[EM] inaccurate Fargo approval voting results

[Closed Limelike Curves]

Michael—that seems a bit uncalled for.

I did forget about the NYC race, you're right. Like I said, IRV only has
pathologies about 10-15% of the time, so out of the first 4
competitive+high-profile IRV elections (NYC, the two Alaska House races,
and the Alaska Senate race) only 2 have had gross pathologies (Alaska
Senate was a decapitation pathology that avoided a center-squeeze).

Although, with that said, I don't think the New York primary was a good
showing for IRV either. Every method had Eric Adams as the winner
(including FPP), but 17.5% of the ballots were exhausted by the end of the
race, and NYC almost declared the wrong winner because of errors in
vote-counting.

On Sun, Jun 9, 2024 at 10:51 AM Michael Garman <
michael.garman at rankthevote.us> wrote:

>
>
> 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."
>>>>
>>>> .
>>>> .
>>>> .
>>>> ----
>>>> 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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