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

[Michael Ossipoff]

Hare might not manifest its problem for the reason I gave, if voters know
what they’re doing. But its fraudulent promotion works against that hope.

Given the consistent fraudulent promotion, with enactments based on an
intentional lie regarding what “RCV” is & will do, we shouldn’t be expected
to trust that it will work.

Given the fraudulent promotion, Oregon & Nevada should reject “RCV”.

Principle doesn’t support fraud.

Fraudulently-achieved “progress” isn’t progress.

On Tue, Mar 19, 2024 at 17:10 Closed Limelike Curves <
closed.limelike.curves at gmail.com> wrote:

> The example I like to use here is Meek in New Zealand local elections.
>> Meek's method uses a fixed point iteration to determine the keep values,
>> and thus necessarily has to be counted by computer. I doubt you could go
>> to an average New Zealand voter and get them to explain how Meek works.
>> Yet they use it, so it's possible for the voters to trust a method with
>> computerized counting.
>
> I think there's two things to distinguish here:
> 1. Trusting the voting machines/computers—this is just an American thing,
> really, because of 2020. That rules out anything that's not
> precinct-summable, though I think it means we *really* need some kind of
> verifiable voting.
> 2. Trusting the voting *method*. The key here is that even educated,
> high-information voters don't care about details and won't understand
> them, but they need to have a high-level overview of your system. The
> educated, high-information voters are the key, because they're the ones on
> all the talk shows, telling their friends to support referenda, etc. These
> people are smart, but they aren't math nerds. We can (and should) hand-wave
> and use imprecise but familiar language to get your point across.
>
> As an example, here's my explanation of ranked pairs for the educated
> voter: "For every pair of candidates, we check which candidate is ranked
> higher by more voters. If somebody wins every matchup, they get elected. If
> nobody wins every one-on-one matchup, we ignore some of the matchups that
> are closest to being tied. This is the fairest way to have an election
> because if most people want someone to win, that candidate should win.
> That's just democracy. We can ignore elections that are basically tied
> since they don't really matter much."
> "Hmm, makes sense, but what's wrong with IRV?"
> "Well, in Alaska, they say Nick Begich lost because he got too many votes.
> It's called a 'monotonicity failure.' But something's wrong with Alaska's
> elections if you can somehow lose because you got too many votes."
>
> This glosses over a lot of details about equal-ranking, what "closest to
> tied" means, etc. They might even confuse the description I gave with
> minimax. That's fine. They don't care. (There's never going to be a
> >3-candidate cycle in real life anyways.) They're willing to delegate
> details to mathematicians and economists, as long as they understand
> why this system makes sense, and they want to be able to give an overview.
>
> The same goes for IRV—IRV has gotten so popular because it just keeps
> getting explained as "eliminate all the spoiler candidates, reassign their
> votes to the next-highest candidate, and then pick whoever got the most
> votes."
>
> Another example would be the Huntington-Hill apportionment method. It's
>> not just complex but needlessly so (Webster would be better). I suspect
>> the average voter would be hard pressed to explain how it works. Over
>> here in Norway we also have a greedy algorithm that handles top-up
>> leveling seats to improve national proportionality while also
>> maintaining regional proportionality. Again, I doubt that an average
>> voter could explain how it works; but they mostly trust it, so there's
>> little problem. (Bizarre outcomes notwithstanding: personally I'd favor
>> a change of algorithm, but that's another matter.)
>
> Here's another example of "glossing over details is ok": Huntington-Hill
> is where you take every state's population, divide by the size of a
> congressional district to get the correct number of districts, and then you
> round to the integer with the smallest % error (whereas Webster rounds to
> the nearest integer). (Which is how the Census Bureau describes it on their
> website!)
>
> Explaining that "% error" involves natural logs or geometric means isn't
> important, nor is iteratively picking better divisors.
>
> On Tue, Mar 19, 2024 at 5:27 AM Kristofer Munsterhjelm <
> km_elmet at t-online.de> wrote:
>
>> On 2024-03-18 02:03, Rob Lanphier 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).
>>
>> That may be, but I feel he's rather too irascible to deal with, and that
>> he gets his partisan preferences in the way of discussing methods.
>> (Other readers, feel free to skip to "voting method stuff below".)
>> Here's from the discussion that ultimately led to the plonkage:
>>
>> On 2023-09-21, Mike argued in favor of IRV by (as I understood it)
>> essentially saying that, given that IRV has compromising failure, any
>> electorate that knew this and still went for IRV were tough enough not
>> to compromise to begin with. The reasoning went that, as they know of
>> IRV's compromising failure, they wouldn't choose a method that had
>> compromising failure unless they were determined to avoid triggering
>> that failure. Quoting:
>>
>> > So I’m sure that I’ll propose & recommend good Condorcet versions
>> > (even if I don’t yet know which ones & how many) over IRV.
>> >
>> > …but I’ll nonetheless include IRV among the methods that I offer,
>> > because it’s better than a lot of people believe.   …though its merit &
>> > workability strongly depend on the electorate & the candidate-lineup.
>> >
>> > I.e. Because it isn’t Condorcet-complying, it’s necessary that the
>> > electorate aren’t timid lesser-evil giveaway voters.
>> >
>> > But an electorate that has just enacted IRV in a referendum didn’t
>> > do so because they want to rank Lesser-Evil over their favorite. They
>> > enacted it because they want to rank sincerely, to express & fully help
>> > their favorite.
>>
>> Emphasis on the last sentence. Source
>>
>> http://lists.electorama.com/pipermail/election-methods-electorama.com/2023-September/004912.html.
>>
>> At the time I found this very strange, and it seemed to me that using
>> such reasoning could lead to absurdity.
>>
>> Then, on the 25th., he said that Coombs had too much of a burial
>> incentive to be useful.
>>
>> > Some academic authors have high praise for Coombs. One say that, with
>> > sincere ranking, & fewer than 5 candidates, Coombs always elects the CW.
>> >
>> > But Coombs is obviously vulnerable to east burial strategy. In
>> particular,
>> > trust & betrayal perpetrated by the voters of a “ lesser”-evil.
>> >
>> > Sure, after that betrayal, they’d hopefully never have any support from
>> > their victims again.
>> >
>> > But 1) Again we’re talking about resolution at least an election-cycle
>> > later; & 2) It could devolve to never-ending routine mutual burial.
>> >
>> > Coombs doesn’t sound very promising to me.
>>
>> Source:
>>
>> http://lists.electorama.com/pipermail/election-methods-electorama.com/2023-September/004941.html
>>
>> So I thought I would respond by poking a bit of fun at it, and
>> indirectly show how the IRV reasoning proved too much and could lead to
>> absurdity:
>>
>> >> But Coombs is obviously vulnerable to east burial strategy. In
>> >> particular, trust & betrayal perpetrated by the voters of a “
>> lesser”-evil.
>> >
>> > Clearly then, knowing this fact, the voters who propose and enact
>> Coombs
>> > must be tough voters who would never ever bury. Therefore Coombs'
>> burial
>> > incentive is no problem wherever it would be proposed.
>> >
>> > I jest :-)
>>
>> Apparently he got quite offended. He responded:
>>
>> >> I jest :-)
>> >
>> > …
>> >
>> > …&, by so doing, you waste our time, & space at the postings-page, &
>> send
>> > your substandard attempt at humor to everyone’s e-mail.
>> >
>> > …
>> >
>> > You’re aware that your bullshit is going to the e-mail of every
>> > list-subscriber, right?
>>
>> and
>>
>> > The only absurdity is in his sloppy attempt at an analogy, which has
>> > nothing in common with what it’s supposed to be an analogy for.   …& his
>> > equally sloppy & absurd conclusion from it (which he expressed as a
>> serious
>> > “real point”, rather than as “jest”);
>>
>> I enjoy these sorts of replies about as much as the next guy, which is
>> to say not at all, so that was that. Now, he did say in his post that
>>
>> > Perhaps Kristofer didn’t read my posts that said that RCV’s
>> > disadvantage is that it strongly depends on the electorate not being
>> timid
>> > lesser-evil giveaway-voters.
>>
>> which suggests that his point was not so much "electorates who propose
>> IRV must necessarily have precommitted themselves to not do
>> compromising" as "IRV will fail if the electorate hasn't". But if so,
>> there are definitely better ways to to say "I think your joke is off the
>> mark, you must have misunderstood".
>>
>> I usually don't poke fun to press the absurdity of a point, so I think
>> he had already got under my skin at that point. All the more reason to
>> stay away.
>>
>> Anyway,
>>
>> === voting method stuff below ===
>>
>> > 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.
>>
>> The example I like to use here is Meek in New Zealand local elections.
>> Meek's method uses a fixed point iteration to determine the keep values,
>> and thus necessarily has to be counted by computer. I doubt you could go
>> to an average New Zealand voter and get them to explain how Meek works.
>> Yet they use it, so it's possible for the voters to trust a method with
>> computerized counting.
>>
>> And I suppose that's the point: trust. It's harder to trust a
>> computerized system when it hasn't built up a reputation for good
>> results, or when previous complicated systems have failed (if IRV is to
>> be considered both a complicated system and one that failed).
>>
>> Another example would be the Huntington-Hill apportionment method. It's
>> not just complex but needlessly so (Webster would be better). I suspect
>> the average voter would be hard pressed to explain how it works. Over
>> here in Norway we also have a greedy algorithm that handles top-up
>> leveling seats to improve national proportionality while also
>> maintaining regional proportionality. Again, I doubt that an average
>> voter could explain how it works; but they mostly trust it, so there's
>> little problem. (Bizarre outcomes notwithstanding: personally I'd favor
>> a change of algorithm, but that's another matter.)
>>
>>
>> I agree that Approval wins by a mile in the bang for the buck category.
>> If your summability is restricted to one number per candidate,
>> Approval/Range is the best you can get, but mostly because the other
>> contenders make it no contest. But I can't shake the "manual DSV" and
>> rb-j objections, that plain honest voters will be annoyed that they have
>> to collapse their expressions into "yay? or boo?", and that the small
>> risk of disastrous returns from misjudged strategy will eventually blow
>> up.
>>
>> Admittedly, I have no proof of this, since Approval hasn't been used
>> much. I just know that's how I would think if my area switched to
>> Approval. (We don't actually have single-winner elections, but you get
>> my point :-)
>>
>> >> 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.
>>
>> There are definitely things I disagree with him about, and that I would
>> tell him were he, say, Forest. But I don't fancy getting my head bitten
>> off again. Maybe I will, but I'm not sure yet.
>>
>> >>     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.
>>
>> That's more or less what I've come to think too. Summability primarily
>> is about interpretability, and secondarily that people transporting the
>> data have a chance to see if it's been tampered with. In both cases it's
>> related to transparency.
>>
>> Computer wise, it's possible to store full rankings for a worldwide
>> election and a reasonable number of candidates on an SD card, even with
>> 100% turnout of 8.1 billion voters. So summability is not for storage
>> purposes alone, unless you're doing a manual count (which again ties
>> into transparency).
>>
>> The interpretability point is weakened as you go from first order to
>> second to third... and by the time you're doing real-time IRV sankey
>> diagrams, all meaning is lost.
>>
>> >> 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.  :-)
>>
>> I'm definitely not going to propose that large language models call
>> elections :-)
>>
>> > 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
>> <
>> https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/math-hard-easy-teaching-instruction/2021/06/25/4fbec7ac-d46b-11eb-ae54-515e2f63d37d_story.html
>> >
>>
>> And that's a good point: the curse of knowledge is very real.
>>
>> >>    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).
>>
>> I'm no fan of IRV either. I'm just saying "if IRV, then Condorcet-IRV".
>> That is, the return on including some Condorcet provision if you're
>> going to do IRV anyway is high enough that you really ought to do it.
>>
>> As far as reporting goes: does anyone here know how Australia does it?
>>
>> I suppose their above-the-line voting makes IRV much more like largest
>> remainders party list, but I've heard that optional voting is becoming
>> more common, which could lead more voters to manually rank the candidates.
>>
>> I also have the impression that polls include pairwise data
>> ("two-party-preferred") showing the relative support between the two
>> party blocs (Labour and LibNat). But I don't want to mess up the
>> details, so I'll leave them to someone who actually lives in Australia.
>>
>> French presidential polls seem to include hypothetical expected pairwise
>> results between the candidates who have some chance of getting into the
>> final. See
>>
>> https://www.politico.eu/article/5-charts-to-help-you-read-the-french-presidential-election/,
>>
>> figure near the bottom. So if we look more broadly, pairwise reporting
>> isn't completely unheard of.
>>
>> > 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
>> <
>> 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.
>>
>> IRV RCV is entirely nonsummable. (Summable) Condorcet should do better,
>> particularly in the absence of cycles. One could possibly do reporting
>> by saying something like "candidate X is still the champ, but his match
>> against candidate Y is evening out - what does that mean, is this region
>> a stronghold of Y's? Did the voters here prefer Y to X because of
>> economic reasons?", etc.
>>
>> When things get cyclical it gets a lot tougher. But simple rules could
>> possibly still work, e.g. minmax as "your strength is the strength of
>> the most unfavorable matchup". Reporting could talk about how X's
>> apparent comfortable margin is taking a beating on some issue that
>> candidates Y and Z are strong at, and that X's victory is looking slim
>> because Y is already doing a good job in the X vs Y contest. Who the
>> current champ is and how his winning chances are either being shored up
>> or eroded by more votes coming in.
>>
>> Copeland is probably quite easy to understand although indecisive and
>> not cloneproof. Brackets could be simple, but I don't know of any
>> Condorcet method that uses them -- and the seed order would have to be
>> set in advance. Otherwise, as more votes come in, it could alter the
>> seed order and make the comparisons seem like an unpredictable mess.
>>
>> >> [1] Both honest voters in the rank-consistent sense and in the von
>> >> Neumann-Morgenstern sense.
>> >
>> >
>> > Could you explain what you mean by this?
>>
>> What I mean is that both honest voters who have a particular rating in
>> mind, but not a ranking; and honest voters who have strengths of
>> preference in mind, have multiple honest ballots to choose between. So
>> the choice of which one to use becomes a matter of what others are
>> doing, even for people who would rather not do strategy.
>>
>> This is most obvious for ranked voters: if your opinion is A>B>C, you
>> don't know if you should approve only A or both A and B.
>>
>> von Neumann-Morgenstern utilities is a way to quantify strength of
>> preference by using lotteries and expected utility.
>>
>> Suppose that your preference is A>B>C, and that you think that getting B
>> for sure is as good as a gamble with a 40% chance of A, and a 60% of C.
>> Then your von Neumann-Morgenstern utility for B is 40% of the one for A
>> plus 60% of the one for C. E.g. if your rating of C is zero and A is 10,
>> then B is 4.
>>
>> By considering what gamble you would find about as good as getting a
>> candidate for sure, you can (theoretically) determine your strength of
>> preference for all other candidates once you have two of them. So that
>> allows a more meaningful theory about what strength of preference really
>> is, and to say that a ballot is honest if it's consistent with these
>> preference strengths.
>>
>> But there's still a problem: you're left with two free variables - the
>> ratings of your favorite and least favorite. So there are still multiple
>> honest Range ballots. And if we suppose that Approval works by approving
>> every candidate above the halfway point on the rating scale, then there
>> are still multiple honest Approval ballots, too.
>>
>> We could get around this by fixing the voter's favorite candidate to a
>> rating of 100% and the voter's least favorite to 0%. Now there is only
>> one honest rated-like ballot. But methods that automatically normalize
>> like this fail IIA, and both in Range and (above mean utility) Approval,
>> there can exist an incentive to not cast that honest ballot.
>>
>> (In practice, people don't like risk and so prefer a sure deal over a
>> gamble, but there are ways to compensate for this too.  The point is
>> that it provides a formalization of the idea of "strength of preference".)
>>
>> -km
>
>
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>> info
>>
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