[EM] No. Condorcet and Hare do not share the same problem with computational complexity and process transparency.

[Michael Ossipoff]

That’s true: The major computational demand, the exhaustive pairwise-count,
is a local precincts-job, & the pairwise totals can be incremented as the
ballots are read.

But there are just a lot more totals, & so there’s undeniably more to the
local counts than with Approval. A lot more totals to audit. With 20
candidates, 380 instead of 20.

…& it requires finding & comparing each pair of candidates’ rank-positions
on each ballot, instead of just a simple plain count like Approval.

So, in more than one way, it’s a much bigger & more complicated count than
Approval.



On Sat, Mar 16, 2024 at 15:58 robert bristow-johnson <
rbj at audioimagination.com> wrote:

>
>
> > On 03/16/2024 5:52 PM EDT Michael Ossipoff <email9648742 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >
> >
> > In 35 years of promotion of a ranked-method & heavy spending, what does
> FairVote have to show for it? Two states & some cities. That isn’t success,
> for 35 years.
>
> It's better than nothing, but FV needs to be more honest about failures.
>
> The repeal effort in Alaska in 2024 is grossly underestimated by the IRV
> happy-talkers just as the repeal effort in Burlington was underestimated in
> 2009 and 2010.  There is evidence of that in the postings I made to this
> list in those years.
>
> I predict that RCV in Alaska will be repealed in November, we'll see.
>
> >
> > If they’d been instead offering Approval there’d likely be a lot more
> success.
>
> That we don't know.  Fargo and St. Louis are the only governments using
> Approval.  And it doesn't take away the pressure on voters to vote
> tactically whenever there are 3 or more candidates.
>
> > …& don’t forget that Condorcet, too, has a very
> computationally-intensive & computationally-demanding count,
>
> We talked about this before, Michael, when I posted.  Because of Precinct
> Summability and the decentralization of the tabulation (that does *not*
> exist with Hare IRV), there is *no* practical bottleneck of computational
> burden (like there is with Hare IRV that first requires the centralization
> of all individual ballot data).
>
> When the ballot is inserted into the ballot machine, the ballot is scanned
> and if the ballot is accepted as not spoiled (Dominion is quite a pain in
> the ass about this), then tallies are immediately incremented, as they are
> now with FPTP.  That will take all of a millisecond.  When the election day
> ends and polls close, all there needs is to print out the tallies for that
> polling place.  Then they are securely published and no one is gonna be
> able to "... find, uh, 11780 .. votes."
>
> If they're counted by hand, if C is the number of candidates, then IRV may
> require up to C-1 passes through the ballot pile.  Condorcet will require
> C(C-1)/2 passes with the ballot pile.  Laborious, but straight-forward.
> And if the precinct is so large that this manual tabulation is unfeasible,
> then they just need tabulators, no matter what the method is.
>
> It's not at all the same problem as with IRV, where, other than 1st-choice
> votes, no one knows what's inside the tabulators or ballot bags that we
> haul from each polling place to City Hall in the evening.  But with FPTP
> and Condorcet (and Approval and Score, I will concede), the only opaque
> section of the path lies solely in the tabulators (human or machine) at the
> polling place.
>
> > with the consequent loss of transparency, & difficulty of
> security-auditing for count-fraud.
>
> Nope, that's a falsehood.  Condorcet is Precinct Summable and those
> tallies add up and the original tallies come right outa the same machine
> that the ballots go into, just like FPTP.  There are no intermediate steps
> that are opaque.  It's not at all the same problem as with Hare RCV.
>
> If we have Precinct Summability the "transparency, & difficulty of
> security-auditing for count-fraud" is the same as we have now with FPTP.
>
> But without Precinct Summability, there is a serious loss and I am trying
> to persuade policy makers in our state of that fact.  So far I got two
> state reps and two state senators to understand this.  This bill (which is
> not going anywhere) was inspired by me:
> https://legislature.vermont.gov/bill/status/2024/H.424
>
> But, unfortunately, S.32 (Hare) is doing better, but *is* getting hung up
> a little in the House Gov Ops.
>
> --
>
> 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
>
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