James replying to Russ, on the subject of the relative feasibility of new methods...
Thanks for this little dose of reality. I see that this bill simply sets up a *study* of *IRV* for *non-partisan* offices, and it took six years to get this far (not yet signed into law)!
That should give the people on this forum a clue about how difficult it will be to sell their favorite methods. And that's why I've tried to emphasize simplicity.
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So, it can be useful to estimate the public adoptability of theoretical voting systems, but please don't expect people to abandon discussion of the more ambitious methods just because you deem them to be overly complex.
James,
I did not mean to suggest that others should not discuss "complicated" methods. I am merely suggesting that, for their own good, they should avoid setting themselves up for disappointment by imagining the public will be open to complicated methods for major public elections.
Actually, as simple as DMC/RAV is, it may still be too complicated for public acceptance within, say, the next 20 or 30 years. If so, I guess we're left with Approval.
What exactly do you mean by that? That approval is the only method that is both immediately adoptable and better than the status quo? I'd suggest that IRV fits that category as well, especially if it allows for equal rankings. I still think that I'd rather have ER-IRV than approval.
IRV is deceptively simple from the voter's perspective. The count at each "round" is identical to a conventional plurality election. If your top choice loses your vote transfers to your next choice. What more could a voter want? (The fact that it's non-monotonic and non-summable would never occur to 99% of voters, and even if they are told they won't care.)
I tried to explain a few weeks ago that this apparent simplicity is the reason for the popularity of IRV, but I got some flack that I didn't have time to reply to.
The one thing we can be absolutely, 100% sure about is that the issue of Condorcet margins vs. wv will *not* be a significant public issue anytime within the next 1,000 years!
I'm hoping that it will never need to be a significant public issue, because before too long it should be clear that margins doesn't have a leg to stand on. WV vs. AWP/CWP might be an interesting public issue at some point, though. Don't know if that will take 1,000 years, but I would be rather surprised if it happened on a large scale during my lifetime. On small scales, perhaps...
I was being a bit flippant about the "margins vs. wv" issue. Let me take another shot at it. Many voters will intuitively reject wv in favor of margins. You can call them naive if you wish, but the point is that such "naive" intuition will create a major impediment to adoption. The issue will never get resolved to the point where ordinal-only Condorcet can be adopted. If public acceptance of Condorcet/margins ever reached a critical mass, Mike Ossipoff would start throwing stink bombs or threaten to light himself on fire in protest, for example.
But the issue will never get anywhere near that far. The whole Condorcet ordinal-only method is so complicated that public interest will never reach a critical mass. And when it becomes clear to the public that many variations exist and even the "experts" do not agree on which is best, even receptive members of the public will simply throw up their hands and move on to other issues -- like who the major-party candidates should be in the next election.
We on this list are one ten-millionth of the population, folks. Please try to remember that.
--Russ ---- Election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
