@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.

@cfrank Then whichever party has more candidates than the other is advantaged. This makes the clone failures even worse

@jack-waugh said in STAR vs. Score:

But systems that lead people to think (correctly or not) that strategy in nomination is no longer helpful to their cause, will likely lead to races having more than three candidates.

You are right that STAR isn't as good with more than three candidates.

What it comes down to, from my perspective, is that to reduce the incentive to strategically exaggerate (*), you need to minimize any reliance on "strength of preference."

STAR does this by doing a pairwise comparison as the last step. A pairwise comparison by its nature doesn't consider strength of preference (as you can see when it is a 2-candidate race in simple FPtP).

Condorcet methods try to do it all with pairwise comparisons. This reduces incentive to exaggerate even further. But since we can't guarantee there will be a Condorcet winner, we'll never get it to zero.

However, my position all along has been that getting it all the way to zero would be nice, but isn't necessary. If you get it close enough to zero, attempts to be strategic will have just as much chance of backfiring as they have of helping. A Condorcet method, including one with a very simple "tie breaking" formula, is good enough. STAR may or may not be good enough. Score is not good enough. Again, this is my opinion, but I it does come from a pretty solid game theoretical foundation.

* technically, incentive to exaggerate isn't the only thing we are trying to reduce. We also want to reduce vote splitting, which creates the incentive to strategically nominate, which in turn causes partisanship and polarization. Finally, we also want to aspire to "one person one vote", so each person has equal voting power. All of these things are accomplished by reducing the consideration of "strength of preference" in the tabulation.

@Ted-Stern Are you referring to this?

Consider this 5 winner example with clones for each candidate
Red: 61% vote A:5, B:3, C:0
Blue: 39% vote A:0, B:3, C:5
RRV Gives ['A1', 'C1', 'A2', 'B1', 'B2']
MES Gives ['A1', 'A2', 'A3', 'C1', 'B1']
SSS Gives ['A1', 'B1', 'B2', 'B3', 'B4']
Allocated score Gives ['A1', 'B1', 'A2', 'B2', 'A3']
STV Gives ['A1', 'A2', 'A3', 'C1', 'C2']

The code I ran (which I can share) was taken from the electowiki page written by the inventor Piotr Skowron and I confirmed with him personally that the result was correct. I suspect you have a bug.

@Jack-Waugh I mean that partisan voters will rank their candidate first and the main opposition last. So one (or both?) of the top contenders is likely to be eliminated early.

OK, it looks like Peltola won.

@jack-waugh That would be identical to Borda.

@rob said in Are Equal-ranking Condorcet Systems susceptible to Duverger’s law?:

So what is that algorithm? I mean, it could be Condorcet, and I have no problem with that, but I can't see how the term "proportional representation" applies. It just sounds like multi-winner.... there isn't anything proportional about it.
The only way the term "proportional representation" would apply (by my understanding of the term) is if we assume that there are some number of parties, and each candidate and each voter is in one and only one party. If a 3rd of the voters are in the Bull Moose party, then a third of those elected should be in the Bull Moose party. The further you get away from that, the less "proportional representation" seems to be a meaningful descriptor.
All of my complaints regarding PR (and with so many people's insistence that it is so much better than single winner methods such as Condorcet methods) are based on the assumption that voter X below is considered to have "better representation" if d, f and e are elected (because candidate d is very close to voter X), than if a, b and c are elected.

For the algorithm, you will be aware of Single Transferable Vote, which gives PR without any mention of parties. If voters happen to vote along party lines, it gives party PR, of course. That's just one example, without having to mention obscure methods invented by people on this forum.

And as for a, b, c versus d, e, f, I discussed that in the other thread here. I'm not sure it's worth quoting though because it's quite long.

@brozai I see, yes according to what I've learned about it QV tends to incorporate the strengths of interests and not just the proportion of people with those interests. Depending on what is desired that may be a good thing or a bad thing. There has also been research on its resistance to collusion and it seems to hold up very well, which is a property that I definitely like.

I found this presentation very interesting:

Youtube Video

One point brought up by an audience member during the Q&A was that QV seems to illuminate the relative preferences of the electorate, which show up in the presenter's data as approximate Gaussian distributions and the grouping together of different strata of right-wing and left-wing groups, which does not occur without the quadratic cost.

@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).

@jack-waugh said in Collaborative Coding for Simulation:

But that's not a blocking issue.

I think there are huge advantages to making stuff that runs on the front end, if you want others in the community to be able to run it. Especially if you don't have web hosting. But mostly if you want others to be able to fork your code and play with it or build on top of it, such as to build it into a voting widget, to build a simulator, etc.

But I can see why on really hard methods like Schulze (which I'm convinced was invented as a parody of improved voting methods.... "let's see if we can make something so complicated none of us even understand it" 🙂 ), it makes some sense to do it in whatever language makes it easier.

@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.")

@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.

@Keith said in S-TM:

If there was two candidates supported by the largest bloc of about 40% of the voters they would still fight with eachother.

Yes, but they would still both be supported by that 40% because they both don't want to do things that make them lose that block.
Positive the fact that they try to have the block bigger and bigger, but if the block is for example "Republican", it will remain "Republican" (as well as the 2 candidates who then end up in the automatic runoff).

Also, falling back to score is not something I would view as a problem

The problem is that if you end up in Score Voting then you might as well use Score Voting from the start, which is simpler (but has its downsides).

@jack-waugh yeah I started to reply there but it has a weird registration process that annoyed me. (it had a "register and post" button, but then complained I wasn't registered when I tried to use it). Also just an old site that looks like it's hardly used anymore. So I didn't bother.

Feel free to direct him here if you want to. (not that there's been a lot of activity here either)

@andy-dienes Awesome. Pandas definitely can make things concise if done right. There are lots of functions.

I have advanced the code from where it was crashing every time to where it gives wrong answers, so that's progress.

I think the solution to the "council is too busy" issue is that people on this forum, in a thread rather than a video chat meeting, fully discuss and hopefully come to a sort of consensus on forum organization and site design issues. This should make it a lot easier on council members who are too busy to schedule a meeting.

I started one here: https://www.votingtheory.org/forum/topic/293/forum-change-requests-that-need-council-approval

Tagging @cfrank @Marylander @Andy-Dienes

BTW, @Jack-Waugh we do appreciate all you've done to get this forum/site running and keep it running, and understand if you want to step back a bit. The board is running great, almost no real technical issues and we've got a lot more embedding capabilities than Reddit or election methods email list. We should talk about ways we might lighten the load on you. For instance, I would be glad to do some simple mockups for tweaked/reworked site navigation, and help deploy it if approved.

@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.

I believe this is resolved.