[EM] Did someone not hear what I said about Approval vs Condorcet?

Sun May 26 23:58:41 PDT 2024

…or of course you could, for the voting, just ask each voter to write on
hir (big) ballot, which member of each of the 18090/2 candidate-pairs s/he
prefers to the other. S/he might be in the voting/booth for a while…

On Sun, May 26, 2024 at 23:51 Michael Ossipoff <email9648742 at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Suppose that there are 300 million voters. Round 18090 off to 20000x
>
> 3E8 X 2E4 = 6E12
>
> 6 trillion.
>
> That’s roughly the number of miles in a light-year.
>
> Whatever the number of voters, nationally, is, suppose that every one of
> them participated in the handcount.
>
> With the work divided among them all, each has “only” an amount of work
> equal to that of determining which member of each one of 18090/2 pairs of
> candidates is ranked over the other on a ballot.
>
> 135 candidates in each ranking. On the average, s/he’d only have to look
> at half of the ranking’s candidates to find each of the 2 members of each
> pair.
>
> …but s/he’d have to do it for both. So the order-determination for each
> candidate-pair, on the average will require looking at 135 candidates.
>
> Suppose that s/he can skim over 10 of them in a second, when doing those
> searches.
>
> Then it would take (135)(18090/2)/10 seconds. That’s about 1.4 days. But
> say she only does it for 8 hours per day (with no breaks). Now it’s more
> like 4.2 days.
>
> But supervision is the whole point. If s/he’s working alone, she can say
> that the pairwise vote-totals are whatever s/he wants them to be.
>
> So in reality, it would be counting *teams* each wit representatives of
> several parties. Say (optimistically) there are 10 parties.
>
> Now it will take 42 days. But the parties don’t really have equal numbers
> of members. It’s going to take longer.
>
> …&, realistically, they aren’t going to scan 10 ranked candidates every
> second for 8 hours with no breaks.
>
> It would obviously take months. Might it not, in fact, be measured in
> years…with every one of the nation’s voters participating in that handcount?
>
>
>
> On Sun, May 26, 2024 at 22:11 Michael Ossipoff <email9648742 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> …& of course multiply that 18090 by the number of ballots, to get an idea
>> of what’s involved in the 18090 order-determinations to be done on each
>> ballot, & recorded, &  then summed, to obtain each of the 18090 pairwise
>> vote-totals.
>>
>> …each of which then must be carried or transmitted to where the central
>> count is done.
>>
>> On Sun, May 26, 2024 at 22:03 Michael Ossipoff <email9648742 at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On Sun, May 26, 2024 at 12:56 Chris Benham <cbenhamau at yahoo.com.au>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>>>
>>>> In 2003  there was California  gubernatorial election with 135
>>>> candidates.
>>>
>>>
>>> That’s 18090 pairwise vote-totals to determine at each precinct from the
>>> rankings, by examining each ranking to determine which member of each
>>> possible candidate-pair is ranked over the other on that ballot.
>>>
>>> …& 18080 pairwise vote-totals for the precincts to sum, store, &
>>> transmit or carry to the central count location.
>>>
>>> …& verify in an audit.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_California_gubernatorial_recall_election#Results
>>>>
>>>> Chris B.
>>>>
>>>> On 26/05/2024 9:29 pm, Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote:
>>>> > On 2024-05-26 07:28, Michael Ossipoff wrote:
>>>> >> Someone keeps repeating that the voters shouldn’t have to vote
>>>> >> strategically. He wants the method to do it all for us, after we
>>>> >> merely state our sincere-rankings.
>>>> >>
>>>> >> That’s of course a common attitude:
>>>> >>
>>>> >> …wanting a high-tech, computation-intensive,computer-dependent
>>>> system
>>>> >> to do it all for us, taking all the actual choosing responsibility
>>>> >> off of us.…sheltering & isolating us from the choice.
>>>> >
>>>> > I would prefer that you do not attribute opinions that the proponents
>>>> > have not expressed. Nowhere have I said that Condorcet "[isolates] us
>>>> > from the choice" we make.
>>>> >
>>>> > What you call "sheltering" and "isolating", I see as the method
>>>> taking
>>>> > proper responsibility - proper responsibility to turn the voters'
>>>> > unambiguous honest opinions into an outcome without dumping the
>>>> > algorithmic calculation upon te voter themselves. See my "kick the
>>>> can
>>>> > down the road" post for more info.
>>>> >
>>>> > Now, I could make a caricature of Approval itself. Perhaps something
>>>> > about a calculator that just says "IDK, do the base conversion
>>>> > yourself, I only accept input numbers in factoradic". But caricatures
>>>> > only make people angry. Let's not stoop to them, shall we?
>>>> >
>>>> >> I’ll ask this for the 3^rd time:
>>>> >>
>>>> >> …
>>>> >>
>>>> >> How would like you to handount-audit a Condorcet count for a
>>>> >> many-candidate national presidential election?
>>>> >
>>>> > I think your question assumes something that won't hold. If you have
>>>> a
>>>> > 25-candidate presidential election, you've already lost, because
>>>> > nobody is going to rank 25 candidates, irrespective of whether the
>>>> > method is Condorcet, IRV, or Borda.
>>>> >
>>>> > I'm not familiar with minor parties in the US. Has there ever been a
>>>> > 25-candidate presidential election?
>>>> >
>>>> > I don't think I can comment beyond that: I don't know enough about
>>>> > poll workers. I'll leave that to someone with experience. (Although
>>>> > roughly calculating: suppose 6 candidates like in Burlington. That's
>>>> > 30 pairs. Five times the work if counting a particular preference is
>>>> > as before. So you'd either need 5x the workers, or five times the
>>>> > time, or some combination of the two.)
>>>> >
>>>> > On an aside, though, I would say that I generally wouldn't want to
>>>> get
>>>> > computers anywhere near election counting. However, if you absolutely
>>>> > have to have them, there are ways of making sure they don't cheat:
>>>> > formal verification. You could also create special-purpose tools that
>>>> > say, only turn ranks into matrices and nothing else: there's no
>>>> reason
>>>> > (apart from programmer convenience) why an election tool should be a
>>>> > general purpose computer that you could hide all sorts of shenanigans
>>>> in.
>>>> >
>>>> >> I’ve discussed that at length in previous posts, & it probably isn’t
>>>> >> necessary to again post about ways of choosing how to vote in
>>>> Approval.
>>>> >>
>>>> >> But, just summarize:It’s easy.Whichever of the various ways you
>>>> >> prefer to use, for choosing whom to approve, it’s easy.…& no, it
>>>> >> doesn’t require knowing your objectively-optimal vote.
>>>> >
>>>> >>
>>>> >> I’ve many times pointed out that Approval’s Myerson-Weber
>>>> equilibrium
>>>> >> is the voter-median.
>>>> >>
>>>> >> i.e. Approval soon homes in on where the Condorcet-Winner is.
>>>> >
>>>> > Not necessarily. See the following paper:
>>>> > https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.04216v2
>>>> >
>>>> > According to the authors, under their model, if every voter follows a
>>>> > particular thresholding rule, then iterative approval generally
>>>> > arrives at the Condorcet winner (but not always). However, if voters
>>>> > are left to choose any thresholding rule they want (as you propose),
>>>> > then anything is possible. The arrangement might even elect a
>>>> > Condorcet loser, and the outcome may be slow to converge or who wins
>>>> > may depend on how many polls you hold.
>>>> >
>>>> > I'm reminded of a quote about distributed algorithms that I read
>>>> > somewhere: "It's really easy to design distributed algorithms that
>>>> > suffer from deadlock, network floods or widely unpredictable and
>>>> > bizarre oscillations". That's in the context of computer science -
>>>> > deadlocks might not be applicable to election methods. But it does
>>>> > justify a starting position of skepticisim when considering schemes
>>>> > that offload more of the work to the voters by turning a one-shot
>>>> > method into a dynamical system.
>>>> >
>>>> >> It seems to me that, in every one of EM’s polls, including the
>>>> recent
>>>> >> one, Approval chose the CW.
>>>> >>
>>>> >> Have we forgotten that?
>>>> >
>>>> > I haven't, nor have I forgotten that Approval wasn't actually the
>>>> poll
>>>> > winner.
>>>> >
>>>> > But let's take this reasoning at face value. I don't have the other
>>>> > polls' ballot data available at the moment, so let's consider the
>>>> > latest one and pick... say, Borda.
>>>> >
>>>> > As one can see by going to
>>>> > https://munsterhjelm.no/km/rbvote/calc.html, pasting in the data,
>>>> and
>>>> > clicking Borda, Ranked Pairs is also the Borda winner.
>>>> >
>>>> > But I don't think I'm going to start advocating for Borda.
>>>> >
>>>> >
>>>> > To not be accused of tu quoque, let me clarify the point. As
>>>> > Burlington shows, an election method needs to handle the hard cases,
>>>> > not just the easy ones, or there may be a considerable uproar when
>>>> the
>>>> > method is faced with a hard case and then stumbles. (In addition,
>>>> > people trying to make sure a stumble doesn't happen may start to do
>>>> > mass compromising, further entrenching two-party rule.)
>>>> >
>>>> > So it's quite possible that our polls are easy cases. But like
>>>> > FairVote claiming that IRV gets the Condorcet winner more than 90% of
>>>> > the time, that doesn't by itself tell us much, because the failures
>>>> > have such a strong impact.
>>>> >
>>>> > I illustrate the example above by picking a method we know to be bad
>>>> > (Borda being so extremely easy to fool with cloning and burial), and
>>>> > showing that the poll result comes out right. If a bad method can get
>>>> > a good result, then "getting a good result" is less useful than it
>>>> > might appear at first glance.
>>>> >
>>>> > -km
>>>> > ----
>>>> > Election-Methods mailing list - see https://electorama.com/em for
>>>> list
>>>> > info
>>>>
>>>
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