[EM] The Equal Vote Coalition and robla

[Rob Lanphier]

Hi Robert,

Due to a delivery glitch, I didn't get some of the replies to my EM emails
right away, including this one.  However, that's not the only reason for
the delay.  I've been thinking about how to reply for a while.  I've even
been having ChatGPT help me out.  More inline....

 On Thu Apr 3 12:58:59 PDT 2025, robert bristow-johnson wrote:

> 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

> [...]
> 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.


That's nice.  You should have registered it  :-P

You continued...

> I still consider EVC to be STAR advocates.  I don't consider STAR (or any
> cardinal method) to be "equal votes".


Admittedly, EVC is pretty heavily biased toward STAR advocates.  I realize
you're not interested in working with anyone who prefers cardinal methods
to ordinal methods, but some of us are ready to compromise.  During the
vetting process when I was being brought on board, it was clear EVC wanted
me because I might help provide more depth in Condorcet advocacy, and I
suspect they'd accept others with even more depth of knowledge and
Condorcet activist chops than me.  When I was in my "job interview" for the
board, I made no secret to them or others about the fact that Condorcet
methods were my first love, and I still trot out my article from The Perl
Journal to show that I've really liked Condorcet methods for a while:
https://robla.net/1996/TPJ

I still consider the Condorcet winner criterion very important.  But, as
I've pointed out many times on this list and elsewhere, I've found the
simulations published by folks like Ka-Ping Yee persuasive demonstrations
that approval voting elections and Condorcet elections are very likely to
result in the same candidate winning.  Approval voting is the only pure
cardinal system that I can get behind (so, for example, I still find pure
score/range voting a very poor choice for high-stakes public elections).
Approval's strategy (and most cardinal method strategy) is more complicated
than most cardinal advocates would have you believe, but it's not THAT
bad.  At least, approval isn't that bad.

Having voted in many San Francisco elections (home of the name "Ranked
Choice Voting" to refer to IRV), I was surprised at how awful I've found
the actual task of voting here.  I expected to have nerdy fun with it, but
voting in the RCV elections has become a chore that I kinda dread.  I
wouldn't dislike RCV as much if I didn't have to worry about accidentally
spoiling my ballot by assigning two candidates the same rank.  I'm
assuming/hoping BTR-IRV doesn't suffer from that same problem, but don't
assume that folks who live in an RCV/IRV jurisdiction love it.  I've found
many folks here who find it annoying, but I haven't (yet) gotten most of
them annoyed enough to make that the focal point of their activism.

I'm not pushing STAR here in SF, but I'm not going to badmouth it the way
you do, Robert. I do badmouth RCV/IRV sometimes, and I've probably
alienated a person or two. The reason why I'm at peace with STAR, though:
it's not a pure cardinal system.  That final pairwise comparison makes it
difficult to come up with plausible scenarios where STAR and Condorcet
disagree.  I know you disagree, but I'm guessing you haven't tried as hard
as I have to come up with plausible scenarios where STAR really fails.  The
funny thing is that most of the times that STAR and Condorcet disagree,
it's because of a Condorcet cycle (which anecdotal evidence suggests could
happen as frequently as IRV<->Condorcet disagreements, though I'm only
vaguely aware of two or three cycles in real-world elections).

The more I think about STAR vs strictly CWC-compliant systems, and the more
I try to get ChatGPT and other LLMs to make the best case they can for you,
I can't get a convincing case that the distinction is a reason to divide
into warring factions over.  Then when I ask ChatGPT to "find Robert
Bristow-Johnson's best case against STAR", I remain unconvinced by what
I've read from you (e.g. your post and comments here):
https://www.reddit.com/r/EndFPTP/comments/1bbq6hu/heres_a_good_hypothetical_for_how_star_fails/

You seem to be pushing voter behavior that's too uniform.  As /u/arendpeter
<https://reddit.com/u/arendpeter> pointed out in their findings, with the
online polls they've posted, folks were a lot more generous with 3 and 4
star ratings than you indicate they will be:
https://www.reddit.com/r/EndFPTP/comments/1bbq6hu/heres_a_good_hypothetical_for_how_star_fails/kvbsc4j/

As I speculate on my own behavior under STAR, I think of how I would have
voted here in SF in the 2024 mayoral race, and I'm pretty sure I would have
been more generous with my stars, even as a very partisan voter.   I would
have given a couple mayoral candidates 5 stars (because I knew they
wouldn't win, but so I could say "I voted for you", since meeting any of
them F2F isn't out of the question for me), I would have given my favorite
viable candidate either 5 stars or 4 stars, I would have given my next
favorite 3 stars.  I doubt I would have given any of the others any stars.
This maps pretty closely to my RCV/IRV ballot.

As it turns out, my vote in 2024 didn't seem to matter much (in most
elections).  I think my bottom ranked candidate for mayor won, and he's
turning out to be a much better mayor than I feared he would be.  Maybe San
Francisco needs a political outsider after all.


> 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.


Saying "absolutely *zero* chance"  seems like ragey hyperbole.  And
honestly, given how hard you’re tilting at the BTR-IRV and Condorcet-TTR
windmills, it seems ironic.  I think STAR is a clever compromise which
seems like it will produce reasonable outcomes, and I've found it seems to
attract more enthusiasm than Condorcet RCV.  In fact, I've never seen
activists as excited about any strict Condorcet system as I have about
STAR.  I'm assuming you've heard of Arrow's theorem and Gibbard's theorem;
so I'm sure you're aware we're not going to arrive at perfection.  Neither
STAR nor Condorcet systems are as easy to explain as approval is in my
experience.


> 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.


I'm not about to tell EVC to drop advocacy for STAR and approval, and It's
not like EVC is rolling in money.  Sass isn't at EVC anymore, and in
general, you may be overestimating the number of people that get a paycheck
from them.  The reason they have such a high profile is that Sara and crew
are hard workers, and they managed to recruit a lot of volunteers that also
do amazing work for them.  Folks are willing to get behind the legal entity
and associated leadership, and they recruit volunteers and they've taken
the risks necessary to get significant local news coverage.  They haven't
had a lot of success at the ballot box yet, but it seems easier to take
potshots at them than it is to actually do the work they've done.


> 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 don't either, to be honest.  I think part of the problem is that we keep
having fights to the death over naming.  "Ranked Robin" is a clever name,
but it's over 200 years too late to rename the Condorcet winner criterion,
and wastes political capital with the academic community.  They'll have an
easier time revising their website than the academic world will have
revising all of the papers that have been written over the years about
Condorcet.  You're right to point out that "Ranked Robin" may get mixed up
with Sass's specific method outlined on electowiki rather than the wider
universe of pairwise-comparison methods (like Tideman's "Ranked Pairs").
I'm not saying EVC should completely abandon the name "Ranked Robin" and
it's not clear that EVC needs to even deprecate the name, but rather,
should establish it as a complementary name for describing Condorcet
methods (and maybe, just let Sass have the name for their specific
Condorcet variant).

It would seem that some folks believe that "Condorcet" is a bad brand,
which it isn't.  Condorcet was a good guy, and though some folks think that
systems that are strictly CWC-complaint are too complicated, many of those
same people underestimate the complexity of the alternative they promote.
We can have honorable disagreements about which election method criterion
we believe is the most important, but thanks to Arrow's and Gibbard's
theorems (not to mention non-mathematical considerations), we're going to
have to compromise on SOMETHING.

>
> 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.


Living in SF, I've learned to assume that anyone who I know doesn't
understand voting systems is referring to IRV when they say RCV.  In fact,
almost everywhere on the Internet, that holds true too.  Maybe that won't
hold true a decade from now, but I'm not about to fight that battle right
now.  I think it's totally reasonable from a search-engine optimization
perspective for someone building a website to use "RCV" to mean "IRV".
Note that SF is the home of the term "ranked-choice voting" to mean
"Australia-style preferential voting".  Also note that many people, when
pressed, think we're using Borda, but I'm pretty sure that Burlington
voters (and activists) aren't any smarter than SF voters and activists.

> > 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.

STAR is fine.  I find it VERY difficult to come up with differences between
STAR and Condorcet that are likely to actually show up in the real world.

> > 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).

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.


Your 5-1-0 strategy assumes only three candidates.  I don't like
score/range, because sophisticated voters will vote either the full score
(max) or nothing (min).  Yes, I suppose there may be sophisticated
strategies that can be used with STAR, but ONLY with incredibly good
polling, and in particular, only if one knows the number of viable
candidates.  As I've seen here in SF, that changes over the course of the
election season.


> 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.


...except if there's a candidate "D", and the voter has opinions on all
four candidates.  Your model doesn't scale above 3 candidates.  Almost all
alternative voting systems assume there will not only be viable third
parties, but viable fourth parties, and viable fifth parties.

But I also shown that with that scoring regime, STAR would make the same
> mistake that Hare IRV makes regarding the Center Squeeze...


STAR doesn't make "the same mistake".  One has to have a comically
simplified voter model in order to contrive scenarios where STAR uniformly
performs identically to IRV.  Condorcet methods and the STAR method are
good at selecting compromise candidates because both make it exceptionally
likely that the compromise candidate makes it to the "final round", where a
critical pairwise comparison is performed.  Even BTR-IRV needs to pick a
"final round" by staging a series of eliminations (like a lineal
championship in boxing) where there's a chain of matches until a
championship round (the "final round") occurs.  We've spoken for years
about making Condorcet more understandable by figuring out how to seed
tournament brackets, which lead to a "final round".  STAR makes it
reasonably easy to understand HOW the candidates were selected for the
final round, and I'm pretty sure it's effective.  STAR's not my favorite if
I could wave a wand, but maybe I'd just make myself dictator for life if I
had access to a magic wand.  :-)

One thing I think we agree on: Hare IRV doesn't eliminate the spoiler
effect; it multiplies it.  Every round of an IRV election has the spoiler
effect.  One huge problem with IRV is how the second/third/fourth/etc
preferences are ignored until the first preference is eliminated.  Those
unlucky enough to rank a spoiler victim too high will have their subsequent
rankings ignored.  STAR may not use a perfect mechanism to select the
final-round pair of candidates, but it's defensible.  The Equal Vote folks
were able to convince enough eager volunteers that the mechanism was good
enough to get it on the ballot, and 30% of voters in Eugene thought it was
good enough.  30% is not nothing.

You would have to convince [voters] that they need to harm the likelihood
> for A to get into the final runoff...


Are you really trying to trot out "later-no-harm"?  How is Condorcet-TTR or
BTR-IRV better than STAR in passing later-no-harm?

I hope you're successful in palling up to Vermont legislators.  I truly
don't want to rain on your parade.  Just stop it with the bad-faith raining
on the STAR parade, okay?  You don't KNOW how voters will behave if we
start having high-stakes elections with the system.  Your 5-1-0 strategy
assumes there will only be three viable candidates, and doesn't take into
account the incumbent vs non-incumbent dynamic (which causes Greens and
Republicans and Vermont Progressives and everyone else to join forces and
badmouth a Democratic-party incumbent).

Even the three-way race between Kiss, Wright, and Montroll in 2009 also had
Smith and Simpson in it.  I'm just going to assume that even Simpson had
folks knocking on doors, and I'll bet he was door-knocking himself.  All of
Kiss's challengers were saying "the incumbent is awful", but I'm guessing
they all emphasized different reasons why he was awful.  When one layers
the "anti-incumbency" effect on the left-center-right political model, we
can see at least one more dimension to voters' choices.  If one adds
"quality of campaign", that turns it into a 3D model.  If one adds "money"
as a dimension...well, now we're in 4D space, and that breaks my brain.
I'm guessing it breaks your brain as well, Robert, even if you won't admit
it.

Look, we should be allies, but it's kinda tough with your online demeanor
and clear overconfidence that STAR is unacceptable.  You haven't proven to
me that STAR is unacceptable, and I haven't found many people who take your
side who engage frequently online.  Please, correct me if I'm wrong.

Rob
p.s. I fear that a lot of people who THINK they understand RCV/IRV, but
when pressed to explain it, describe Borda.
p.p.s. I'm annoyed that Marcus Ogren calls it "Ranked Robin" rather than
"Condorcet" in this Medium post, but it seems really interesting and
relevant to this conversation:
https://voting-in-the-abstract.medium.com/voter-satisfaction-efficiency-many-many-results-ad66ffa87c9e

p.p.p.s. Some of you may have noticed I've turned on "Reply-all munging"
for the mailing list.  I'm pretty sure the increased use of DKIM is the
reason why I've missed out on many messages from this list.  Munging helps
with DKIM compliance and thus should make delivery more robust, but it also
means simple replies are more likely to go to the mailing list rather than
just the sender, even if you mean to just send a private reply to the
sender.  Be careful out there!
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