[EM] inaccurate Fargo approval voting results

[Michael Garman]

Oh, I’m sure the highly-funded, endorsed, and publicized candidates in the
NYC mayoral election not named Adams would love being called insignificant!
Brilliant analysis from the politics understander.
On Sun, Jun 9, 2024 at 1:49 PM Closed Limelike Curves <
closed.limelike.curves at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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."
>>>
>>> .
>>> .
>>> .
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>>> 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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