[EM] Legislative language for Condorcet RCV

[robert bristow-johnson]

I'm changing the title of the sub-thread.

> On 04/03/2025 4:51 PM EDT Kristofer Munsterhjelm <km-elmet at munsterhjelm.no> wrote:
> 
>  
> On 2025-04-03 21:58, robert bristow-johnson wrote:
> 
> > 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).
> 
> What do you think of minmax? One possible way to put it is "in the 
> absence of a Condorcet winner, elect the candidate who would need the 
> fewest additional top votes to become one".
> 

Is that language sufficiently *procedural*.  Like spelling out the step of exactly how to count the votes and declare the winner?

> It has the disadvantage of not being Smith, and perhaps the standard of 
> judgement could be considered arbitrary, but that phrasing is pretty simple.
> 
> (This works because an A-top ballot increases the pairwise strength of A 
> vs everybody else. So the candidate who needs the fewest such votes is 
> the one whose worst defeat is the least worst.)
> 
> As for the others, I would much prefer C-TTR to C-Plurality; I suspect 
> the latter would be too easy to manipulate.
> 

Remember that it's only in 0.5% of the RCV election that this opportunity to manipulate would exist.  For me, thinking about legislative language, it's about persuading legislators (and voters) that the law is reasonable and reflects their collective vote.  They're not going to like any obscurity or opacity.  They may suspect something sneaky that benefit some group (like "liberals") might be slipped in underneath obscure language.  Anti-RCV people already suspect that.

I have a document of templates for legislative language here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1DGvs2F_YoKcbl2SXzCcfm3nEMkO0zCbR/view .  Even though the legislative language they came up with is different: https://legislature.vermont.gov/Documents/2024/Docs/BILLS/H-0424/H-0424%20As%20Introduced.pdf I still consider the templates sufficient to explain clearly the essential components of the law.

Anyway, using the template, how compact can you get the Minimax or Copeland language to look?  And, to the pedestrian voter (or legislator), how to we persuade them that this law is transparent and that it truly reflects the voters' collective will?

Condorcet-Plurality is in the template.  Condorcet-TTR wouldn't be much worse:

_______________________________________________

All elections of [office] shall be by ballot, using a system of ranked-choice voting without a separate runoff election. The presiding election officer shall implement a ranked-choice voting protocol according to these guidelines:
(1) The ballot shall give voters the option of ranking candidates in order of preference. Lower ordinal preference shall be considered higher rank and the candidate marked as first preference is considered ranked highest. Equal ranking of candidates shall be allowed. Any candidate not marked with a preference shall be considered as ranked lower than every candidate marked with a preference.
(2) If a candidate receives a majority (over 50 percent) of first preferences, that candidate is elected.
(3) If no candidate receives a majority of first preferences, a Condorcet-consistent retabulation shall be performed by the presiding election officer. The retabulation shall examine every possible pairing of candidates. Given N as the number of candidates, then the number of possible pairings of candidates is N(N-1)/2. In each pair, if the number of ballots marked ranking a selected candidate over the other candidate exceeds the number of ballots marked to the contrary, then the other candidate is declared defeated. After all candidate pairings are examined, the candidate who remains not declared defeated is the Condorcet winner and is elected.
(4) If no Condorcet winner exists in subdivision (3), then the prevailing candidate of the pair involving the two candidates having the most first preferences is elected.
(5) The [governing jurisdiction] may adopt additional regulations consistent with this subsection to implement these standards.
_______________________________________________

So, in subdivision (4), how would the language look like for Minimax?

For a single-method system like Ranked Pairs, how would subdivisions (3) and (4) be replaced?


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

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