![]() | This article is rated C-class on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | |||||||||||||||||||||||
|
I'm very surprised by this claim. How do we know the Condorcet winner? Where was this count documented? Are the ballots public? Is it even legal to do a Condorcet count? Tom Ruen ( talk) 06:57, 12 August 2009 (UTC)
The article does not exactly explain why there was a controversy. It mentions the first round plurality, but that only means IRV worked as it was supposed to, id est not electing someone on plurality alone when there is voter splitting. If you look at the candidates as "Left Wing" and "Right Wing," then even from the first round it is obvious that the actual plurality was for a "Left Wing" candidate, a plurality that was split, giving the illusion that the "Right Wing" candidate had a plurality (a real life example of the "Hitler Hyperbole" used in advocating IRV). The IRV voting corrected that in the subsequent rounds, thus choosing the candidate that was most preferred. So, why the controversy and later repeal of the IRV system? Is this just an example of "sour grapes" by the RW supporters, or is it a lack of understanding by the voters on how IRV plays out and its purpose? An explanation of the fundamental whys of the controversy added to this article would be appreciated. — al-Shimoni ( talk) 12:12, 17 November 2012 (UTC)
Hello fellow Wikipedians,
I have just modified 3 external links on Burlington mayoral election, 2009. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
When you have finished reviewing my changes, please set the checked parameter below to true or failed to let others know (documentation at {{
Sourcecheck}}
).
An editor has reviewed this edit and fixed any errors that were found.
Cheers.— InternetArchiveBot ( Report bug) 00:38, 11 November 2016 (UTC)
Hello fellow Wikipedians,
I have just modified 2 external links on Burlington mayoral election, 2009. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
When you have finished reviewing my changes, you may follow the instructions on the template below to fix any issues with the URLs.
An editor has reviewed this edit and fixed any errors that were found.
Cheers.— InternetArchiveBot ( Report bug) 17:59, 27 July 2017 (UTC)
(The first few posts in this section were copied from my talk page) North8000 ( talk) 21:48, 16 February 2018 (UTC)
Regarding this edit , "most-preferred" in this context isn't a subjective term; it's the definition of Condorcet winner. All the voters' expressed preferences are tallied up and one candidate is literally preferred over all the others. I've already provided references explaining this, but we could add more academic refs for the definition, or change the wording to "the candidate preferred more often than the others" or something more explicit, if you think that's better. — Omegatron ( talk) 13:53, 16 February 2018 (UTC)
How about "pairwise champion" as described above, or "pairwise winner"? — Omegatron ( talk) 17:10, 17 March 2018 (UTC)
The text asserts FairVote called it a success for just one reason, citing a primary source from Fairvote that in fact listed three. I added all three in this edit and plan to put all three in again unless someone can convince me why all three do not belong here. NewsAndEventsGuy ( talk) 12:49, 17 February 2018 (UTC)
(copied from Talk:Instant-runoff voting) I've also taken a look at the pairwise matrix shown at Burlington mayoral election, 2009, and am wondering whether it could benefit from visualization as well. I'll leave that for another discussion. Raellerby ( talk) 14:33, 8 April 2018 (UTC)
In their last edit, User:RRichie changed the last sentence of the article summary from this:
...to this:
...and put this in the edit summary:
The article itself goes into detail which includes mention of the controversy surrounding Kiss and Burlington Telecom. From what I've read and understand about the election, Kiss was a beleaguered mayor embroiled in scandal, and his political weakness probably played a big role in IRV's repeal. The article itself lays it out in (what I hope is) a well-cited and NPOV way:
The citations in that section dispute the idea that the Burlington Telecom scandal was the dominant reason behind the repeal. I'm going to undo User:RRichie's change from today, but a better summary of the article text would be welcome. -- RobLa ( talk) 19:54, 9 June 2018 (UTC)
The analysis section states: "The election is considered a success by IRV advocates such as FairVote, since it prevented the election of the presumed winner under a plurality system by avoiding the effect of vote-splitting between the other candidates". This is FairVote's assertion, and is untrue.
In an election between Andy Montroll and Bob Kiss, Andy Montroll wins. By adding Kurt Wright as a candidate, we split the vote: Andy Montroll loses votes to Kurt Wright. Under Plurality, Andy Montroll and Bob Kiss split the vote, and Kurt Wright wins; under IRV, Andy Montroll and Kurt Wright split the vote, and Andy Montroll is eliminated, transferring votes strongly to Bob Kiss. Kurt Wright is the spoiler candidate. John Moser ( talk) 14:51, 11 November 2018 (UTC)
Ballots that do not include a vote in an election are, in common practice, excluded from vote totals because they are abstentions from voting. In the same way, ballots that become exhausted because not all candidates are ranked represent voters’ abstention from the next round of voting. For that reason, when calculating percentages for a round, the total number of “active” ballots, where votes are actually cast, is the most representative divisor.
The summary table shows the votes received in the last round in which a candidate participated, along with the “Share in Maximum Round” which was calculated as the fraction of all ballots rather then the percentage of votes actually cast. The other day I changed it to the latter since that is more representative and therefore better to use in this compact diagram. Today RobLa changed it back to what they called the “correct percentages”.
These two sets of values are equally “correct”, but those based on actual votes rather than ballots are more representative.
Opinions: which should be used here?
— Andy Anderson 05:16, 19 March 2019 (UTC)
This explains some edits I'm going to make to this article.
I know anti-RCV folks like Rob L like to worship at the altar of the Burlington story and want to make this story one of disgruntled backers of the Condorcet candidate, Democrat Andy Montroll, driving the repeal. Thus, the current version of the article rather hilariously says "A group of several Democrats led a signature drive to force a referendum on the election method (supported by Republican Kurt Wright)."
But that's a false narrative. The repeal campaign was in fact led by Kurt Wright, the Republican candidate who lost after leading in first choices. The folks active in the campaign were primarily people who backed his 2009 campaign, a-nd the repeal measure only carried 2 of the the city's 7 wards - the two ward with the council's only Republican councilors and where Wright had done well in 2009. Democrat Andy Montroll backed keeping RCV, as did Bernie Sanders, prominent Democrats like Howard Dean and nearly the entire city council.
Wright convened the repeal campaign kickoff news conference. A story on that news conference [1] reports "Several of the IRV opponents, including Ewing, backed Republican Kurt Wright for mayor this past March. Another Wright supporter, David Hartnett, also collected signatures for the group. "
That article highlights the centrality of Kiss's problems as mayor: <<The question for March 2010, however, is how much of the anti-IRV effort is truly a referendum on IRV, and how much is a referendum on Mayor Kiss. His term isn't up, technically, until 2012, but a spate of leadership crises related to Burlington Telecom, the Moran Plant redevelopment and the loss of General Dynamics practically put Kiss in the lame duck category. And to think it's only the guy's first year of a three-year term.>>
See other stories on how John Ewing backed Wright's campaign in 2009 [ https://www.sevendaysvt.com/vermont/right-as-wright/Content?oid=2136269] and Dave Hartnett was Wright's 2012 campaign spokeperson [2]
Another story after the campaign summarizes things accurately - including howhow the Burlington Telecom scandal revived a stagnant repeal campaign and how the repeal vote broke down, with only the Wright strongholds backing repeal.
https://www.sevendaysvt.com/vermont/irv-repeal-signed-into-law/Content?oid=2178268
...The IRV repeal effort seemed stagnant until news of Burlington Telecom's financial troubles went public in the fall. Then, it seemed to gather steam and by March the anti-Kiss sentiment appeared to crest and the vote in March was seen as both a referendum on the voting system itself, as well as one on Kiss and his administration.
Overall, IRV lost by a 52-48 margin, but it was defeated resoundingly in the New North End Wards 4 and 7, and barely survived in Ward 6. Support was strong in the other four wards, but turnout there was much lower. ere's how the IRV vote broke down by ward:
Ward 1: 405 to keep, 264 to repeal Ward 2: 428 to keep, 185 to repeal Ward 3: 510 to keep, 292 to repeal Ward 4: 1203 to repeal, 606 to keep [ GOP ward' Ward 5: 793 to keep, 545 to repeal Ward 6: 490 to keep, 477 to repeal Ward 7: 1006 to repeal, 437 to keep [ GOP ward] RRichie ( talk) 02:51, 24 March 2019 (UTC)
User:RRichie is the CEO of FairVote and has a rather significant conflict of interest. Mind you I'm also an elections reform person, and have to take my own care when I'm working on these.
The first of the recent series of edits removes most reference to "controversy" and talks about "focusing attention" instead. It begins directing focus on Kurt Wright as a sore loser, and the string of edits continues this theme.
User:RRichie even states on this talk page: "The IRV repeal effort seemed stagnant until news of Burlington Telecom's financial troubles went public in the fall. Then, it seemed to gather steam and by March the anti-Kiss sentiment appeared to crest and the vote in March was seen as both a referendum on the voting system itself, as well as one on Kiss and his administration." Nevertheless, he leans heavily on Kurt Wright and his campaign team being the first ones to rally against IRV—even if they were apparently unsuccessful.
Even so, the narrative is sufficiently informative, and I've edited it to undo replacing "other voting reform advocates" with "opponents of IRV" (hey, look, score voting is clownshoes and those people have all these fantasies about people scientifically measuring candidates and not voting strategically, but if we're calling them dumb we still have to admit they're honest about their misguided ideas), and added in the terminology of "post-election controversy" because that's an accurate description of what happened.
The most important part of all of this is the technical analysis: Why did IRV fail? Well it failed because of vote splitting. It also failed because of a mutual majority lock-in property—when too many voters in a minority coalition all share in ranking at least one candidate above all mutual majority candidates (Bob Kiss and Andy Montroll, in this case), those voters's ballots (no matter their contents!) have zero impact on the election—but that's new research and pointedly *doesn't* go in the article…yet. What we do know is those voters who voted Wright above Montroll and Montroll above Kiss ultimately didn't count, and the election behaved as if Montroll and Kiss were in the same party and all remaining voters were party voters voting in a party primary: those voters as a closed and associated group selected Kiss, the others selected Wright, and the runoff was between Kiss and Wright.
The rewrite is still polished up to heavily emphasize a narrative of Kurt Wright and his flunkies instrumenting a repeal as sore losers, and downplays that their efforts failed until Bob Kiss was suddenly unpopular. I suspect the Republicans—typically against ranked voting in the current political environment—would have voted for repeal anyway; can't prove anything about that either way. At the end of the day, the repeal was bipartisan. Seeing as I can't figure on how to rewrite it without slanting it the *other* way (which is just as bad) and the historical context is informative, it stands for now, even if it reads as a series of inferences to justify a conspiracy theory and persuade the reader of an association between the public opinion of the system and the actual performance of the system. John Moser ( talk) 02:50, 5 July 2019 (UTC)
This counts as too much OR, but someone can have fun with this.
IRV fails the participation criterion in interesting ways. In particular, because dividing a set into two subsets always results in a subset with no more than elements, if given the universe of all candidates and a finite set of all voters , if there is a mutual majority , and if majority and minority such that all voters in prefer all candidates to all other candidates, and all voters in prefer a set of candidates to all other candidates, the result of IRV is independent of the votes cast by if .
The actual theorem is more-complex than that and expands into a mutual plurality kind of thing. That behavior is *extremely* useful when selecting multiple candidates for proportional representation: even before reducing the ballot power (as per Meek's Method et al), sets of ballots mutually favoring subsets of candidates sort of decide among themselves without input from other voters. As candidates are elected, the voting power of those ballots is diminished so that others have primary power in selecting mutually-representative candidates, but large coalitions retain more voting power so as to get representation appropriate to the coalition size.
When selecting one candidate, as per IRV, this behavior locks out voters, and is able to disenfranchise large coalitions of voters, particularly when a majority party or other majority coalition represents less than of all voters. Irrelevant voters who don't rank candidates in are excluded from the count of all voters in these considerations, which exemplifies the generalization.
The simple explanation for 2009 is vote-splitting between Montroll and Wright. The complete explanation is really that Wright captured more Montroll>Kiss voters than Kiss>Montroll voters, and that Wright's coalition was smaller than the Kiss-Montroll coalition but larger than half the Kiss-Montroll coalition. As such, Wright's coalition had zero impact on the election and may as well have not voted. The election behaved as a party primary between a theoretical party made up of voters who voted all but one of Kiss and Montroll over Wright (yep, the generalization is complex), followed by a general election between the nominees.
Because the state changes at every round and the voters whose ballots impact each subset of candidates changes, the generalization actually functions more like a PRNG than a social choice function: the outcome is a function of the ballots, but it's not the computation of the relationship of the nature of the voters's exposed preferences as a whole to the candidates and the selection of a winner based on that relationship. Still, it follows certain rules and can be predictable and manipulated: the interesting part of Burlington, 2009 isn't that it elected a non-representative candidate, but that the failure mode is so readily analyzed and so easily reproduced by nominating candidates that you can weaponize it and thus a well-resourced political entity can act as a dictator and force the election of a specific candidate.
Condorcet methods generally resist this, although Condorcet-Hare methods (ironically, all based in some way on IRV) both avoid this defect and are highly-resistant to all other strategy. John Moser ( talk) 03:26, 5 July 2019 (UTC)
The following Wikimedia Commons file used on this page or its Wikidata item has been nominated for deletion:
Participate in the deletion discussion at the nomination page. — Community Tech bot ( talk) 03:06, 20 June 2022 (UTC)
I removed the " stub" assessment for this article, since it's clearly more mature than that. I'll leave it to someone else to decide what assessment the article deserves. -- RobLa ( talk) 02:40, 29 June 2023 (UTC)
@ AndyAnderson Typical practice is to include truncated ballots in totals; see 2011 Irish presidential election for an example.
A reversed convention wouldn't make sense, because indifferent or truncated ballots affect the outcome of many elections. Lots of Condorcet methods are affected by the inclusion of truncated ballots. Truncated IRV ballots affect earlier rounds as well. Handling truncated ballots plays a major role in STV elections (multiple-seat IRV), and truncated ballots are always included in quota calculations. Generally, if a ballot can affect the outcome of an election, it has to be included in calculated voting shares. Closed Limelike Curves ( talk) 16:06, 20 March 2024 (UTC)
@ Jannikp97 I think it's sensible to try looking for a better source than rangevoting.org (which I admit has its problems). That being said, could we hold off on removing the citations until we can find better ones? Even if the source is unreliable, it's better to include it so users can verify the reliability themselves—with no citation, it's easy to think the information probably comes from a reliable source that just hasn't been included in the text. The better source needed tag is very helpful for these cases. Closed Limelike Curves ( talk) 16:35, 2 April 2024 (UTC)