[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > > D- The CVD folks sent the below to Science Magazine which apparently had a > story about voting in May 2001. [...] > > I have NOT seen the original Science magazine material.
You also evidently haven't seen Brams and response, appearing on the next page. I don't have the original op-ed that prompted the exchange, but you can probably find it at most libraries. Following are the uncut versions of the later exchange. ---------------------------------------------------- The Science of Elections - A Rejoinder. Steven Brams and Dudley Herschbach are right about the defects in the plurality voting system used in most American elections (Editorial "The Science of Elections", vol.292, 25 May 2001, page 1449). But, on both theoretical and practical grounds they are wrong to tout approval voting over instant runoff voting (IRV). Used for decades in Australia and Ireland and considered in 13 state legislatures this year, IRV lets voters rank candidates in preference order. A voter's best strategy is to sincerely rank the candidates. If no candidate gets a majority of first preferences, candidates at the bottom are sequentially dropped. Each ballot cast for those eliminated candidates is added to the totals of the next choice indicated on that ballot until a candidate achieves a majority. IRV duplicates a series of traditional runoffs, but without the need for additional elections that cost taxpayers and candidates more money and often lead to falloffs in voter participation. In contrast, approval voting is a binary system, where the voter can only indicate "yes" or "no" for each candidate. The problem is that voters rarely have binary views about a range of candidates. Let's assume a voter sees Z as most favored, Y as less favored, and X as unacceptable. By voting for "acceptable" candidates Y and Z the voter could cause Z to lose. But by voting only for Z, the voter makes it easier for unacceptable X to win. The voter will be torn between voting defensively against X or strategically for Z. Approval voting has another important real world flaw. Political behavior has much to do with what is rewarded by the election system, and approval voting would exacerbate one of the worst aspects of American campaigns: avoidance of substantive policy debate. Because a candidate could lose despite being the first choice of an absolute majority of the electorate, smart candidates would avoid controversial issues that alienate any significant number of voters. Smiling more and using policy-empty themes like "I care" will not clarify the important choices leaders must make. Those rewarded by approval voting should be characterized as "inoffensive" more than "centrist." IRV strikes a better balance. It rewards candidates who stand out on policy enough to gain first-choice support, yet encourages coalition-building and fewer personal attacks as candidates seek to be the second-choice of other candidates' supporters. These arguments help explain why IRV is used and proposed far more often than approval voting, including in upcoming ballot measures in Alaska and San Francisco that would implement IRV for their major elections (see <www.fairvote.org/irv> for details). The American Political Science Association even uses IRV to elect its president. It is the right system for America's high stakes elections with a single winner. (Rob Richie is the executive director of the Center for Voting and Democracy. Terrill Bouricius is the Center's New England regional director. Philip Macklin is a professor emeritus of physics at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio.) Rob Richie The Center for Voting and Democracy 6930 Carroll Avenue, Suite 901 Takoma Park, MD 20912 (301) 270-4616 [EMAIL PROTECTED] Terrill Bouricius 56 Booth Street Burlington, VT 05401 (802) 864-8382 [EMAIL PROTECTED] Philip Macklin 211 Oakhill Drive Oxford, OH 45056 (513) 523-5644 [EMAIL PROTECTED] ----------------------------------------------------------- RESPONSE IRV is a special case of a voting system proposed by Thomas Hare of England (and others) 150 years ago. It sounds attractive but, when compared with approval voting (AV), has some decidedly unappealing features, including: * its propensity to lose majority candidates, especially centrists, who may do poorly when challenged from both the left and right. Even when there are only three candidates, it is not uncommon that the centrist comes in third, which means that he or she loses under IRV. By contrast, AV tends to help such candidates, because they draw approval from their opponents' supporters on both the left and right, who want to avoid at all costs helping the candidate on the opposite side of the political spectrum. * its nonmonotonicity, which means that raising a candidate in one's ranking can cause him or her to lose. This can occur because of the way in which candidates are sequentially dropped and their votes transferred to those who remain in the race. This perverse property of IRV was discovered only about 30 years ago. It is antithetical to the very notion of democracy, in which expressing a stronger preference for a candidate should help rather than hurt that person. By contrast, expressing approval for additional candidates under AV can never hurt them and may help them. * its complexity, which even mathematicians have not fully understood, as witnessed by misstatements they have made about the Hare system. It is noteworthy that the American Mathematical Society, after long debate, abandoned the Hare system for AV. In fact, none of the eight professional societies that have adopted AV over the last 15 years has reconsidered its decision and chosen a different voting system. It is true that AV is a binary system, but not with respect to where voters draw the line between acceptable and unacceptable candidates. Thus, if there are five candidates, a voter might reasonably approve of one, two, three, or four out of the five candidates. The voter is sovereign in deciding who is worthy of approval, whereas IRV forces voters to make a strict ranking, which may be asking too much for those who do not know a great deal about the candidates but do know who is basically acceptable and who is not. It is also true that AV may not always elect the first choice of a majority of voters. But that result, surprisingly, is sometimes desirable. If, for example, 50 voters rank three candidates XYZ (in that order) and 49 voters rank them YZX, AV will elect Y if the 50 XYZ voters approve of both X and Y, and the 49 YZX voters approve of either Y or both Y and Z. Is not Y the better social choice, compared with the IRV winner, X, whom nearly half the voters consider the worst choice? Our critics make two false claims. A sincere ranking under IRV is not always optimal-a voter can sometimes ensure the election of a preferred candidate by not being sincere. The American Political Science Association (APSA) does not use IRV. To the embarrassment of one of us (Brams), a political scientist and a member of the APSA, the APSA does not have competitive elections for any of its offices. We think their charge that AV would force all candidates toward a lowest-common-denominator position of blandness is erroneous. In a detailed study of the 1980 presidential election, which had a significant third-party candidate (John Anderson), Peter Fishburn and one of us (Brams) showed that Ronald Reagan would have won under AV, based on both election and poll data (1). We strongly doubt that AV would have compromised Reagan's strong convictions or his campaign behavior-or affected the outcome. Indeed, trying to be everything to everybody is likely to make a candidate not even minimally acceptable to many voters and, therefore, not a smart campaign strategy under AV. Our critics point to the serious interest in IRV. We would point to the failure of the Hare system, after being adopted in several large U.S. cities like New York about 50 years ago, to stand the test of time. The last city still to use the system in the United States is Cambridge, MA. Serious analysis of AV began only about 20 years ago. Since then AV has gained many adherents both inside and outside the scientific community. Both its compelling theoretical properties and its simplicity commend it for practical use, which cannot be said for IRV in those jurisdictions that do not already have electronic voting equipment that would permit voters to rank candidates. Steven J. Brams1*. Dudley Herschbach2 1Department of Politics, New York University, New York, NY 10003, USA. 2Department of Chemistry, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA. *To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] References and Notes 1. S. J. Brams, P. C. Fishburn, Approval Voting (Birkh�user, Boston, 1983).
