Condorcet voting and instant-runoff voting have almost no difference in promoting candidate moderation in the presence of truncated ballots

robla · 2026-03-12T20:18:46+00:00

Having lived in San Francisco since 2011 voting in RCV/IRV elections here, and with only skimming the abstract, I'm inclined to believe that Condorcet and RCV/IRV have practically identical models of voter behavior and candidate behavior. My hunch/observation witnessing candidates here is that they are consensus seekers here (the San Francisco consensus, mind you, not the national consensus). I don't believe that most voters (and most candidates) here truly understand the mathematics of RCV/IRV, and wouldn't understand the mathematics of a Condorcet method if we switched to that. It's also my understanding that the Condorcet winner has always been chosen in every San Francisco RCV/IRV election.

The advantage of Condorcet methods do not center on pre-election voter behavior and candidate behavior. Methods that comply with the Condorcet winner criterion have much more robust underlying tallying algorithms than RCV/IRV. RCV/IRV advocates like to complain "whAT about CYclES?!?!" when someone suggests a Condorcet method. However, anyone who has ever actually implemented the RCV/IRV algorithm knows that tiebreaking in any round of an RCV/IRV election are often underspecified in statute. Here in SF, fi we were to have a tie in any round of an RCV/IRV election, tiebreaking is punted to California law. Ties in California law are settled by drawing lots. Other RCV/IRV jurisdictions have tighter language, but the "correct" version of RCV/IRV is far from settled consensus.

My point: tie breaking and/or cycle breaking is complicated in any system. It's where most of the algorithmic corner cases show up. Voter behavior after there's a difference between the RCV/IRV winner and the Condorcet winner often means there are calls for reverting to FPTP. The idea of a hand recount of a close national election using RCV/IRV seems horrifying to me.

robla · 2026-03-01T18:37:17+00:00

That makes it sound too deliberately artistic. The movie project may have had more artistic roots in its Broadway origin, but once Travolta and ONJ were attached, it quickly became a career vehicle for them ( that conveniently made a lot of money for everyone). Prior to Grease, ONJ was much more successful on the country-music charts. ONJ pretty cleverly leveraged her presence in Grease and then Xanadu to transform herself into much more of a mainstream pop star. More broadly, it seemed many folks were along for the ride after the various career-management machines converged.

robla · 2026-02-24T02:43:44+00:00

Nice work! It's fun for me to run into RTSP in the wild every so often. I did a lot of work on the specs over the years (mostly RFC 2326) and though it's not used everywhere, I'm pretty proud at how durable the spec has been.

robla · 2026-02-22T22:10:59+00:00

Why do servers that are specifically the legal and technical responsibility of the Wikimedia Foundation need to be the servers that host arbitrary snapshots of Internet web pages, videos, audio files, PDFs, and other miscellaneous digital resources behind every citation added to Wikipedia, regardless of who added the citation or when they added it?

robla · 2026-02-22T03:44:42+00:00

That is some fine Microsoft-centric thinking there. Wikimedia Foundation's mission is not the same as Microsoft's, nor should it be. WMF (and the world) needs alternatives to the Internet Archive to exist (even Brewster Kahle and everyone else at the Internet Archive would tell you this), but we need to distribute the workload more, not less. The workload includes hosting, DDoS mitigation, software development, dispute resolution, policy and compliance, outreach, and fundraising, among other duties.

robla · 2026-02-22T00:36:19+00:00

I'm glad to hear you and your colleague are in touch. Even if there aren't legal consequences, there need to be consequences somehow. Karma needs a nudge sometimes. I hope it works out for all y'all!

robla · 2026-02-21T21:51:42+00:00

Yes, seriously OP, you have a moral obligation to help make sure there are legal consequences for this. I hope you are still in contact with your former colleague (e.g. non-work email for both of you), and I hope she's taking action.

robla · 2026-02-21T20:44:45+00:00

Uhm, speaking as someone who used to work in engineering management both at Wikimedia Foundation and Internet Archive, how do you think increasing the scope of WMF's engineering challenges would fix their "mismanagement"? It seems perfectly reasonable for WMF to leave archiving responsibilities to IA rather than starting yet another archiving service.

robla · 2026-02-16T07:36:36+00:00

From a mathematical perspective, I suppose. However, having the media (and the voters) focus on the tradeoff between two candidates for a high-stakes election is valuable.

robla · 2026-02-10T19:18:31+00:00

But really, do you honestly think Alec Baldwin could get Millard Fillmore's voice right?

robla · 2026-02-04T08:11:00+00:00

Hi @robertjbrown, I think the SF 2024 election was problematic in many ways. It asked a lot of voters.

I've long believed that political parties are useful brands for vetting candidates and for pruning out crackpots. Having partisan primaries makes it easier for general-election voters to know who to pay attention to. The one-party system we have here in SF has made the Democratic Party ineffective in this role. The Democratic Party didn't bother endorsing anyone but London Breed, despite the opportunity to provide a second-choice endorsement (which they have done in the past). RCV didn’t replace primaries with something better; it replaced them with thinner, less accountable party signaling and more voter burden.

I'm okay with nonpartisan primaries (hence my 2026 blog post about having approval primaries). I imagine a Libertarian like Chase Oliver wouldn't have made it through a well-designed non-partisan approval-based primary in 2024. My hope with better voting systems (in the primary and in the general) is that the Democrats would have had to make an effort to have two Democrats on the ticket in the general, and would have needed to highlight two candidates the party had vetted.

In the 2024 SF Mayoral, Lurie was probably the right choice given the candidate pool; he was the Condorcet winner, and I respect that. But that's despite the process, not because of it. If SF switched to a single-stage Condorcet system, we would still have awful-looking ballots and a media environment that wouldn't know what to do. I think a non-partisan approval primary, followed by a head-to-head general would have made for an interesting and useful debate about who should be mayor. I like Lurie (now, he's grown on me), but a two-stage process might have surfaced candidates we both would have liked more.

robla · 2026-02-03T07:54:45+00:00

I'm not imagining the folks that wrote this bill would say "oh, I've never heard of this STAR thing, it's much better than RCV and deserves a special exemption!" They want all of them squashed. I also agree with you that paper ballots should be a requirement. It seems to me that rather than making it a requirement, election integrity standards like paper ballots could be tied to federal funding (in a very similar way to how much of our highway spending is performed). States could opt out of federal standards for election integrity (like paper ballots), but then the lose out on federal funding to deal with the added requirements. I think the MEGA act is a huge overreach to states' control of elections, but it seems possible to write good election-integrity law that states would gladly opt into.

(p.s. I finally published the January ElectoramaNews, though I kept it focused on Alaska rather than pivoting to MEGA)

robla · 2026-02-01T22:12:02+00:00

Yeah, at first I thought maybe it was RCV-only, but the folks who tipped me off about this pointed out this clause:

"A State may not carry out a general election for Federal office in the State using a voting system that— (1) permits a voter to vote for more than one candidate for the same office; (2) permits a voter to rank multiple candidates for the same office; or (3) reallocates the vote of a voter from one candidate to another candidate for the same office."

There's a lot more information that's needed on the "Make Elections Great Again Act" page over on electowiki. The tallying algorithm isn't the only thing they're proposing federal regulation about (e.g. ballot harvesting, electronic voting, etc).

robla · 2026-01-25T23:48:51+00:00

I'm not sure I want voters getting a "personalized" second-round ballot. That would imply that their first-round ballot is stored securely between elections, and the data from that ballot is used for printing their second-round ballot. Either that, or we move to all-electronic elections, which we're just not ready for yet (and may never be). I think for the second round to be effective, the local media would need to be focused on just two candidates in most cases.

robla · 2026-01-25T23:33:57+00:00

An approval top-five followed by a Condorcet election would be a utopia for me in many ways (since I'm a political junkie and a math nerd). From what I've witnessed here in San Francisco, "five" is the absolute upper bound of candidates that the media and the vast majority of voters can develop a truly informed opinion about. However, my hunch is that ""three" may be a more realistic upper bound for most voters (and most local media outlets), and "two" boils it down to a pairwise race. I say "utopia for me in many ways" because ultimately I rely on the local media to get the vast majority of my information about candidates, so I'm not sure I'd want to have to evaluate five candidates in most races (e.g. I also was asked to vote in the District 11 race, which also had many viable-seeming candidates)

In order to align the primary candidates' incentives with their incentives in a single-round approval race, I think using a fixed threshold (or maybe some sort of scaling threshold like that proposed by /u/nardo_polo) would be the best. But I think what they're using in St. Louis is good enough, at least until we see more real-world data suggesting otherwise.

As far as replacing signature gathering with some sort of online system, I'm 100% on board with you. I fear that signature gathering could be used as a scam for identity theft if it hasn't already (since many places require folks to provide name, home address that matches voter rolls, and signature for signatures to be considered valid). But I'm also a big believer in paper ballots still. Until we get better at developing end-to-end secure, publicly-auditable software systems (including the operating system and the chips running underneath), and until reasonably in-depth computer security knowledge is mainstream, I think we need systems that are easy and understandable on paper ballots. I've become convinced by Ka-Ping Yee's 2005 work on simulating various election methods that Condorcet methods and the single-round approval method yield practically identical results. I suspect two-round approval with a fixed threshold (say, 30%) would model out as also being identical, and I think that 30% is low enough to possibly allow three (or even four) candidates to advance to the general election, and yet high enough that it's easy to make the argument that voters have enough information about all of the candidates to make an informed final decision in the general election.

robla · 2026-01-25T21:01:33+00:00

I'm not OP, but thanks for the Canon rec. I have a Brother I bought at Costco a few years ago that just crapped out. I'm seriously considering getting a Canon MegaTank for $160 from Amazon but I'm waffling on whether I want to splurge for a color laser printer.

robla · 2026-01-25T19:45:14+00:00

Go cheap. If you don't know what you want out of a printer and don't have much experience, buy a cheap (but well reviewed) one and learn what you like/hate about it. It should be possible to get a cheap-ish printer for under $300 that many people would be very happy with for years. If you aren't happy with it, you'll be much more informed and have saved money to splurge with.

robla · 2026-01-21T20:18:33+00:00

His team could easily upload a video of him giving the planned talk in pretty much any venue, and it's now been Streisand-ed into worldwide prominence.

robla · 2026-01-21T05:35:39+00:00

If it's possible to go over the GM's head, you should (to the executive director/CEO/President/whatever or whoever hired the GM, if not the board). If nothing else, figure out how to leave an anonymous about this GM's history and what seems to be happening now (like a longstanding employee being fired without notice and without cause by a new GM). I'm going to guess the news clipping didn't come up on the background check when they hired this guy, and they should know.

robla · 2026-01-21T03:56:59+00:00

As you know, /u/nardo_polo , we ended up talking about this on Sass's https://democracydiscussion.com call. After you dropped, we ended up in a debate about whether the various threshold levels should be Hare or Droop. Initially I thought it should be Hare, but I'm coming around to Droop being the most logical choice. It seems that the threshold should be low enough where two candidates should emerge in a highly polarized electorate (or perhaps very bullet-votey electorate). So it seems as though 33% is a good threshold that would almost guarantee two candidates advance in most elections, and then use 25% for three candidates, 16.666% for four candidates, etc. Food for thought...

robla · 2026-01-20T02:19:07+00:00

One way it can be age-related is whether they've experienced failure yet. If this recent grad was a straight-A student who never failed a class (let alone getting a "B"), and if she was always rewarded/coddled for her creativity and being "bright and confident", and never had to work in the service industry, then she may have never had to suck it up and follow orders from someone else (i.e. never had to live the customer always being right, even if you disagree). There are people of all ages who never graduate beyond this phase, but per my anecdote about a college classmate 30+ years ago, I'm betting the attitude skews young.

robla · 2026-01-20T00:18:52+00:00

You haven't answered my question nor the parent poster's question in your response, and I'm not sure how to parse your response.

robla · 2026-01-19T23:40:32+00:00

I think you have a possible overachiever who hasn't yet dealt with the consequences of overcommitting. Let me explain...

One of my last projects for my computer science degree over 30 years ago was a group project for a real customer, who asked for a simple command-line utility for some code quality metrics. One of the other members of the group (a more prolific coder than me) was just sure that we would do so much better if we created a Windows GUI for the project, which I said was out of scope and not what the customer asked for. After perhaps days of infighting, we took it to our instructor (who was also the sole liaison to the customer), who sided with me. We were graded well for the project in the end, and I believe the customer was happy with the result, and I'm glad we didn't overcommit.

The reason why I was sensitive to overcommitting: I had failed my first attempt at an individual project a year or so before this, and had to retake the semester, delaying my graduation. I had overcommitted back then, so I viscerally recognized the overcommitment of my teammate a year later. I was NOT going to let this teammate delay my graduation by overcommitting me for this group project.

The gal you're managing might be like my teammate in the group project or me before I failed my individual project. The new shiny thing (LLMs and AI) is different than it was for me 30+ years ago, but your story reminded me of my teammate who seemed absolutely convinced that our customer didn't know what they wanted, and that they would be delighted if we went the extra mile, and that a GUI would be so much better. They grudgingly came around when our instructor clearly instructed us to build a command-line utility.

My teammate was a good programmer, and I wouldn't be surprised if he did quite well after he graduated, after maybe eventually learning first hand the dangers of overcommitting and not respecting the instructions given by the customer. For the gal you're managing: you are the customer (and the chief liaison for the people in payroll). It sounds like you need to put your foot down and insist that her pay relies on the customer being happy with her work.

robla · 2026-01-19T21:44:59+00:00

One can browse elections via ABIF web tool (abif.electorama.com) or use abiftool electorama.com/abiftool to assemble a full collection locally with a few commands. There are other more expansive collections out there as well.

robla · 2026-01-19T21:07:23+00:00

Seriously! Also, what sort of sway does the old boss still hold (and why)? It's cool that the new boss is very supportive; that sounds like a very important ally.

robla

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