[EM] Poll, preliminary ballots

[robert bristow-johnson]

Majority Rule is not unrelated to the equality of the value of our votes.Powered by Cricket Wireless------ Original message------From: Closed Limelike CurvesDate: Sun, Apr 21, 2024 22:23To: robert bristow-johnson;Cc: election-methods at lists.electorama.com;Subject:Re: [EM] Poll, preliminary ballotsMajority rule? Sure (in fact, Condorcet goes by the name "Majority-rule" in economics literature.) One-person-one-vote? Condorcet is unrelated to that, and in some cases these outright conflict. Most notably, participation failures give you cases of one-person-negative-one-votes.On Sun, Apr 21, 2024 at 6:23 PM robert bristow-johnson <rbj at audioimagination.com> wrote:

> On 04/21/2024 2:28 PM EDT Richard, the VoteFair guy <electionmethods at votefair.org> wrote:
> 
>  
> On 4/18/2024 12:32 PM, robert bristow-johnson wrote:
> > 
> >  > The payoff is that RCIPE would not have failed in Burlington and Alaska!
> >>  That's huge.
> > 
> > Any Condorcet method would have that huge payoff.  What "huge" benefit 
> > does RCIPE have that a simpler Condorcet method doesn't have?
> > 
> > Like Condorcet-Plurality or Condorcet-TTR?
> > 
> > Or MinMax?
> 
> Condorcet methods require explaining pairwise comparisons between every 
> candidate and every other candidate.  That's a significant disadvantage 
> for voter education.  And voter understanding.  And voter trust.

Really?

"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 should not be elected."

> In contrast, I have never heard anyone claim that a pairwise losing 
> candidate doesn't deserve to be eliminated.

It's not enough insuring that the Condorcet loser loses.

> Regarding the simplicity advantage, the RCIPE (Ranked Choice Including 
> Pairwise Elimination) method only needs two simple sentences added to a 
> well-written IRV law:
> 
> "Pairwise losing candidates are eliminated when they occur.  A pairwise 
> losing candidate is a candidate who would lose every one-on-one contest 
> against every other remaining candidate."
> 
> Robert, I know you strongly dislike the misrepresentations from the 
> FairVote organization.  I too dislike those misrepresentations.  (I've 
> been hearing them for the three decades since I got the VoteFair domain 
> name.)
> 
> Yet I do not share your opinion that those misrepresentations justify 
> your low opinion of IRV as being worse than plurality (if I recall your 
> poll ballot correctly).

I have never said that IRV is worse than plurality.  But, because it's so hard to change long-standing law, regarding something as fundamental and important as how our leaders are elected, I am normally opposed to changing from plurality to IRV, because that entrenches IRV further.  IRV is not a good stepping stone to Condorcet.  I believe that making course corrections early in the voyage is less expensive than making sufficient course correction (to get to the same destination) much later.

So, politically, as far as I'm concerned, being for converting from FPTP to IRV in any jurisdiction in the U.S. is being *against* converting to Condorcet RCV.  I am only *for* converting to Condorcet RCV.  IRV is the wrong RCV standard to carve into stone.

And I consider the Precinct Summability issue to be important too.  That is something we have right now with FPTP and we lose it if we go to IRV (at least for contests that go beyond the first round).  This is a loss of a component of process transparency, which to me is as fundamental to keeping elections honest.  I don't think we should give up on that property, especially when we don't have to with RCV done correctly (Condorcet).  But IRV makes us give that up.  I don't want to see any incremental losses to process transparency.

I'll repeat something I've said before:

1. Finite limit to elected terms of office
2. Well-warned elections
3. Equal and unhindered access of the enfranchised to the vote
4. The secret ballot
5. Process transparency
6. Equality of our vote (One person, one vote), which requires
7. Majority rule

These are the fundamental ethical principles on which fair single-winner elections are based.  We need all of those things for elections to be what they promise to be in participatory democracy.

> Specifically, unlike you/Robert, I see value in these aspects of IRV:
> 
> * Uses ranked choice ballots (like Condorcet methods, unlike score, 
> unlike Star, unlike Approval)
> 
> * Eliminating one candidate at a time can work well if the eliminated 
> candidate is really the least popular candidate during that counting round.
> 
> * When a counting round does not include a pairwise losing candidate, 
> eliminating the IRV-based fewest-transferred-votes candidate is a 
> reasonable cycle-resolution method.  In particular it's cloneproof, but 
> without the complexity of the Schulze method.

Seems to me that BTR-IRV would be a lot simpler to explain.  Particularly to people who already understand "traditional" IRV.

> So in my opinion, adding the elimination of pairwise losing candidates 
> elevates the resulting method, RCIPE, to the top of my poll ballot.
> 
> It offers both math advantages and 
> easy-for-voters-to-understand-and-trust advantages.
> 
> In contrast, most voters don't trust starting with the idea of creating 
> a full pairwise counting matrix and then looking for a candidate who 
> wins every one of their pairwise contests.  That's why Condorcet methods 
> have been so easy for FairVote and other organizations to criticize and 
> dismiss.  And why it's so difficult for us math-savvy experts to explain 
> to non-math folks.

Really?

"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 should not be elected."

That's it.

That's how I explain Condorcet to people.  Then I ask them "If more voters mark their ballots preferring Candidate A over Candidate B, then why *should* B be elected?"

If Candidate B were to be elected, that would mean that the fewer voters preferring Candidate B had cast votes that had greater effect, essentially had greater value and counted more than those votes from voters of the larger set preferring Candidate A.

If our votes are not going to count equally, then I want my vote to count more than yours.  If that's unacceptable to you, then let's together insist that all of our votes count equally.  Then, in order for that to happen in a single-winner race, Majority Rule must be controlling which means "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 should not be elected."

That's it.  No other rule reflects Majority Rule and One-Person-One-Vote better than the Condorcet criterion.


--

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

"Imagination is more important than knowledge."

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