Wednesday February 8, 2017

Ranking Electoral Reforms

Electoral reform is near and dear to my heart, and I started OpaVote to help promote betting voting methods, such as instant runoff voting and the single transferable vote. There are many other important electoral reforms, and some are more important than better voting methods.

Below I present a U.S.-focused list of electoral reforms roughly in order of the importance that I place on them. Others will certainly have strong disagreements, and I'd love to hear from you. I'll update this post over time with additional explanations for the other electoral reforms.

Top-two primary

The 2016 election for U.S. President is a shining example of the problems with conventional primaries (likely producing the most disliked major-party candidates ever). Although voters are increasingly identifying themselves as independents rather than being affiliated with a political party, the Democratic and Republican parties hold enormous control over the electoral process.

For most elections, the Democratic part has a primary to elect its candidate, the Republican party has a primary to elect its candidate, and later an election is held to decide between the Democrat and the Republican (and sometimes third party or independent candidates).

Conventional primaries produce bad election outcomes because (i) they elect partisan candidates rather than moderate candidates, (ii) the parties have too much control (e.g., "super" delegates), and (iii) third-party or independent candidates are essentially shut out of the electoral process.

Instead, a primary election should be open to all candidates who have qualified for the ballot. A candidate may identify a political party that they identify with, but the political parties would not have any significant involvement. The top-two winners (who may identify with the same party) then compete in a run-off election to determine the winner.

Even better, the winner could be determined in a single election using instant runoff voting and there would be no primary at all!

A top-two primary should allow for more moderate candidates rather than partisan candidates, give more power to voters rather than political parties, and elect candidates who better represent the will of the voters. Reduced partisanship should hopefully help with the other electoral reforms described below.

Increasing voter turnout (e.g., election day holiday, voting over multiple days, etc.)

Fair voting districts (end gerrymandering)

Proportional representation

Ranked-choice voting for individual offices

National popular vote for President (eliminate electoral college in U.S.)

Full representation for Washington D.C., Puerto Rico, and other U.S. territories

Felon voting rights

Campaign finance reform

Compulsory voting

Reduce voting age

Why Switch to Online Voting?

As people become increasingly less willing to go somewhere to vote, condo associations and HOAs, high schools, universities and colleges, and nonprofits are looking for the right online voting tool to increase voter turnout. From cost to convenience, there are a number of reasons to switch to online voting.

Cost

If you think that an online voting tool is cost prohibitive, then you will probably be surprised that it is not only less costly both for the tool and for your staff’s time. OpaVote gives you a relatively inexpensive but secure way of getting more people to participate in the voting process.

Secure

One of the major benefits of online voting is that you can ensure that the right people receive their ballots. They receive an email with a link that provides the necessary information. Security is not a concern as voting pages are encrypted. The encryption helps to make people feel that their vote is safe from tampering.

Easy User Interface

With a user interface that is easier to use than the traditional lever, you don’t have to worry that a person will cast their ballot other than how they intended. The system displays their choices as a confirmation before their ballot is recorded - if there's a correction needed, the voter can simply go back!

Convenience

If you need to increase voter turnout, there is no better way than OpaVote as your online voting tool. Your voters will have a way to vote from anywhere, at any time!

2016 Year in Review

Screenshot of OpaVote website as of May 2016.

OpaVote in May 2016

It has been another great year at OpaVote, and we have been working hard to continue to make it work better for you and to introduce new features.

We hired a web designer to completely redesign the home page. We love the new design and think it is much better than the old design that you can see here.

Below are list some of the more significant improvements that we introduced over the past year. Please let us know what you would like to see in 2017!

New Features in 2016

In 2016 we had more than 250 code checkins and 14 blog posts. Here is a summary of the highlights of our improvements to OpaVote over the last year:

Tracking of voter activity in your election. OpaVote shows you a graph with the number of email opens, the number of voting page visits, and the number of votes cast on an hourly basis.
Detailed reporting of email delivery. OpaVote tells you when emails have been delivered to individual voters. If emails bounce, OpaVote tells you why so you can try to fix it!

Much more content about supported voting methods. OpaVote supports a lot of voting methods, and we want to help you understand the different options and how they work. See our help menu for more info.
HTML editors for election and contest descriptions. Nobody will miss the markdown notation that we used before. :)
OpaVote Counts now support just about all of the features of OpenSTV (which is no longer available). We still need to implement manual tie breaking and expect that feature in the coming year.
Free recounts of ballots for all voters. We previously provided ballots to voters, but now your voters can recount them for free using all the methods supported by OpaVote.
Better election results page to easily access all relevant information about the election. Detailed results, ballots, and recounts are just a click away.
New report types. In addition to seeing the bar charts on the results page, we provide a text report (good for emailing) and a CSV report you can open in any spreadsheet program.
A new support forum. This is the place to get your OpaVote questions answered.
We now have a poll widget that you can embed on your own website so your voters don't even need to visit OpaVote. We have an example poll widget and instructions for using it.
We have a first draft of an API for automating interactions with OpaVote from your own servers. You can use our API to create Counts automatically or obtain information about your election while it is in progress.
We added Amazon login in addition to Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn. For your security, we don't store your passwords, and we want to provide login accounts that are convenient for you.

Donations by OpaVote

We continue to support election reform and we have donated to the following causes in 2016:

Please consider these organizations in making your year end donations.

That is our wrap up for 2016, and we are looking forward to a great 2017!

Ensuring Election Integrity

Button with the text Election Integrity!

At OpaVote, we want both election managers and voters to have confidence in the integrity of the election outcome. Election integrity is important for all types of elections, such as condo or HOA elections, high school elections, university or college elections, or nonprofit elections.

There are two main ways that election integrity could be compromised:

The election manager could manipulate the election.
Hackers could manipulate the election.

We'll address both of these in this blog post.

Election Manager

An election manger at OpaVote is responsible for all aspects of running the election. The manger needs to provide the information about the election, candidates, voter lists, etc. Although you hopefully trust your election manager, we do a few things at OpaVote to limit what a corrupt election manager could do.

First, we don't allow election managers to modify information about the election after the election has started. For example, changing the candidate list or the dates of the election would allow an unscrupulous election manager to attempt to influence the result. In some cases, we will modify an election in progress at the request of the election manager where we determine that it is not meant to influence the result (e.g., fixing typos).

Second, election managers can't see preliminary results of the election. Election managers can only see results when the election is over, and they can't reopen voting. If a naughty election manager could see preliminary results, then he or she could contact supporters of a candidate to make sure they vote.

Third, we record detailed statistics of all voters who voted. This includes the date and time of the vote and the IP address of the computer used to vote. This information may be helpful in determining whether any fraud was committed (e.g., many votes from the same IP address or at the same time). Since this list contains email addresses of voters, we don't make it publicly available, but it is available to the election manager, and we'll respond to legitimate requests from non-managers if there is a question of election integrity.

Fourth, election managers can't see the secret voting codes of email voters. This prevents the manager from voting on behalf of an email voters. Managers can see the codes for code voters, but since the managers are responsible for providing the codes to voters we can't limit that.

Hackers

We do a few things at OpaVote to limit our exposure to hackers.

First, we greatly limit our risk by not storing sensitive information. At OpaVote, we do not store any credit card numbers, and instead we rely on third parties to securely process payments for us. We also do not store any passwords. Managers login to OpaVote with another account (Google, Facebook, or LinkedIn) and we receive only a token that acknowledges that you logged in correctly.

Second, we use Google App Engine for the servers that run OpaVote. Google take enormous efforts to prevent hackers from accessing its servers, and we rely on their expertise to make sure our servers are safe.

Third, we use REALLY long secret codes for email voters. For our secret codes, there are 16^32 possibilities (16 raised to the power of 32). That doesn't look a big number, but here it is written out: 340,282,366,920,938,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. If you could try a billion codes per second, then it would take more than a billion years to try all of the codes.

Fourth, all voting web pages are encrypted in transmission between your computer and our servers. This prevents anyone from seeing your vote or getting access to your secret code.

Plain English Explanation of Scottish STV

Scottish STV is a great method to use for electing a group of people. To help you and your voters understand how it works, we give a "plain English" explanation of how votes are counted with Scottish STV.

If you'd like to see additional details, you are welcome to review the statute passed by Scotland.

At a high level, the vote count takes place in rounds. For the first round, you count the first place votes. For subsequent rounds, you will either (1) transfer surplus votes from a candidate or (2) eliminate a candidate. We'll assume that you've read our STV overview and understand what surplus votes are.

You may find it helpful to review some Scottish STV election results while you are reading this.

Quota or Threshold

All STV methods have a quota or winning threshold. The quota is computed using the number of non-empty votes. For example, at the time of this writing, this election had 2006 total votes, but 252 of them were empty, so the quota is computed based on the 1754 non-empty votes.

The quota is computed by (1) dividing the number of non-empty votes by the number of seats plus one, (2) adding one, and (3) discarding any fraction.

For example, with 1754 non-empty votes and 2 seats, we compute 1754/3 + 1 and discard any fraction, which gives a quota of 585.

First Place Votes

The first step is quite easy. All votes are assigned to their first choices.

Transfer Surplus vs. Eliminate

At each round after the first, we need to either (1) transfer surplus votes from one candidate or (2) eliminate one candidate. The decision is easy. If at least one candidate has surplus votes, then we transfer surplus votes. If no candidates have surplus votes, then we eliminate one candidate.

Note that in each round we process exactly one candidate. If more than one candidate has surplus votes, then we select the candidate with the largest number of votes and transfer only that candidate's surplus votes. Other candidates with surplus votes will be processed in subsequent rounds. If no candidates have surplus votes, then one candidate with the fewest number of votes is eliminated.

Once a candidate has transferred surplus votes or been eliminated, that candidate can no longer receive any votes. For example, suppose in round 2 that A has a surplus and those surplus votes are transferred. Suppose in round 3, that candidate B is eliminated and some of B's votes rank A second. For B's votes that rank A second, those votes will pass over the second choice of A and transfer to the third choice.

Transfer Surplus Votes

When transferring surplus votes from a candidate, we are actually transferring ALL votes received by that candidate, but we transfer them at a fraction of their value. The idea is that a quota of votes remain with the candidate and the surplus votes get counted towards the next choices on the ballots.

For example, suppose candidate A has 671 votes and that the quota is 585. A thus has 86 surplus votes (671 - 585 = 86) that need to be transferred.

Candidate A has 671 votes, so we transfer each of them 86/671 of their value. If we transfer 671 votes at a value of 86/671, then the total "number" of votes transferred is 86.

Fractions are hard (for people and computers) so the transfer value of 86/671 needs to be converted to a number, and the result is 0.128166915.... Most fractions result in an infinitely long number so the Scottish rules truncate to 5 digits or 0.12816. Accordingly, each of A's votes gets transferred at a value of 0.12816 to the next choice on the ballot.

Each candidate receiving votes from A may now have a total number of votes that isn't a whole number. For example, candidate B may have had 478 votes before the transfer, received 26.65728 votes (208 of A's votes at a value of 0.12816), and now have 504.65728 votes.

Note that candidate B now has some votes with a value of 1 (e.g., the votes where B was ranked first) and some votes with a value of 0.12816 (the votes received in the surplus transfer from A).

Eliminate Candidate and Transfer Votes

Eliminating a candidate is much simpler. All votes get transferred to their next choices at the same value that they currently have.

Exhausted Votes

Looking at Scottish STV results, you'll see a bar for "Exhausted" votes. An exhausted vote occurs when a ballot has no next choice. This can happen when you transfer surplus votes or votes from an eliminated candidate. For example, if a voter ranked candidate A first and didn't rank anyone else, then that vote would become exhausted when transferring surplus votes from A and 0.12816 would be added to the exhausted bar.

Ties

Ties can occur when you are selecting a surplus to transfer or when selecting a candidate to eliminate. For example, suppose both candidate A and candidate B have surplus votes and that they have the same number of votes. We now need to pick either A or B to transfer surplus votes.

With Scottish STV, ties are broken by looking to previous rounds. Suppose A and B are tied at round 3. To break the tie, we look to round 2 and see which candidate had more votes. If A had more votes than B at round 2, then we select A to transfer surplus votes at round 3. If A and B were also tied at round 2, then we look to round 1. If they are tied at round 1, then we make a random selection.

Ending the Election

The election is over when all the winners are determined. If there are N positions being filled, then the election is over when N candidates have reached the quota or when only N+1 candidates remain (the winners being the N candidates with the highest numbers of votes).

Ranked-Choice Voting Results in San Francisco

Screenshot of a bar chart of 1 round of ranked-choice voting results.

San Francisco is in the process of counting the ranked-choice voting ballots for its city elections. To make it easier to visualize the results, we have also processed the ballots with OpaVote and are sharing our results. You can see an example bar chart here, and click the links below for full results.

San Francisco is amazing in that they publish all of the ballot data. You can download it yourself here. We downloaded the ballot data, converted it into the BLT format used by OpaVote, counted the ballots, and you can see our results here:

This is based on the November 17th data release, and you can see that our results match the official results.

You will see one difference between the official results here and our results. In the official results, the last place candidate is eliminated one by one. In the OpaVote results, all losing candidates are eliminated simultaneously. Look at the second round of the District 1 election to see an example. OpaVote eliminates 8 candidates simultaneously because none of these candidates could possibly win the election (the sum of all their votes is less than both Sandra and Marjan).

So who is right? Technically, OpaVote is right, but in practice it doesn't make a difference. The San Francisco city charter says at Sec. 13.102(e):

If the total number of votes of the two or more candidates credited with the lowest number of votes is less than the number of votes credited to the candidate with the next highest number of votes, those candidates with the lowest number of votes shall be eliminated simultaneously and their votes transferred to the next-ranked continuing candidate on each ballot in a single counting operation.

This is what OpaVote does and we call it a batch elimination.

In practice, it doesn't matter since the outcome will always be the same regardless of whether candidates are eliminated one by one or in batches.

You need to be careful, however, with other implementations of IRV. I won't go into to the details here, but if you implement IRV with a tie-breaking scheme that break ties by looking at previous rounds (which San Francisco doesn't) then it is possible that one-by-one elimination gives a different result than batch elimination.

Increase Voter Turnout With Online Elections

Whether it's a condo or HOA election, a high school election, a university or college election, or a nonprofit election, improving voter turnout is a central concern. High voter participation makes for better representation and greater civic engagement. Establishing more voting locations is a traditional method of making voting easier, but what if you could put a ballot box in every voter's pocket?

OpaVote's online voting tool makes that possible. Online voting means no printing (and possibly misprinting) paper ballots. It means voter choices are clear, with no attempts to read half-erased selections. Online ballots are secure and private, and OpaVote offers multiple voting formats that allow voters to rank options, select single or multiple options, and you can add links to the ballot, a crucial detail in elections with ballot questions.

OpaVote offers the online voting tool of the future with prices for the present. OpaVote offers the same security and flexibility as its competitors at a fraction of the cost. You can quickly poll a committee for free, or have as many as 10,000 voters for an election cycle lasting more than a year for less than it costs to print and send paper ballots. You can do more than boost voter turnout with OpaVote. You can give your organization the tools it needs to connect with the people you value the most.

For more information, visit www.opavote.com!