@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.