> On 02/17/2023 11:05 PM EST KenB <kdbearman at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> Robert, ordinarily I not only find most of your posts very interesting
> (when I understand them, as I'm not a mathematician or well-versed on
> all the technical stuff that most everyone here posts) but I also admire
> your patience.
I don't think I have ever been known, by people who know and love me, to have much patience.
> But in the case of your last two posts (below) I object
> twice. Then I have a question about cycles.
>
> (1) Your wrote, "If a simple majority of voters mark their ballots
> preferring Candidate A over Candidate B, then Candidate B is not
> elected. Why *should* Candidate B be elected? The IRV people twist
> themselves into pretzels trying to answer that." My objection is this:
> You describe a Condorcet election rule and then ask why [implicitly in
> an IRV election] the Condorcet rule isn't followed.
>
It sorta is, 99.4% of the time with IRV. 99.4% of the time IRV succeeds at not electing Candidate B. 0.4% of the time, IRV fails when the failure was unnecessary and avoidable, and 0.2% of the time Arrow prevails and *no* method would have avoided electing a candidate that was not defeated by some other candidate in a head-to-head.
> Your question isn't entirely honest. If you're talking about an
> election where the criteria/rules are Condorcet, then no IRV (or FPTP)
> proponent I know of will say B should be elected.
Oh, but they *do*, Ken. In Burlington 2009, Bob Kiss was Candidate B. In Alaska 2022 (August), Mary Peltola was Candidate B.
Now, I know at least two IRV proponents (one posted to this forum years ago and was the person who told me about this EM mailing list) that have told me that Candidate B was better because they had more "core support" than Candidate A and basically called Candidate A "Milquetoast" or "kiss the baby".
In this vid https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3s5jornaUY at index 56:41, Deb Otis does exactly that.
> If you're not talking
> about a Condorcet election, then your question is inapt and the
> "pretzels" comment is just a bit insulting, I hate to say.
Well, they say RCV will elect candidates having more popular support, will discourage the election of fringe candidates (which seems to me that the opposite of "fringe" is more centrist), and then when their method exactly fails to do that, they come up with this excuse. Watch the video. (My presentation to Senate Gov Ops was earlier.)
They twist themselves into pretzels because their method failed at 3 times to do what they say it would do, 2 of the 3 times, a different method would have succeeded at doing what they say IRV is meant to do, but they don't want it and then, to justify not adopting the method that does even better, they go back on or *twist* what their message is. They say Montroll is bad because he's too bland. Why? Only because he's centrist.
> --
> (2) In your second post, responding to Forest Simmons, you wrote, "IRV
> tried to simplify the debate with a method that essentially has no
> overall principle." My objection is this: IRV proponents employ a
> simple principle to explain the process, viz. that the vote counting in
> the absence of a first-count majority is a series of runoff elections
> using one ballot/precinct appearance.
That's a process. (And you didn't explain how the runoffs are carried out.) What's the principle?
At least FPTP has a simple principle that everyone can understand: "The candidate with the most votes wins." Condorcet has Majority Rule (which is simply what the Condorcet criterion is). What explicit principle does Hare IRV have?
>
> If I misunderstood what your "no ... principle" comment was about,
> please clarify for me. (I know you detest IRV, but that comment also
> was just a bit insulting.)
Listen, I'll take IRV over Approval or STAR. Or even FPTP, but it's soooo hard to change something as fundamental as how we vote, that when we have a lesson to learn (and we do, in Vermont, but we're forgetting the lesson), what I detest is the disingenuity and the short memory people have about it.
> --
> (3) As I wrote above, I don't grok a lot of the technical stuff you
> all discuss in the EM list.
I don't grok most of the stuff the other guys are talking about. Remember, I am just an activist, I am not one of the scholars like you see here arguing about esoteric stuff that I don't usually get.
I wrote my paper to *connect* the schlubs like me to the stuff these scholars debate about. But I only scratch the surface.
> I think, though, that I understand what a cycle is.
Rock-Paper-Scissors. Condorcet Paradox.
> So I'd like to give you more information about the
> one-in-500+ you've referred to, the Minneapolis Ward 2 election in 2021,
> before I ask a question.
>
> There were five candidates on the ballot. (Scroll down to "Original
> tabulation" here:
> https://vote.minneapolismn.gov/results-data/election-results/2021/council-ward-2/)
> The five were, in descending order, a Democratic Socialist; a Democrat
> (called Democratic-Farmer-Labor or DFL in MN), who fell just short of
> party endorsement; a Green; another DFLer; and a Republican.
>
> The top three differed very little on issues or policies. However, there
> were three Charter amendments on the ballot*; Question 2 would have
> abolished the police department and replaced it with a Department of
> Public Safety. (Q2, the only one that failed, was extremely
> controversial and probably helped increase city-wide turnout.**)
BTW, the City of Burlington is also having similar controversial questions on our ballot in March. Just like that.
> Of the
> top three, Arab opposed it and Worlobah and Gordon supported it. That's
> the only substantial issue difference I know of among the three.
>
> I'm giving you all these local details because I wonder, Does "cycle"
> mean much when the candidates in the cycle are essentially
> interchangeable?
In a loose sense. It means that there is a sorta circular symmetry about it. No matter who you elect in the Smith set (who was Gordon, Worlobah, and Arab), there is someone else who beats that candidate.
Gordon beats Worlobah, Worlobah beats Arab, Arab beats Gordon. Condorcet is stumped. Who do you elect? IRV and Plurality elect Worlobah.
And a spoiler is unavoidable. Whether it's IRV or Condorcet. Since Worlobah was elected, then Arab was the spoiler, if Arab never ran and Ward 2 voters came to the polls and voted their same preferences with the remaining candidates, then Gordon would have won.
But if the method (whatever method) had elected Gordon instead, then that means Worlobah is the spoiler. And if Arab was elected, then Gordon is the spoiler.
Arrow Impossibility. Condorcet Paradox. Here is that paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.09846
> I.e., whichever of the three won, the supporters of
> the other two would have approved of most official policy outcomes
> anyway, so what does "cycle" mean outside of election theory?
It means a circular *collective* preference. Our ranked ballots are linear, not circular, so individually we can't do a cycle. If you like A better than B and you also like B better than C, then, as an individual we must assume you also like A better than C.
But collectively, we can be a little more schizoid about it. It's like a bunch of Bernie voters saying "If I can't have Bernie, then I'm voting for Trump."
> OTOH, if
> that interchangeability is irrelevant in discussing cycles, please
> explain for me.
Without considering the actual politics, but just how people voted, it means that there is no way that you can satisfy this simple principle of Majority Rule:
If more voters mark their ballots preferring Candidate A
to Candidate B than the number of voters marking their
ballots to the contrary, then Candidate B is not elected.
That's a simple and fair rule. And that rule is necessary in order to *consistently* value our votes equally. If Candidate B were to be elected, even with fewer voters preferring him/her, then those fewer voters had votes that had more juice, that counted more, than the votes coming from the larger number of voters preferring Candidate A.
In ***all*** of the US RCV elections except Minneapolis Ward 2 2021, that simple and fair rule could have been satisfied. In **all** of the other elections (when the rule could have been satisfied) except two (Burlington 2009 and Alaska 2022) that rule *was* satisfied with IRV. So three anomalous elections. But only one of those elections would have to be anomalous, if we had a Condorcet-consistent method rather than Hare.
Now, what I told the folks on the Senate Gov Ops, if you needed surgery to correct a critical condition and you had a choice of procedures, one with a 0.2% table mortality and the other with a 0.6% table mortality, all other factors being the same, which procedure would you choose?
Minneapolis 2021 was the one time that the patient dies on the operating table and there ain't diddley squat that the surgeons can do to save the patient. But the table fatalities in Burlington 2009 and Alaska 2022 were preventable.
--
r b-j . _ . _ . _ . _ rbj at audioimagination.com
"Imagination is more important than knowledge."
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