@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.

@toby-pereira thanks for the "lumpers vs. splitters" description, made me chuckle. It'd be nice if there was an interface that both lumpers and splitters could appreciate, like something that kept the tags and categories collapsed or expanded based on how you last set it.

In the context of this forum, maybe it could make sense to keep the most "general" categories and move everything else to tags? People would still need to agree on what counts as general though.

Some issues with tags though: they have a length limit, and the interface for browsing them and adding them isn't as organized or alluring (colorful) as the category browser.

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.

@jack-waugh said in STAR-like method ("reverse STAR"?):

@rob said in STAR-like method ("reverse STAR"?):

To me the most fair method would give every voter equal influence on the outcome.

I am in emphatic agreement. I suspect the lack of this equality is a very key tool that the ruling class uses to keep the rest of us down. I do not know how to articulate the sufficient conditions for equality of influence. I believe that one of the necessary conditions, however, is Frohnmayer balance.

I haven’t seen a solid argument for why being “Frohnmayer balanced” automatically is better. There are many balanced methods that are terrible. But it, alone, shouldn't be the goal. A good method probably achieves it.

Vote splitting is the real enemy, and having it balanced (e.g. For and Against voting) doesn't eliminate vote splitting per se, but it tries to balance it between "clustering" vote splitting and "declustering" vote splitting. Clustering is what you get with plain old plurality, where you want to reduce similar candidates, incentivizing parties and primaries. For and against adds a declustering effect on top of that. But it's a fairly crude one, since it is still plurality.

As for recursive IRV, you could make it immediately Frohnmayer balanced simply by doing some sort of Borda count at the deepest level. I'd be willing to bet that, if you did, it would still converge to the same result. I will try it, though, it should be super easy to do.

I actually haven't “proven” anything regarding recursive IRV, but I do have it fully implemented now, thanks to a good bit of help from chatGPT, which made it so much easier. It's actually surprisingly fast, even when going way deeper than I'd expect is needed. I'd still like to build some sort of visualizer for it that's better than just a big dump of Json which is what I currently have.

However, although not a proof per se, I can walk through the logic a bit of why I think it is superior to anything else out there in terms of fairness. In general I will talk about it as if it recurses to Infinity, even though in practice, it should be completely unnecessary to go more than a couple levels deep for real world purposes.

First the background. We may all have different ideas of what fairness is, but to me it is all about removing vote splitting. Vote splitting is when irrelevant alternatives disproportionately draw votes away from relevant candidates. STAR, IRV, and Condorcet methods all attempt to remove irrelevant alternatives, but each have their flaws. With Condorcet methods, obviously there isn't always a Condorcet winner and that is the singular flaw (in that case, it “kicks the can down the road”, leaving you to find another way to settle who the winner is). With STAR, you're using score totals to guess what the irrelevant alternatives are, and that isn’t a lot more than a guess and is absolutely subject to vote splitting at stage one. With IRV you are using a process of elimination to estimate which are irrelevant. Since IRV depends on (inverse) plurality to determine who to eliminate, it also is subject to vote splitting at the elimination stage.

However, IRV, for all the complaints about it, does do one thing correctly, and that is that the process of elimination that it uses is always better than not using it, in terms of increasing the accuracy and resistance to vote splitting of the final result. That alone doesn't set it apart from other methods, but it just needs to be pointed out: process of elimination is always a good thing in terms of reducing the vote splitting effect, compared to using plurality directly.

And that last point is what recursive IRV taps into. If, in seeking a final winner, we get better results than plurality by using the process of elimination, why can’t we use the process of elimination to get better results than plurality for deciding who to eliminate? We’re always using plurality, but with each increased level of recursion, we are making it more indirect. The more indirect the usage of plurality, the better the result.

So recursive Irv, unlike every other voting method I know, can apply its effect over and over until we decide it's “good enough.” In that way, it’s analogous to how we address the computer science problem “binary representations of floating point numbers can never exactly represent certain numbers, like 1/3”. While true in theory, we can just add enough bits and the problem gets less and less significant. If 32 bit floats aren’t good enough, use 64 bit. If 64 bit isn’t good enough, use 128 bit. There is no limit to how many times you can increase the number of bits, and each time you, say, double them, the precision is increased by a predictable amount. It is a straightforward problem to increase the precision. While it has costs, obviously, you don’t need to reinvent anything if you need more precision, you just apply more of the same.

All my tests shows that recursive IRV will find a Condorcet winner, if they exist, very quickly. I’ve never seen it take more than one extra recursion level. But it doesn’t “seek out the Condorcet winner”, instead, finding the Condorcet winner is a byproduct of a process that makes the method more accurate, more resistant to vote splitting. But since that process still works in the absence of a Condorcet winner, we have something that never has to fall back on some ugly and imperfect kludge.

@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).

@rob Thanks Rob, the plain English is just what I needed. I will think about it

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

@sarawolk said in My proposal for this forum:

We recruit some new volunteers to our Forum Council, Tech Committee, and Moderation Committee.

From where? The forum has been nearly a ghost town for most of its existence. But if a team of volunteers want to step up, that sounds like a plan and it doesn't sound like you need what I've offered. I will admit it seems a bit like magical thinking to me, but maybe you know something I don't.

I suggest you assemble this team of volunteers first, let them convince you that they are actually going to stick around and do the work, then make decisions. To me, it doesn't make sense to make decisions assuming a bunch of people are going to be ready to take on responsibilities, especially if those people haven't been participating in the forum already. I just don't see it happening.

When talking to Jack, he seemed to be convinced there was tech team ready to jump in. So maybe I'm wrong. I just have seen no signs of this.

We keep the forum constructive and drama free.

Offering to step up and run this democratically, per the original vision, doesn't sound like drama, and I would consider it constructive. I'm not attacking you or anyone else. I'm just saying the forum wasn't gaining traction, for very predictable reasons. Meanwhile the only person who has taken on day-to-day responsibility for the forum, Jack, says he's not willing to do that anymore. I have offered to spend a lot of my time, time that most people on the council don't seem to have, to both fill in the role Jack had played, while otherwise making positive things happen.

Also regarding drama: I've gone out of my way to try to suppress drama on the forum, only once using my admin powers (in a case of doxxing, I edited a post and diplomatically DM'd its author [1]), but often stepping in [2], sometimes in the awkward situation of, well, our tech admin posting stuff that many found offensive, off-topic and divisive. I don't know if anyone else ever has, other than a couple people weighing in, such as @spelunker did when he first arrived and was greeted by some toxic content, or as @Andy-Dienes did in that same situation. (I believe we've lost Andy, one of our best contributors --- I don't want to speak for him but I believe the "tone" of the forum was a significant thing that drove him away, and I'm pretty sure it wasn't because of a discussion of the future of the forum, since he also wished for some significant changes [3]).

Regardless, I am not trying to rehash events of two years ago, and am not attacking anyone. I don't see how this is escalating anything. I do feel that general issues about the forum's future should be resolvable in public at the forum. I understand taking things to private discussion for very specific cases, but for discussing how decisions are made at the forum and such..... why the need for secrecy? If you are worried about someone coming to the forum and being put off by my post...well, sorry, but I don't get it. If they are going to be put off by anything, it is that there is little activity, and whatever activity there is is not easy to find without several clicks, and if they do that, sometimes it is toxic and off topic. Not that we are talking about options to make the forum better.

I am honestly confused as to Jack's ongoing role. I understood he was wanting to back away due to frustration over a non-responsive council. If this wasn't the case, I would never have offered to step up.

That said, I think we need a lot more than what Jack has been doing, as I have outlined above. Basically, someone who is likely to be here on a daily basis, managing the social side, adding features and organizing the site and content etc. I don't see why a forum would be expected to succeed in the absence of this.

In any case, my offer stands for the time being but unless I hear strongly enough that people want this, I'm mostly assuming that the few left at the forum aren't interested.

(the doxxing has been removed but this is one conversation where moderation was otherwise needed) https://www.votingtheory.org/forum/topic/256/new-method-i-think-hare-squared/12

https://www.votingtheory.org/forum/topic/301/deutschland/14
https://www.votingtheory.org/forum/topic/303/the-metadiscussion
Note that if Jack wasn't the admin of the board, and we had anyone else who was actively moderating, a better way to handle it is for a moderator to delete the post, and DM Jack to diplomatically explain why without making a big public deal.

Here is where Andy suggested improvements , we all agreed, and nothing happened. If I had the role I propose, I would have put it to an open vote (on the forum), notified the council, and unless there were objections within a week or two, made the changes:
https://www.votingtheory.org/forum/topic/227/way-too-many-categories
I would have, separately, proposed and held a vote on changing the front page to be the "recent activity page", with a banner for links to other things at the site such as the CES forum archive.

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