Posts made by robla

Hi folks, the Debian Project Leader election of 2003 is a particularly interesting corner case in elections. I've been talking up this old election in many places; mainly on reddit this past week (my /r/Debian post from Thursday , and my /r/EndFPTP post yesterday/Saturday), but I'm going to guess not everyone here reads reddit, and y'all seem like the kind of folks that would be interested in this kind of thing. This is admittedly an excuse to promote a couple of things: 1) my ABIF tools like "awt" and "abiftool", and 2) a mailing list I created last month to discuss election-software development.

Background: The Debian Project has an annual election for the "Debian Project Leader", in which developers vote using the "Schulze method" (a Condorcet method). The official results of the latest election can be found here:

• https://www.debian.org/vote/2024/vote_001

Most elections are pretty boring for outsiders. They might even be boring for the developers who vote in the elections. However, you all may find the 2003 election interesting if you weren't already aware of it:

• https://www.debian.org/vote/2003/vote_0001

In the 2003 election, it appears that Martin Michlmayr defeated Bdale Garbee by a mere 4 votes. However, a more interesting aspect of this to be the results if the people voting in this election had used "IRV". Below is a link to the results of this election as shown in "ABIF web tool" (or "awt"), using Copeland (also a Condorcet-winner method), IRV, and STAR voting:

• https://abif.electorama.com/id/DPL2003

As you can see, Branden Robinson beats both Bdale Garbee and Martin Michlmayr if IRV is used. This is because Garbee and Michlmayr are tied in the third round, so both get eliminated, at least per the election law in the city of San Francisco which states:

(e) If the total number of votes of the two or more candidates credited with the
lowest number of votes is less than the number of votes credited to the candidate with the
next highest number of votes, those candidates with the lowest number of votes shall be
eliminated simultaneously and their votes transferred to the next-ranked continuing
candidate on each ballot in a single counting operation.

Because of this quirk of IRV, that means that changing only one ballot can change the results of the election between three different candidates. For example, find the following line in the ABIF, and comment it out (using the "#" character at the beginning of the line).

1:BdaleGarbee>MartinMichlmayr>BrandenRobinson>MosheZadka>NOTA

To find this line, you'll need to show the "ABIF submission area". Once you find the line and comment it out, you can hit "Submit", and see the fruits of your labor. You can muck around with the election however you want, and see the results of your mucking. In the case of commenting out the line above, Bdale Garbee gets eliminated as a result (which isn't too surprising), but Martin Michlmayr wins, defeating Branden Robinson. This despite the fact that Michlmayr was behind Robinson in the third round by 13 votes in the prior round of voting prior to eliminating the ballot above. It's very surprising that eliminating a ballot that ranks Michlmayr higher than Robinson causes Michlmayr to defeat Robinson.

Garbee can also win by eliminating one of the ballots that ranks Michlmayr higher than Garbee, such as this one:

1:MartinMichlmayr>BdaleGarbee>BrandenRobinson>NOTA>MosheZadka

One of the participants over on the Debian subreddit asked "Wouldn't it be better to randomly choose one of the tied candidates and to then eliminate only that one?" That's not a terrible suggestion, though it would make IRV explicitly non-deterministic, which would create its own problems.

For those that are interested in perusing, there are many of the other Debian elections are available here:

• https://abif.electorama.com/tag/debian

I didn't find any other Debian elections that were as numerically interesting as the DPL2003 election, but please let me know if you find something. You can see all of the elections that I've converted to ABIF and published here (which is only 32 of them, as of this writing):

• https://abif.electorama.com/tag

There are many other elections that could be converted with abiftool.py, which is a command-line interface to the same library used by the ABIF web tool. The user interface for abiftool.py and the ABIF web tool are admittedly a bit janky, but they work for me. Still, if you're a Python developer and/or a web developer generally, and you have time and interest in helping out, please get in touch. In addition, if you're interested in discussing electoral software in general, consider joining the recently created "election-software" mailing list:

• https://electorama.com/es

The list is pretty low volume right now, but I haven't promoted it very widely yet. I'm hoping that many folks who are writing electoral software will join and either convince me to join their project or allow me to convince you to join the growing legions of developers writing software that supports ABIF. :-)

@cfrank wrote:

some of the obvious patterns have emerged, such as ballot type

I think making the taxonomy of voting system start with "ballot type" is a mistake. Granted, a cardinal ballot can easily be converted into ranked (ordinal) ballot, but that's not the defining characteristic of an election method. It's possible to have a Condorcet-winner compliant method that uses either rated (cardinal) ballots or uses ranked ballots. Election methods should be classified by their tallying algorithm, not their user interface.

I applaud @cfrank 's effort on the chart, even if I might disagree with the conclusions. As of right now, I don't entirely understand the chart, but that's okay. I don't entirely understand Arrow's, Gibbard's or Satterthwaite's theorem's either, and I've appreciated their effort for years.

I generally agree with @rob with respect to IIAC. I agree with him that it's absurd how cardinal-voting advocates try to declare victory and say that cardinal methods pass IIAC, and appreciate the example he provided in a different comment (@rob's comment
"For instance, if there are 3 candidates, and I approve Alice and Bob, but not Chris, for it to be independent of irrelevant candidate Chris, they have to assume that I would still approve both Alice and Bob if they were the only candidates."). In general, single-winner elections are asking voters to do one thing: pick a single winner. There is no way to avoid the comparative/competitive aspect of single-winner elections. Trying to escape the clutches of electoral impossibility theorems by saying that ratings of candidates are independent of the other candidates being considered is rank silliness (pun intended).

Generally, it seems wise not to think too hard about a specific impossibility theorem, and just assume that any good table with binary assessments of criteria are going to have "FALSE" or "NOT PASSED" or whatever for every method for at least one criterion. Election methods are graded on a curve, and each table is a different professor. Arrow's table only had four or five columns for the different criteria. Other tables have more. The tables on English Wikipedia are arbitrary and capricious (as many professors are), and seem to be rather moody with respect to pass/fail criteria. Note that when professors grade on a curve, it means that the student is in competition with other students in the class. It seems that rankings are pervasive.

Even if we agree that some tables (or some "professors") aren't very helpful, I hope we can agree that perfection is unattainable in election methods. We shouldn't spend too much time arguing about specific tables as we each try to gain personal insight on different methods. @cfrank - I suspect that your three meta-critieria ("Stable", "Simple", and "Consenual") are a bit too vague to be useful to newcomers to electoral reform. I'm not sure that there are three meta-criteria that work, but please, keep trying to find them! As we all know, it's almost impossible not to get lost in the weeds when trying to understand election methods, and a good visualization could be helpful.

Kenneth Arrow absolutely deserved his Nobel Prize, because Arrow's Theorem was (and is) a big deal. The exact choice of criteria was beside the point; what Arrow did was describe a few "common sense" criteria and then showed them to be mutually exclusive. Later work (e.g. Gibbard-Satterthwaite) had more compelling criteria, but his description (and proof) of how these criteria can be mutually exclusive keeps us from wasting time when evaluating methods.

The metaphor I frequently use: there's no such thing as a perfect vehicle (infinitely fast, spacious cargo capacity, fits in a backpack, completely safe, high fuel efficiency), However, new vehicles come out every year that are purportedly better than the prior year's vehicles, and there are many old vehicles that don't live up to today's safety and performance standards. First-past-the-post barely lived up to 18th century performance standards (and quickly led to the two-party system that George Washington hoped to avoid by creating a norm against parties. We see how that worked out.

Arrow's Theorem has been turned into an excuse by people touting inferior voting methods ("no system is perfect"), but we should be able to explain why the status quo sucks without trashing Arrow and his work.

@rob said in Being "non-partisan" (and "conflict of interest" statements):

I do object to this chart at the Wikipedia link (enwiki:"2018 San Francisco mayoral special election") you posted, as it misrepresents Jane Kim's position relative to Leno and Breed.

I object to it too, but I'm not about to get into an edit war over it. I'm pretty sure that (just like in the general population), there are more advocates of RCV/IRV editing English Wikipedia than there are advocates for approval/Condorcet/etc. I believe that the best thing for you to do (if you want it fixed) is to post a comment on the corresponding "talk" page ("Talk:2018 San Francisco mayoral special election")

@rob said in Being "non-partisan" (and "conflict of interest" statements):

I live in San Francisco, on purpose.

@rob: thanks for your statement. Since you and I have met in person (and been to each other's homes), I feel a little more certain that you aren't a sockpuppet tnan I am with other participants.

As for "San Francisco, on purpose", its difficult for me to say the same thing. When you and I first met in person (in 2006), I had convinced my employer to open a Seattle office. Since I was their first Seattle-based employee, they wanted me to spend my first few weeks working at their San-Francisco-based office. You weren't working for the same folks, but we met nearby at Caffe_Trieste (which I believe was your suggestion, since I was the out-of-towner) You bicycled across town to meet up in the early evening, which seems crazy (since I now know just how hazardous San Francisco is for bicyclists, and my understanding is that 2006 was much worse than 2022). Still, I enjoyed my 2006 visit, and visited many more times in the following years.

I reluctantly moved to San Francisco in 2011, but I've come to appreciate the place. However, it seems the politics here are even crazier than Seattle's politics. Did you know they use ranked-choice voting here? Wasn't the 2018 San Francisco mayoral special election all sorts of fun?

My reluctance about being here is not because of the politics of the place. It's because of the breathless bubble after bubble. But hey, web3 is going great!

@andy-dienes said in Being "non-partisan" (and "conflict of interest" statements):

I'm not sure what any of those bullets imply in terms of biases / COIs, but is that helpful or kind of what you were looking for?

Yeah, this kind of political intro is incredibly helpful to me. Thanks! It seems that you and I have similar political alignments. Even if yours were radically different than mine (e.g. if you were a pro-Trump, pro-insurrection type), I'd still be able to have a civilized, constructive election-method discussion with you. Since "election-method discussions" and "political discussions" are so closely adjacent (and overlapping spaces), it seems impossible not to sometimes have one person believe they're having an "election-methods discussion", while the other person has segued into a thinly-veiled "political discussion". Having an idea where other folks stand makes it easier to make more informed assumptions about them and avoid potential wasteful hotbuttons and avoid wasteful, veiled conversations (since we're all making assumptions about one another, whether or not we want to admit that about ourselves).

I don't think it's necessary for everyone to meticulously describe all of their political conflicts of interest. Just an informal statement would be helpful sometimes. I suppose maybe it's okay if y'all remain a political-alignment mystery to me (or even a mystery with respect to your real-life identity). I just hope that none of you are sockpuppets.

I think Jack brought up a very good point in a message in another thread:

@jack-waugh said in Terms for Specific Voting Systems:

I suspect that many self-described "conservatives" would expect that any proposal to change the voting system comes from "liberals" looking for a way to win elections unfairly at the expense of "conservatives". I put those terms in quotes because I am referring to people using those terms. I do not know what the users of those terms think the "conservatives" want to conserve or what the "liberals" want to liberate. I would use the terms without horror quotes if I stood ready to answer those questions should you ask them of me.

Okay, I'm an unapologetic west-coast "liberal", and I'm not afraid to wear that on my sleeve (even though it caused problems for me in central Missouri at least twice). I also grew up in an unapologetically "conservative" family (where I feared the day when my father would discover Rush Limbaugh after hearing him on my old Ford's AM radio, only to find out that my Goldwater-supporting mother would become an avid Limbaugh listener first). I'm used to living in red counties and blue counties, and I'm familiar with the extremes.

I'm not here to convince any of y'all to be a librul. However, I think we shouldn't kid ourselves about the fact that almost every single of us has a "team color", so to speak, and it's almost impossible to talk about American politics without acknowledging the utter dominance of the two big parties and the utter certainty we can have that a Republican or a Democrat is going to win the 2024 United States presidential election, and that a Democrat or a Republican is going to be the runner up. Maybe someone from the Forward Party will get a non-negligible portion of the popular vote, but we're talking about a Perot-like randomizing, anti-incumbent force, rather than someone with a real chance of winning in 2024.

Given the American political environment (and that, I'm guessing, most participants on VotingTheory.org seem to live in North America), it might make sense if we knew (more-or-less) what each other's political leanings are. I find it much to engage with other English Wikipedia editors when I'm confident that they've fully disclosed their conflicts of interest, and I'd be willing to engage with more authors here on VotingTheory if I knew where they were coming from (even if I didn't agree with their political perspectives). Thoughts?

@toby-pereira said in Terms for Specific Voting Systems:

Being from the UK, I've always called it First Past the Post, but since posting on voting forums / mailing lists, I found people calling it plurality, so I used that term as others were using it (and I assumed it was the common US name for it).

I think your initial instinct was correct. I suspect that the British talk about electoral reform a lot more than Americans do, and "FPTP" seems to be the name that stuck in Great Britain, so it's fine to use it in that context. But the United Kingdom and the United States are two countries separated by a common language, and we Americans don't believe we have a perfect system, because we invented democracy and have a large military to spread our democratic ideals. There seems to be a bit more outward humility in Great Britain.

Anyway, my point is this: most Americans tend to conflate "plurality rule" with "majority rule", and don't really have a name for the thing you call "first-past-the-post voting", because they don't think about it that hard (much in the same way that many languages don't have separate words for "blue" and "green"; presumably the distinction wasn't that important when the respective languages became prominent). The "choose-one" nomenclature works in many contexts speaking to people who don't realize that the English language wasn't invented by Americans.

@rob - if I were inventing FPTP/choose-one voting today, I might have picked the latter name, but almost certainly wouldn't have picked the former. Come to think of it, I wouldn't have chosen "choose-one" if I was trying to get people to use it. Basically, what "FPTP" means with respect to choose-one voting is "the horse that gets the best time most votes wins". If I were the inventor of the method, and I wanted people to use it, I'd like the "first-past-the-post" analogy. Horse races are (allegedly) exciting!

As it stands, candidates shouldn't like being compared to horses, and candidates are trying to get a bigger number, not a smaller number. So I hate the analogy. But changing the name of an existing voting system (especially one that a person dislikes) takes a much larger marketing budget than either you or I have. Since the Center for Election Science has a much larger budget, I'm basically following their lead when I call it "choose-one voting".

@rob - I wouldn't go so far as saying there's "no reasonable meaning". "First-past-the-post" apparently makes sense to people who speak 19th century British English, speak of the weight in terms of "stone", and sprinkle extra instances of the letter "u" in words like "labour" and "colour". I also think FPTP is easier to Google for than "choose-one". I appreciate that /r/EndFPTP seems to be the leading subreddit among those of us that want something better than the most widely-used election method.

That said, I also appreciate the effort that Aaron Hamlin et al have been putting into getting folks to use "choose-one" as less wonky nomenclature than "FPTP". When speaking to people whose first question after hearing about approval voting is: "are you talking about that voting system where you rank the people you like?", it's helpful to be able to respond with "no, the ballot looks the same as a choose-one election, but voters get to mark all of the candidates they approve of. It's 'choose-many' voting instead of 'choose-one'." Using "choose-one" is a good habit to get into when speaking to naive Americans (i.e. most people here).