More politicking

[imc]

As you will no doubt know by now, I survived the nomination process for the LiveJournal Advisory Board election and will therefore appear in the poll which is due to be posted tomorrow.
There has been a certain amount of controversy about the rules for counting the votes because they are not actually that clear, and some interpretations of them

Comments

[emperor]

Why can't they just use condorcet and have done?

[imc]

Well, "Instant Runoff" is cool (to Americans), and no one has heard of Condorcet…

Besides, they are only allowing you to vote for three choices so the result is always going to be far from perfect whichever system they choose.

[cos]

The major problem here is only allowing three votes. There's no way to do a sensible IRV or condorcet vote if you impose that limitation.

[caramel_betty]

An interesting quirk is that it appears not to be IRV as she is normally done regarding eliminations if the final rank is tied. e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting#Handling_ties

It appears from the code, and your write-up, that if A had 10 votes, and each of B, C and D had 5 votes, B, C and D would be eliminated simultaneously. If B, C, and D voters voted for all of B, C and D in any order (e.g. the voters want to stop A at all costs), most ordinary IRV eliminations would somehow pick one of them to eliminate. So, say, eliminate C. A=10, B=7, D=8. Eliminate B, and all the votes transfer to D. D wins.

If your reading is right - and it seems to be accurate - this would make A win.

[anonymous]

For a robust set of IRV rules that avoid all the nonsense about 51%, see:
http://www.electoral-reform.org.uk/article.php?id=116

These special rules for IRV (= Alternative Vote in UK) were written in 1978 specially to avoid all the "51%" type of complications.

I commend these rules to you and all who are interested in IRV.

James Gilmour
Edinburgh, Scotland

[imc]

That's fine but I don't get to pick the rules - LiveJournal management does - I just get to talk about them.

[jiggery_pokery]

The upshot of this is that putting me in first place on your ballot will not automatically let the troll candidate get in by default, provided you use the second and third place votes wisely.

Thinking about it further, I think you may be right and I may be wrong here. Sorry about that. Will need to think some more, though.

[pne]

(i.e., not 51% as the rules say; I am guessing here that they meant to say "more than 50%")

I think I've heard this called "50%+1" several times. (Mathematically, I suppose that means "floor(numvotes*0.5)+1".)