Re: [EM] Why We Shouldn't Count Votes with Machines
Rob, As I said, I am not responding to any more of your unsupported internal chatter/attacks. Instead here is interesting news coverage today by CBS news: Voting Machine Doubts Linger - Concerns Over Vulnerability Of Electronic Machines Sending Many States Back To Paper Ballots http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/08/16/eveningnews/main4355733.shtml Most of the country, thankfully *is* beginning to get the concepts that I've been trying to explain for why only voter marked paper ballots and routine scientific post-election audits provide a way to publicly verify the accuracy of election outcomes in a way that the public can comprehend and support. This CBS article *gets it*. For the best election auditing legislative proposal, reviewed by election officials, and statisticians and mathematicians who are experts in election auditing mathematics, please review this and see how it would work for your pet voting method: http://electionarchive.org/ucvAnalysis/US/paper-audits/VoteCountAuditBillRequest.pdf You will not be able to provide information or data to support the assertion that US election outcomes are mostly accurate today due to the lack of any scientific independent post-election auditing in all US states and lack of public access to election records, lack of ballot security, lack of any public oversight over ballot security, lack of timely public access to election records, and lack of post-election ballot reconciliation. I know of NO state, not even one, which employs all the fundamentals which would demonstrate the accuracy of its election outcomes. The U.S. currently has a voting system that is wide-open to outcome-altering vote fraud in almost all states. It is naive to imagine that no insiders take advantage of this susceptibility and unaccountability. Rigging an election is much easier to do and to get away with than robbing a bank, and the financial rewards and power obtained from election rigging are far greater. And all the available data is highly consistent with ubiquitous vote miscount - not surprising without any measures to detect or correct vote miscount in most states. Why would you imagine that any election outcomes are accurate? Why would you imagine that state legislative election outcomes are accurate? Why would you imagine that any US congressional election outcomes are accurate? There is no evidence to support any claim of accurate election outcomes in most states. Cheers, Kathy Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Why We Shouldn't Count Votes with Machines
Jonathan Lundell wrote: On Aug 16, 2008, at 12:54 AM, Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote: I am for a record on disk of each ballot, but done in a maner to not destroy secrecy. You have to be very careful when doing so, because there are many channels to secure. A vote-buyer might tell you to vote exactly at noon so that the disk record timestamp identifies you, or he might, in the case of Approval and ranked ballots, tell you to vote for not just his preferred candidate, but both the low-support communist and the low-support right extremist as well, so that he can tell which ballot was yours and that you voted correctly. In the US, at least, voting by mail has become so prevalent that I wonder whether it's worthwhile making voting machinery absolutely impregnable to vote-buying. All else being equal, sure, why not, but if we trade off other desirable properties to preserve secrecy, and leave the vote-by-mail door unlocked I think it'd be better to lock the vote-by-mail door. One simple way of doing that has already been given, with the two envelopes under a verified setting. If you like technology, you can achieve the same effect, without the need for the physical verified setting, by using blind signatures. However, that runs into the same problem where the voters may not know what's going on. The fingerprinting vulnerability of ranked ballots is annoying, because I like ranked methods (rated ones would have even greater a vulnerability). I can think of a crypto solution where the recording is done under k of n secret sharing, and the secret-holders don't disclose their key parts unless it becomes necessary to do a recount. But yet again, how could the voters know that'll actually work? Even if they don't, it may still be better than nothing, though. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Why We Shouldn't Count Votes with Machines
Dave Ketchum wrote:
So you're saying that computers are better than specialized machines?
I'm not sure that's what you say (rather than that machines are better
than paper ballots), but I'll assume that.
Your specialized machines can each do a fragment of the task. However,
dependably composing a capable whole from them requires big efforts from
humans.
Composing the same capability whole from a computer and adequate
programming can be easier.
Each does a fragment of the task, yes; that's the point of modular
design, so that you can treat the local units differently from the
central units and don't have to prove everything everywhere.
Consider a general computer. Even for general computers, it makes little
sense to have the district joining software - that counts the results
from various districts and sum them up in the case of a summable method
- on the individual units. As such, the general-purpose computers are
already specialized, only in software instead of hardware.
Because the specialized machines are simpler than computers, once mass
production gets into action, they should be cheaper. The best here
would probably be to have some sort of independent organization or
open-source analog draw up the plans, and then have various companies
produce the components to spec.
They can be cheaper by not doing the complete task - make the task an
election system and the cost goes up and dependability becomes expensive.
By extension, they can be cheaper by, in concert, doing just enough and
no more. One doesn't need Turing-completeness to count an election.
(Perhaps unless it's Kemeny.)
The simplicity of voting could also count against general-purpose
computers as far as manual labor is concerned. If the machine has been
proved to work, you don't need to know what Access (yes, Diebold used
Access) is to count the votes, and you don't need a sysadmin present
in case the system goes to a blue screen.
You need equivalent of a sysadmin to sort out getting a whole composed
of your specialized machines.
The way I would set up the system, there would be different counting
units. The group of units would need a person to unlock them each time
a new voter wants to vote; that could be included in the design so that
you don't need a system administrator for it. Then, once the election
day is over, gather the read-only media (CD or programmable ROM), and
either send them or the summable result (given by a second machine) to
the central. Count and announce as you get higher up in the hierarchy.
If the components are constructed correctly, and proved to be so (which
can be done because of the units' relative simplicity), then there won't
be any bluescreens and little need for maintenance - except for cases
where the machines simply break.
In this manner, the setup is more like paper balloting than it is to
ordinary computer systems. The read-only media take the place of the
ballot box, and the aggregating machines the place of the election count
workers.
Computers get cheaper and cheaper - think of what is hidden inside a
cell phone.
That's true. Maybe a compromise could be using cheap computer hardware
with read-only software, standardized components, and have the software
not be a full OS, but instead just enough to get the job done and be
provable. You'd have to rely on that there are no hardware backdoors,
but the existence of such would be very unlikely, and the entire thing
would have to be put inside some sort of tamper-resistant enclosure so
hackers can't attach keyloggers or do similar things.
That's true, but it's still fairly simple. Assume the ranked ballot is
in the form of rank[candidate] = position, so that if candidate X was
ranked first, rank[X] = 0. (Or 1 for that matter, I just count from
zero because I know programming)
Then the simple nested loop goes like this:
for (outer = 0; outer num_candidates; ++outer) {
for (inner = 0; inner num_candidates; ++inner) {
if (rank[outer] rank[inner]) { // if outer has higher rank
condorcet_matrix[outer][inner] += 1; // increment
}
}
}
What ran this loop outside a computer?
A chip with just enough transistors to do this task. I'm not a hardware
expert, but I think it could be done by the use of a HDL like Verilog.
It's less than instead of greater than because lower rank number means
the rank is closer to the top.
Write-ins could be a problem with the scheme I mentioned, and with
transmitting Condorcet matrices. One possible option would be to
prepend the transmission with a lookup list, something similar to:
Candidate 0 is Bush
Candidate 1 is Gore
Candidate 2 is Nader
Candidate 3 is Joe Write-In
Candidate 4 is Robert Write-In, etc
and if the central gets two condorcet matrices that have the same
candidates in different order (or share some candidates), it flips the
rows and columns to make the numbers the same before adding up.
Do you concede central
Re: [EM] Why We Shouldn't Count Votes with Machines
But murderers get away with murder, police are being bought off by criminals, government employees steal office supplies. No one knows exactly how much any of things happen. We try to limit them (balancing the degree of the problem and the cost of addressing it), and we go on with our lives. OH. So you see it as no big problem to pretend to live in a democracy (where you can pretend to yourself that most election outcomes are accurate) and continuing to let elections be the only major industry where insiders have complete freedom to tamper because 49 US states never subjected their election results to any independent checks, except the wholly unscientific ones in NM. Even when Utah used to use paper punch card ballots, one person did all the programming to count all the punch cards for the entire state of Utah, and no one ever checked after the election to make sure that any of the machine counts were accurate. You sure must believe in the 100% infallibility and honesty of this one person, and all the other persons who have trivially easy access to rig elections. Apparently none of the plethora of evidence that election rigging has been occurring ubiquitously in the US is of any interest or concern to you. I'm not Rob, so excuse the interruption, but some questions and ideas here: Won't the people, as a last stop, keep fraud from being too blatant? You don't need scientific methods to know that something's up if a state was 80-20 Democratic one cycle and then suddenly becomes 80-20 Republican (or vice versa) the next. Fraudsters could swing 45-55 results, but it doesn't completely demolish democracy, since the 60% (or whatever margin) results would presumably be left alone. Fraud corrupts results, but it seems to me that fortunately we have some room to implement improvements that get us closer to verifiability without having the fraud that exists plunge the society directly into dictatorship. New voting methods and improved fraud detection could also strengthen the prospects of each other. If you have an election method that supports multiple parties (since the dominant parties can't rig all the elections everywhere), then instead of only one other party, you have n-1 parties actively interested in keeping an eye on what rigging attempts do occur, and a lesser chance of entrenched forces colluding to ignore each other's attempts, since collusion among multiple entities become much harder as the number of entities grow. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] [Election-Methods] [english 94%] PR favoring racial minorities
On Sun, Aug 17, 2008 at 6:06 AM, Juho [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: (Continuous elections could also increase the level of participation in decision making in the sense that old votes could be valid for a long time even if the voter wouldn't bother to change the vote often. Well, on the other hand the votes must have some time/event limits after which they become invalid. Otherwise the system would e.g. make any changes in the party structure very unprofitable.) There is also the security issue. Continuous voting requires some way for a person to cancel their vote. That is hard to achieve in a way that maintains the secret ballot. One option would be to allow a voter decide in advance how long their vote will stay active, when they cast it. A voter could pick 3 months, 6 months, 1 year, 2 years, 4 years for their vote. Each ballot would be marked with the length of time it will remain valid for. The results would then be announced broken down by length of time they remain active for. If you pick 4 years, then you will not be permitted to cast another vote for at least 4 years (for that office). OTOH, if you pick 3 months, then you will have to vote again 3 months later. This would be reasonably simple for methods that don't have rounds. However, it would be complex for things like IRV. If the ballot lists are a matter of public record, then voters who vote every 3 months and reliably vote could end up being targeted by the parties as they have the ability to withdraw support much more rapidly. (kinda like how politicians currently spend much more time with their supporters near election time). When thinking about the problems of continuous elections and direct democracy maybe the first problem in my mind is the possibility of too fast reactions. Populism might be a problem here. Let's say that the economy of a country is in bad shape and some party proposes to raise taxes to fix the problem. That could cause this party to quickly lose lots of support. Actually, one option would be to allow each voter vote once every 4 years, but stagger when each person gets to vote. For example, their might be an election every 6 months electing one eights of the legislature. This gives continuous feedback, but still requires time to change the composition of the legislature. A swing in the votes would only have 1/8 the effect on the legislature. These rather direct forms of democracy could be said to require the voters to be more mature than in some more indirect methods in the sense that the voters should understand the full picture and not only individual decisions that may sometimes even hurt them. In an indirect democracy painful decisions are typically not made just before the elections. This is not an ideal situation either. But all in all, the more direct forms of democracy seem attractive if the voters are mature enough. I think it probably depends on how it works. Initially, people might switch their vote at the drop of a hat, but as time passes, people are less likely to bother. Also, under a PR/coalition based government system, it would encourage any coalition formed to have more than a simple majority. If the coalition has 60% of the legislature, it is less likely to be massively swayed by short term popularity changes. This kinda happens already. In Ireland, coalitions tends to aim for the high 80's (of 166) so that they can lose a few to byelections without causing the coalition to fall. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] [Election-Methods] [english 94%] PRfavoringracialminorities
On Sun, Aug 17, 2008 at 6:08 AM, Juho [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Don't know the details of these mechanisms but tickets seem to me like add-ons that may have both good and bad effects. They do reduce the problems of vote splitting due to short votes. In Ireland, there are no 'how to vote' cards. Voting the 'party ticket' in this context is just voting for all candidates that your party puts forward before giving any rankings to any other candidate. A large number of voters in Ireland don't do that. The voter might support FG but still vote for a FF candidate first choice because they like that candidate and then vote for all the FG candidates. This is called a personal vote and it has a large effect on tactics in Ireland. Some candidates can end up with almost two quotas due to a large personal vote. The problem for parties is that the surplus doesn't remain within the party and leads to a vote management strategy. (If none of their candidates have a large surplus, then they get to keep most of the personal votes for any of their candidates). I tend to favour counting exact proportionalities at national (=whole election) level ((if one wants PR in the first place)). One slight issue here is how to define proportionality. It is implicitly assumed that if a voter votes for a candidate, they also support the candidate's party. However, as can be seen with personal votes, this is not always the case. I also tend to favour more fine-grained expression of opinions, as in STV or with trees, as a way to allow the voters to better influence the direction the system takes (reduces the risk of stagnation and alienation of the voters from the parties and politics that continue as before no matter how we vote). I think PR-STV at the national level where the voter votes for a list but can override the initial votes is the best compromise between maximum expression and reasonably low complexity. However, that is pretty complex to actually count. Another option is to allow a voter vote for local candidates and then as their last choice, vote for a national list. The local count would be standard PR-STV, but with the same quota nationwide (and a rule that you must reach the quota to get elected). Unallocated seats would then be assigned using d'Hondt or similar method based on the amount of votes transferred to the national list. Also, it could be in effect an open list. The person elected would be from the district that transferred the most votes to the party's national list. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Why We Shouldn't Count Votes with Machines
On Sun, Aug 17, 2008 at 10:09 AM, Kristofer Munsterhjelm Won't the people, as a last stop, keep fraud from being too blatant? You don't need scientific methods to know that something's up if a state was 80-20 Democratic one cycle and then suddenly becomes 80-20 Republican (or vice versa) the next. Fraudsters could swing 45-55 results, but it doesn't completely demolish democracy, since the 60% (or whatever margin) results would presumably be left alone. Excellent point Kristofer. Absolutely you are correct. It would be immediately obvious if a fraudster stole 100% of the available target votes or even 50%, so all our calculations for determining the sample size for post-election audits assume that a vote fraudster would steal at most, say 20% of available target votes, and then allow the candidate to add atleast one auditable vote count to the audit that may appear to look suspicious, or provides for calculations to determine any suspicious-looking auditable vote counts. In practice, when we analyze the available exit poll data that we can obtain (in Ohio 2004 presidential election some data was made available and state-wide data in the recent 2008 primary elections), it looks like the exit poll discrepancies can be explained by vote shifts from one candidate to another of under about 15% of the margin amounts. Audit amounts need to be based on the reported unofficial margins and the error bounds in the auditable vote counts and the total number of auditable vote counts. The concepts are explained in the first few pages of this doc in lay person's terms as much as possible: http://electionarchive.org/ucvAnalysis/US/paper-audits/VoteCountAudits-PPMEB.pdf Fraud corrupts results, but it seems to me that fortunately we have some room to implement improvements that get us closer to verifiability without having the fraud that exists plunge the society directly into dictatorship. That is the hope, IF we can get our elected officials to agree to implement the improvements. However, it appears that most officials who get elected see nothing wrong with a system that elected themselves (It must not be broken, it elected ME.) New voting methods and improved fraud detection could also strengthen the prospects of each other. If you have an election method that supports multiple parties (since the dominant parties can't rig all the elections everywhere), then instead of only one other party, you have n-1 parties actively interested in keeping an eye on what rigging attempts do occur, and a lesser chance of entrenched forces colluding to ignore each other's attempts, since collusion among multiple entities become much harder as the number of entities grow. I do not believe that the number of parties in power has any effect on whether or not publicly verifiable routine measures are in place to detect and correct vote miscount are effective or not. However, the voting method could effect how difficult or easy costly or not it is to implement routine measures that detect or correct vote miscount. For instance, the IRV counting method could make it much more difficult and costly to implement measures to routinely detect and correct errors, whereas other voting methods may not make routine error detection and correction more difficult and so may make publicly verifiable election outcome accuracy much easier to achieve. The practical effects of the various voting methods on election administration and in particular on as yet unimplemented but necessary routine measures to detect and correct vote miscount, must be considered when deciding on which voting method to promote. Cheers, Kathy Dopp The material expressed herein is the informed product of the author Kathy Dopp's fact-finding and investigative efforts. Dopp is a Mathematician, Expert in election audit mathematics and procedures; in exit poll discrepancy analysis; and can be reached at P.O. Box 680192 Park City, UT 84068 phone 435-658-4657 http://utahcountvotes.org http://electionmathematics.org http://electionarchive.org How to Audit Election Outcome Accuracy http://electionarchive.org/ucvAnalysis/US/paper-audits/legislative/VoteCountAuditBillRequest.pdf History of Confidence Election Auditing Development Overview of Election Auditing Fundamentals http://electionarchive.org/ucvAnalysis/US/paper-audits/History-of-Election-Auditing-Development.pdf Voters Have Reason to Worry http://utahcountvotes.org/UT/UtahCountVotes-ThadHall-Response.pdf Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] [Election-Methods] [english 94%] PR favoring racialminorities
Raph Frank Sent: Saturday, August 16, 2008 12:22 AM Jonathan Lundell wrote: I could see a kind of proxy front end to STV elections. I'm not sure I'm convinced it would be a good idea, or even practical to implement, but suppose that any person or group (including parties) could register an STV ranking, and a voter could select that ranking instead of ranking individual candidates. I think this is fantasy for real public elections. The practicalities and deadlines for nomination, the preparation of ballot papers and the distribution of postal ballots are already so tight that allowing this further step after the candidates have been nominated is not practical. I am also extremely sceptical about its potential to contribute anything useful to the political process. I think a reasonable compromise is the system where a voter picks a list and can override it. This could include a system where any voter can register a list prior to the election. I would recommend against any provision for above the line voting (picking an pre-ordered list) of any kind in STV-PR. This is standard in Australia but it has perverted STV-PR from being a sensitive voter-centred system to being little more than a closed-list party-list PR system. There are complicating factors in Australia that may have helped to drive the voting system in this direction, specifically, compulsory voting, the requirement to mark preferences for all or a very number of the candidates, and the large number of candidates a party must nominate in some States to be recognised as a party. Above the line voting suits the registered political parties just fine, but it shifts the balance of power and accountability from the voters to the party machines - just what STV-PR was designed to prevent. And I don't think registered voter chosen lists will ever get off the ground. The voters can then pick one of the lists that made it to the ballot or enter the write-in code for the list that they want to use (or just leave blank to truncate after their 'manual' rankings). Combined with an override option this gives allows maximum expression balanced with reasonable convenience. There is no evidence, apart from Australia which has both compulsory voting and compulsory marking of preferences, that marking all the preferences you want is in any way inconvenient for the voters. One nice feature of a list system without override is that it allows much larger PR-STV elections. If there was a limited number of lists (say 5 lists per candidate) and each voter picks one list as their ballot, then the polling stations can just announce the total for each list. In principle, it would allow a single PR-STV district for electing a legislature with 100's of members. (Though in that case, the number of lists might be restricted to 1 per candidate). With the write in option, it wouldn't be that restrictive, as all a minority party supporter would have to remember is 1 number. The evidence from countries which presently have single-member districts but are considering reform of the voting system, is that electors want a balance between proportional representation of the main political groups AND guaranteed local representation. It is difficult enough to convince them that with STV-PR they really can get both with modestly sized multi-member districts. It would be impossible to persuade them of the benefits of PR reform if all the members were to be elected at large (UK House of Commons = 646 MPs, Scottish Parliament = 129 MSPs). STV-PR was once viewed in this utopian way in the UK (in the 1880s), but now it is promoted by practical reformers who are more attuned to the concerns of real electors. James Gilmour No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG. Version: 7.5.526 / Virus Database: 270.6.4/1616 - Release Date: 16/08/2008 17:12 Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] PR favoring racial minorities
Predictions based on that idea would consider the ideal to be direct democracy. Next to that would be continuous update of representative power (continuous elections). While both of these might work if we were machines, the former scales badly and the latter would put an undue load on the voters unless they could decide whether to be part of any given readjustment. I don't see the burden to voters as a big problem since the system allows some voters to follow and influence politics daily and some to react only on a yearly basis. Hence the unless they could decide whether to be part of any given readjustment part. Irrespective of that, there's also the paradox-of-choice type load that one gets upon permitting voters to alter their decisions at any time, but perhaps the voters would get used to it and down-adjust the effort they exert at any given time, reasoning that if they elect wrongly, they can fix it at any later time. (Continuous elections could also increase the level of participation in decision making in the sense that old votes could be valid for a long time even if the voter wouldn't bother to change the vote often. Well, on the other hand the votes must have some time/event limits after which they become invalid. Otherwise the system would e.g. make any changes in the party structure very unprofitable.) Another option that presents itself is that of candidates handing over their power to their successors, but one should be very wary of unintended consequences if one makes power transferrable in non-transparent ways. Party list elections could just have the party instead of the candidates gain the power, but I think that would defeat some of the dynamic purpose of continuous elections, and possibly lead to pseudoparties whose only purpose is to shield the candidates from changes of opinion. If we consider the case where decisions have effects that don't appear instantly, it gets more complex. For instance, democratic opinion could shift more quickly than the decisions made by one side has time to settle or actually do any difference. But even there, if we consider it an issue of feedback, we have parallels; in this case to oscillations or hunting, and to control theory regarding how to keep such oscillations from happening. When thinking about the problems of continuous elections and direct democracy maybe the first problem in my mind is the possibility of too fast reactions. Populism might be a problem here. Let's say that the economy of a country is in bad shape and some party proposes to raise taxes to fix the problem. That could cause this party to quickly lose lots of support. These rather direct forms of democracy could be said to require the voters to be more mature than in some more indirect methods in the sense that the voters should understand the full picture and not only individual decisions that may sometimes even hurt them. In an indirect democracy painful decisions are typically not made just before the elections. This is not an ideal situation either. But all in all, the more direct forms of democracy seem attractive if the voters are mature enough. From the feedback point of view, populism would be another form of overreaction or opinion shifting too quickly. Consider the tax case. For the sake of the argument, let's say that the tax raise is going to make things better in the long run. Then the problem is that the adjustment mechanism (the people using the election system) react too quickly. A common way of fixing this for ordinary feedback systems is to introduce smoothing. In a continuous election, this may take the shape of that, if you change your vote, the power given to the previous candidate slowly decreases while the power given to the new candidate slowly increases instead of happening immediately. This would take the edge off populism and other overreaction-related problems while avoiding the representative problem of don't do anything before the elections, since the elections can still be any day of the year, and a different day for different supporters of any given candidate. Still, there are limits. When dealing with machine feedback loops, one usually has the luxury of being able to tune loop characteristics (such as the degree of smoothing, reaction to increasingly large changes, and so on) beforehad, which wouldn't be applicable for a political process since the situation of the world may change with time. Second, there's no sure way of knowing, ahead of time, whether the tax (in the example) really would benefit the society or not, at least not without being given more data; so smoothing could both harm and help, and knowing what level to set it to, even if we had a completely unbiased and trustworthy engineer to adjust the dynamics, seems to be a problem for which we can't even know whether any given answer is correct. It would be like setting the federal interest rate, yet more
Re: [EM] [Election-Methods] [english 94%] PR favoring racialminorities
On Sun, Aug 17, 2008 at 7:34 PM, James Gilmour [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Raph Frank Sent: Saturday, August 16, 2008 12:22 AM I think a reasonable compromise is the system where a voter picks a list and can override it. This could include a system where any voter can register a list prior to the election. I would recommend against any provision for above the line voting (picking an pre-ordered list) of any kind in STV-PR. This is standard in Australia but it has perverted STV-PR from being a sensitive voter-centred system to being little more than a closed-list party-list PR system. This problem is caused by the lack of an override. Each voter has a choice, they can vote for one of the party lists by placing one mark on the ballot or they can vote their own rankings. However, if they vote their own rankings, they must rank all candidates standing in the district. This might be the difference between 1 mark and 80+ rankings. The effect is that 95%+ of voters just use the (closed) party lists. I don't think registered voter chosen lists will ever get off the ground. The compromise was that each candidate would pick his own list. However, clearly the Australian system is not 'real' PR-STV as it effectively forces voters to vote based on the party list. OTOH, the Australian system wouldn't be quite so bad if they didn't require that each voter rank every candidate. That would mean that each voter's vote would be slightly weaker if they decided not to use the party list (but probably still 95%+ strength) There is no evidence, apart from Australia which has both compulsory voting and compulsory marking of preferences, that marking all the preferences you want is in any way inconvenient for the voters. My thoughts are for large districts, it allows voters to in effect submit long ballots. However, in most cases, as long as you rank at least 1-2 candidates who end up getting elected, your vote would be nearly full strength. Also, I would make it voluntary. Each ballot would be a list of local candidates, and on one side you get to rank them directly and on the other side would be the ability to use their list. A voter would be allow to just cast 1 vote for their favourite and leave it at that. The evidence from countries which presently have single-member districts but are considering reform of the voting system, is that electors want a balance between proportional representation of the main political groups AND guaranteed local representation. It is difficult enough to convince them that with STV-PR they really can get both with modestly sized multi-member districts. Yeah is annoying. In Ireland, there are a fair few 3 seater constituencies. It would be impossible to persuade them of the benefits of PR reform if all the members were to be elected at large (UK House of Commons = 646 MPs, Scottish Parliament = 129 MSPs). STV-PR was once viewed in this utopian way in the UK (in the 1880s), but now it is promoted by practical reformers who are more attuned to the concerns of real electors. I guess it depends on what you want. PR-STV allows the voters to decide if they want local or national candidates to be elected. It also allows them balance party based PR with electing candidates that they like. Personally, I don't see perfect national party PR as a goal in and of itself. This should be down to what the voters actually want. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] [Election-Methods] [english 94%] PR favoring racialminorities
On Aug 17, 2008, at 11:34 AM, James Gilmour wrote: The evidence from countries which presently have single-member districts but are considering reform of the voting system, is that electors want a balance between proportional representation of the main political groups AND guaranteed local representation. It is difficult enough to convince them that with STV-PR they really can get both with modestly sized multi-member districts. It would be impossible to persuade them of the benefits of PR reform if all the members were to be elected at large (UK House of Commons = 646 MPs, Scottish Parliament = 129 MSPs). STV-PR was once viewed in this utopian way in the UK (in the 1880s), but now it is promoted by practical reformers who are more attuned to the concerns of real electors. A related problem here in California is the small size of our state legislature, relative to the state's population. The California state assembly (our lower house) has only 80 seats. Compare that to the UK's 646; California has a population 60% of the UK's. California has 5-6X the population of Scotland, but less than 2/3 the seats. As a consequence, California's single-member Assembly districts are already quite large, so that it's prohibitively expensive for most candidates to mount a viable campaign. Five-member districts would be to my way of thinking an absolute minimum (more would be better), but without increasing the assembly size, such a scheme would lead to enormous districts. (For non-US readers, state-house district sizes vary widely (wildly) from state to state. California has nearly 500K residents per seat; Maine has ~8500.) Some PR reforms have proposed a modest increase in the size of the Assembly (eg from 80 to 120), but, while desirable in itself, this would to the difficulty of implementing PR at all, given that any change gets resisted. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] [Election-Methods] [english 94%] PRfavoringracialminorities
On Aug 17, 2008, at 20:05 , Raph Frank wrote:
On Sun, Aug 17, 2008 at 6:08 AM, Juho [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Don't know the details of these mechanisms but tickets seem to me
like
add-ons that may have both good and bad effects. They do reduce
the problems
of vote splitting due to short votes.
In Ireland, there are no 'how to vote' cards.
Voting the 'party ticket' in this context is just voting for all
candidates that your party puts forward before giving any
rankings to any other candidate.
It makes sense to me to allow such generic names and not force the
voters to list all the candidates of the party to be sure that the
vote will be counted for the right party (assuming that the number of
candidates is large).
A large number of voters in Ireland don't do that. The voter
might support FG but still vote for a FF candidate first choice
because they like that candidate and then vote for all the FG
candidates.
This is called a personal vote and it has a large effect on tactics
in Ireland. Some candidates can end up with almost two quotas
due to a large personal vote.
The problem for parties is that the surplus doesn't remain within
the party and leads to a vote management strategy. (If none
of their candidates have a large surplus, then they get to keep
most of the personal votes for any of their candidates).
This is a very interesting real life example on how such horizontal
preference orders may impact the elections and strategies in them.
Do you have a list of the strategies/tricks that are used?
I tend to favour counting exact proportionalities at national (=whole
election) level ((if one wants PR in the first place)).
One slight issue here is how to define proportionality. It is
implicitly
assumed that if a voter votes for a candidate, they also support the
candidate's party. However, as can be seen with personal votes,
this is not always the case.
If candidates are seen as individuals then the rounding errors of
such small units are typically higher than the rounding errors of
big units like parties.
(What I was thinking was basically that if there is one quota of
voters that have opinion X then the representative body could have
one representative that has opinion X. This could apply to parties
but also to smaller groupings and individuals as well as other
criteria like regions (= regional proportionality) (and even
representation of other orthogonal groups like women, age groups,
religions, races if we want to make the system more complex).)
I also tend to favour more fine-grained expression of opinions,
as in STV or with trees, as a way to allow the voters to better
influence
the direction the system takes (reduces the risk of stagnation and
alienation of the voters from the parties and politics that
continue as
before no matter how we vote).
I think PR-STV at the national level where the voter votes for a
list but
can override the initial votes is the best compromise between maximum
expression and reasonably low complexity.
I mentioned earlier also the possibility to use trees here. A bullet
vote to a candidate would by default be inherited by the (small)
group that the candidate belongs to, then the party ('party ticket')
and so on.
However, that is pretty complex to actually count.
Yes this adds complexity. But this would not be too far from the use
of the 'party ticket'. Right?
Another option is to allow a voter vote for local candidates and then
as their last choice, vote for a national list.
This is maybe yet one step more complex since now candidates can
belong to different orthogonal groupings (several local parties; one
party covers all local regions). Or maybe you meant to allow voting
only individuals locally, not to support all local candidates of all
parties as a group.
The local count would be standard PR-STV, but with the same quota
nationwide (and a rule that you must reach the quota to get elected).
Ok. National level proportionality could influence the election of
the last candidates in the districts.
Unallocated seats would then be assigned using d'Hondt or similar
method based on the amount of votes transferred to the national list.
Also, it could be in effect an open list. The person elected would be
from the district that transferred the most votes to the party's
national
list.
Maybe all districts would be guaranteed their fixed number of seats
(typically based on the number of citizens of each district). The
extra seats would be first allocated to parties and then to districts
(using some appropriate algorithm).
Due to the involved rounding errors I'm not sure that this style of
sending the remaining votes to national level would make the results
better (more proportional?) than just allocating the remaining vote
fractions to the local candidates of the party ('local party
ticket'?). (I'm however not sure that I even understood the intention
Re: [EM] [Election-Methods] [english 94%] PR favoring racial minorities
On Aug 17, 2008, at 19:44 , Raph Frank wrote: On Sun, Aug 17, 2008 at 6:06 AM, Juho [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: (Continuous elections could also increase the level of participation in decision making in the sense that old votes could be valid for a long time even if the voter wouldn't bother to change the vote often. Well, on the other hand the votes must have some time/event limits after which they become invalid. Otherwise the system would e.g. make any changes in the party structure very unprofitable.) There is also the security issue. Continuous voting requires some way for a person to cancel their vote. That is hard to achieve in a way that maintains the secret ballot. Yes, not an easy task since votes can not be anonymous as they normally are after voting. It is possible to develop methods where the election officials would not know the identity of each voter (only the voter would have that information) but this may get quite complex. One (at least theoretically) simple approach would be to arrange elections say every Saturday and assume that each voter has a computer (or corresponding device) that is on-line and votes on behalf of the voter every Sunday. If the voter has not updated the data then the application just uses the old data. This method would not require keeping a record on how each voter voted. (P.S. I used Saturdays above instead of Sundays sine that way the politicians have one day time to pack their belongings before the next working week and new representatives to move in. In real life we would however probably need some hysteresis here. Maybe that could be in time. Maybe we could also use different voting weights for the representatives. This would allow longer times to allow new representatives in and kick the old ones out. Also a system where the representatives could work at home instead of at the capital is possible.) One option would be to allow a voter decide in advance how long their vote will stay active, when they cast it. A voter could pick 3 months, 6 months, 1 year, 2 years, 4 years for their vote. In order to allow a party to be split in two, or popular representatives to retire, then the time should be short enough not to penalize this party too much. If all votes will be outdates say in one year then a one year delay between announcement of the event and its final implementation would be sufficient (since then there would be no lost votes, assuming that the voters can vote in the new way right after the announcement). Also faster changes would be possible since most votes would probably be changed sooner. Each ballot would be marked with the length of time it will remain valid for. The results would then be announced broken down by length of time they remain active for. If you pick 4 years, then you will not be permitted to cast another vote for at least 4 years (for that office). OTOH, if you pick 3 months, then you will have to vote again 3 months later. I'm not sure if this is still a continuous election in the sense that the voter could change opinion at any time. This would be reasonably simple for methods that don't have rounds. However, it would be complex for things like IRV. Wouldn't IRV be at least easier than a two round runoff? (= instant runoff vs. sequential runoff) If the ballot lists are a matter of public record, then voters who vote every 3 months and reliably vote could end up being targeted by the parties as they have the ability to withdraw support much more rapidly. (kinda like how politicians currently spend much more time with their supporters near election time). When thinking about the problems of continuous elections and direct democracy maybe the first problem in my mind is the possibility of too fast reactions. Populism might be a problem here. Let's say that the economy of a country is in bad shape and some party proposes to raise taxes to fix the problem. That could cause this party to quickly lose lots of support. Actually, one option would be to allow each voter vote once every 4 years, but stagger when each person gets to vote. For example, their might be an election every 6 months electing one eights of the legislature. This gives continuous feedback, but still requires time to change the composition of the legislature. A swing in the votes would only have 1/8 the effect on the legislature. Yes, gradual impact could help in stabilizing the system. These rather direct forms of democracy could be said to require the voters to be more mature than in some more indirect methods in the sense that the voters should understand the full picture and not only individual decisions that may sometimes even hurt them. In an indirect democracy painful decisions are typically not made just before the elections. This is not an ideal situation either. But all in all, the more direct forms of democracy seem
Re: [EM] [Election-Methods] [english 94%] PR favoring racialminorities
There could also be systems where the number of seats per district is rather small but PR is counted at the top level. This means that you can tweak the system to get a bit more locality and a bit more political proportionality at the same time. (This of course has a cost, e.g. making the set of elected candidates at each district a bit more random (since also the election wide level will influence the local selection of representatives).) Juho On Aug 17, 2008, at 22:02 , Jonathan Lundell wrote: On Aug 17, 2008, at 11:34 AM, James Gilmour wrote: The evidence from countries which presently have single-member districts but are considering reform of the voting system, is that electors want a balance between proportional representation of the main political groups AND guaranteed local representation. It is difficult enough to convince them that with STV-PR they really can get both with modestly sized multi-member districts. It would be impossible to persuade them of the benefits of PR reform if all the members were to be elected at large (UK House of Commons = 646 MPs, Scottish Parliament = 129 MSPs). STV-PR was once viewed in this utopian way in the UK (in the 1880s), but now it is promoted by practical reformers who are more attuned to the concerns of real electors. A related problem here in California is the small size of our state legislature, relative to the state's population. The California state assembly (our lower house) has only 80 seats. Compare that to the UK's 646; California has a population 60% of the UK's. California has 5-6X the population of Scotland, but less than 2/3 the seats. As a consequence, California's single-member Assembly districts are already quite large, so that it's prohibitively expensive for most candidates to mount a viable campaign. Five-member districts would be to my way of thinking an absolute minimum (more would be better), but without increasing the assembly size, such a scheme would lead to enormous districts. (For non-US readers, state-house district sizes vary widely (wildly) from state to state. California has nearly 500K residents per seat; Maine has ~8500.) Some PR reforms have proposed a modest increase in the size of the Assembly (eg from 80 to 120), but, while desirable in itself, this would to the difficulty of implementing PR at all, given that any change gets resisted. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info ___ All new Yahoo! Mail The new Interface is stunning in its simplicity and ease of use. - PC Magazine http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/nowyoucan.html Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] [Election-Methods] [english 94%] PRfavoringracialminorities
Juho Sent: Sunday, August 17, 2008 10:29 PM On Aug 17, 2008, at 20:05 , Raph Frank wrote: The problem for parties is that the surplus doesn't remain within the party and leads to a vote management strategy. (If none of their candidates have a large surplus, then they get to keep most of the personal votes for any of their candidates). This is a very interesting real life example on how such horizontal preference orders may impact the elections and strategies in them. Do you have a list of the strategies/tricks that are used? See Campaigning Under STV - A guide for agents and parties http://www.electoral-reform.org.uk/downloads/Proof%201%20Cam%20under%20STV%20-%20Update-1.pdf This was originally written for the political parties in Scotland in anticipation of the STV-PR elections for local government in May 2007. James No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG. Version: 7.5.526 / Virus Database: 270.6.4/1616 - Release Date: 16/08/2008 17:12 Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] [Election-Methods] [english 94%] PRfavoringracialminorities
On Sun, Aug 17, 2008 at 10:28 PM, Juho [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
On Aug 17, 2008, at 20:05 , Raph Frank wrote:
Voting the 'party ticket' in this context is just voting for all
candidates that your party puts forward before giving any
rankings to any other candidate.
It makes sense to me to allow such generic names and not force the voters to
list all the candidates of the party to be sure that the vote will be
counted for the right party (assuming that the number of candidates is
large).
In Ireland, it is rare that parties run more than 2+ candidates in a given
constituency and if then, only the 2 main parties.
The problem for parties is that the surplus doesn't remain within
the party and leads to a vote management strategy. (If none
of their candidates have a large surplus, then they get to keep
most of the personal votes for any of their candidates).
This is a very interesting real life example on how such horizontal
preference orders may impact the elections and strategies in them.
Do you have a list of the strategies/tricks that are used?
The main one is 'vote management'. This is where you split up
the constituency and only allow certain candidates to campaign in
those areas.
A very popular candidate mightn't be allow campaign at all. In
practice, this doesn't always work out. For example, in Limerick
one of the FF candidates takes great pride in getting lots of first
choice votes.
Also, sometimes it might backfire and the very popular candidate
might fail to get elected as they don't campaign in any specific regions.
(What I was thinking was basically that if there is one quota of voters that
have opinion X then the representative body could have one representative
that has opinion X. This could apply to parties but also to smaller
groupings and individuals as well as other criteria like regions (=
regional proportionality) (and even representation of other orthogonal
groups like women, age groups, religions, races if we want to make the
system more complex).)
This is the party centric viewpoint. PR-STV is more based on the
candidate-centric viewpoint. You vote for someone because you think
they would make a good representative.
I think PR-STV at the national level where the voter votes for a list but
can override the initial votes is the best compromise between maximum
expression and reasonably low complexity.
I mentioned earlier also the possibility to use trees here. A bullet vote to
a candidate would by default be inherited by the (small) group that the
candidate belongs to, then the party ('party ticket') and so on.
Right, however, a tree can kinda be considered a list. The candidate would
rank themselves first and then all the members of their leaf and work back
along all the branches.
Yes this adds complexity. But this would not be too far from the use of the
'party ticket'. Right?
Well, party ticket is just manually voting for all members of your current
party. It is no more complex than a standard ranked ballot.
Ranked ballots are inherently more complex than just voting for a list/tree etc.
Another option is to allow a voter vote for local candidates and then
as their last choice, vote for a national list.
This is maybe yet one step more complex since now candidates can belong to
different orthogonal groupings (several local parties; one party covers all
local regions). Or maybe you meant to allow voting only individuals locally,
not to support all local candidates of all parties as a group.
Right, there would be a party list at the top/national level.
Basically, it would work like PR-STV just with a fixed quota (same in all
districts).
You would rank local candidates as per normal and then specify which
national list you want the remainder of your vote to go to.
If your first choice gets elected with 2 quotas, you would have half a vote
remaining to pass to the national list.
The local count would be standard PR-STV, but with the same quota
nationwide (and a rule that you must reach the quota to get elected).
Ok. National level proportionality could influence the election of the last
candidates in the districts.
There would be a mix of nationally elected and locally elected candidates.
If everyone in a consitutency just voted for a national list as first choice,
then that constituency would have no local candidate elected.
Maybe all districts would be guaranteed their fixed number of seats
(typically based on the number of citizens of each district). The extra
seats would be first allocated to parties and then to districts (using some
appropriate algorithm).
Right. However, that is actually more complex than it sounds :).
A party might be entitled to one more seat, but the only remaining
candidate it has left is in a constituency that has already received its
max number of seats.
Also, constituencies don't need to be assigned integer numbers of seats.
Due to the involved rounding errors I'm not sure that
Re: [EM] [Election-Methods] [english 94%] PR favoring racialminorities
On Sun, Aug 17, 2008 at 10:28 PM, Juho [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Are there any statistics from real STV-PR elections on how many votes (sum of fragments) run out of candidates during the counting process? The easiest way to see that is to look at how many votes are remaing to the last count. Taking Limerick East as an example: http://electionsireland.org/counts.cfm?election=2007cons=159ref= After the last count, the totals were: Willie O'Dea: 8,230 Peter Power: 8,230 Michael Noonan: 8,230 Jan O'Sullivan: 9,051 Kieran O'Donnell: 6,966 Tim O'Malley: 5,776 Total: 46,483 Total valid poll: 49,375 Percentage votes remaining at least count: 94.1% This shows that most vote strength remained until the end. However, it does show the issue with not readjusting the quota. O'Donnell was elected with only 6966 votes, while everyone else needed a full quota. Ofc, perhaps, O'Sullivan's transfers may have all ended up with him as there was a FG/Lab voting pact. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] [Election-Methods] [english 94%] PR favoring racialminorities
On Sun, Aug 17, 2008 at 10:29 PM, Juho [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: One could also complete short votes (at least by default) to something longer (e.g. party preferences or just party as a whole) to get rid of this problem. That is another option, the Australians seem to be against the concept of exhausted ballots. The vote could be extended by the party list of the voter's first choice. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] [Election-Methods] [english 94%] PR favoring racialminorities
On Sun, Aug 17, 2008 at 10:29 PM, Juho [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: There could also be systems where the number of seats per district is rather small but PR is counted at the top level. This means that you can tweak the system to get a bit more locality and a bit more political proportionality at the same time. (This of course has a cost, e.g. making the set of elected candidates at each district a bit more random (since also the election wide level will influence the local selection of representatives).) There is also Fair Majority Voting, which allows single seat districts combined with PR. It does have some issues though. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] [Election-Methods] [english 94%] PR favoringracialminorities
Juho Sent: Sunday, August 17, 2008 10:29 PM Maybe the interesting question is if voters mark sufficiently many candidates so that their vote is not lost. Are there any statistics from real STV-PR elections on how many votes (sum of fragments) run out of candidates during the counting process? You'll find some relevant information in this ERS report Scottish Local Government Elections 2007 - Report and Analysis by Lewis Baston. http://www.electoral-reform.org.uk/downloads/Scottishlocalgovernmentreport.pdf You'll find some more info in the papers presented at STV One Year On http://www.electoral-reform.org.uk/article.php?id=143 including Lewis Baston's PowerPoint presentation: http://www.electoral-reform.org.uk/downloads/Lewis_local_elections_June%2012.ppt I have started an analysis of represented voters and wasted votes using the ballot data for Glasgow City Council. This work is on hold at present, but it was prompted by colleagues in British Columbia who are faced with the wasted vote gibe about the runner-up's votes. You'll find the full ballot data for Glasgow (21 wards = local government electoral districts) in BLT (preference profile) format at: http://www.glasgow.gov.uk/en/YourCouncil/Elections_Voting/Election_Results/ElectionScotland2007/LGElectionResults.htm For each ward, take the Full Results link and download the zipped folder. The BLT file is the first file in each zipped folder. NB The voters were constrained by 3- and 4-member wards and by three of the larger parties nominating only one candidate in many wards. James No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG. Version: 7.5.526 / Virus Database: 270.6.4/1616 - Release Date: 16/08/2008 17:12 Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
