[Lnc-business] commentary on Scottish STV

[Elizabeth Van Horn]

Hmm, we have people with 9 & 5 votes, being beaten-out by those with 
only 4 & 3 votes?

Well, I've little to no faith in our results then, and this won't 
instill confidence in LNC procedures for our members.

---
Elizabeth Van Horn


On 2019-02-26 18:52, Joe Bishop-Henchman via Lnc-business 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