[EM] The critical importance of Precinct Summability.

[Closed Limelike Curves]

Chris: I agree with you that the importance of precinct summability is
often exaggerated. If you tallied all results on election night, using
two-way communication, this would fix the problem if you've received all
ballots by election night (since you can post round-by-round results). That
said, it's not useless, because lots of US states *don't* do that. The main
issue is whether states will in practice actually adopt practices required
for safe IRV elections. So far, they haven't.

On Sun, Aug 11, 2024 at 11:45 AM robert bristow-johnson <
rbj at audioimagination.com> wrote:

>
>
> > On 08/08/2024 2:23 PM EDT Chris Benham <cbenhamau at yahoo.com.au> wrote:
> >
> >
> ...
> >
> >  I've long regarded people running around with their hair on fire
> yelling about "precinct summability" to be simply a propaganda furphy
> against Hare RCV,
>
> That's fine.  You may regard us as such.
>
> > the good single-winner method that currently has the most traction as a
> reform proposal.
> >
>
> That it currently has the most traction is agreed (if we leave out FPTP,
> of course).  That it is "good" or "*the* good ... method" is not agreed to.
>
> >  Why is determining which candidate has the fewest top-preference votes
> inherently more problematic than determining which candidate has the most
> top-preference votes?
> >
>
> It's not.  It's equally problematic.  Considering only the top-preference
> votes, instead of considering the entire ballot (which effectively occurs
> *only* in the IRV final round) is the same mistake that FPTP makes.
>
> The **entire purpose** of RCV is to consider voters' contingency choices
> when the candidate of their (first) choice cannot be elected.  E.g.:
>
> “You get to vote for your real favorite candidate as your first choice,
> and then you get a series of backup choices,” says Deb Otis, director of
> research and policy at FairVote, a nonpartisan organization which advocates
> for ranked-choice voting. “If your top choice is eliminated, your vote
> [goes to] your backup choice, and so your voice is still heard.”
>
> It's a falsehood.  We all know that.  Anyone who marked their "real
> favorite candidate as [their] first choice" and that candidate loses in the
> final IRV round, that voter will never have their vote go to any backup
> choice and that voter's contingency vote will not be heard.
>
> Most of the time it doesn't make any difference, the outcome of the
> election will remain unchanged even if those losers in the final round get
> to have their second or third-choice votes counted.  But we know that, in
> two U.S. elections in the 21st century, it *did* make a difference.  Those
> voters would have been better off not voting (as their first choice) for
> their favorite candidate and they would have been better off voting
> tactically.
>
> >  At each polling station you have observers representing the candidates.
> They all have cameras, phones and pocket calculators. I don't see any
> reason why there should be anything "opaque" about the process.
> >
>
> Doesn't matter if you have observers at each polling place observing if
> it's Hare RCV.  The most we will learn at the polling places are the
> first-choice tallies.  So then we will know how the IRV first round goes
> (or if there was an outright majority winner).  But if there are additional
> rounds, it's opaque and without the redundancy necessary to double-check
> the government's round-by-round tabulation.
>
> The part of the process where the voter inserts their ballot into the
> machine must be opaque in order to protect the secrecy of the vote of that
> voter.  But at the end of the day, at that particular polling place, to
> have transparency we need the tallies (sufficient to sum with other polling
> places and determine who won the election) printed out at that polling
> place and displayed for all to see.
>
> Now Venezuela does that (it's also FPTP).  So those tallies were actually
> observed and recorded by entities that are not the Venezuelan government.
> Those tallies, BTW, show Maduro losing by a nearly 2 to 1 margin.
>
> The problem is that the government displayed no breakdown of vote tallies
> nationwide.  They just made up numbers that show Maduro winning and shown
> *nothing* else about how they came up with those numbers.  If there was no
> tallies displayed at the polling places, no one would be the wiser.
>
> But how they got to their nationwide totals *is* opaque.  If they *had*
> shown a breakdown of the tallies from each city and jurisdiction inside the
> country, those tallies could be compared to the tallies that had already
> been observed and recorded *at* the polling places immediately after the
> polls closed.
>
> >  Here Venezuelan President Maduro speaks for himself (in Spanish with
> English subtitles):
> >  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpHlR-CYSss&t=3734s
> >
> >  If you want to watch the rest of that long video, I suggest doing so at
> higher-than-normal speed.
> >
>
> It's horseshit, Chris.  The Carter Center is much more trustworthy than
> the Maduro government.  Trump speaks for himself, too.  Does that make it
> anymore credible?
>
> Like Trump (a dictator wannabee) Maduro uses hours-long speeches to bore
> us to death so that blatant falsehoods buried therein are obfuscated amidst
> the blather.
>
> --
>
> r b-j . _ . _ . _ . _ rbj at audioimagination.com
>
> "Imagination is more important than knowledge."
>
> .
> .
> .
> ----
> Election-Methods mailing list - see https://electorama.com/em for list
> info
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.electorama.com/pipermail/election-methods-electorama.com/attachments/20240812/3f5b8f11/attachment.htm>