[EM] inaccurate Fargo approval voting results

[Closed Limelike Curves]

Michael—the issue is it fails much more than 1% of the time, it's just
hidden from sight. We can see the same mistake in FPP. If it looks like 97%
of FPP elections "got the right result", there's clearly *something* fishy
going on in that number.

And there is! The issue is that those 97% and 99% figures are based on the
incorrect assumption that which candidates choose to run isn't affected by
the electoral system. If everyone who wanted to run for office *did* run,
pathologies would be much more common. We saw this in Alaska, where the
top-4 format made the pathologies that usually get swept under the rug by
the nomination stage visible. In the *very first* major election with
multiple significant candidates, we saw a simultaneous
monotonicity/participation/majority failure. This lines up much more
closely with what models predicted: in competitive 3-candidate elections,
all of these pathologies should be quite common, happening around 5-15% of
the time.

The reason IRV looks like it "basically works" is because its pathologies
mean moderate and third-party candidates know they have no hope of winning,
so they never run in the first place. At that point, in a 2-party system,
all voting systems will return the same results (because it's just a simple
majority vote).

I think this bears repeating: *a low rate of **empirical** pathologies is
often a negative, not positive, indicator*. If your dataset has no examples
of center-squeeze, that means your system is so bad at electing Condorcet
winners that moderate candidates are refusing to run in the first place.
Similarly, we'll know Condorcet methods are working if (sincere) Condorcet
cycles start popping up all the time. That's how we'll know we've
successfully depolarized our politics and broken free of the old
one-dimensional political spectrum (where the median voter theorem protects
us from cycles).

On Sat, Jun 8, 2024 at 2:44 PM Michael Garman <michael.garman at rankthevote.us>
wrote:

> I'm happy to make tweaks! I don't have all the answers, Bob. I've never
> pretended to.
>
> My issue is with the people -- many of whom are on this list -- who view
> something that fails less than 1% of the time as insufficiently preferable
> to the status quo and would encourage voters to reject it in favor of
> preserving FPP.
>
> Advocate for the best currently viable option != accept it as the best
> we'll ever have.
>
> On Sat, Jun 8, 2024 at 5:40 PM robert bristow-johnson <
> rbj at audioimagination.com> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> > On 06/08/2024 4:20 PM EDT Michael Garman <michael.garman at rankthevote.us>
>> wrote:
>> >
>> >
>> > Oh no…it only works 99.2% of the time! The horror!
>> >
>>
>> Could work 99.6% of the time.  Or we could revert to FPTP and it works
>> 97% of the time (i.e. in less than 3% of RCV elections, a difference occurs
>> in who is elected).  The failure rate of FPTP is not all that bad, yet
>> there is your organization, FairVote, RCVRC, dozens of state/local
>> organizations, with scores of employees committed to correcting that 3%.
>>
>> But not interested in correcting their own flaws.  So much so that they
>> lie about the performance of their own product and they lie about the
>> objective failures when they do occur.
>>
>> A bridge or some other construction that failed, unnecessarily, 0.4% of
>> the time that it is used would not be considered acceptable.  But elections
>> are less important than bridges.
>>
>> You see, Michael, when the stakes are high, even low failure rates become
>> important.  The Electoral College hasn't failed all that often, but because
>> in recent times it has failed twice, 16 years apart, that's bringing
>> attention to the systemic failure (because this failure is favoring a
>> particular side).
>>
>> As RCV is used more and more, these other failures will happen more
>> often.  Each time this failure occurs, especially when the failure is
>> unnecessary and avoidable, bad shit happens.  Like repeal efforts that get
>> on the ballot.
>>
>> So the question is, do RCV advocates learn from these glitches?  Or
>> continue to deny the failures or minimize the significance of the failure?
>>
>> You are clearly in the latter group.  You haven't learned yet that course
>> corrections early in the voyage are less costly than later in the voyage.
>> We're quite early in the voyage of RCV reform, there is solid evidence of
>> not heading in the intended direction, yet you continue to deny the
>> indication of a course correction and insist that we dig in deeper and
>> commit to exactly the same heading that has already demonstrated the need
>> for adjustment.
>>
>> The need for adjustment is multi-faceted (another thing you ignore).
>> Especially with the nut-cases challenging the legitimacy of election
>> results *along with* T**** and sycophants actually trying to simply fudge
>> the election results, any reform that causes a reversion or roll-back of
>> process transparency *hurts* the election reform movement.  Right now, with
>> FPTP, we have redundancy in tabulation and we can tell who wins *directly*
>> from the tallies posted at the source (the polling places) on the evening
>> of the election.  This is what protects us from some corrupt official
>> simply fudging the numbers and "finding, uh, 11780, uh, votes."
>>
>> Secretary of State Raffenberger was not (and is not) corrupt, but Jeffery
>> Clark (a different high official) obviously is.  We need process
>> transparency to prevent a corrupt election official from fudging the
>> numbers from the tallies.  We need decentralization and process
>> transparency to prevent the QAnon assholes from making any credible claims
>> that accurate tallies were fudged.  We lose all that with Hare RCV.  And
>> like the 0.4% of the Hare RCV that failed, this loss is unnecessary.
>>
>> But you're still in denial.
>>
>> --
>>
>> 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
>>
> ----
> Election-Methods mailing list - see https://electorama.com/em for list
> info
>
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