 12 years ago.
> >
> > I am sending the legislators my paper: https://drive.google.com/file/d/14assN41UL7Mib9PpwsjM63ZT17k9admC/view?usp=sharing
> >
> > and, just for shits and grins, this 2004 Scientific American article that is coauthored by a Nobel laureate, Eric Maskin, that plugs doing it the Condorcet way.  https://drive.google.com/file/d/1m6qn6Y7PAQldKNeIH2Tal6AizF7XY2U4/view?usp=sharing
> >
> > Are there any scholars here that would like to, via Zoom, help out and appear before a legislative committee in the state of Vermont and testify?  Hopefully, you would be in favor or *some* Condorcet-compliant RCV but even if you're for Approval that would be okay.
> >
> > I could use some help to not appear that I am the only person in the world that thinks something was wrong in Burlington 2009 and that this something wrong can actually be fixed.  I think that I have the facts and arguments straight, but I need more people.
> >
> > thanks for any help.
> >
> > robert
> >
> > > On 05/29/2020 6:46 PM robert bristow-johnson <rbj at audioimagination.com> wrote:
> > >
> > >
> > > > On May 29, 2020 3:46 PM Toby Pereira <tdp201b at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > Thank you for this response, Forest. I was reminded of this subject again when I re-encountered Jameson Quinn's work on Voter Satisfaction Efficiency the other day. According to his simulations, to be found here https://electionscience.github.io/vse-sim/VSE/ ranked pairs performs quite a bit better than the Schulze method. This surprises me since I wouldn't expect much difference in practice (as I put in the original post of this discussion). I'm not sure if Jameson still reads the stuff on this mailing list, but it would be interesting to know what caused the difference.
> > > >
> > >
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > On Wednesday, 4 March 2020, 17:45:08 GMT, Forest Simmons <fsimmons at pcc.edu> wrote:
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > If the Smith set is a cycle of three, then the methods you mention give the same result as long as the defeat strength is measured the same way. (You knew that)
> > > >
> > > > Not all of these satisfy Independence from Pareto Dominated Alternatives. I doubt that would make a difference in any known public election from the past, but all else being equal, it is a difference that could make a difference.
> > > >
> > > > Simplicity of explanation and implementation, along with heuristic appeal, and other selling points may be more important than any other distinction among the methods you mention.
> > > >
> > > > For me the easiest to sell formulation of Schulze is in the form of "beat-path." But that is probably just the mathematician in me appreciating an elegant way of creating a transitive relation with minimal violence to the intransitive relation on which it is based.
> > > >
> > >
> > > For me, the easiest sell is what makes for simpler and easy-to-understand legal language, since cycles will be exceedingly rare and a cycle bigger than Rock-Paper-Scissors will almost certainly never happen.  And RP and Schulze and River elect the same candidate for the Condorcet case and the 3-candidate Smith set.
> > >
> > > Now that is different than the STV-BTR, which I am actively plugging for lawmakers here in Vermont.  In the case of Rock-Paper-Scissors, STV-BTR will elect the candidate with the most votes in the semifinal round.  But I am finding that the language for STV-BTR is far easier to sell than even RP.
> > >
> > > --
> > >
> > > r b-j                  rbj at audioimagination.com
> > >
> > > "Imagination is more important than knowledge."
> >
> > --
> >
> > r b-j                   rbj at audioimagination.com
> >
> > "Imagination is more important than knowledge."
> > ----
> > Election-Methods mailing list - see https://electorama.com/em for list info

-- 

r b-j                  rbj at audioimagination.com 

"Imagination is more important than knowledge."