[Lnc-business] commentary on Scottish STV

[Sam Goldstein]

My only commentary on this entire fiasco is how the heck did candidates 
get elected to a LNC committee with
a maximum of two votes?  I know I'm just a hayseed Hoosier from corn and 
fly over country, but dang, let's
put this aside and have a real election at the upcoming LNC meeting.

---
Sam Goldstein
Libertarian National Committee
317-850-0726 Cell

On 2019-02-26 19:25, Alicia Mattson via Lnc-business wrote:
> One thing that I found particularly annoying about the way that OpaVote
> reports the results is that it does not report the actual number of 
> votes
> attributed to each candidate in each round.  Instead it shows us a 
> percent,
> though percentages have nothing to do with who is elected or 
> eliminated.
> If someone has a whole number of votes, those bars on the chart meet up
> with the vertical lines, but otherwise it doesn't tell you that in 
> Round 3,
> Jeff Lyons had 1.8333 votes, and that Parr and Shade had 0.33333
> votes...instead it says Lyons had 14.1% of the vote and Parr/Shade had
> 2.6%. What do the percentages matter when the goal is to get to 2 
> votes?
> 
> I was under the impression that with 13 ballots choosing 9 seats from 
> 46
> candidates, the "threshold" of 2 meant that only 6 could be elected.  
> So I
> was surprised when the system listed 9 candidates elected.
> 
> On this OpaVote page of a "plain English" description of Scottish STV:
> https://blog.opavote.com/2016/11/plain-english-explanation-of-scottish.html
> 
> It says things like, "All STV methods have a quota or winning 
> threshold."
> Once the "winning threshold" is determined to be 2, it sounds like one
> needs at least 2 votes to be elected.  There was another quote that I 
> don't
> see now (maybe it was on the generic STV page rather than the Scottish
> variant) which referred to repeating the process until there are X
> candidates who have exceeded the threshold.
> 
> Now I'm noticing in the final paragraph of the Scottish STV page the
> following, "If there are N positions being filled, then the election is
> over when N candidates have reached the quota or when only N+1 
> candidates
> remain (the winners being the N candidates with the highest numbers of
> votes)."  So even the low threshold of 2 is not required for election.
> Once there are only 10 candidates left, the top 9 are elected.
> 
> -Alicia
> 
> 
> On Tue, Feb 26, 2019 at 3:52 PM Joe Bishop-Henchman <
> joe.bishop-henchman at lp.org> wrote:
> 
>> 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
>>