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

[Closed Limelike Curves]

VNM-sense means roughly that a 50 is just as good as a 50% chance of a 0 or
100.

VNM is great--if you put it together with the Dutch Book theorems, it
basically gets you to "score voting is the objectively correct voting
system" ;-)

(Except sadly not if you have strategic voters.)

On Sun, Mar 17, 2024 at 6:04 PM Rob Lanphier <roblan at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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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> info
>
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