[EM] Fixing Narkive (Re: help with advocacy)

[Forest Simmons]

 Rob,

I was trying to find Eppley's July 2007 article in the Pasadena weekly by
Googling Eppley VPR, and that Narkive result came up.

Besides BTR-IRV some other minimal tweaks to greatly improve IRV (though
not as viable as your idea) are Voting Published Rankings (VPR) and the
Candidate Withdrawal option, ... both thoroughly expounded by Eppley.

Also we could mimic the movement of states pledging their Electoral College
votes to the plurality winner ... by pledges to support the Pairwise Winner
in the context of ranked choice ballots.

That doesn't confer Smith compliance, but the following version would do so
for a small cost ... very small compared to the total cost of IRV:

If the base method is loser elimination like IRV, then as soon as there is
a Pairwise Winner among the remaining candidates, the pledge takes effect.
If there are not enough pledge votes to render further rounds moot, then
the rounds continue until pledged votes are sufficient to give the
(current) pairwise winner (among the remaining candidates) an outright
majority of the votes still in play.

Ideally the technology should accommodate voter pledges as well as
candidate pledges.

Way too much for the current Burlington situation, but a way to respect
voter wishes when the base method is incapable of delivering as advertised:
"... your second choice will be there to take effect should your first
choice be eliminated..."

For that promise to be fulfilled at every stage for some voter, the
candidates would have to be eliminated in the same order as the ranking
order of that voter. If that promise is kept to most voters, then most
ballots would have the same first choice, so nobody's second choice would
matter. So IRV propaganda makes a promise that cannot be kept  to more than
half of the voters except vacuously ... i.e. when the IRV winner is
identical to the Plurality winner, i.e. when IRV does not improve on
Plurality.

So any advantage IRV has over Plurality depends on a disingenuous promise
... it cannot give different results from Plurality without violating that
promise on at least half of the ballots.

It's not that IRV fails to keep that promise once in a while ... pervasive
failure is inevitable!

 It sounds to me like grounds for a law suit!

My Best,

Forest

On Thursday, April 15, 2021, Rob Lanphier <roblan at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi Forest,
>
> You linked to Narkive in a very recent message, referring to Steve
> Eppley's rhetoric from long ago:
>
> On Thu, Apr 15, 2021 at 4:19 PM Forest Simmons <fsimmons at pcc.edu> wrote:
> > https://election-methods.electorama.narkive.com/8HqX0Gjr/single-winner-
> election-data-from-the-openstv-database
>
> Your email led me to visit this URL:
> https://election-methods.electorama.narkive.com/
>
> It appears as though Narkive has stopped archiving EM-list since 2018.
> I did a little bit of checking the website for more information:
>
> https://narkive.com/legalese
>
> I would love to figure out how to restore that, but I'm not sure how.
> Can you (or anyone) find contact information for the maintainer(s) of
> Narkive?  I have some ideas, and I'm planning to follow through on
> them, but it could be that I'm missing out on an obvious FAQ that
> tells me where to go for technical questions, but my hunch is that
> it's deliberately vague, since the website is a small-time operation
> (much like this mailing list)
>
> Rob
>
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