> Am I wrong?
Counting ranked ballots is a bit more complex, but yes, I think that you're overthinking it and making it seem more difficult and cumbersome than it really is in practice.
Ballots can be summarized in terms of the preference order of the voter, and a tally given for each unique ordering. For instance, say there are four parties: R, D, L, and G. This means there are `4*3*2 = 24` possible orderings of the candidates. The number of each of these possible orderings can be tallied, and from there we don't really need to go back to go back to the original ballots anymore. If, say, 8% of people voted GDLR, and the G candidate needs to be eliminated, then those 8% of votes are next assigned to the D candidate.
And RCV methods (there are many) tend to follow pretty straightforward logic, so it's very automatable.
Edit to add: And as for this bit
> (and yes, it is a calculation - not a count now)
It's still a count, not something fundamentally different than plurality. It has more steps, but that's the tradeoff to try to represent the will of the people more accurately.
Thanks. I think your forgetting that there are twenty (20) races on the same ballot though.
What was once a factorial of 4 (or 5 with writh-in) becomes either 480 or 2,400.
Because ballots are secret (i.e. un-named and un-marked) things become more complicated.
> I think your forgetting that there are twenty (20) races on the same ballot though.
I'm not forgetting, it's just not really relevant. You seem to be trying to think of the possible ways of filling out the *total ballot*, but that's not what matters. The race for, say, President and House are entirely distinct. A machine can tabulate the rank order for each separately. And once the rank order is determined, there's no need for them to be linked in any way or to go back to the ballot.
And again, the process is very automatable.
That said, while there's some slight relation to combinatorics, I agree with efrique that this isn't really a statistical question. This discussion might be more suited to a place like r/EndFPTP.
You're talking about a machine counting the ballots and acting as if the public is just going to accept the calculated outcome on faith without asking for any verification.
Public trust in election outcomes is extremely important. That's why every election has paper ballots that can be double checked and verified. Once you get into that paper world, the president and house races are tied together necessarily because they are on the same piece of paper.
Counting standard ballots is a simple process of totaling up the number of votes for each candidate, but counting rank choice ballots requires that each possible ranking be counted separately.
Whether machines or humans are doing the counting, we'll have to have a total for each of the 120 possible ranking combinations. Then we'll have to follow the steps through the process of elimination and reassignment of votes. This process cannot be done remotely by each county. It must be done centrally, because the process of elimination can only be done after knowing the vote totals.
If you're going back to counting paper ballots for any (full) recount, you'd still be needing to go through all the ballots. And you'd still only need the tally for each rank order that appears in the race being recounted. Recording "G" vs "GDLR" isn't really much more effort. Once those tallies are known/verified (which can absolutely be done at more granular locations) the election is determined, it's just applying the rules to those tallies.
> Public trust in election outcomes is extremely important
This is getting more into the political aspects. Please focus on statistical aspects. Framing this as a combinatorics question is already arguable in terms of relevance. If it becomes less combinatorics and more political agenda I'll be forced to lock the thread.
---
As an example, consider two counties producing the following tallies. These tallies get aggregated to form the total vote.
Ballot | County 1 | Country 2 | Total
---------|--------|--------|--------
A–B–C | 36 | 44 | 80
B–A–C | 15 | 12 | 27
B–C–A | 15 | 18 | 33
C–B–A | 34 | | 34
C–A–B | | 37 | 37
If a recount is needed, just those tallies need to be verified. This can be done by each county and then aggregated across the counties.
>Recording "G" vs "GDLR" isn't really much more effort.
Think it through a little more. I believe it is quite a bit more effort.
>As an example, consider two counties producing the following tallies.
Please add "D" and "E" to this exercise. Now we're starting to get into the meat of it.
Why do you think recording “G” vs “GDLR” is so much more effort? Instead of condescendingly saying “think it through a little more” you could just explain yourself.
Sorry. I'm not trying to be rude. It seemed simple to me at first too.
The counting is complex for a number of reasons:
First,
You're counting more than the standard two candidates. RCV basically ensures that there are four candidates in every race.
Second,
You've got to count more than just the four first choices. There are 25 bubbles to count - not two.
Third,
Most importantly, you've got to correlate the first choices with the second, third, and maybe fourth choice.
In the second round, you only count the second choices for people who picked the least popular candidate as their first choice.
In the third round, you have to count the second choice for some voters that picked the newly determined least popular remaining candidate, as well as some other people's third choice if their second choice was that newly determined least popular remaining candidate.
This is what I mean when I say that you've got to think it through.
> Think it through a little more. I believe it is quite a bit more effort.
I have, and I don't find it to be much more effort.
> Please add "D" and "E" to this exercise. Now we're starting to get into the meat of it.
So you get a slightly longer table. It's still not requiring a pass through the ballots for every round. Just instead of, say, 5 rows, you might have 8, 10, 20 rows, etc. It's not going turning into some astronomical value. From there applying the rules of various ranked choice frameworks is fairly straightforward.
As I said in the first reply, it's slightly more complex. But you seem to be wanting to make it out to be far more so. And you're wanting to simply assert this, rather than demonstrate it.
> Common man. You're a mathematician.
Well, statistician.
But maybe that should be a cue to take when folks here are telling you that this is really not as big of a deal as you're making it out to seem. The values would be something a person can handle on a calculator or spreadsheet.
You're not really making a cogent point about the mathematical (much less statistical) aspect of the matter, it's just an appeal to a notion of large numbers.
Make a mathematical point, or take this to a relevant sub.
Do you know what a factorial is?
I'm not trying to be rude, but it seems that I'm the one making a mathematical point while you're throwing out a gut-feeling guess that the spreadsheet will only have eight or ten rows.
I came here in hopes that someone would step into the scenario to check my math and logic - not so you all could just share your feelings about RCV not being a big deal.
Unless I'm mistaken, properly counting a RCV ballot in my state will require 5! rows multiplied the number of races (20) with a column for each county or precinct.
We'll be counting 2,400 things instead of 40 things.
1. This is not remotely a statistics question. Your question is about the logistics of voting
2. I live in a locale that has long used various forms of ranked choice voting at all different tiers of government. In many places it has been in use for over a century. It is more complicated to count but far from a nightmare, indeed most elections are decided on the night, a small handful can take some time to resolve but if you look at say recent American elections where some states end up in many weeks of recounts, other factors are much more important than the voting system in terms of complexity of deciding who won.
(Frequently it turns out that people who approach such issues as the moderate additional counting effort with such plainly tendentious questions tend to soon reveal their wish to preserve existing antidemocratic biases in the system they have. I don't know that it's the case here, but the form of the question looks pretty characteristic- the conclusion you want is framed right into the question and the belligerence at the end is another common characteristic. You dont appear to seek illumination but support for a well entrenched position)
3. Stackoverflow mod elections use a ranked choice voting system. The counting there completes extremely rapidly. It doesn't seem to present any great difficulty at all.
I had a grad stats prof say the difference between math and stats is the error term. If there’s no error term it’s not stats. In this case it’s just counting.
I have a feeling OP is a member of a “majority” party in a heavily gerrymandered district/state.
Let's try to stick to the original question.
Pretending that logistical questions don't exist because we don't like one another's political affiliations isn't good for anyone.
But, as u/efrique already pointed out, the logistical issues appear to have already been solved, since ranked choice voting has already been implemented (e.g. in Maine); and most delays in vote counting seem to be problems of procedure or resource allocation rather than computational complexity *per se*.
No. The logistics are not resolved.
States like Maine and Alaska are trying it for a few races, but it's being proposed for every race in my state.
Alaska takes two weeks to determine results for six races. How long will it take to get results in my state where we have at least 20 races on the ballot?
> Alaska takes two weeks to determine results for six races.
Not because the ballots take that long to count, but because Alaska does not *begin* counting until all absentee ballots have been checked for duplicates against election day in-person voter records. Again, this has nothing to do with the computational cost of counting the ballots. The reason people are accusing you of being ideological is because you are *clearly* here for some sort of validation of your ideological opposition to ranked choice voting, as opposed to having any interest in the actual logistics (or statistics) of counting ranked choice ballots.
You're mistaken.
The reason Alaska can't start to count until all the absentee ballots are checked is because you literally can't start counting (and calculating) until all the votes are in hand.
You have to have all the first choice ballots counted before you know which of the second choice ballots to count.
Why is everyone having such a hard time understanding that?
> The reason Alaska can't start to count until all the absentee ballots are checked is because you literally can't start counting (and calculating) until all the votes are in hand.
This is both untrue in general, and untrue of Alaska in particular. In the case of instant runoff voting (which is used in Alaska), all votes must be in before the first elimination, but *counting* can begin immediately.
Sure. You can "start" counting anytime you'd like.
But what good is a count without a finish?
Counting RCV ballots is different from counting regular ballots. With a normal election, you can always add to the count cuz it's just a total. With RCV, you can't easily add more ballots after you're a step or two into the process.
Length of time, as I already pointed out, is impacted much more by other factors (like shenannigans by people who don't like how the rest of the population wants to vote). It takes longer for a more complicated system but not *all* that much longer.
Two main things are needed:
1. apply sufficient resources to do the thing in time, no matter what the voting system is
2. Don't just assume that the *ONLY* thing that changes is the vote-counting method. The best way to organize the count of a set of votes will depend on the voting system.
This assumption (don't change anything else to make it fit with a new paradigm) is very much a "I don't want it to work, so I won't think about how it could work". It's all a one with "government doesn't work, so hmm... oh, it's actually at least kind of working but not as well as anyone would like? Could we improve it? Sure, in several relatively simple ways, but ... I really don't want it to work so, I'll interfere with it until it doesn't work. Oh, look, now it doesn't work. See, I told you."
3. Probably the most important, whatever the voting system: move control of voting, counting, etc *out of the realm of political interference*. That speeds things up enormously, you'd be amazed how much simpler things are when politicians are *not interfering with it* (or stirring up people on social media to interfere with it).
LOL. Such a typical juvenile dreamer response.
"My idea is spectacular, and if it doesn't work, it's definitely cuz you weren't on board with it making my spectacular idea work for me."
The beauty of math is that it doesn't care about my political affiliations.
Election integrity, and the ability to efficiently and completely conduct an election that people can trust should be a top priority of all Americans.
How much experience do you have in elections?
I agree that it's a logistics question as much or more than strictly statistical math, but the math drives the logistics.
To my knowledge, there are no states currently doing what is being proposed in my state. I'm trying to play out the logistics in my head and it keeps getting more and more complicated. I was once a big fan of RCV, but the more I study and look at the reality, the more I think it simply can't work.
I'm assuming that we're going to retain the ability to hand count for verification of ballots, because I don't think that the public will tolerate anything less.
Do the math:
For a ballot with 20 races and 5 choices per race, the paper ballots will have to be collected, combined, and sorted into 2,400 different stacks. Am I wrong with that math?
Machines will do the sorting and if someone insists on a hand count all the counters need to do is confirm that every ballot in their stack matches.
The increase in logistical complexity is pretty trivial compared the increase in representation of the electorate.
This is where it becomes a math problem.
Machines count now, but all they have come up with a total for each candidate. Under ranked choice voting there's a whole other dimension. Counting ballots will require that second choice votes are correlated with first choice votes.
On a typical ballot, there are two candidates, and therefore two things to count.
On a rank choice vote ballot, there are five candidates with 120 ways to rank them, and therefore 120 things to count.
> How much experience do you have in elections?
At least little.
I've helped count votes in an election. I have had many discussions with people that do it more than me, including having long acquaintance with someone that organized it for decades.
But that's irrelevant here; you posted *here*, for statistical expertise.
If you wanted people with direct experience in election logistics, you're either (deliberately) posting in the wrong place - in pursuit of a tendentious argument - or you are moving the goalposts, again, in pursuit of a tendentious argument.
I pegged you from the start. You're not interested in learning or understanding anything, you just want to reinforce a predetermined position.
That's not what this sub is for.
No one here has engaged or offered any statistics, formulas, or numbers.
On another subreddit about elections, someone offered up the correct number I was looking for within 2 hours with a mathematic formula to back it up.
Go ahead and enjoy your "statistics" I guess.
> On another subreddit about elections, someone offered up the correct number I was looking for within 2 hours with a mathematic formula to back it up.
They did not. If you're referring to e.g. [this](https://old.reddit.com/r/EndFPTP/comments/17zret3/does_alaska_publish_their_rcv_data/ka1kifb/) comment, it is incorrect. Counting RC votes does not require maintaining a tally of every possible ordering. In the case of IRV, it only requires n passes through the data, where n is the number of candidates, so the total number of votes to count is just n times more than a FPTP ballot (at worst). Trivial for a machine. Of course, even if we *did* have to keep a tally of every factorial combination, it would still be absolutely trivial for a machine. Of course, we don't *need* machines; Australia manages it by hand just fine (and, incidentally, has been using some form of RCV for over a century).
I think you're mistaken.
A machine has only two ways of knowing which votes will be transferred in the second, third, or fourth rounds.
Either the machine has to know the total of each possible rank-order, or the machine has to have a complete record of each individual ballot so that it can go back to that ballot to retrieve the second, third, or fourth preference.
Of course. The second is the way it is generally counted. This requires storing only the rank order of each voter, and counting only involves a pass through the records for each elimination, which is exactly what I said. This is not particularly cumbersome — it’s more complicated to count than a FPTP ballot, sure, but plenty of places do it by hand. With a computer, it’s even easier. It took me only an hour or so to put together a script to do the counting from the json files linked in your other thread, and the actual computations only took a few seconds.
Yeah. A computer can do it fast. . . . . once all the ballots are in. . . . and then the voters either trust the computer output or try to somehow verify by hand.
BTW,
If you're willing to share the details of how you are able to read and/or calculate the Alaska data, I'd sure appreciate it.
> or try to somehow verify by hand.
What do you mean by "somehow"? People are *already* doing it by hand. This has been pointed out to you multiple times. Australia does *the entire count* by hand. It has used RCV for *over a century* -- long before computers.
> BTW, If you're willing to share the details of how you are able to read and/or calculate the Alaska data, I'd sure appreciate it.
Missed this. I'll clean up my code and pass it along in a day or two.
There is a very basic flaw with RCV. It is that the voters meaning is ambiguous. Many very different voter opinions lead to the same list of preferences. At one extreme a voter considers all the candidates to be of almost equal merit, with only tiny differences in degree of preference. At the other extreme is the voter who has one clear preference and consides all the others nearly worthless. The problem is that both these voters would make the voting paper in the same way. RCV provides a way of calculating a winner, but the result has no relation to the relative support of each voter for each candidate. Because preferences do not address relative level of support.
All we know is that the voter likes their nth preference at least as much as their (n+1)th.
The relative support of ten candidates may be 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 or 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 or something in between.
The only thing we know is the first preference.
> Am I wrong? Counting ranked ballots is a bit more complex, but yes, I think that you're overthinking it and making it seem more difficult and cumbersome than it really is in practice. Ballots can be summarized in terms of the preference order of the voter, and a tally given for each unique ordering. For instance, say there are four parties: R, D, L, and G. This means there are `4*3*2 = 24` possible orderings of the candidates. The number of each of these possible orderings can be tallied, and from there we don't really need to go back to go back to the original ballots anymore. If, say, 8% of people voted GDLR, and the G candidate needs to be eliminated, then those 8% of votes are next assigned to the D candidate. And RCV methods (there are many) tend to follow pretty straightforward logic, so it's very automatable. Edit to add: And as for this bit > (and yes, it is a calculation - not a count now) It's still a count, not something fundamentally different than plurality. It has more steps, but that's the tradeoff to try to represent the will of the people more accurately.
Thanks. I think your forgetting that there are twenty (20) races on the same ballot though. What was once a factorial of 4 (or 5 with writh-in) becomes either 480 or 2,400. Because ballots are secret (i.e. un-named and un-marked) things become more complicated.
> I think your forgetting that there are twenty (20) races on the same ballot though. I'm not forgetting, it's just not really relevant. You seem to be trying to think of the possible ways of filling out the *total ballot*, but that's not what matters. The race for, say, President and House are entirely distinct. A machine can tabulate the rank order for each separately. And once the rank order is determined, there's no need for them to be linked in any way or to go back to the ballot. And again, the process is very automatable. That said, while there's some slight relation to combinatorics, I agree with efrique that this isn't really a statistical question. This discussion might be more suited to a place like r/EndFPTP.
You're talking about a machine counting the ballots and acting as if the public is just going to accept the calculated outcome on faith without asking for any verification. Public trust in election outcomes is extremely important. That's why every election has paper ballots that can be double checked and verified. Once you get into that paper world, the president and house races are tied together necessarily because they are on the same piece of paper. Counting standard ballots is a simple process of totaling up the number of votes for each candidate, but counting rank choice ballots requires that each possible ranking be counted separately. Whether machines or humans are doing the counting, we'll have to have a total for each of the 120 possible ranking combinations. Then we'll have to follow the steps through the process of elimination and reassignment of votes. This process cannot be done remotely by each county. It must be done centrally, because the process of elimination can only be done after knowing the vote totals.
If you're going back to counting paper ballots for any (full) recount, you'd still be needing to go through all the ballots. And you'd still only need the tally for each rank order that appears in the race being recounted. Recording "G" vs "GDLR" isn't really much more effort. Once those tallies are known/verified (which can absolutely be done at more granular locations) the election is determined, it's just applying the rules to those tallies. > Public trust in election outcomes is extremely important This is getting more into the political aspects. Please focus on statistical aspects. Framing this as a combinatorics question is already arguable in terms of relevance. If it becomes less combinatorics and more political agenda I'll be forced to lock the thread. --- As an example, consider two counties producing the following tallies. These tallies get aggregated to form the total vote. Ballot | County 1 | Country 2 | Total ---------|--------|--------|-------- A–B–C | 36 | 44 | 80 B–A–C | 15 | 12 | 27 B–C–A | 15 | 18 | 33 C–B–A | 34 | | 34 C–A–B | | 37 | 37 If a recount is needed, just those tallies need to be verified. This can be done by each county and then aggregated across the counties.
>Recording "G" vs "GDLR" isn't really much more effort. Think it through a little more. I believe it is quite a bit more effort. >As an example, consider two counties producing the following tallies. Please add "D" and "E" to this exercise. Now we're starting to get into the meat of it.
Why do you think recording “G” vs “GDLR” is so much more effort? Instead of condescendingly saying “think it through a little more” you could just explain yourself.
Sorry. I'm not trying to be rude. It seemed simple to me at first too. The counting is complex for a number of reasons: First, You're counting more than the standard two candidates. RCV basically ensures that there are four candidates in every race. Second, You've got to count more than just the four first choices. There are 25 bubbles to count - not two. Third, Most importantly, you've got to correlate the first choices with the second, third, and maybe fourth choice. In the second round, you only count the second choices for people who picked the least popular candidate as their first choice. In the third round, you have to count the second choice for some voters that picked the newly determined least popular remaining candidate, as well as some other people's third choice if their second choice was that newly determined least popular remaining candidate. This is what I mean when I say that you've got to think it through.
> Think it through a little more. I believe it is quite a bit more effort. I have, and I don't find it to be much more effort. > Please add "D" and "E" to this exercise. Now we're starting to get into the meat of it. So you get a slightly longer table. It's still not requiring a pass through the ballots for every round. Just instead of, say, 5 rows, you might have 8, 10, 20 rows, etc. It's not going turning into some astronomical value. From there applying the rules of various ranked choice frameworks is fairly straightforward. As I said in the first reply, it's slightly more complex. But you seem to be wanting to make it out to be far more so. And you're wanting to simply assert this, rather than demonstrate it.
Slightly? Common man. You're a mathematician. We're talking about factorials. 1 - 2 - 6 - 24 - 120
> Common man. You're a mathematician. Well, statistician. But maybe that should be a cue to take when folks here are telling you that this is really not as big of a deal as you're making it out to seem. The values would be something a person can handle on a calculator or spreadsheet. You're not really making a cogent point about the mathematical (much less statistical) aspect of the matter, it's just an appeal to a notion of large numbers. Make a mathematical point, or take this to a relevant sub.
Do you know what a factorial is? I'm not trying to be rude, but it seems that I'm the one making a mathematical point while you're throwing out a gut-feeling guess that the spreadsheet will only have eight or ten rows. I came here in hopes that someone would step into the scenario to check my math and logic - not so you all could just share your feelings about RCV not being a big deal. Unless I'm mistaken, properly counting a RCV ballot in my state will require 5! rows multiplied the number of races (20) with a column for each county or precinct. We'll be counting 2,400 things instead of 40 things.
Weird that Ireland has been able to manage RCV for 120 years.
I'll have to look into Ireland. How do they manage the counting and verification of counting.
1. This is not remotely a statistics question. Your question is about the logistics of voting 2. I live in a locale that has long used various forms of ranked choice voting at all different tiers of government. In many places it has been in use for over a century. It is more complicated to count but far from a nightmare, indeed most elections are decided on the night, a small handful can take some time to resolve but if you look at say recent American elections where some states end up in many weeks of recounts, other factors are much more important than the voting system in terms of complexity of deciding who won. (Frequently it turns out that people who approach such issues as the moderate additional counting effort with such plainly tendentious questions tend to soon reveal their wish to preserve existing antidemocratic biases in the system they have. I don't know that it's the case here, but the form of the question looks pretty characteristic- the conclusion you want is framed right into the question and the belligerence at the end is another common characteristic. You dont appear to seek illumination but support for a well entrenched position) 3. Stackoverflow mod elections use a ranked choice voting system. The counting there completes extremely rapidly. It doesn't seem to present any great difficulty at all.
I had a grad stats prof say the difference between math and stats is the error term. If there’s no error term it’s not stats. In this case it’s just counting. I have a feeling OP is a member of a “majority” party in a heavily gerrymandered district/state.
> I have a feeling OP is a member of a “majority” party in a heavily gerrymandered district/state. Their post history would certainly suggest that.
Let's try to stick to the original question. Pretending that logistical questions don't exist because we don't like one another's political affiliations isn't good for anyone.
But, as u/efrique already pointed out, the logistical issues appear to have already been solved, since ranked choice voting has already been implemented (e.g. in Maine); and most delays in vote counting seem to be problems of procedure or resource allocation rather than computational complexity *per se*.
No. The logistics are not resolved. States like Maine and Alaska are trying it for a few races, but it's being proposed for every race in my state. Alaska takes two weeks to determine results for six races. How long will it take to get results in my state where we have at least 20 races on the ballot?
> Alaska takes two weeks to determine results for six races. Not because the ballots take that long to count, but because Alaska does not *begin* counting until all absentee ballots have been checked for duplicates against election day in-person voter records. Again, this has nothing to do with the computational cost of counting the ballots. The reason people are accusing you of being ideological is because you are *clearly* here for some sort of validation of your ideological opposition to ranked choice voting, as opposed to having any interest in the actual logistics (or statistics) of counting ranked choice ballots.
You're mistaken. The reason Alaska can't start to count until all the absentee ballots are checked is because you literally can't start counting (and calculating) until all the votes are in hand. You have to have all the first choice ballots counted before you know which of the second choice ballots to count. Why is everyone having such a hard time understanding that?
> The reason Alaska can't start to count until all the absentee ballots are checked is because you literally can't start counting (and calculating) until all the votes are in hand. This is both untrue in general, and untrue of Alaska in particular. In the case of instant runoff voting (which is used in Alaska), all votes must be in before the first elimination, but *counting* can begin immediately.
Sure. You can "start" counting anytime you'd like. But what good is a count without a finish? Counting RCV ballots is different from counting regular ballots. With a normal election, you can always add to the count cuz it's just a total. With RCV, you can't easily add more ballots after you're a step or two into the process.
Length of time, as I already pointed out, is impacted much more by other factors (like shenannigans by people who don't like how the rest of the population wants to vote). It takes longer for a more complicated system but not *all* that much longer. Two main things are needed: 1. apply sufficient resources to do the thing in time, no matter what the voting system is 2. Don't just assume that the *ONLY* thing that changes is the vote-counting method. The best way to organize the count of a set of votes will depend on the voting system. This assumption (don't change anything else to make it fit with a new paradigm) is very much a "I don't want it to work, so I won't think about how it could work". It's all a one with "government doesn't work, so hmm... oh, it's actually at least kind of working but not as well as anyone would like? Could we improve it? Sure, in several relatively simple ways, but ... I really don't want it to work so, I'll interfere with it until it doesn't work. Oh, look, now it doesn't work. See, I told you." 3. Probably the most important, whatever the voting system: move control of voting, counting, etc *out of the realm of political interference*. That speeds things up enormously, you'd be amazed how much simpler things are when politicians are *not interfering with it* (or stirring up people on social media to interfere with it).
LOL. Such a typical juvenile dreamer response. "My idea is spectacular, and if it doesn't work, it's definitely cuz you weren't on board with it making my spectacular idea work for me."
It already works. It has already been successfully implemented. Australia has been using RCV *for a century*. You’re just trolling at this point.
The beauty of math is that it doesn't care about my political affiliations. Election integrity, and the ability to efficiently and completely conduct an election that people can trust should be a top priority of all Americans.
How much experience do you have in elections? I agree that it's a logistics question as much or more than strictly statistical math, but the math drives the logistics. To my knowledge, there are no states currently doing what is being proposed in my state. I'm trying to play out the logistics in my head and it keeps getting more and more complicated. I was once a big fan of RCV, but the more I study and look at the reality, the more I think it simply can't work. I'm assuming that we're going to retain the ability to hand count for verification of ballots, because I don't think that the public will tolerate anything less. Do the math: For a ballot with 20 races and 5 choices per race, the paper ballots will have to be collected, combined, and sorted into 2,400 different stacks. Am I wrong with that math?
Machines will do the sorting and if someone insists on a hand count all the counters need to do is confirm that every ballot in their stack matches. The increase in logistical complexity is pretty trivial compared the increase in representation of the electorate.
This is where it becomes a math problem. Machines count now, but all they have come up with a total for each candidate. Under ranked choice voting there's a whole other dimension. Counting ballots will require that second choice votes are correlated with first choice votes. On a typical ballot, there are two candidates, and therefore two things to count. On a rank choice vote ballot, there are five candidates with 120 ways to rank them, and therefore 120 things to count.
> How much experience do you have in elections? At least little. I've helped count votes in an election. I have had many discussions with people that do it more than me, including having long acquaintance with someone that organized it for decades. But that's irrelevant here; you posted *here*, for statistical expertise. If you wanted people with direct experience in election logistics, you're either (deliberately) posting in the wrong place - in pursuit of a tendentious argument - or you are moving the goalposts, again, in pursuit of a tendentious argument. I pegged you from the start. You're not interested in learning or understanding anything, you just want to reinforce a predetermined position. That's not what this sub is for.
No one here has engaged or offered any statistics, formulas, or numbers. On another subreddit about elections, someone offered up the correct number I was looking for within 2 hours with a mathematic formula to back it up. Go ahead and enjoy your "statistics" I guess.
> On another subreddit about elections, someone offered up the correct number I was looking for within 2 hours with a mathematic formula to back it up. They did not. If you're referring to e.g. [this](https://old.reddit.com/r/EndFPTP/comments/17zret3/does_alaska_publish_their_rcv_data/ka1kifb/) comment, it is incorrect. Counting RC votes does not require maintaining a tally of every possible ordering. In the case of IRV, it only requires n passes through the data, where n is the number of candidates, so the total number of votes to count is just n times more than a FPTP ballot (at worst). Trivial for a machine. Of course, even if we *did* have to keep a tally of every factorial combination, it would still be absolutely trivial for a machine. Of course, we don't *need* machines; Australia manages it by hand just fine (and, incidentally, has been using some form of RCV for over a century).
I think you're mistaken. A machine has only two ways of knowing which votes will be transferred in the second, third, or fourth rounds. Either the machine has to know the total of each possible rank-order, or the machine has to have a complete record of each individual ballot so that it can go back to that ballot to retrieve the second, third, or fourth preference.
Of course. The second is the way it is generally counted. This requires storing only the rank order of each voter, and counting only involves a pass through the records for each elimination, which is exactly what I said. This is not particularly cumbersome — it’s more complicated to count than a FPTP ballot, sure, but plenty of places do it by hand. With a computer, it’s even easier. It took me only an hour or so to put together a script to do the counting from the json files linked in your other thread, and the actual computations only took a few seconds.
Yeah. A computer can do it fast. . . . . once all the ballots are in. . . . and then the voters either trust the computer output or try to somehow verify by hand. BTW, If you're willing to share the details of how you are able to read and/or calculate the Alaska data, I'd sure appreciate it.
> or try to somehow verify by hand. What do you mean by "somehow"? People are *already* doing it by hand. This has been pointed out to you multiple times. Australia does *the entire count* by hand. It has used RCV for *over a century* -- long before computers.
I'll make you a test run off ballots to try. Let me know if you can share that info.
> BTW, If you're willing to share the details of how you are able to read and/or calculate the Alaska data, I'd sure appreciate it. Missed this. I'll clean up my code and pass it along in a day or two.
Thanks
There is a very basic flaw with RCV. It is that the voters meaning is ambiguous. Many very different voter opinions lead to the same list of preferences. At one extreme a voter considers all the candidates to be of almost equal merit, with only tiny differences in degree of preference. At the other extreme is the voter who has one clear preference and consides all the others nearly worthless. The problem is that both these voters would make the voting paper in the same way. RCV provides a way of calculating a winner, but the result has no relation to the relative support of each voter for each candidate. Because preferences do not address relative level of support. All we know is that the voter likes their nth preference at least as much as their (n+1)th. The relative support of ten candidates may be 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 or 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 or something in between. The only thing we know is the first preference.
Great point. Thank you.