[Lnc-business] commentary on Scottish STV

[Caryn Ann Harlos]

These analysis are great and I can run all ballots through other methods as
well.  We need this real life experience.


On Tue, Feb 26, 2019 at 5:25 PM Alicia Mattson via Lnc-business <
lnc-business at hq.lp.org> 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
> >
>
-- 

*  In Liberty,*

*Libertarian Party and Libertarian National Committee Secretary *- Caryn.Ann.
Harlos at LP.org <Caryn.Ann.Harlos at LP.org> or Secretary at LP.org.
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