Talk:2024 United States House of Representatives election in Alaska

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Infobox

RickStrate2029, do you have any actual argument for why all four candidates should go in the infobox? WP:5%R establishes the precedent that only candidates with 5% of the vote should be in the infobox. You can't just ignore me and say that I "lack an argument," the way a discussion works is that you actually respond and explain why you think I'm wrong. Also, why do you keep talking about me in the third person? It's really weird BottleOfChocolateMilk (talk) 14:20, 19 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Agreed on the question of only including the 2 major candidates (unless there's some real indication about the importance of the other candidates – e.g. polling). – Closed Limelike Curves (talk) 16:18, 23 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

2022 spoiler effect

Mentioning @CRGreathouse, who mediated last dispute about this topic over at 2022 Alaska's at-large congressional district special election. I think a very brief mention of the spoiler effect in the 2022 race is important context for why Nancy Dahlstrom dropped out, and should be included in this article. @BottleOfChocolateMilk claims it's biased against RCV to describe the spoiler effect that occurred in that election. I have cited several reliable sources describing the race as spoiled. Do you think this is reasonable information to include, so long as the mention is brief (1-2 sentences on why Dahlstrom dropped out?) – Closed Limelike Curves (talk) 01:43, 23 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I think it's important that the spoiler effect is mentioned. Without this context it's hard to understand the behavior of the candidates or the outcome of the election. I agree that such mention is brief.

As a rule of thumb I like RCV, so I don't this this is merely a case of slandering an RCV method. I feel like the general Wikipedia policy is to follow Brandeis and let sunlight disinfect.

CRGreathouse (t | c) 15:28, 23 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

"Spoiled election" is blatantly pejorative. BottleOfChocolateMilk (talk) 21:30, 23 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

"Spoiled election" is a simple statement of fact. The spoiler effect just refers to any situation where the outcome of an election is determined by vote-splitting, as happened in the 2022 special election. – Closed Limelike Curves (talk) 21:39, 23 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Like, similarly, I could describe the 2000 Florida election as having a spoiler effect, or the 2007 French presidential election (which is not the one you're thinking of!). – Closed Limelike Curves (talk) 21:56, 23 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Closed Limelike Curves, as far as I can tell, none of the three sources use the word "spoil". This is blatant WP:SYNTH. I would also note that two of the three sources provided for that statement in the lede are either self-published or opinion articles, and so are unreliable for statements of fact. Curbon7 (talk) 09:15, 12 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I agree with you fully. Also please note that the corresponding author is a prolific and tenacious POV pusher, so you may find productive progress in the discussion to be difficult. Affinepplan (talk) 14:51, 12 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Hi @Curbon7! Sorry about that—looks like the sources explicitly referring to the spoiler effect were deleted in this edit, which I'd missed. However, I'd be happy to restore them (particularly Graham-Squire and McCune's paper). Does this address your concern? – Closed Limelike Curves (talk) 01:31, 13 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

you would need a source attesting specifically to the fact that Dahlstrom withdrew to avoid a center squeeze, not a source about the 2022 election containing a spoiler effect.

in either case the language pre-change here https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=2024_United_States_House_of_Representatives_election_in_Alaska&diff=prev&oldid=1257028240

is more than sufficient to constitute a "brief mention." the passage I removed in the edit you linked was entirely inappropriate for this article and should not be reinstated. Affinepplan (talk) 01:42, 13 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

RCV Table Discussion

Please see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:2022_United_States_House_of_Representatives_election_in_Alaska#Total_votes_tallly for previous discussion on table details and differences between "First Choice" and "Round 1" numbers. Confusingly, some of the Round 1 numbers in this election are lower than the first choice numbers, which shouldn't be possible given my understanding of the meaning of both values. However, the results are currently unofficial and it's possible one set or both will be updated and resolve the discrepancy, so we can probably just wait for a bit before worrying too much. 74.109.243.195 (talk) 06:54, 21 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

@Dbaron Thanks for the contributions so far. Just wanted to let you know that I was starting this discussion in case any issues come up. Thanks, 74.109.243.195 (talk) 07:00, 21 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, I noticed that discrepancy when I added the numbers (see my edit descriptions), but figured I would add them anyway. Hopefully one or the other set of numbers will be updated before or in the final results. I agree it's confusing. Otherwise I just tried to model my edits after the 2022 results table. David Baron (talk) 22:18, 21 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

2024 is peculiar, but not in the same way as 2022. In 2022 (as at November 30 according to Elections Alaska), the 264,589 total number of votes in Round 1 for the four candidates[1] was greater than the 263,610 summary total number of first preferences for the four candidates plus the write-in votes[2], which was anomalous though explained in the previous talk page. In 2024 (as at November 20 according to Elections Alaska), the number of votes in Round 1 for each of the four candidates[3] (e.g. 159,071 for Begich and 151,758 for Peltola) was less than the summary number of first preferences for each of the four candidates[4] (e.g. 159,375 for Begich and 152,596 for Peltola), which was anomalous in a different way as yet unexplained and inconsistent with the 2022 reasoning. 2A00:23C6:1492:7A01:3528:231B:A5F4:6CBF (talk) 23:45, 23 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

After quite a bit of analysis, I believe that the issue is that hand-counted ballots (from rural areas) are included in the general summary, but not in the RCV calculations. See this article from 2022's Special Election on a similar issue. It appears there are about 2000 ballots from House Districts 36-40 in the general summary but not in the RCV results. I was able to determine this by processing the Cast Vote Record from the AK Division of Elections page and comparing it to the summary CSV which has precinct level results. Unfortunately, I'm not aware of any publications which have covered this information for this cycle, so there's no sources to draw from for the article.

Assuming the results are certified as-is, we're left with two sets of official results that will appear inconsistent. Perhaps we should just separate the First Choice info from the rest of the table and report both despite the inconsistency? It's a strange situation, but they will both be official results, so a "just the facts" approach may be best. 74.109.243.195 (talk) 21:31, 29 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I've gone ahead and deleted the "Transfer" column between First Choice and Round 1, because it was unused and placing negative values there wouldn't make sense. 74.109.243.195 (talk) 17:12, 30 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]