Re: [EM] Need IRV examples; voting show

[Dave Ketchum]

On Fri, 6 Dec 2002 23:38:30 -0000 James Gilmour wrote:

Bart had been digging the archive and found this exchange:

Bart had written:

For example, instead of precincts, suppose the division is between
walk-in and absentee votes, or between election-night and recount
results.  Imagine candidate A being declared the winner, with a recount
turning up additional votes supporting A, thereby causing A to lose.  I
think this would undermine public acceptance of the outcome, especially
given the recent hysteria surrounding the U.S. electoral college.  The
answer might be to keep all preliminary results secret, but I'd be more
comfortable if that weren't necessary.

A GUARANTEED result of introducing secrecy would be to increase voter suspicion that there were evil reasons for the secrecy.

Another effect of such secrecy would be to increase opportunity for exactly the evils the voters might suspect.

There is a natural division between walk-in and absentee votes:
Usually most votes will be walk-in - usually enough to determine election winner. Thus it is possible to sum these counts shortly after the polls close and report winners and near ties - AND this is EXPECTED.
It is reasonable to permit absentee ballots to be completed and mailed the day before election day. Thus counting of these cannot be completed until several days after election day.

If a counting method has the problem about changing declared winners described above, secrecy is not acceptable as a method of hiding the problem (as I state above), and voters seeing the switch of winners is not acceptable (seems reasonable), seems to me we have declared the counting method to be a failure.

I had replied:

I think you describe two quite different scenarios here.
It may be current practice in the USA to declare walk-in and absentee votes
separately, but I would suggest there is no possible justification

for it.  All

the votes, however cast, count towards one single result to produced

one single

winner.  How the respective candidate totals were made up is

completely irrelevant

to that result.  Of course, the political parties, professional

psephologists and

interested academics would all like precinct by precinct information, and much
more, but none of that is of any relevance to the result.  So why

should any of it

be made public?

I do agree that your recount scenario could cause problems.  But

going back to the

original dataset which produced this "problem", isn't the answer to adopt
Condorcet's rules?  That option is not available to us in the UK

because we must

be able to count public elections manually (except in approved pilots of "new"
technology), and so Condorcet is impractical.

Bart wrote (29 Nov)

Or the answer could be to adopt approval voting, especially if the only
practical alternative is IRV.

This statement puzzles, for any implementor capable of doing IRV should certainly be able to attend to Condorcet's simpler requirements.

But there are some other serious problems with Approval.

If you acknowledge that voter rankings
will be utilized in such a haphazard way that you would prefer to keep
information about subsets of the vote secret, wouldn't it be better to
avoid collecting information you can't use reliably?

I do not acknowledge that voter rankings will be utilised "in such a haphazard
way", unless "haphazard" means something very different your side of the pond.
There is nothing haphazard about the situation I described.  Publishing "results"
precinct by precinct is just totally irrelevant when all that matters is the
city-wide totals.  It is not a question of keeping them secret.  Rather the
question is why on earth would you want to publish such irrelevant information?

I never recommend collecting such information.  Of course, in a non-preferential
voting system, it is possible to count the votes locally at each precinct and
remit only the totals to the central "counting" station.  That would be more
difficult with a preferential voting system, but not impossible.

It is not allowed in the UK.  Here all the ballot papers that have to be counted
must be taken to one central counting station.  At the central counting station,
the "returns", ie the marked electors' roll, the counterfoils of issued ballot
papers and the unused ballot papers, are reconciled polling station by polling
station, but there is only one count and only one set of figures.

Most voting in New York State is done via mechanical lever machines - everything human muscle power, including turning a crank after polls close to print all the counters on a big sheet of paper. The numbers for the precinct can be reported to county by phone, and the printout can be delivered as official record.

To do ranked ballots would require new machines, but seems to me the totals for the precinct would still be generated there and reported from there.

In return,
approval ballots contain information not present in ranked ballots,
namely an indication of the voters' strength of preference.

I don't buy that.  In Approval each voter just sorts the candidates into two
sets - acceptable and not acceptable.  That seems to me to be LESS information
than on a typical ranked ballot.  If you really want information about "strength
of preference" you will have to introduce some system that allows each voter to
weight his or her preferences as they wish.  Then you must normalise those
weightings if you want to ensure that each voter has one vote and only one vote.
And of course, in normalising the weights, you will throw away a significant part
of the information about the differences in the strengths of preference BETWEEN
voters.

Agreed as to "don't buy that".  Have zero enthusiasm for this "strength" effort.

In computer models conducted by Merrill and others, approval voting
produced results more in line with Condorcet's method than did IRV,
especially when there are many candidates.

Maybe, but that does not remove the serious defect in Approval.  One person, one
vote is violated.

Seems to me those who stumble as to one person, one vote are a bit weak as debaters:
If Dick is allowed to do what Tom is permitted, and allowed to do it twice, then Dick has a privilege that should be forbidden.
If Tom is allowed to make a complex statement about his voting desires, and Dick and all others are each allowed the same opportunity, then each is allowed the same one vote, regardless of its complexity.

This is even more true when
the IRV variant is a restricted one, such as the "supplemental vote"
method used in London (where the voter is only allowed a first and
second choice).

The Supplemental Vote is highly defective and should NEVER be used.  It will
usually disenfranchise a large proportion of those who vote.  In the London
Mayoral election, 22% of the second preferences were discarded because they were
not cast of either of the two front-runners.  Many of us campaigned against the
use of the Supplemental Vote, but our Government had political reasons for its
choice - they thought it would help their candidate to win.  They were wrong!!

Makes no sense to me. Going back to 2000 and Plurality, I do not influence Bush vs Gore if I vote for Nader - I did not vote for a front runner, but voting for Nader was within my rights.

James

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Dave Ketchum 108 Halstead Ave, Owego, NY 13827-1708 607-687-5026
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