10. Dopp: IRV entrenches the two-major-political party system
IRV neither "entrenches" nor "overthrows" the
two-party system. It simply ensures no candidate
wins over majority opposition. If a minor party
has the support to earn a majority of vote, it
can win in an IRV election. If not, it will not win.
This is pure smokescreen. Sure, it doesn't
*guarantee* a two-party system. It merely makes
its continuation highly likely. That's what Dopp
meant by "entrenches." IRV has no record of
assisting in the overturning of a two-party
system, but there is an obvious way in which it helps maintain it.
It eliminates the first-order spoiler effect.
Major parties can then, with less risk, ignore minor parties.
Whatever the mechanism, that's what seems to
happen. See the description of OPV at:
http://www.abc.net.au/elections/federal/2004/items/200407/s1162263.htm
This is Antony Green of ABC writing about Optional Preferential Vote:
"In almost every case, optional preferential
voting will assist the candidate with the highest
primary vote." In other words, OPV will behave
like Plurality, most of the time. And Plurality
is well-known to strongly favor two-party systems.
IRV is a winner-take-all method, like plurality
voting and two-round runoffs. However, IRV
allows independents and candidates with minor
parties to run without being labeled as spoilers.
Same as two-round runoffs. However, runoffs have
surprises, quite often (about one-third the
time). With IRV, that is much more rare.
With top-two runoff, a third party only has to
muscle its way up to second place to make it into
the runoff, not all the way to the top. Suddenly
it has credibility for that election. If I were
involved with a third party, I'd want to see
Top-Two runoff, real runoffs, not IRV, which
gives me almost no chance to convince the pubic
that my party is viable. Robert's Rules of Order
deplores the characteristic of collapsing an
election into one ballot, with no runoff
possibility, precisely because it doesn't allow
the extra consideration that repeated balloting
does. Given that in most systems, the lower
preference candidates are not actually
eliminated, it is simply "suggested" that voters
pick one of the top two -- because that's all
that is on the ballot -- Top Two runoff, with
write-in votes allowed, actually fulfils the
Robert's Rules preference for repeated balloting,
particular if a majority remains required.
This may reveal a higher level of support for
these parties, and if these parties are
attractive to voters, their support may grow.
Apparently it doesn't work that way.
Relating to multi-party representation, any
winner-take-all, single seat election method
tends towards two dominant parties, at least in
any given geographic area. To allow for multiple
parties to regularly win office, jurisdictions
should adopt a form of proportional
representation in which candidates will be able
to win office with less than 50% of the vote.
Actually, want to go whole hog, use Asset Voting,
first proposed by Lewis Carroll in 1884. He
proposed it, actually, for proportional
representation using STV. And exhausted ballots?
Well, he wrote, a voter who wasn't familiar with
all the candidates could choose to vote for just
one, and then this candidate could "spend" these
votes to create seats, as if it were his own
property. Warren Smith, proposing Asset Voting in
2004, used the same metaphor, the votes are the candidate's "Assets."
But Asset Voting also works if the ballot is a
standard vote-for-one ballot, or an Approval
ballot (if it is Approval, because no votes are
wasted, votes for more than one must be divided
or else the voter would get more than one vote of
effect on the election, and that's more
complicated to count.) And then the Assembly is
composed of all candidates who get a quota of
votes, either directly or through vote transfers
controlled by the candidates. Very, very simple,
and thoroughly, intensely democratic. But this is for another day.
STV is quite a respectable method for
proportional representation, it is only when it
is used single-winner that it becomes seriously
problematic. There are better methods, though,
that are precinct-summable, much simpler to count.
Note that Australias IRV elections are often
cited as an example of two-party domination. But
while the two major parties (one of which is
divided into two parties, with one party running
in one particular region of the country)
dominant representation, the minor parties
contest elections very vigorously, with an
average of seven candidates contesting house
elections in 2007. That year the Green Party did
not win any seats in house elections, but it ran
candidates in every district and earned 8% of
the national vote. It naturally would prefer a
proportional representation system, but supports
IRV over alternate winner-take-all systems and
uses it to elect its internal leaders.
Could it be that it supports IRV against its own
interests? Notice that it isn't winning any
seats. What does that say? It says to me that IRV
makes them irrelevant. With a plurality system,
for example -- which I don't recommend -- and 8%
of the vote, they'd have serious clout. With IRV, they are defanged.
Continued with:
Dopp: 11. "Could deliver unreasonable outcomes
."
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