[EM] Coombs method and typical RCV hybrid

robert bristow-johnson rbj at audioimagination.com
Sat Jan 22 15:52:01 PST 2022


1. I don't consider Ranked Pairs to be particularly expensive.  How many candidates do you expect to have?  50?  I am expecting at most 5 or 6 in most elections and I support sufficiently strong ballot access laws to keep irrelevant candidates from wasting real estate on the ballot.

2. Culi, I have been involved in some activism to both educate and promote evolving from Hare RCV (what used to be called "IRV" until FairVote appropriated the more general term "RCV", which I consider to be both dishonest and entitled) to one of any Condorcet-compliant methods.  Please take a look at https://tinyurl.com/2tety9tj .

3. For a Condorcet method to make it into practice in a governmental election, the algorithm needs to be expressed in words and needs to have such a description self-contained (not to simply refer to "Tideman Ranked-Pairs" or "Schulze using margins").  It needs to be fully spelled out and a C program, by itself, is not good enough.  That said, simplicity is key, because we are already dancing on the edge even with Hare RCV.  To date, I have fiddled with Bottom-Two Runoff IRV and with a straight description of Condorcet with a contingency of FPTP if there is no Condorcet winner.

If we're gonna do Ranked-Choice Voting, then let's do it right.  Burlington 2009 proves that Hare RCV (or Ware, take your pick) is not RCV done right.

robert

> On 01/22/2022 4:03 PM culitif at tuta.io wrote:
> 
> 
> Yeah that's a good point. I just figured most Americans would be more familiar with the term Ranked Choice Voting and I didn't wanna scare them off thinking they were gonna have to learn something new. Anyways, I made the change. Should be up already
> 
> Best,
> Culi
> 
> 
> Jan 22, 2022, 12:50 PM by dcarrera at gmail.com:
> > 
> > On Sat, Jan 22, 2022 at 2:40 PM <culitif at tuta.io> wrote:
> > > I would like to add Ranked Pairs and similarly complex Condorcet methods at some point, but I might need to ask for help with the logic behind those as they can be notoriously difficult to optimize.
> > > 
> > > Thanks for your suggestion of the River method. I haven't actually given it much of a look before. I'd suggest we make a poll to see which methods people think would be most important to add to the site, but I have a feeling we'd end up stuck arguing about how to conduct that poll before ever actually doing the poll :P
> > 
> > Ha ha. :-)
> > 
> > Yeah, RP is notoriously expensive. It was my favorite method until I discovered River. RP is very strong and I find it a million times more intuitive than Schulze, which is its best known competitor. I suspect that you'll get a lot of buy-in for River in this list. Yes, it is less widely known but I think everyone in this list would love to fix that. It has nearly the same intuition as RP but it is vastly cheaper (computationally), and if I recall correctly, it meets all the criteria of RP and Schulze plus one more... I forget which one... Maybeindependence of Pareto-dominated alternatives.
> > 
> > So... if you like RP but you find it slow... River is its faster, better, but obscure cousin.
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > > I appreciate you showing interest in the work so far though. It makes me want to continue with the project. I just purchased the domainvotevote.page (http://votevote.page)so hopefully it can have a proper home soon!
> > 
> > Yeah, it looks great. Kudos to you. One little detail that I like is that you say "Coomb's RCV" , "Culi's RCV", etc. As you might know, some of us are frustrated that the IRV folk have tried to appropriate the "ranked choice" language, as if theirs was the only election method with ranked ballots. Honestly, if any method was to appropriate the name RCV it should be Copeland because it's the older method. Anway, by adding language like "Coomb's RCV" it sends the message "yeah, this is also RCV, it's a different (better) one". So it helps chisel away at the "RCV = IRV" idea.
> > 
> > Would you consider replacing "Standard RCV" with something other than "Standard"? Maybe "IRV RCV" or "Australia RCV" or whatever.
> > 
> > Cheers,
> > -- 
> > Dr. Daniel Carrera
> > Postdoctoral Research Associate
> > Iowa State University
> 
> ----
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--

r b-j . _ . _ . _ . _ rbj at audioimagination.com

"Imagination is more important than knowledge."

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