Clearer statement of lost rank votes in IRV with illustrations

[wolftune]

Thought of this per http://www.equal.vote/srvvsirv first and foremost.

I suggest a short summary at the top that says something like:

---

Traditional instant-runoff: voters set ranked order (no ties!); candidates with fewest 1st-choice votes are eliminated one-by-one in series of rounds. Voters think their rankings all get counted, but when candidate is eliminated, all remaining 2nd and 3rd choice votes for them never count at all.

Score Runoff: voters score as many candidates as they want; one instant-runoff round considers preferences between the top two scoring candidates. All scores from all voters get counted equally.

---

(Then maybe say "Read on for more details and discussion of the differences and similarities between these two forms of instant runoff voting")

[SaraWolf]

I'm not sure what you mean by "..but when [a] candidate is eliminated, all remaining 2nd and 3rd choice votes for them never count at all." How about this instead:

Traditional instant-runoff: voters rank their preferred candidates in order (no ties!); Those with the fewest 1st-choice votes are eliminated one-by-one in a series of rounds. Voters think their rankings all get counted, but if your candidate is pretty strong and doesn't get eliminated until later in the game your second and third choice may never be taken into account. This means some voters get more say than others! That's not fair and it can actually lead to a spoiler effect where the best candidate is eliminated early before their votes are all totaled.

Score Runoff: voters score as many candidates as they want. All the scores are counted in one round so the first, second, third and-so-on choices for all voters get taken into account. Always!

[wolftune]

That wording is too vague. We can be precise while not being jargonny.

There are two angels to take, both easy to illustrate, to express briefly and clearly.

Illustration ideas

• Candidate perspective: At the round where you are eliminated, many of the outstanding ballots can have 2nd, 3rd, etc. rankings for you, but those never count.
  • Illustration: giant stack of votes are left over when candidate A gets eliminated, indicate that a large portion have candidate A in 2nd place . What happened to those votes? Gone.
• Voter perspective: Every round where your 1st choice goes on, another candidate was eliminated. So, as your 1st choice passes rounds, your later choices disappear with your rankings of them never counted.
  • Illustration: one ballot with rank order. Round after round, your 2nd, 3rd, 4th choices all get crossed out with your vote not counting (your ranking of them is irrelevant because your 1st choice is still in the running), and then your 1st choice gets crossed out — boom, you're disenfranchised, you don't get to move to 2nd or 3rd choice because they're already gone.

These would be easy to show in simple illustrations. Just show each visual round-by-round and everyone can SEE the uncounted votes.

And this sort of clarity should be in the text before we get illustrations. So instead of "pretty strong" and "later… may never…" we can just say "your 1st choice eliminated in a later round than your 2nd and 3rd means, against the impression you had when voting, those preferences never get counted" or similar.

[wolftune]

@nardo could you add labels here and mark this item a higher-priority one?

[SaraWolf]

This is a super important and confusing concept. The text above still seems confusing to me but I'd love to see a sketch of the comic idea! I'm a pretty good artist so I could do a final once the concept is laid out unless you want to.

Option 1: Voters who's preferred candidates are eliminated in order, from first choice to last, will have their votes counted 3 or more times. Once for each round. On the other hand if your choices are eliminated in reverse order your vote may never be counted at all.

Option 2: If your 2nd and 3rd choices are eliminated before your first choice is eliminated your vote may never count at all. It's unfair to take all of some voters choices into account but disregard the choices of other voters.

[wolftune]

@SaraWolf

It's this: if your 2nd and 3rd choices are eliminated in earlier rounds than your 1st choice, then you never get your 2nd and 3rd choices counted. In other words, you sort of get your 1st choice counted, but they still lose, and your work filling out and thinking about your 2nd and 3rd choices is thrown out without consideration.

Here's another way to frame it: A voter whose 2nd and 3rd choices get eliminated before their 1st is the identical to a voter who marks only a 1st choice and doesn't use the ranking system at all. Which is to say that you give the premise that the voter gets some influence by providing their rank choice, but they don't actually.

Here's the illustrations in text:

Candidate-focused illustration

1. There are 4 candidates, A B C D, highlight B for illustration
2. show piles of tons of ballots and indicate that B has a a modest number of 1st-choice ballots in their column, maybe candidate A has a good bit more than any others and B, C, D are all similar, but B is just a bit less than the others.
3. peek under the other columns and see that 100% of A, C, and D voters put B 2nd (so everyone wants B as 1st or 2nd choice)
4. show that B is eliminated and their pile gets moved to a mix of the others
5. show candidate B saying "what happened to everyone else marking me 2nd? Those never count?"

Voter-focused illustration

(this is the more important one)

1. Show the voter's ballot filled out in this order: A>B>C>D (perhaps just A>B>C implying that they don't like D, not sure if better to rank all or only top 3 for illustration)
2. show that round one eliminates B by showing that line in their ballot being crossed off (their ballot is still active for A, of course)
3. show the next round, C gets eliminated
4. show that in the final runoff D wins (show this by crossing off A, as that makes it clear how not-at-all did this voter get any say in the result)
5. show the A voter saying: "what happened to my 2nd or 3rd choice rankings? They never count?"

For this latter illustration, there's no need to describe how many of what votes moved where in each round. All that matters is that this voter had their rankings discarded. The core thing is to just show people this is what IRV does to some voters, nearly always. Basically every single IRV election in reality will do this either partly or fully to some portion of the voters.

[SaraWolf]

That's more clear. I can probably get to that this weekend! Have you guys seen the comic from Australia that I have up on my RCV page? https://www.facebook.com/rankedchoicevoting/photos/a.558195497696763.1073741829.558170711032575/558195527696760/?type=3&theater

On another note I'm concerned that if we produce great education material against IRV that it'll be used elsewhere to fight IRV without promoting SRV. I'm thinking it might be a good idea to make sure that every piece of PR has info about both together so it can't be misused.

On Thu, Feb 16, 2017 at 4:12 PM, Aaron Wolf notifications@github.com wrote:

@SaraWolf https://github.com/SaraWolf

It's this: if your 2nd and 3rd choices are eliminated in earlier rounds than your 1st choice, then you never get your 2nd and 3rd choices counted. In other words, you sort of get your 1st choice counted, but they still lose, and your work filling out and thinking about your 2nd and 3rd choices is thrown out without consideration.

Here's another way to frame it: A voter whose 2nd and 3rd choices get eliminated before their 1st is the identical to a voter who marks only a 1st choice and doesn't use the ranking system at all. Which is to say that you give the premise that the voter gets some influence by providing their rank choice, but they don't actually.

Here's the illustrations in text: Candidate-focused illustration

1. There are 4 candidates, A B C D, highlight B for illustration
2. show piles of tons of ballots and indicate that B has a a modest number of 1st-choice ballots in their column, maybe candidate A has a good bit more than any others and B, C, D are all similar, but B is just a bit less than the others.
3. look under the other columns and see that 100% of A, C, and D voters put B 2nd (so everyone wants B as 1st or 2nd choice)
4. show that B is eliminated and their pile gets moved to a mix of the others
5. show candidate B saying what happened to everyone else marking me 2nd? Those never count?

Voter-focused illustration

(this is the more important one)

1. Show the voter's ballot filled out in this order: A>B>C>D (perhaps just A>B>C implying that they don't like D, not sure if better to rank all or only top 3 for illustration)
2. show that round one eliminates B by showing that line in their ballot being crossed off (their ballot is still active for A, of course)
3. show the next round, C gets eliminated
4. show that in the final runoff D wins (show this by crossing off A, as that makes it clear how not-at-all did this voter get any say in the result)
5. show the A voter saying: "what happened to my 2nd or 3rd choice rankings? They never count?"

For this latter illustration, there's no need to describe how many of what votes moved where in each round. All that matters is that this voter had their rankings discarded. The core thing is to just show people this is what IRV does to some voters, nearly always. Basically every single IRV election in reality will do this either partly or fully to some portion of the voters.

— You are receiving this because you were mentioned. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub https://github.com/nardo/Equal.Vote/issues/16#issuecomment-280507877, or mute the thread https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AYZR6_N6R-kTKZwS0hHwChrdB4nNeVKvks5rdOXWgaJpZM4MCdel .

[wolftune]

Re: the anti-IRV issue, the fact is that I'm not convinced that IRV is even positive. It obviously has advantages over FPTP in aggregate when just used as a ballot system abstractly (i.e. the VSE analysis shows IRV as improvement over FPTP). But I think that the complexity and problems and lack of significant enough improvement make efforts for IRV potentially negative. They take time, energy, costs, and political capital just to get us a mediocre system with serious flaws. If all that energy were instead spent on ending gerrymandering or many other reforms, it would be far better spent. Besides, passing IRV and then seeing it repealed is worse than nothing, and so it pushing for it to see the reform go down.

If we convince people to pursue truly valuable reforms, that's positive whether the reform is SRV or non-ballot related pro-democracy reforms.

But anyway, everything we do will be CC-BY licensed, and that means anything we publish will be legally required to give credit to the source. And we should state the source as Equal.vote so any time people distribute our material, it should point them back to equal.vote where they can learn about SRV.

And finally, my view is that if people all understand IRV and actually, to my surprise, come up with good talking points and strategies around it that still present it accurately, then that will be far better than promoting it on false pretenses. I'm mainly interested in people actually understanding things if they are going to argue for them.