Yee Paper on Visualizing Voting Methods

Just a quickie (I know, I haven't posted that Egypt piece I promised; turns out, just because you don't know a lot about a foreign country's politics, doesn't mean they're simple) and not something that's new if you've been following us closely, but Ka-Ping Yee has a nice, simple, short paper based on his previous work, titled "Disadvantages of Transferable Vote Systems". This one is restricted to just plurality, IRV, and approval, and comes out strongly for approval. Also, the pictures look pretty sweet, so check it out.

Lessons From Egypt: The Voting System Matters

I'm writing a longer piece on this same topic, but I want to get something out while it's still in the news.

• First, David Rea writes "Egypt has not rejected Democracy," which lays out the problem and a possible solution. Short version: when an organized but disfavored minority wins an election, that's bad; for the nation, for the voters, and for the reputation of democracy itself. Use approval voting.
• Second, Warren Smith provides the numbers to back those claims up. A better voting system (such as score voting) probably would have chosen Amr Moussa, who came in 5th(!) in the actual election.

Elections matter. Getting them right, matters. Getting them wrong can lead to violence, war, and death.

LoAE Mascot: The Least of All Weasels

From frozenplanet.tumblr.com

Too much serious business last month, so it's time for some relaxation. I've been lying in wait with this post for a few weeks now, waiting for the perfect time to pounce. You see, all the world's great organizations—sports teams, political parties, even nations—have something in common, and that's mascots. So after careful consideration of several possibili... oh, who am I kidding? It's a silly pun, plus look at how cute this little guy is!

This is Mustela nivalis, or the least weasel. Found in North America from the U.S. eastern seaboard to Alaska (much like myself) as well as across northern Asia, all of Europe, and even into northwestern Africa, the least weasel is astoundingly prolific, but rarely noted, possibly because of it's small stature (weighing just 1 to 9 ounces (30-250 grams.)) Which is a mistake, since this tiny carnivore can take down prey five times its own size, and more! Legends even say that the weasel is the only creature capable of defeating the basilisk. Basically, they're fuzzy little magical four-footed ninjas, and who doesn't love ninjas?

I know who has my vote for next King of the Animals.

From Bering Land Bridge National Preserve

Red Crayon Statistics

I know, I implied the previous post would be the last one about Minneapolis. But I can't help it. My first post on the subject implied that former interim elections official Patrick O'Connor was lying about the 2009 ranked-choice-voting-powered election in Minneapolis, as the official report (which he commissioned) contradicts his claims. But today, the exact same lie is being propagated by the author of the report!

I started to question my own sanity here. These guys really should know better, and no one could really expect to get away with such an obvious lie. Is it possible I'm the one who's wrong? But then I remembered how absolutely ludicrous it is to suggest that only one ballot out of nearly 50,000 could be spoiled. No system has ever been that accurate, and anything under 1% is considered a triumph of electoral vigilance.

But then I noticed the subtlety they're using here. Both O'Connor and Schulze talk about spoiled ballots earlier in their articles, but when they try to counter the complaints of excessive ballot spoilage under RCV, their specific claim is that only one ballot was "uncounted". Now, given the context of that claim, you might assume that "uncounted" and "spoiled" are being used as synonyms for each other. Nope! Let's check the report again!

Of the 45,968 total ballots cast, there were 1,888 spoiled ballots and 2,958 voter error ballots (2009 Election Statistics, n.d.), which indicates ballots with voter errors specific to Ranked Choice Voting, including overvote, repeat candidate, skipped ranking and undervote (Minneapolis Method for Hand-Counting RCV Ballot Sorter & Counter, n.d.). Comparatively, during the general municipal election in 2005, there were 755 spoiled ballots of the total 70,987 absentee and in-person voters (Voter Turnout and Registration, 2005). In 2009, there was only one ballot cast that was totally defective and not counted. This was a ballot where no ovals were filled in and a handwritten essay written in red crayon on it. Excluded from this analysis are any ballots not counted due to failure to comply with the rules regarding absentee ballots. These ballots were not opened to ascertain voter intent.

That is the "one ballot" they're talking about. There were 1,888 spoiled ballots, a more than 380% increase in spoilage rate over the previous election, but never mind that! Because only one guy wrote on their ballot in crayon that year, that means those 1,888 don't really count against anything.

The truth is, RCV nearly quadrupled the number of spoiled ballots in Minneapolis, and there would have been a ten-fold increase had the election been machine-counted rather than hand-counted. That alone aught to be enough to disqualify RCV as an election method, but there are plenty of other reasons for it, too.

I'm upgrading O'Connor's and Schulze's "damned lie" to "statistic".

Minneapolis Prediction

One more thing about Minneapolis: apparently, despite multiple ballots, the Democratic-Farmer-Labor party wasn't able to decide on an endorsement among the six candidates interested in running for mayor under its party label. So all six will appear on the "choose three" ranked choice ballot, along with four other candidates. This makes it very likely, like in Oakland before, that the winner of this vote will not end up with more than 50% of the ballots cast, despite the claims of ranked choice supporters that it guarantees a majority win.

The way this happens is that many ballots will have all of their listed candidates eliminated, at which point the ballot is no longer considered to count towards determining a majority. This occurred for about 11% of the ballots in Oakland, except the final results weren't reported as "45%/44% with 11% exhausted", they were reported as "51%/49%". In other words, the final results were reported as if 13,000 voters didn't exist.

We'll see what happens, and how it's reported, in Minneapolis this November, but my money is on a similar outcome.

In Minneapolis, Someone's Not Being Truthful

UPDATE: I've figured out where O'Connor is getting his number from.

Way back in 2010, I wrote a post about the final, official, report for Minneapolis' inaugural Ranked Choice Vote, conducted in 2009. It was an entirely boring election with entirely predictable results, and RCV did no worse or better than any other election method would in such a situation. The most-damning part of the report though, was how RCV seemed to have caused a quadrupling in the percentage of spoiled ballots, from 1.06% to 4.1% (see page 18 of the report.)

So imagine my surprise when I see in my RSS feed an OpEd from the Minneapolis StarTribune claiming that only one single ballot was spoiled. And imagine my further surprise when I see that it was penned by Patrick O'Connor, Minneapolis' interim elections director during that 2009 election, the same Patrick O'Connor mentioned by name (on page 1) of the very report that so grandiosely contradicts his statements published today.

Did Mr. O'Connor simply not read the report he commissioned four years ago? Or is he intentionally spreading falsehoods about it? I think Minneapolis deserves to know.

Congress is Too Small

And now, a brief tangent from election methods...

Stop me if you've heard this one: Article I, Section 2, Clause 3 states that each representative should serve no less than 30,000 people, and therefore the House should have over 10,000 members. That probably sounds a little crazy, and it probably is. And yet, Congress is too small. What would a better number be though? This is actually a difficult question, as well as a surprisingly touchy subject, one which has caused so much anger and vitriol in the past, that Congress has actually been afraid to re-examine the question. And so, we've had the same number of representatives—435—for over one hundred years. The House has stayed the same size for a century, even though our population has more than tripled in that time.

Ahh, you may be thinking, if our population has tripled, then we should triple the size of the House too! Right? Well, no. A linear increase (X times as many people = X times as many representatives) is the same pitfall that led to the 10,000-member House. Rather, political scientist have done a little bit of math, and their best suggestion is that the size of any legislature should be proportional to somewhere between the square-root and the cube-root of the population it represents. X times as many people = √X times as many representatives. There are a couple different specific recommendations I was able to dig up, and both fall within that range. If the population is P, they suggest (2×P)^1/3 and 0.37×P^0.4. Let's throw a square root example in here too. First, let's assume the Constitution is perfect; that implies 0.047×√P. Now, for a population of 308,745,538, these equations give sizes of 850, 919, and 825. Let's not forget to subtract the Senate though! So we're looking at a House of 750, 819, or 725 members. Quite an increase from 435.

Year	1790	1910	2010
Population	3,929,214	92,228,496	308,745,538
(2×P)1/3	198	569	850
0.37×P0.4	160	567	919
0.047×√P	93*	451	825
Actual	93	527	535

It looks like the founder's initial estimate was a little low-balled. On the other hand, the number of citizens eligible to actually vote was also a lot lower than the census would suggest, so perhaps it is—in addition to being a reminder of our horrible past—at least consistent. But each equation suggest that the 1910 number was in about the right ballpark. Today? The House needs to be at least two-thirds again as large as it is now, probably even a bit larger. As a nice side-bonus, the rule about each state having at least one representative becomes redundant; even Wyoming's residents "earn" theirs just by virtue of their population and the application of the Huntington-Hill method.

These guidelines can be applied to parliaments, congresses, committees, boards, councils; any representative body. And, in practice, most organizations are pretty close. People have a pretty good gut feeling about when a representative body, isn't. When it's too small, as our congress is now, people can just feel that there's corruption. When it's too large, people can just feel that it's inefficient and full of weak candidates.