> >Thanks for doing this analysis! This is BIG news in the small world > >of voting methods! :-) > > How so? It's well known that IRV/AV/STV doesn't necessarily find the > Condorcet winner. It shouldn't be too surprising that there are > real-world examples. > -- > /Jonathan Lundell.
Yes, Jonathan, of course it is well known -- to people on the EM list and a few other lists that aren't under the spell of the Center for Voting and Democracy's propaganda. I suspect that most people who promote IRV have no clue about the numerous flaws of IRV, or if they have heard about the problems from some person or some web site, the significance of those problems hasn't "sunk in". (I was among those clueless for about a year.) I have kept my eye on the EM list for several years, and I have not seen, until today, an example of Condorcet failure in a real-life public IRV election. I believe the reasons for not seeing any such examples are: 1. The raw ballot data which is needed to do the analysis has been unavailable except for a very few, recent elections. Australia has been doing IRV elections for many decades, but the way the IRV results are summarized and reported, it is impossible to determine if the IRV winner is not the same as the Condorcet winner. (Of course, if some candidate gets a majority of first-choice votes (which is often the case), then that candidate is always the IRV winner and Condorcet winner.) 2. Despite many decades of using IRV and proportional representation, Australia still has two dominant parties. (It is debatable whether IRV helps keep that two-party system in place, the way Plurality voting does in the US. There might be other factors that keep the third parties small in Australia.) Because third parties seldom get a small fraction (typically less than 20%) of the first-choice votes, there are few opportunities for IRV and Condorcet to get different results. So, it's great to have this example of Condorcet failure in an IRV election -- right here in the US! -- so soon after IRV was implemented in a few cities around the US. I don't want to slow down voting reform in general. But I would love to slow down the spread of IRV, so we non-IRV reformers can implement some other, hopefully better voting methods. I would welcome the help of any IRV enthusiasts who decide, for whatever reason, that IRV is not the best method to promote. And yes, _any_ non-Condorcet method can exhibit Condorcet failure, by definition! But most of us who promote those other methods will admit that fact. In my experience, it's hard to get IRV supporters to understand and acknowledge the problems with IRV. Cheers, - Jan ---- election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
