WE ALL SCREAM FOR ICE CREAM!

I thought this was going to be easy….it is not.  It is complicated and it goes back to the old saying “those who county the votes…..”

Here is the challenge, again suppose to be easy….you eliminate the bottom vote getter and re-allocate their next choice.

Great – from last round we eliminate

Chocolate Peanut Butter

Then Neapolitan….

OK

Then we have a tie….again….in this case the random number generator says we should eliminate Strawberry.

Side / authors note:  Neapolitan.  It isn’t even a FLAVOR – it is a trash “flavor” for those who can’t make a decision. Come one, cowboy up and make yup your mind!

So we eliminate Strawberry.   We should be moving on and making progress – next for elimination is Chocolate Chip.  RIGHT?

DARN IT – Now we have another issue.  These Strawberry ranked choice voters are making my life hellish.

Some of the Strawberry’s next votes are for flavors that have already been eliminated!

What to do now?

Do I add these flavors back into the count and start eliminating from the smallest again?

Do I spoil those ballots, if you insist on voting for a crazy flavor with zero chance of winning, do I spoil your ballot now since that choice has already been eliminated? OR do I keep on applying them until the ballot is exhausted (remember, you only get 5 choices).

In this case, because I am a kind and benevolent dictator, I am NOT going to spoil the ballot and play it out to the end, but know this – I don’t like you.

Stay tuned…..

Round 1 – Ice Cream

And the winner is……

Nobody.  yet.

If you are flow charting out the tabulation, here are the easy as 1-2-3 steps:

• Step 1 – is someone over 50%+1 (Y – declare winner, N – goto Step 2)
• Step 2 – eliminate the lowest vote getter and reassign votes.  Easy, right?
• Step 3 – goto Step 1.  Easy, Right?

Step 2 is causing me some heartburn, because we immediately begin to run into issues / challenges.

The lead vote getter is Mint Chocolate Chip with 21% of the vote.

It would appear we should eliminate “Neapolitan”, but that would be incorrect. Neapolitan has three round 1 votes.

We first must deal with write ins, because some of them receive less than 3 votes.

The verbatim write ins are as follows:

We now have to decide on a classification for write ins.  Is Chocolate peanut butter the same as Chocolate/Peanut Butter?  Is it the same as Peanut butter cup?

We have to be extremely careful here for a couple of reasons, hypothetically “M. Mouse” as a write-in could mean “Mickey Mouse” or “Minnie Mouse”.   We shouldn’t be in the business of guessing or interpreting voter intent.

The next issue is what order, if tied, do we eliminate ballots and re-allocate votes.  This matters in the situation where the first place vote getter is one or two short of achieving victory.  It would also matter if the reallocation caused a selection to be eliminated in the following round or surviving another round.  Yes, the odds of these situations are small – but they do exist, and we need to consider this.  In addition, you have to make these decision when coding.

In what order do we eliminate tied lower tier ballots?  Do I eliminate “Coffee” or “Peach” first? What reasoning do i code-in?

In this case, we have the following write ins with 1 vote:

• Tiger tail
• Pralines ‘n Cream
• Coffee
• Peach
• Strawberry cheesecake
• Black raspberry
• Spumoni
• Raspberry
• New York Super Fudge Chunk
• Chocolate/Peanut butter
• Peanut butter chocolate

We have 2 votes for “Peanut Butter Cup”

We have 3 votes for “Chocolate peanut butter”

So, these are the coding decisions I am making:

I will ignore capitalization, but will not ignore spelling when classifying write ins.  If a voter misspells a write in, then so be it.  I am sure each state will have different rules if they enact RCV as to write ins (see Alaska and Murkowski write in election as an example of rules regarding write ins). I simply can’t interpret voting intent and need to take the write in as presented.

I will alphabetize … no…. changed my mind ….. I will randomize the tied ballots to determine the order they are eliminated and second choice reallocated.

I created a random number generated and sorted low to high and I will eliminate the write ins in the following order:

• Peach
• Tiger tail
• New York Super Fudge Chunk
• Spumoni
• Chocolate/Peanut butter
• Pralines ‘n Cream
• Black raspberry
• Strawberry cheesecake
• Raspberry
• Coffee
• Peanut butter chocolate

I stress this is a decision that I made.  I don’t know if it is the “correct” way to do this, and that could be a potential issue.  I am not sure enacting legislation considers this or is specific.

Again, the chances the order that I eliminated and re-allocate write ins will have a material effect on the eventual outcome is small – HOWEVER, if it were the decision I just made as a coder would be an issue.  I will need to talk to an RCV expert to explore this further.

WRITE INS FLOW

We immediately experience an additional issue.  The rules require that one does not vote any one choice more than once, and if one does – the ballot becomes “spoiled”.  Our voter with his love for “New York Super Fudge Chunk” is proving to be an issue.  An additional question, is the entire ballot spoiled?  Say for example, “NYSFC” voter in round three voted for Vanilla.  Do we count round 3 or is the entire ballot spoiled for all future rounds?  If we immediately spoil the entire ballot are we disinfranchising the voter for additional rounds?

I think for our excercise, I am going to make the decision that if a voter doesn’t follow directions and votes for one choice more than once – the ballot becomes spoiled for future rounds.  Sorry, NYSFC – your strident love for “New York Super Fudge Chunk” has invalidated your ballot because we are a strict father. 

So, to recap – we aren’t even out of the write-ins, and we have three major coding / tabulation issues:

• write in classification
• order of elimination for ties
• spoiled ballots

I am going to need another cup of coffee.

Round 1 Results (combination elimination of write ins)

So, after dealing with the write-ins, Mint-Chocolate Chip has increased its lead, and we start again. Thankfully, it’s not close enough to get sued…..yet.

Conclusion

As we observed in the previous post, it is the accumulation of small errors that could lead to a catastrophic failure.

So far we have seen possible issues with:

• Ballot presentation
• Allowing or not allowing voter error
• write in issues (classification)
• order of elimination of lowest tiers
• spoiled ballots – when in the process?

Yes, agreed, the chances are small – BUT – if some error were to cast doubt on the tabulations, it would be terrible for confidence in the process. 

Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) and Ice Cream

With the pending Democrat primary race for Mayor in NYC using Ranked Choice Voting (RCV), we are thinking through the process of how to properly poll Rank Choice Voting and how to write the back-end code to do the analysis.

What I thought would be a weekend in project has turning into a completely different beast.  If you ever want to move from theory to execution of something – write code for it.  Writing code forces you to explore the details and try to attempt to anticipate errors etc.

In these blogs posts, I will not attempt to give a primer on Ranked Choice Voting.  Others have done that well:

• • • Ballot Pedia
    • Wikipedia

Bias Alert –  you should know that I am not sold on RCV as a method of voting in the United States because it adds layers of complexity to a system – counting votes –  that we are currently struggling with in the United States.   As we will soon discover, each detail / decision is a thread for someone to pull on that could further cast doubt on our voting systems.

What I will attempt to do is walk through our fake data set and explain our logic on polling / coding and address various decision making.  I will highlight issues that I see as potential problems in polling / casting votes.

In our exercise, we were going to ask people to “rank choice vote” flavors of ice cream.  What could possibly go wrong???

ISSUE #1 – Presentation of Ballot

As a rule when polling, you want the poll to resemble the actual voting process as much as possible.

Even before collecting data, we were presented with a couple of issues / deicision points:

• Presentation of Ballot – method
• Allowing errors or not

As one of the people who took the poll pointed out, there are multiple ways of actually presenting the ballot – and it appears New York City is using two different methods.

There is an array and a multi-screen approach.  NYC’s sample ballot shows an array and online NYC demonstrates RCV on something called an ‘AutoMark Ballot Marking Device’ uses the multi-screen approach (https://www.vote.nyc/page/ranked-choice-voting).

NYC Sample Ballot

MYC Automark Ballot

 NYC isn’t clear on what method is used when, and finding out the details was outside the scope of my weekend project. 

While our online software has the ability to do either type of question, I decided for this exercise to use the multi-screen approach.  Why, to allow for error….

ISSUE #2 – Error Handling

As another reader pointed out, it would have been helpful, if we would have removed their previous choices from screens.  Example, if they picked Vanilla, it should be removed from future choices.  It would NOT have been difficult to do; however…..

It doesn’t appear that is what is being done in NYC on the printed ballot or the multi-screen approach.   It appears that errors are allowed (butterfly ballot anyone).  I would need to speak to an electronic voting machine expert to explore IF machines allow a voter to error or not, but with paper ballots we can’t code out human error. 

Therefore, when programming the survey, we “errored” on allowing the voter to “error” – even though the “rules” clearly state if you vote twice for something your vote will be “spoiled” (We will have much more on that later). 

ISSUE #3 – Instructions

As a “voter” / “survey respondent” pointed out – we had a problem with definitions / unclear instructions.  The instructions were to “Rank Choice Vote” for ice cream flavors.  We did this purposefully to mimic the ballot instructions. 

Some people were confused asking should I vote for “my favorite” or “my least favorite”, requesting more descriptive instructions.   I assume this confusion would exist on any ballot. 

In addition, it appears many “voters”  “survey respondents” didn’t realize there was a space on each choice for a “write in.” 

Conclusion

Even before data collection or simulated voting – we made two decisions (ballot presentation and error handling) that could potentially have a material effect(s) on the results, and we haven’t even started coding results yet.

The challenge with this when you study system failures of any kind, it is not normally one huge error that causes failure, it is an accumulation and compounding of smaller errors. 

But for now with those decisions made, we collect data….