11. Dopp: "Could deliver unreasonable outcomes
."
Unreasonable outcomes are less likely with IRV
than with any other single-seat voting method in use today.
Top-two runoff? Approval Voting (used in a number
of professional societies)? Borda Count, used in
various forms in a few places for governmental elections?
Top-two runoff can produce much the same
unreasonable outcomes as IRV, but there is a
serious safety mechanism. In most places,
write-in votes are allowed in the runoff, so if a
truly bad result happens, the voters can fix it.
Usually, though -- in every case I'm aware of --
the two candidates remaining include one good
enough that the voters don't bother to work as
hard as it would take for a write-in to win. With
IRV, that flexibility does not exist.
Every single voting method ever proposed can
deliver "unreasonable outcomes" in some
scenarios, but real-world experience has shown
IRV to be one of the best methods.
Because he says so? Is there any academic
consensus on that? (FairVote knows that there is
not, and certainly voting systems experts,
generally, have a low opinion of IRV, and only
support it, sometimes, in comparison to
Plurality. For some reason, voting systems
experts don't much think about Top-Two Runoff,
they mostly focus on deterministic methods that
always produce a result, always complete an
election from a single ballot. Which is one very
serious limitation, incompatible with majority rule, actually.
The overwhelming number of election method
experts agree that IRV is fairer and more
democratic than plurality voting even if some
might prefer other theoretical voting methods.
Seriously spun. Sure, better than plurality
voting, better than diving into a swimming pool
with no water in it. Better than dictatorship.
Better than lots of things. But ask those same
experts about Top-Two Runoff, which is the real
choice, the real alternative in most places. IRV
is actually being implemented in places that had
top-two runoff, not plurality. Is it better.
What, I wonder, does FairVote think Robert's Rules of Order would say?
The American Political Science Association
(the national association of political science
professors) has incorporated IRV into their own
constitution for electing their own national
president. Roberts Rules of Order recommends IRV over plurality voting.
FairVote knows the truth about this, and the
statement has been very carefully worded to
convey the desired impression without actually
lying. The impression conveyed is false, the
words used are true. Genuine, class-A political
spin. Fortunately, I've been working on these
issues for about nine months now, with the
Wikipedia article, which was at one time full of
FairVote spin, enforced by sock puppets and Rob
Richie himself, edit warring using an anonymous
unregistered account to keep all genuine
criticism out of the article and maintain all his
talking points, including the two above.
What's the problem? Go look at the APSA
constitution and, sure enough, you will find a
provision that if there are three or more
candidates for the office of President-Elect, the
"standard method of the alternative vote" is to
be used. And the method is described, and it is
STV, or what we call, loosely, IRV. But what does
this *mean.* Richie wants us to think it means
that political scientists prefer IRV. Sometimes
the APSA factoid is even listed as a "recommendation" of IRV.
However, how does APSA *actually* elect its
Presidents? Surely if we are going to look to the
political scientists for guidance on election
methods, we'd want to see what they actually use,
and STV is in the Constitution only as a contingency.
The President, with the advice and consent of the
Council, another elected body, appoints a
Nominating Committee which names a single
nominee. If there is no other nominee, this
candidate is elected at the Annual Meeting.
However, it is possible to nominate other
candidates by petition. The last time there was a
petition candidate was almost forty years ago. In
order for them to use IRV, there would have to be
a second petition candidate. The chances of that
can be estimated at once in 1600 years.
Wait, what about the Council? Ah, yes, the
Council. Plurality-at-large. There are as many
candidates nominated for the Council as there are
seats, but there are some petition candidates,
often. Voters vote for as many seats as are open,
and the candidates with the most votes win. So
... political scientists are actually using
Plurality. Period. They are not actually using
IRV, and they set it up so that the need for IRV
would be extraordinarily rare. Should we do this.
Now, next factoid: to repeat it: "Roberts Rules
of Order recommends IRV over plurality voting."
Well, it doesn't exactly recommend it. It says
that "preferential voting" gives a fairer result
than plurality voting if it is considered
impractical to use repeated balloting, which is
what they *actually* recommend, indeed *require*
unless bylaws specifically permit otherwise.
It then states that "there are many forms of
preferential voting." We've named some above.
Borda Count, for example, or what Brams calls
Fallback Voting, more widely known as Bucklin
Voting. But Robert's Rules then describes the STV
method "by way of illustration." And then it
proceeds to tell us the problems of this specific
described method: it "deprives" voters of the
opportunity to base later choices on the results
of earlier rounds (which is what is allowed with
Top-Two Runoff) and it can fail to find a
"compromise winner," and it blames this on candidate elimination.
This latter failure is the "Center Squeeze"
phenomenon of IRV: a candidate might be
preferred, collectively, over every other
candidate, but merely because the candidate does
not get enough first preference votes, it is
eliminated before all the votes that would show
this are counted. Those votes, in fact, are never
counted. We'll come back to that.
Attempting to make a virtue out of a vice,
FairVote has invented the Core Support Criterion
which is a reference to this. Suppose that there
are three candidates in an election, and their
partisans are about equal in number. Add a fourth
candidate who is the first choice of nobody, but
who is everyone's second choice. According to the
Core Support Criterion, a candidate should not
win who is not the first choice of at least one
voter, so this obvious compromise candidate,
preferred by every voter by a large margin over
whoever would win the IRV election, can't win.
Preferred by, in the example given, a vote of three to one.
Let's make a more reasonable example, the Core
Support Criterion is based on something utterly
impossible, I'd say. Suppose there are three
candidates running a close race. Any one of them
could have the lowest first round total. With
IRV, that one would be eliminated. Now, suppose
that one of the three candidates is really very
broadly trusted, and is the second choice of
nearly everyone who does not have him or her as a
first choice. I can think of candidates for whom that might be true. So we have
34: A>B>C
33+:C>B>A
33-:B>A>C
There is nothing particularly unreasonable about
this profile. B is eliminated in the first round.
But B would beat, in a pairwise election, A, the
IRV winner, by a vote of 66:34, a landslide. And
with just a few more votes, B would win the IRV
election as well, *by the same margin*, because
one of the other candidates would be eliminated
and those votes for B would be revealed. So a
very few votes in the first round flips the
result from B, a landlide winner, to one of the
others. Which one depends on where the votes taken from B went.
This problem is serious enough that Robert's
Rules mentions it. FairVote will tell you it is very rare.
Of course it is rare. This problem does not
happen in a two-party system! And IRV, remember,
helps maintain a two-party system.
Is this problem inevitable? Definitely not!
Consider Fallback Voting (a.k.a. Bucklin). The
first round does not find a majority, so the
second round votes are added in, the election
becomes an Approval election. Wonder of wonders,
B is elected with a vote of 100%! That is
because, when the approval threshold is lowered
to include second rank choices, every voter has
placed B in second rank or higher.
Any Condorcet method would also, of course, elect
B, because B is the pairwise winner. Approval would probably do the same.
Now, FairVote will doubtless point out that
Bucklin doesn't satisfy Later-No-Harm.
Later-No-Harm, however, is incompatible with the
basic principles of majority rule, which requires
compromise if decisions are to be made. Robert's
Rules is utterly unconcerned with Later-No-Harm.
But here is how it would affect the election:
Some voters would think that if they vote for B
in second place, this might help B defeat their
favorite. So they wouldn't vote for B, they would
"truncate." However, real voters don't mostly
think like that, even though political activists
wish they would. If a voter has a very strong
preference for the favorite over all others, then
they won't rank others, quite properly. But if
they have a weak preference, they will; in the
example given, B is widely known and respected. B
might not get a two-thirds majority, but it only
takes a relatively small number of the other
voters ranking B second to bring B the victory.
Continued with:
Dopp: 12.Not all ballots are treated equally
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