@rb-j Right, no problem. I have since read your description/ proposed legislation and I understand you describe the method for resolving Condorcet failures as a simply choosing the plurality winner. (which is fine, in my opinion, because they are so rare)

@rb-j No, just Hare, I have yet to process the full set of ballots, mine is based on the data that is visible in the Sankey diagram and the chart below it.

But I think I have an approach to doing it with a BTR election that should work fine. Obviously this doesn't show all information about the election, and there are cases where it may not really be reflective of what we want to show (I think the above way may be a bit misleading as to how far Jane Kim was behind Mark Leno -- she was very close to him in the round she was eliminated, and probably would have received the vast majority of his votes if he was eliminated, so she could have easily won against London Breed).

Another way of doing it, comes up with this:

Screenshot 2022-08-05 171115.png

In this case, Jane Kim is shown as closer to Mark Leno because her score is simply (66043 / 68707) (ratio of her score and Leno's in the round she was eliminated), times Mark Leno's already-calculated score. In other words, I don't average her ratio with London Breed's (times London Breed's score) into Kim's score in this simpler way of tabulating scores.

I think the logic should work fine with BTR. I think. Remember that I am proposing it purely as a simplified way to visualize an election, the scores are not suggested as determining the winner. I'd be interested in seeing if it holds up well when looking at atypical elections, such as when there is no Condorcet winner or a case like B******ton 2009.

Ultimately, what I want to show is "how close was each candidate to winning?" Which might be measured as "how many ballots would need a single change -- i.e. reverse the order of two adjacent candidates -- to make this candidate win under this method?"

That's a lot harder to actually calculate, though. So this is kind of an approximation.

@rb-j I think they made the same mistake someone who says "safety equipment prevents injury and death" makes, when they don't qualify it with "safety equipment prevents injury and death some of the time, but there are times when even using safety equipment won't prevent injury, because the world isn't perfect. So let's dwell on that latter case, rather than actually making progress by getting people to use safety equipment".

main-qimg-f86cdc5316f9f635be1a4cac6cf0670a.jpg

I'm all in on the safety equipment manufacturer continuing to attempt to make the equipment better. I am not in agreement with discouraging people to wear it at all because it has a non-zero failure rate.

I continue to believe you are doing an overall disservice by dwelling on one failure that was the equivalent of the guy above getting a bruise or abrasion.

@sass Ok well I don't know what you mean by "competitive elections." The elections RCV-Hare have been used in seem quite competitive. I have often used the 2018 San Francisco mayor election as a good example of a competitive election that RCV-Hare did a great job with. irvmayor.png

But you said "3+ competitive factions," which I'm not sure what you mean by that. What qualifies as a faction? In the election above, Mark Leno and Jane Kim campaigned together, and were often "co-endorsed" by newspapers and organizations. To me, that's the sort of thing that should happen. I don't know whether you consider Leno and Kim as a single faction or two factions, or really what you mean. Could you give us a definition of "competitive" or "competitive factions"? For instance, does "competitive" mean "highly polarized, with significant portions of the electorate utterly hating at least one front runner"? Or simply "very close"?
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@jack-waugh said in Election security under IRV:

I guess Rob's vision here is that in the first count (as distinct from a hand recount), the precinct will have the voters cast their ballots through scanners, and a system set up and tested in advance by IT people will publish the data, without necessarily doing matching (although it could). So then anyone with IT skills and a computer and an Internet connection could replicate the tally.

To be clear, in a perfect world we'd use a condorcet method where each precinct could submit a pairwise matrix and that would be good enough to determine the outcome 100% of the time.

Technically not all Condorcet methods this is true for, but at least it is true if there is a Condorcet winner.

But yeah, the main point I was making is that, as long as they publish the full ballot data within a reasonable period of time (which the vast majority do), any attempt to cheat in the ways suggested would probably result in someone going to jail. I have not seen a reasonable way someone could do this effectively and avoid having it be detected

If the concern is not cheating, but just some random mistakes along the way, ok, different thing. I tend to think those tend to cancel out. Better voting machines help, paper trail helps, etc. I think any desire for absolute perfection in this regard is outweighed by the massive problems caused by the choose-one method. I mean, we are literally watching democracy fall apart in front of our eyes.

What is happening here, within this communicty, is that some of us are trying to fight two enemies (choose-one and RCV-Hare), which is simply bound to fail. I'd rather join forces with the RCV-Hare folks and defeat the true enemy, choose-one.

@rb-j Right. I think #1 and #3 can sort of be turned around and hopefully reframed as "Condorcet RCV is nothing more than a minor tweak, to get that extra 0.2%". It's not conceding, any more than Honda is conceding that the 2022 Civic is bad by making a few changes for the 2023 model.

As far as I'm concerned, they still can not only call bottom two runoff "RCV", they can call it "IRV." Just treat it as the same method, with a minor performance tweak.

The vast majority of those who would weigh in on Ranked Choice give exactly zero fucks as to the difference between Hare and Bottom Two. They both use identical ranked ballots, they both go through an elimination process to eliminate "irrelevant" candidates that could be spoilers, they both are center leaning, and they both remove most of the incentive to vote or nominate strategically compared to choose-one.

As for 4, sure, they can keep arguing that if they want, but I wonder why they bother since it is so few elections it makes a difference. And I'm not sure the concept of "base" is seen as a positive to many these days. It seems to be used more of a pejorative than anything on the news, e.g. "just playing to the base," etc. In other words, it represents polarized politics. It seems like most people who would be interested in ranked choice voting would see it as a negative, anyway.

For #2, a good counterargument is that if you make it Condorcet compliant, it means results can be delivered immediately due to it being precinct summable (via a pairwise matrix). With bottom two runoff, the only case where it is not precinct summable is when there is no Condorcet winner and then it has to actually go through the runoff process. That is far more rare than the case in Hare-IRV where no one has a majority of first choice. For most "regular people," that is what makes it seem complex, having to wait days while they do the runoff process.

It's like this, then, to restate it?

In each round, the effective "votes" for the round are the ballots where a given candidate is the top-ranked on that ballot, from among the candidates still in the running. The round is going to eliminate someone from further consideration and you are going to find also the one candidate from among the remaining candidates in the round who received the second-lowest count of "votes" in the round. You will take the ratio of "vote" counts of those two candidates and remember that as the ratio between the scores you will report for those candidates. Eventually this chain will lead to the winner, and you assign the score 100 to the winner and use the remembered ratios to calculate the rest of the scores. Since every score is a product of 100 with some numbers that are strictly greater than zero and less than or equal to one, every score will be positive.

@rb-j said in New method (I think?): Hare-squared:

Yes, it is. The correct time to rail is right now, with the experience in Vermont and now with the newly experienced difficulties of Maine and NYC with administering RCV elections and getting timely results.

Let's rail, but let's rail on valid grounds only, lest we attract a reputation for disingenuous propaganda. Before the first successful powered flight by humans extended with machines, all prior efforts had failed. Eventually craft work and/or engineering advanced sufficiently to overcome the problems and reach the goal. Just because NYC flubbed up with administering RCV IRV Hare, doesn't mean a method of administering it that works better couldn't be engineered. Rob is saying let the precincts publish over the Internet the counts of all the ballot types cast there. Then anyone with a computer and a little knowledge of how to use it could reproduce the tally, and it would not take days (maybe it would take me days, but lots of others would do it in two hours and that includes research and reverse engineering the format and writing scripts).

@rob, Score Sorted Margins is mentioned on the Approval Sorted Margins page on electowiki.org as a variant.

Forest Simmons invented ASM, and I just extended it to scores.

OK, it looks like Peltola won.

@jack-waugh The difficulty of strategically manipulating Condorcet been covered excrutiating details in numerous discussions and papers, going back decades. Don't act like this is the first time the question has been asked.

You're still doing the same annoying thing, responding with a single question, derailing the meaningful and fresh part of conversation with circular questions, while ignoring everything else.

@cfrank said in Condorcet with Borda Runoff:

Can you explain why it doesn’t make sense to try to elect a candidate that is not highly divisive whenever possible?

I personally think a method should indeed do that, but trying to label that a "supermajority" might be misleading or at best, vaguely defined. Supermajority what? Supermajority might indicate something like 70%, but the other variable is "degree of approval." So does it mean something like, over 70% thinks they are pretty good, as opposed to a simple majority where over 50% thinks they are awesome? If so, I would describe that as the system "favoring moderate candidates."

Regardless, I still suspect that a Condorcet compliant method will accomplish such a goal (favoring moderate candidates) better than any given method that isn't Condorcet compliant -- at least if you also want to avoid strategic manipulation and all that ugliness.

Notice that FairVote's primary complaint about Condorcet systems seems to be almost the exact opposite of yours. They think that Condorcet systems favor moderate candidates too much. (Then again, maybe you consider "moderate" to be significantly different from "supermajority support". I am considering them roughly the same, if I properly understand what you mean by "supermajority.")

It will be interesting to see. And even more interesting to see what happens when they run again in a few months, given that this was more or less a RCV practice vote. Probably fewer bullet voters next time, which may work in Begich's favor.

I understand that Alaskan culture places a high value on respectfulness, and that's why some otherwise Republican-leaning voters may have chosen Peltota second to Begich, since Palin ran a very negative campaign.

It's interesting to see Palin claim that Republicans lost because the vote was split. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/sarah-palin-alaska-congressional-race-nick-begich-mary-peltola/ If she's right, this may be less the fault of RCV than it is the fault of the fact that people bullet vote.

@cfrank I'll make sure to include Bucklin.

@cfrank said:

The book "Economics and Computation" (edited by J. Rothe) suggest that it "may also be appropriate to not implement a specific tie-breaking rule, but to randomly choose one from several 'reasonable' tie-breaking rules

Ewwww. 🙂 Not a fan of random anything.

My current thinking on Condorcet is that, preferable to finding the Condorcet winner directly and then doing something else if there is none, is to have a singular mechanism that determines the winner (always, unless there is a "true tie" which becomes less and less likely with large numbers of voters), that just happens to be Condorcet compliant. BTR-IRV is a good example. My intuition is that it is less likely to provide an incentive to strategically try to create a cycle, if a cycle isn't really a major "thing".

Anyway, that's probably just semantics (as to whether it is a tie breaker) and straying a bit from voting on voting methods.

@rob definitely man. It’s pretty ridiculous, I hope it can get fixed soon. It seems to be growing in public awareness, which is definitely a good thing.

Holy crap Begich is the Condorcet winner.

This is bad for FairVote....

https://www.karmatics.com/voting/alaskaspecial.txt

https://codepen.io/karmatics/pen/ExKZVjM

Here is my code for converting the bulky object from the 373 megabyte JSON into slightly more compact representation (861 bytes.... 0.00001% of the size!)

Hope you like for loops.... sorry not sorry!:

// console.log (ballotsAsString(JSON.parse(data), 69, { // '215': 'a', // begich // '217' : 'b', // palin // '218' : 'c', // peltolta // '214' : 'd' // write in //}); function ballotsAsString(data, electionId, nameMap) { // array of ballots is called "Sessions" var ballots = data.Sessions; var counts = {}; // count of each ballot "signature" for(var i=0; i<ballots.length; i++) { var ballot = ballots[i]; // descend through "Original", and "Cards" var original = ballot.Original; if(original) { var cards = original.Cards; if(cards) { for(var j=0; j<cards.length; j++) { var card = cards[j]; if(card) { for(var k=0; k<card.Contests.length; k++) { var contest = card.Contests[k]; if(contest.Id == electionId) { var stringArray = [], hash = {}, isOvervote = false; var marks = contest.Marks; for(var m=0; m<marks.length; m++) { var mark = marks[m]; var candidateIdStr = nameMap[mark.CandidateId]; // if it exists in hash, this is an overvote if(hash[candidateIdStr]) { isOvervote = true; break; } else { hash[candidateIdStr] = true; stringArray.push(candidateIdStr); //stringArray.push(candidateIdStr + '[' + (10-m) + ']'); } } if(!isOvervote) { // reject ballot if overvote //var s = stringArray.join(' '); var s = stringArray.join('>'); if(counts[s]) { counts[s]++; // already have ballots like it } else { counts[s] = 1; // first one like it } } } } } } } } } // convert to array so we can sort it by count var sortArray = []; for(var x in counts) { sortArray.push({r: x, n: counts[x]}); } sortArray.sort((a, b)=>{return b.n-a.n}); // build final array of strings var outStringArray = []; for(var y=0; y<sortArray.length; y++) { var item = sortArray[y]; outStringArray.push(item.n + ': ' + item.r); } // combine into single string return outStringArray.join('\n'); }

which distills it down to....

a: Begich b: Palin c: Peltolta d: Write-in ------------ 21657: c>a 20522: b>a 19494: c 19134: b 17607: a>b 16174: c>a>b 9960: b>a>c 9957: a 7446: a>c>b 6576: a>b>c 5557: a>c 3162: c>d 2773: 2695: b>c>a 2567: c>b>a 2402: c>d>a>b 2146: c>d>a 1987: c>a>d 1914: c>a>d>b 1193: b>a>d 1143: a>b>d 1002: c>b 836: b>a>d>c 743: a>c>d>b 559: b>c 522: a>c>d 512: a>b>d>c 502: d 497: c>d>b>a 477: b>d 418: a>d 389: d>c>a>b 343: a>d>c>b 315: b>d>a 306: c>a>b>d 298: b>d>a>c 287: a>d>b 278: b>a>c>d 257: c>d>b 256: d>a>c>b 240: d>c>a 222: d>c 220: d>a>b 219: d>a 204: a>d>b>c 184: a>b>c>d 179: d>a>b>c 156: a>d>c 147: d>a>c 138: a>c>b>d 131: d>b>a>c 125: b>d>c>a 116: d>b>a 103: d>b 98: d>c>b>a 88: b>c>a>d 82: c>b>a>d 78: c>b>d 70: c>b>d>a 67: b>c>d>a 47: d>b>c>a 33: b>c>d 31: b>d>c 23: d>b>c 20: d>c>b

@cfrank Here's what Parker Friedland says at https://www.reddit.com/r/EndFPTP/comments/x9oupk/comment/ins933t/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

This was a lot more than just a Condorcet failure.

Condorcet Failure:
Begich beats Peltola by 52.5% and Palin by 61.4%.

Favorite Betrayal Failure:
If 2913 Palin voters that preferred Begich to Peltola betrayed Palin by strategically ranking Begich 1st he would have won instead of Peltola.

Monotonicity Failure:
If Peltola were able to gain the support of 5825 Palin voters, she would have lost to Begich.

Participation Failure:
If 5825 Palin voters that preferred Begich to Peltola had forgotten to vote, Begich would have won.

Consistency Failure:
If 5828 Palin>Begich voters, 2915 Begich voters, and 2914 Peltola>Begich voters were removed from the election, Begich would have won and if you counted just those removed votes, Begich also would have won. I wonder if it's possible to get a similar result by subdividing actual counties or voting precincts.