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

Sun Mar 17 18:03:46 PDT 2024

Hi Kristofer,

I have a detailed reply below.  In short, I'm still pretty sure Michael
Ossipoff is worth listening to every so often (even though many of his
emails are thoughtless stream-of-consciousness that would get him banned in
most places, and I haven't ruled that out if it becomes clear he's driving
people away).  Credible voter models show that approval voting and
Condorcet consistency are practically compatible, even if they aren't
strictly compatible.  A system that "computers can count, even if people
can't" is not viable in our lifetimes, because people are more complicated
than computers.

More inline....

On Sun, Mar 17, 2024 at 4:28 AM Kristofer Munsterhjelm <km_elmet at t-online.de>
wrote:

> On 2024-03-16 23:57, robert bristow-johnson wrote:
> >> On 03/16/2024 5:52 PM EDT Michael Ossipoff <email9648742 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >> …& 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).
> >> 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.
>
> I've got Mike plonked, so I don't see his posts,

That's too bad.  Michael is frequently annoying, but he's frequently
correct.  This mailing list was started in large part because of a
mailing-list conversation I had with Michael in 1995, where he was being
obnoxious on another list.  I thought I'd be able to show that he was a
crank.  Turns out he taught me about center squeeze.  You should consider
unplonking him.

> but I would like to add this:
>
> - If a lack of summability is not a problem, then BTR-IRV isn't that
> much more complex than IRV. And at the cost of slightly more complexity
> than that, Benham can preserve IRV's strategy resistance and do away
> with most of its exit incentive.
>

Having volunteered as a poll worker for the first time in a city that uses
RCV for some elections, it changed my perspective on election security.  I
appreciated how much process there was, but also how much of the process
was shrugged off when it was a little inconvenient.

There weren't any RCV races in the March 5 election here, so I didn't have
to perform any tech support for RCV, but having voted in many RCV races, I
could see what a goat rodeo that can become for poll workers.  My hunch is
that the more complicated the election, the easier it would be to have
steps of the process shrugged off as poll workers get frazzled as the day
wears on.

I think "summability" is really just shorthand for "vaguely makes sense for
someone who really really cares about the end result to keep track of the
election in real time".  Strict Condorcet methods are admittedly difficult
on this count.  Approval is drop-dead simple on this count.

I've become convinced (by simulations and gradual persuasion over the past
decade or so) that approval is good enough.

If computers do the counting, then relatively laborious steps aren't any
> problem, as long as the public understands why they're there.

I think that's an easy thing for those of us who are good with computers to
say.  Computers are taking over the world, but there's a limit to how much
people trust computers and the people who write the software for
computers.  Many people "trust" computers only as far as they can throw a
datacenter.  Granted, it's possible to wire up many computers in a small
box that most healthy adults can throw and call that a "datacenter", but
I'm talking about the brick-and-mortar datacenters often placed near power
generation plants.  Most people have given up the fight, and welcome our
robot overlords, but our robot overlords don't really care if we understand
elections, and may prefer to do away with elections and take control
themselves.  :-)

In seriousness, I'm guessing this mailing list skews heavily "math
literate" in addition to skewing heavily "computer literate", and I think
that those of us that are literate in those way have a hard time relating
to people that aren't as literate in those areas:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/math-hard-easy-teaching-instruction/2021/06/25/4fbec7ac-d46b-11eb-ae54-515e2f63d37d_story.html

> BTR-IRV's
> safeguarding step follows directly from your concept that "if more
> people prefer A to B than vice versa, then B must not be elected".
>
> - If, on the other hand, lack of summability *is* a problem, then that
> disqualifies IRV outright and we're done.
>

I'm supportive of BTR-IRV, but I'll concede that summability and reporting
results in an easy-to-understand form (in real time) is a big problem.  I
think it's important for voters (on election night) to be able to see a
television reporter say "Results from the precincts on the southwest side
of town were just reported, and CandB took the lead over CandA.  Let's turn
it over to our analysts at the elections desk to explain what happened!"
The pre-election polling and exit polling should provide a reasonably
understandable explanation.  I fear we're due for a lot of election fraud
if most people don't understand what happened (and honestly, having lived
in San Francisco since 2011 and seen how some close elections have turned
out, it wouldn't surprise me at all if there's some consequential electoral
fraud here).

It would seem to me that the only reason one would accept IRV and reject
> Condorcet-IRV would be if there's a manual count and the initial O(n^2)
> Condorcet matrix calculation is considered too laborious. Or for
> marketing reasons.
>

Why not both?  I think that both FairVote and the Center for Election
Science spent years marketing against "nerds" that understand the
importance of the Condorcet winner criterion
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet_winner_criterion>, so Condorcet
advocates went through some tough times as those two organizations gained
traction.  Thankfully, both organizations have gotten more careful about
their anti-Condorcet rhetoric, and both organizations have new leadership.
equal.vote is mildly pro Condorcet, but only mildly so, and maybe only
because they know I'll call them out if they get too overt marketing
against the Condorcet winner criterion.  They endorse "Ranked Robin
<https://electowiki.org/wiki/Ranked_Robin>", which ... I won't get into
here.

> As for Approval, my position hasn't really changed: it is able to pass
> so many criteria by offloading the burden of voting onto the voter
> himself and by classifying a large swath of different ballots as all
> "honest" (in the rank-consistent sense). Not only strategic voters have
> to play the strategy game, but honest voters too[1]: just determining
> which honest vote to submit requires strategy! With ranking, on the
> other hand, it's easy: there's only one rank-consistent honest ballot,
> so if you don't want to play the game, just submit that ballot. No
> manual DSV needed.
>

In the 1990s and 2000s (and perhaps even much of the 2010s), I would have
wholeheartedly endorsed this position.  I've been persuaded that Approval
is fine.  People understand "approval ratings" (or at least, they think
they do).  When we had a close RCV election here in San Francisco (the 2018
mayoral special election
<https://electowiki.org/wiki/2018_San_Francisco_mayoral_special_election>),
the pre-election polls were useless.  That bothered me a lot.  I preferred
the winner, but it was really obvious that in a city where there were
parties competitive with the Democratic Party (who seemingly preferred the
winner of the 2018, since she was the "establishment" candidate), an RCV
election that was close as our 2018 election would have been a complete
fiasco.

We may want to make a point of figuring out a seemingly fair way of seeding
an arbitrary number of candidates in pairwise bracket, since there are a
lot of people that find those fun:
https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/bracket-challenge/?contestid=32#brackets/fullbracket

(See also Forest's explanation of my point at
>
> http://lists.electorama.com/pipermail/election-methods-electorama.com/2016-October/000717.html
> .)
>

I hear you, and I read what Forest wrote.  Ultimately, I think it's
important for most voters to vaguely know what the election is going to
look like in order to be comfortable using the system.  I don't think most
folks here in the SF Bay Area really understand RCV.  The topic frequently
comes up on the nightly news, for example here:
https://www.ktvu.com/news/lawsuit-filed-to-overturn-oakland-mayoral-election

My fear is that RCV makes fraud easier, because few people truly understand
what's going on under the hood, and the founders of FairVote don't help
educate; they obfuscate.  I'm hopeful that FairVote will get over their
nasty case of "founder's syndrome" soon, so that they will become better
partners in electoral reform efforts.

[1] Both honest voters in the rank-consistent sense and in the von
> Neumann-Morgenstern sense.
>

Could you explain what you mean by this?

Rob
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