[ARIN-consult] Consultation on Implementing Single Transferrable Voting for ARIN Elections

[Richard Laager]

On 1/7/22 1:24 PM, William Herrin wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 7, 2022 at 11:15 AM Richard Laager <rlaager at wiktel.com> wrote:
>> On 1/7/22 12:33 PM, William Herrin wrote:
>>> When I see a voting system like STV which allows for the election
>>> of the candidate most opposed by a clear majority of voters, alarm
>>> bells ring. It's an obviously incorrect outcome that shouldn't be
>>> possible.
>>
>> "most opposed" isn't necessarily what's going on. For example, imagine a
>> ballot with candidates that are very similar and the electorate is okay
>> with all of them.

> Refer to my prior post in which an example of "most opposed" is
> readily inferred.
> https://lists.arin.net/pipermail/arin-consult/2022-January/001507.html

I'm aware of your example and that's exactly my point.

Looking at the percentage numbers (I don't have time to dig up Condorcet 
voting software and run the example through it), candidates 2, 3, and 4 
could easily be clones. (Clones is a voting system term of art.)

If they're clones, the electorate split across those candidates nearly 
evenly (21%, 20%, 19%), because they are pretty much the same. In that 
case, a good voting system should elect some of them. This a feature, 
not a bug:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independence_of_clones_criterion


Take your vote counts, replace 2/3/4 with "C" (for clone), keep only the 
highest C in each line, and combine together. You get:

30% 1, C, 5
60% C, 1, 5
10% 5, C, 1

The cloned candidate was clearly preferred.

-- 
Richard