Ranked Choice Voting

[Joe Elliott]

Ranked Choice Voting

On off subject post, but too important to have Off-Topic. If anyone wants it moved, they will have to talk Duncan into doing it.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/there-s-a-reason-why-lisa-murkowski-can-threaten-to-leave-the-republicans/ar-BB1cBQXL?ocid=msedgntp

As I understand it, “Ranked Choice Voting” is where there is no primary. There is only one election and you list, in order, the candidates you accept. If no one has 50%, the candidate with the least is eliminated and you check again, until one candidate now has 50% and is the winner.

This will eliminate the power of an extreme group, like the Trump base. They wouldn’t be able to primary out moderate Republicans. Actually, in light of recent events, I doubt they can do this efficiently even under the current rules. But will make it much harder for some demagogue to get too much influence. “Bend to my will or you will be primaried out”.

This is important issue. Email your governor and both your local state legislatures urging them to make this a priority.

[Allan Fritzke]

I studied RCV and I am not sure if it is applicable to president/senate/house votes. You can see it being applied in a situation where you have 20 people to choose from for a position where you may have only 10 openings.  You have to figure out from your voter's choice  which out of the 20 get the most votes and win a seat on the board.   For example, a school board vote or multiple position voting situations.

https://www.fairvote.org/how_rcv_works

It is a good question - and one that could only be answered in a what if scenario if it involves only 2 people and see how the dominion main tally machine handles the input.   We have no idea what goes on inside the software algorithms themselves and what happens when 2 people run off against each other.  Not sure if you have a 3rd person running what happens.  In my opinion, RCV should not apply to anything and a vote cast in the situation of president, senate or house does not need to have an RCV algorithm applied at all.   It should simply be 1+1+1 and no votes moved around!

The report in question discussed a bit about RCV and the WIGM method was chosen and claimed to be applied to voter logs in all but 2 occasions.  Again, a school district election are a president/senate/house election scenario.   As I stated above, there can be a legitimate reason for finding the best solution for 20 people running for 10 positions and thousands of people making a choice for the 10 out of the 20.  That makes sense.

https://www.9and10news.com/content/uploads/2020/12/Antrim_Michigan_Forensics_Report_121320_v2_REDACTED.pdf

As usual, the important parts are redacted after page 18 but they did say that the RCV WIGM method was used in Antrim County.  However they did not clarify if this was done and used for school district (example 20 people running for 10 positions)  or if it was being used fraudulently in the presidential election.   That is the heart of the matter. 

In  the  logs we identified  that  the  RCV  or  Ranked  Choice  Voting  Algorithm  was  enabled  (see image  below  from  the  Dominion  manual).  This allows  the  user to  apply  a weighted  numerical  value  to  candidates  and  change  the  overall  result.The declaration of winners can be done on a basis of points, not votes

I think more important to look is voter adjudication which can be done manually.  So, if you feed votes into the machine, you can manually change what was on the page (interpret it) and then set the electronic to correspond and have the machine accept it.  If scrutineers are not allowed near the machines or totally kicked out of a room and sent home,  there is a path to change votes by the machine operator,  mark them as spoiled or accept them as is or decide yourself who it is for.

Again, nothing wrong to have software to enable that process. However, it should be done transparently and not in the middle of the night and should have someone close enough to watch what the operator was doing - not 10 feet away.  There are claims there were less spoiled ballots in the 2020 than ever before and that adjudication was used.

The  Dominion  software  configuration  logs  in  the  Divert  Options,  shows  that  all write-in  ballots were  flagged  to  be  diverted  automatically  for  adjudication.  This means  that  all  write-in  ballots  were  sent  for  "adjudication"  by  a  poll  worker  or election  official  to  process  the  ballot  based  on  voter  "intent".  Adjudication  files allow  a  computer  operator to  decide  to  whom  to  award  those  votes  (or  to  trash them)

19 6. In the logs all but two of the Override Options were enabled on these machines, thus  allowing  any  operator  to  change  those  votes.    This  gives  the  system operators carte blanche to adjudicate ballots, in this case 81.96% of the total cast ballots with no audit trail or oversight. [Image 10]:

Of course this top secret information, so it wasn't allowed to be viewed. Not sure who would redact that and why it isn't public knowledge. Did it contain personal information or software proprietary?

2 good papers to look at wrt RCV and WIGM method.

https://www.heritage.org/election-integrity/report/ranked-choice-voting-bad-choice
http://www.votingmatters.org.uk/RES/gilmour7.pdf

They all seem to indicate filling multiple positions on boards with delegates in excess of the number of vacancies. The voters choose there own preferential list to fill all the positions and then the software finds the best fit - not a case for a mainly a Biden versus Trump scenario where votes should just be counted 1+1+1 and added up.