[EM] The Equal Vote Coalition and robla

[robert bristow-johnson]

> On 04/03/2025 2:36 AM EDT Rob Lanphier <roblan at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 
 I joined the board of the Equal Vote Coalition in January 2025:
> https://www.equal.vote/about

That's quite interesting.

> This first email is the email you should respond to if you want to say how aghast y'all are that I'm completely sold out (which...I'm not getting paid, so I'm selling out cheap, it seems).
> 

I have mixed feelings about Equal Vote Coalition.  I am jealous of the name and the domain name.  I think that name belongs strictly to Condorcet advocacy.

> On paper, the Equal Vote Coaltion is not rigidly a "cardinal-only" organization. They define "Ranked Robin" on their website (https://www.equal.vote/ranked_robin), which at one point was effectively a hybrid of Copeland and Borda. The branding is great, 

I still consider EVC to be STAR advocates.  I don't consider STAR (or any cardinal method) to be "equal votes".  I also consider STAR or Score to have absolutely *zero* chance of ever being adopted for governmental elections.  And while Score is simple in concept, STAR, being a hybrid, is a little bit contrived.

We really should concentrate on reforming RCV to be Condorcet consistent.  That's what EVC should be doing.  Personally, I don't understand how or where EVC is getting their money to operate and support as many employees as they do.

About "Ranked Robin" that's seems to me to be a Sass invention and I don't understand why they tepidly promote that instead of just Condorcet RCV in general.  I have become convinced that for Condorcet RCV to ever be adopted in legislation, it will have to be either 
1. BTR-IRV which requires only a small change to the existing IRV language or 
2. a Two-method "straight ahead" Condorcet method.  Probably either Condorcet-Plurality or Condorcet-TTR.

The reason I came to this position was from discussions with friendly legislators and legislative counsel here in Vermont.  We need for "The law should say what it means and mean what it says."  The Two-method straight-ahead Condorcet is simply that.  Any other Condorcet-consistent method seems to obscure what it's doing.  What we want the law to do is to insure that if more voters mark their ballots that Candidate A is preferred to Candidate B, that Candidate B is not elected.  That's the only way that ensures that our votes are valued equally (as in "Equal Vote Coalition") and for the election to not be spoiled and for voters to not be punished for voting sincerely (which disincentives tactical voting).

And I am completely in disagreement with Sara Wolk about conceding the label "Ranked-Choice Voting" to only the Hare method.  Borda, Bucklin, and Condorcet are also RCV.  We must not allow FairVote to appropriate the term "RCV" to mean *only* IRV.
 
> Most folks with the organization feel that STAR voting is superior to Condorcet methods.

For no good reason.  I guess it's their child, as ugly as it is.

> Not me.

That's good.

> I feel like score/range voting requires too much work from voters to figure out the best strategy (which, as near as I can tell, is either vote the maximum score or the minimum; hence transforming it into approval voting in practice). STAR voting's final pairwise comparison makes it acceptable in my eyes to put candidates into more than two tiers, and I have a difficult time contriving realistic scenarios where voters would be doing the wrong thing by voting sincerely. I know many folks here disagree with that assessment, but...well ... reply to me if you want to. I'm happy to engage in the conversation again in this thread.
> 

I had shown before that *with* the assumption that if a voter's preference is A>B>C, they're gonna mark their STAR ballot A:5, B:1, C:0 because that will best accomplish their political goal in nearly all circumstances.  They want A elected and for that to happen, A has to get into the Automatic Runoff.  If A gets into the Runoff, then A is already ranked higher than anyone else and their vote in the final runoff is for A.  But if A can't get into the final runoff, then it's a choice between B and C and then scoring B just 1 level above C is sufficient for their entire vote to be for B.  Scoring B any higher only makes it more difficult to get their favorite, A, into the final runoff, so *ostensibly* there is no reason to score B higher than 1.

But I also shown that with that scoring regime, STAR would make the same mistake that Hare IRV makes regarding the Center Squeeze.  At least with numbers proportional to Burlington 2009 or Alaska August 2022.  The Condorcet winner exists and would not be elected.  If someone were to respond that this wouldn't happen if some voters scored B higher than 1, that may be true.  But why would any A proponents do that?  You would have to convince them that they need to *harm* the likelihood for A to get into the final runoff (which harms A's chance to be elected) in order to prevent the candidate they hate, C, from being elected.  But that is the tactic of "compromising" that is exactly what we're trying to get away from.  We do not want to make voters forsake their most favorite candidate in order to prevent their least favorite candidate from winning.

--

r b-j . _ . _ . _ . _ rbj at audioimagination.com

"Imagination is more important than knowledge."

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