[EM] Mr Hare's system

robert bristow-johnson rbj at audioimagination.com
Mon Apr 19 15:23:55 PDT 2021



> On 04/17/2021 9:40 AM Richard Lung <voting at ukscientists.com> wrote:
> 
>  
> To EM members, 
> 
> I edited writings of "John Stuart Mill: Proportional Representation is Personal Representation" especially on Mr Hare's system, as he called it, when an MP in Parliament. It is the antithesis of what is being dubbed, here, or wherever, as "Hare STV."

How is it different?  Other than multi-winner and the Hare threshold instead of Droop.

> My claim was that System Of Logic was like a work of antiquity, such is the tremendous progress of natural science.

The odd thing is that Condorcet is earlier than Hare.  I dunno all the history but I'll been that Hare STV caught on because it wasn't so much effort to tabulate by hand.

Condorcet is more principled.  Condorcet is committed to majority rule and Hare-STV is not.  (Hare-STV is Later No Harm and that's been flung at me before.)  But Hare cannot commit to this simple ethic: If more voters mark their ballots preferring Candidate A over Candidate B than the number of voters marking their ballots to the contrary, then Candidate B is not elected.

Condorcet is what delivers on the three big promises of "RCV" that FairVote promotes.  And any Condorcet is virtually precinct summable.  I consider that really important for the sake of transparency and doing better than FPTP.

But any Condorcet method is more laborious if hand counted.

> While, Representative Government is still ahead of its time. And this has much to do with Thomas Hare, independent inventor of the Andrae system, as it is called in Scandinavian countries -- but rarely used there. An exception was the Iceland Citizens Convention. And they called in a Scotsman, (Dr James Gilmour) for the STV count. 
> The great pioneer reformers, Clarence Hoag and George Hallett promoted At-large STV/PR -- the real "Hare STV" -- in many American cities. Cambridge, home of MIT, was the only city, where the science, in political science, out-weighed the political. 

Richard, I'm pretty sure that the city council elections in Cambridge Massachusetts are the same Hare STV that FairVote promotes.  Unless these are multiwinner election (I'm not sure about that).  Burlington used exactly the same software to run the election in 2009 and it even has the words "Cambridge" in some of the output files.  I can send them if you want.  Below at bottom I just pasted the text, FYI.

-- 

r b-j                  rbj at audioimagination.com 

"Imagination is more important than knowledge."




# Final piles of ballots, sorted by candidate.
# Created Tuesday, March 3, 2009 8:15 PM


# This file can be used for auditing, or for filling mid-term vacancies
# in Cambridge.  To fill a vacancy, edit the line below that says,
# "# CAMBRIDGE-VACANCY-RECOUNT candidate-code".  Remove the '#', so
# that ChoicePlusr will process the line, and replace "candidate-code"
# with the candidate code for whom the ballots are to be recounted.
# Be sure to rename the file when saving it!  E.g. to "<Your Election
# Title> Recount Input.txt".



# The following lines are the configuration lines necessary for a Cambridge
# style recount.
.COMPLY-WITH CAMBRIDGE
.ELECT 1


# The Candidates:
.CANDIDATE C01, "Bob Kiss"
.CANDIDATE C02, "Andy Montroll"
.CANDIDATE C03, "James Simpson"
.CANDIDATE C04, "Dan Smith"
.CANDIDATE C05, "Kurt Wright"
.CANDIDATE C06, "Write-in"

# The following lines exclude those candidates who
# were elected or excluded in the original election
# from participating in a future runoff.
.EXCLUDE-CANDIDATE C01

# ******* The following line must be edited for a Cambridge recount! *******
#.CAMBRIDGE-VACANCY-RECOUNT candidate-code

# Suppose that Joe Smith resigned mid-term, and Karen Jones was elected
# to fill that seat.  But then Karen Jones also resigned!  You can rerun
# the same recount, but specify that Karen Jones is excluded.
#.EXCLUDE-CANDIDATE candidate-code

# This specifies the format for the ballots
.BALLOT-FORMAT-FIELDS BALLOT-ID-ALPHA BALLOT-VALUE RANKINGS-ALPHA

# Ballots for candidate C01 ("Bob Kiss")
# Candidate has 4,313 ballots in his/her pile.
# Vote total: 4313.
.FINAL-PILE C01
000001-00-0001, 1) C01,C02
000001-00-0006, 1) C01,C02
000001-00-0008, 1) C01,C04,C02,C05,C03
...
    ...
        ...


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