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  • Re: abiftool, awt, and devotee development

    From Wouter Verhelst@21:1/5 to Rob Lanphier on Mon Aug 19 11:30:01 2024
    Hi Rob,

    On Thu, Aug 15, 2024 at 10:01:12PM -0700, Rob Lanphier wrote:
    Hi folks,
    My main reason for writing this mailing list is to ask for help on a
    couple of things:
    1. I've written and published the results of many elections as
    tabulated by my relatively new software for displaying
    election results, and I want some feedback on it.
    2. There's a text format (called "Aggregated Ballot Information
    Format" or "ABIF") that I've helped create, and I'm hoping folks
    familiar with the devotee codebase would be willing to look at the
    format, and maybe even add ABIF support to devotee.

    It seems similar to the format that is used by the tool which the Debian Technical Committee uses.

    I'm personally not involved with Devotee, but the format seems
    straightforward and I can't see any reason from the sidelines why at
    least an output file in that format couldn't be done...

    [...]
    A particularly interesting Debian Project Leader result from a few
    years ago is this one:
    [3]https://abif.electorama.com/id/DPL2003
    Note that awt tabulates the DPL2003 results not only using Condorcet,
    but it also tabulates using "instant-runoff voting" (also known as
    "IRV" or "RCV" as it's called in the United States). What's
    interesting about the DPL2003 election is that Condorcet methods and
    IRV result in different results. Pretty much all of the other
    elections that the Debian community has had have resulted in the same
    Condorcet vs IRV winner. Election nerds (like me) find DPL2003
    fascinating.

    That is fascinating. When I looked at the Condorcet results, my initial assumption (before I scrolled down) was that Bdale Garbee (who defeated everyone except the eventual winner, Martin Michlmayr) would be the IRV
    winner.

    It turns out it's actually Branden Robinson who would win using IRV, and
    he only defeated Moshe Zadka in Condorcet.

    In IRV, NOTA is eliminated in the first round, Moshe Zadka in the
    second, and then with the removal of those ballots, somehow Branden
    defeats both Martin Michlmayr and Bdale Garbee...

    Circling back to my main requests:
    1. Is awt actually giving the correct result? Do y'all see any bugs?

    I haven't looked at the code, so I don't know.

    --
    w@uter.{be,co.za}
    wouter@{grep.be,fosdem.org,debian.org}

    I will have a Tin-Actinium-Potassium mixture, thanks.

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  • From Don Armstrong@21:1/5 to Rob Lanphier on Mon Aug 26 05:30:01 2024
    On Thu, 15 Aug 2024, Rob Lanphier wrote:
    My main reason for writing this mailing list is to ask for help on a couple 2. There's a text format (called "Aggregated Ballot Information Format" or "ABIF") that I've helped create, and I'm hoping folks familiar with the devotee codebase would be willing to look at the format, and maybe even add ABIF support to devotee.

    There's a pretty similar format[0] that I made pocket-devotee[1] consume
    that we use for most CTTE votes (which are public, but have a limited
    number of voters).

    devotee itself uses its tally format which pocket-devotee also can consume.

    As far as developers of devotee, I think it's basically Kurt Roeckx and
    Manoj Srivastava. Not sure how active they are in voting theory.

    [I personally don't have spare cycles, so I'm not of much use to you.
    Sorry!]

    0: https://salsa.debian.org/debian/tech-ctte/-/blob/master/resolved_issues/893200_TC_Chair_election/run_vote.sh
    1: https://salsa.debian.org/debian/tech-ctte/-/blame/master/scripts/pocket-devotee?ref_type=heads#L198
    --
    Don Armstrong https://www.donarmstrong.com

    I stared at the mountain rising over me. Empty. It was a pointless
    thing to have done -- climb up it, across it, and down it. Stupid! It
    looked perfect; so clean and untouched, and we had changed nothing.
    [...] I had been on it too long, and it had taken everything.
    -- Joe Simpson "Touching the Void" p117

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