[Lnc-business] commentary on Scottish STV

[Joe Bishop-Henchman]

I also just played the results Ms. Harlos sent out and came to the same 
fascinating (to me, at least) realization. Ranked choice voting works 
great if 800 people are choosing 5 or 9 spots; when it's 12 or 13 people 
choosing 9 spots, there are odd results. Especially if each voter is 
limited to nine choices, resulting in premature exhaustion of several 
ballots.

Here are the final results with number of distributed votes:
V. Sarwark - 2.00
P. Bilyeu - 2.00
Merced - 2.00
Dasbach - 2.00
Lyons - 1.91
Kelly - 1.00
Shade - 0.66
Recuero - 0.50
Myers - 0.50

Forget majority - three of our final 9 were elected with less than one 
vote after fully distributing everything. As the report indicated, 37 of 
the 40 rounds broke a tie by random, including on the final round. With 
that many random choices, we could probably re-run the results and get a 
different final three members each time. (One reading of Scottish STV is 
that while it doesn't require a majority it still requires hitting the 
threshold of 2, and only four people did so.)

I compared it to approval voting (the usual method we have used for 
filling vacancies), assuming (probably incorrectly) that everyone would 
have voted for the same people:

Valerie Sarwark	12
Paul Bilyeu	11
Alex Merced	11
Jeff Lyons	10
Steve Dasbach	9
Jennifer Moore	9 (not elected)
Omar Recuero	7
Fernando Davis	5 (not elected)
Johnny Walker	5 (not elected)

Tyler Bargenquast	4
Brandon Bobbit	4
Bryan Bombardier	4
PJ Capelli	4
Jennifer Flower	4
Cecil Ince	4
Kenny Kelly	4 (elected)
Mayna Myers	4 (elected)
Kevin Warmhold	4
Marc Lazerow	3
Kevin Moore	3
James Olivi	3
Fransisco Olvera	3
Sean Parr	3
Ashely Shade	3 (elected)
Sharon Smith	3

The starkest differences between the two voting methods are that J. 
Moore appeared on 9 of our 13 ballots, on all but one in the top six, 
but was not elected, while Shade (appearing on just three ballots as 
4th, 5th, and 7th choices), was elected by random coin flip ahead of 
over a dozen other people who appeared on more ballots.

I would suggest if we do this again in the future:
* No limit on # of candidates to rank, to prevent premature ballot 
exhaustion.
* In an extended ballot where we're all sharing results, those voting 
last have an incredible information advantage for tactical voting. 
Results should be secret until voting has closed.
* If not requiring a majority, establishing a floor for # of votes to be 
elected. In the end, what we did was for all purposes no different from 
randomly picking 9 LNC members to each pick one person for the 
committee, except worse since three of those elected got less than 1 
vote.



JBH

------------
Joe Bishop-Henchman
LNC Member (At-Large)
joe.bishop-henchman at lp.org
www.facebook.com/groups/189510455174837

On 2019-02-22 04:32, Alicia Mattson via Lnc-business wrote:
> I have a number of comments I wish to make about the Scottish STV 
> voting
> system, but I don't have time to write it all up this evening.  I will
> start with these comments and add more details to these thoughts later.
> 
> It is one thing to read the theory and rules for a voting system on a
> webpage, but it's another thing to print out the paper ballots and 
> enact
> the process yourself to see the effects of each step.  Last night, I 
> took
> the 7 ballots cast up to that point, printed them out on paper, and put
> them in piles on the floor to manually experience how it works.
> 
> It didn't take long before my eyes got wide.  Then a little later my 
> jaw
> dropped as I realized more and more implications of the process.  When 
> I
> was done, I paced around the living room in a bit of a rant as I put my
> realizations into words.
> 
> Clearly, this voting system was envisioned for situations in which the
> number of ballots being cast VASTLY outnumbers (by orders of magnitude)
> both the number of seats being filled and also the number of 
> candidates.
> 
> In our case, however, if everyone had voted it would have been 17 
> ballots
> cast to choose from more than 40 candidates to fill 9 seats.  I only 
> saw
> ballots from 12 people on one election and 13 on the other, making the
> ratios even worse.  This seems to be in the range of 
> worst-case-scenario
> for this voting system.
> 
> With these ratios, the process devolves into essentially a casino game 
> of
> chance necessitating random candidate eliminations early in the 
> process.
> After the first round of vote distributions, we might as well just tell 
> the
> candidates to play Russian roulette...or for fewer dead bodies we could
> just draw names out of a hat.
> 
> If I correctly understand the process, then it's mathematically 
> impossible
> for the number of ballots cast in these two elections to elect more 
> than 6
> candidates to each committee.  Looking at the vote distribution, we'll
> elect at least 3 but no more than 6, depending on the outcome of some
> random selections, so we're in for re-balloting anyway.
> 
> More specifics later...
> 
> -Alicia