Egypt Didn't Want This

It sounds ridiculous to have to say it. Of course Egypt didn't want this. No one wants death and violence in the streets. But it does seem that a majority of Egyptians support the military coup that recently removed their first democratically-elected president, when hardly one year ago a majority of Egyptians supported the election of that same president. Or did they? I'm not suggesting nefariousness, I'm not suggesting ballot-stuffing, election fraud, vote buying; nothing like that. No, Morsi won the election completely within the rules. But despite that fact, a majority of Egyptians did not, in fact, support him. The problem was, the rules were incredibly stupid. Un-democratically stupid. Self-defeatingly stupid. And we could shrug and say "I guess that was dumb of Egypt," except that we use the same rules in much of the United States.

The rules for Egypt's 2012 presidential election (and for most seats of the preceding parliamentary election) were simple: plurality, and if no candidate receives a majority, the top-two candidates head to a runoff. Now, there were five candidates who received more than 2% of the vote in the first round of the election. And it is entirely possible—and I would say it's probably—that the first- and second-place candidates were the two least liked candidates of that group, by which I mean, either one would have lost in a runoff election against any of the other three. In other words, in 2012, Egyptians elected their second-least-preferred choice to be their president. In such a revolutionary time, with years of political oppression finally released, and with several vastly different ideas of where to take the country politically, is it even a surprise that such a candidate would be removed less than a year later?

I've constructed a simple example using Yee's Voteline simulator that roughly parallels the results in Egypt. Beginning with Morsi (a Muslim Brotherhood leader and the election winner) on the left, then Abou al-Fotouh (a former leader in the Muslim Brotherhood), followed by Sabahi (a secularist and opponent of the Mubarak regime), Moussa (one time Minister of Foreign Affairs under Mubarak, but also something of a rival of his), and finally Shafik (named Prime Minister by Mubarak on the eve of his expulsion.)

When the middle three candidates are removed, the result mirrors the outcome of the runoff election. It's a very approximate recreation, and I'm not entirely comfortable with Sabahi and Moussa's positions in particular, but there's a rough line from most-recent leader of the Muslim Brotherhood to most-recent member of the Mubarak government, with Sabahi (having not ever been a member of either) in the middle. Now, I'm no expert on Egyptian politics, and a one-dimensional simulation like this must necessarily leave out some details, but I believe my result to be at least illustrative if not entirely accurate. You're more than welcome to play around with Yee's simulator yourself to see if you can find something better.

I found it interesting, while I was reading up on the candidates, that most Egyptians voted for a secularist candidate (Sabahi, Moussa, or Shafik) and also most Egyptians voted for a candidate unaffiliated with Mubarak's government (Sabahi, Abou al-Fotouh, or Morsi) but the runoff election pitted the most-religious candidate against the candidate closest to Mubarak. In other words, the 3rd-5th place candidates split the middle of the electorate, dooming the runoff to extremism. You can also see that most other election methods, including approval voting, Borda count, and any Condorcet method, would all have elected Sabahi (however, this is where I lose some faith in the model, as I think Moussa may have proved to be the true winner under some of those methods, but it would take a multi-dimensional model to see it. A Sabahi/Moussa runoff would have been a good election.) Interestingly, instant runoff voting ends in the same Morsi/Shafik showdown as plurality plus runoff, and ends the same way, further condemning that method.

The moral of the story is: Winning an election, if that election has stupid rules, doesn't necessarily get you the best result. In a developed democracy, we can roll with it, wait four years, and try again. In a high-stakes post-revolutionary environment, getting it wrong this way leads to violence, death, and an irrevocable (if unfair) stain on democracy itself. But democracy didn't fail in Egypt. Democracy didn't kill 600 Egyptians last week. Plurality voting did.

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.