At 01:09 PM 6/23/2008, Stéphane Rouillon wrote:
After a nice discussion about keeping cool,
usually a great idea if one can manage it. On the
other hand, sometimes getting a little hot can get things done.
So now can you acknoledge that IRV is better than FPTP ?
I can accpet IRV being worst than any other
method (even if I do not agree all the time)
but FPTP has to be worst!
I would once have agreed with this, and, still,
under some conditions, would agree that IRV is,
in some ways, better than Plurality. However, it
also can be worse in some ways, and there's the
rub: what is the balance? Political activists,
once they've made a decision -- and they tend not
to be the best of decision-makers, not thoroughly
investigating before deciding -- they become like
a guided missile that can't be recalled, it will
continue trying to hit its target even if it
would become obvious, to an intelligent pilot,
that it is an Iranian Airbus rather than a military jet.
But, in the United States, where I live, IRV
isn't replacing pure FPTP. It's replacing Top Two
Runoff (TTR). And it is pretty clear to me that
TTR is superior in just about every way, that
common arguments used to claim the reverse are
spurious, and that the one possible superiority,
cost, becomes, actually, an argument for
different reforms, not IRV, with its quirks and
its typical reproduction of Plurality results in
nonpartisan elections, and, in partisan
elections, its reproduction of TTR problems without the ameliorating factors.
Why is IRV being pushed in the U.S. as if it were
a positive reform? The initiative did not come
from voting systems experts. It came from
political activists, interested in proportional
representation. The history is pretty clear:
There was a conference in the early 1990s to
consider how to bring PR to the U.S. Out of that
conference (but not by the conference itself, it
was a small group who acted on their own), came
the formation of the Center for Proportional
Representation, I think it was called. At some
point, I'm not clear when, they changed their
name to the Center for Voting and Democracy, to
represent a wider focus and to match the strategy that had been developed.
Possibly the best method in common use for
Proportional Representation is Single
Transferable Vote. We now know how to do it
better, to be sure, but STV is pretty good, and
it gets better the more members districts have.
Now, problem is, STV is a complicated voting
system, more complicated even than IRV, because
the vote transfers get pretty hairy as members
are elected. (I'm assuming that one of the better
methods is being used. STV if it is just the
"top" candidates isn't so good, it's going to
imitate, more or less, plurality-at-large.) This
was considered an obstacle, and correctly so.
There are other methods which aren't so
difficult, that can be even more accurately
proportional and simpler for voters, but
remember, these were not voting systems experts
and they didn't want to invent something new.
(Though, in my opinion, the *best* method, and
surely the simplest, would be Asset Voting, as
first described by Lewis Carroll in the early
1880s and reinvented by Mike Ossipoff, Warren
Smith, and possibly others, recently.)
What to do? I can imagine the excitement when the
name "Instant runoff voting" was proposed. Runoff
voting was in used in the U.S., and it costs
money to hold those runoff elections. The extra
cost of STV could be justified by the cost
savings from runoffs. So if they could get
jurisdictions using top two runoff to establish
IRV, it would then be a smaller step for these
jurisdictions to move to proportional representation.
It was a political strategy, and it did not take
into account the serious problems of IRV. For
starters, IRV is used in two-party systems, and
its effect is to protect the major parties from
election spoilage by minor parties. It does allow
third parties to exist, but makes it very
difficult for them to actually thrive. Because of
PR in the Senate, I think it is, they can
exercise some power. But they don't win seats in
the House where IRV is used. (I'm could be
getting things mixed up, but we have Australian
readers who, I'm sure, will correct me if I get it wrong.)
STV is a good multiwinner method, as I mentioned,
for proportional representation, because the
members it elects are clearly good choices,
except for the last one. When you are electing
many members, that the last member can be a bit
off doesn't matter so much. But when that's the only one elected ....
Further, IRV as generally used in Australia
(Preferential Voting) is different from IRV as
being implemented here. First of all, full
ranking of all candidates is required, or the
ballot is informal and is not counted. This has
two consequences: a majority is always found, but
the majority can be, to some extent, coerced, and
"donkey voting" is common, apparently, where
voters simply make the easiest marks they can to
fill out the ballot. (Thus they use Robson
Rotation to randomize ballots to minimize the
effects of this.) Secondly, PV is being used for
partisan elections, which behave quite differently than nonpartisan elections.
In the U.S. what is being implemented is, almost
entirely, Ranked Choice Voting with limited ranks
(Three in San Francisco, even with as many as 22
candidates on the ballot), and it is replacing
Top Two Runoff, not Plurality, and TTR is
*mostly* used for nonpartisan races (and I think
all the IRV implementations have been nonpartisan).
Now, IRV was used before in the U.S. It was
replaced. What was it replaced by? Isn't that an
interesting question? Why is it that FairVote,
the organization that the Center for Voting and
Democracy, never mentions this in public debates
over IRV? In some places IRV was replaced for
clearly partisan reasons, and sometimes that gets
mentioned. But IRV was used for party primaries
in some places. Why was it replaced? The reason
I've seen -- and I'm not certain that this is the
case -- is that not enough voters were using the
additional preferences to justify the complicated
ballot, so it was replaced with .... ta dah!
Top Two Runoff. Which allows voters to vote for
one only, a fairly easy choice to make, and which
*usually*, in nonpartisan elections (and it is
arguable that party primaries are nonpartisan)
either makes the same choice as IRV, or a better
one. Like IRV, it can miss a compromise winner,
but then it makes the best choice among the
remaining ones, and -- big secret, not widely
known, often coming as a surprise -- voters can,
if they want, where write-in votes are permitted
in the runoff, *fix* an error in the top two choice. And occasionally they do.
IRV is sold as a simulation of runoff voting,
hence the name; the implication is that it
produces the same results, but without an
expensive extra election. However, when we look
at actual runoff elections, we see "comeback
elections," where the runner-up in the primary
ends up winning the runoff; it happens about
one-third of the time. It's worth looking at why
this happens, it's pretty clear to me, but I
won't go there yet. At this point, it's enough to
note that IRV is *not* producing these comeback
elections, and this is quite solid from the data
we have. Even in partisan environments, comeback
elections can be expected to be less common than
one out of three: the exception is where there is
vote-splitting from an upstart third party.
So, it's possible to argue that IRV is an
improvement over FPTP in a situation where (1) a
majority isn't required to win, and (2) it's a
partisan election. In nonpartisan elections, IRV
is simply reproducing the results of Plurality,
for much higher counting cost. Why does this happen?
Apparently, in nonpartisan elections, the voters
for a particular candidate tend to be a
representative sample of the entire voter
population with regard to its opinion about
*other candidates*. In other words, if, say, 30%
of voters think A is best (if B is excepted),
then 30% of voters who prefer B will have A as
their second choice. I didn't expect to find
this, it was quite a surprise to see it, but I'm
not the first to notice the phenomenon, Antony
Green of ABC notes it in his analysis of
preferential voting in Australia. (In other
words, it even happens with partisan elections,
to a substantial extent, meaning that voters
aren't as partisan as political activists would like them to be.)
Now, in some places in Australia, they have
Optional Preferential Voting. Where they have PV,
they call the quota an "absolute majority,"
meaning that all ballots with legal votes are
considered. Where they make full ranking
optional, they change the quota to a moving one,
i.e., a majority of all ballots containing votes
for continuing candidates. And, according to
Antony Green, bullet voting is on the rise in
those places. Which would eventually lead to the
situation encountered in the U.S.: not enough
voters using additional preferences to make the
trouble of using STV for single-winner worth the effort.
Top-two runoff is known to favor the survival and
occasional wins of minor parties. It is, again,
obvious why. It is less of a leap to make it to
second place in an election than it is to make it
all the way to the top, so third party candidates
manage to do it more often. And then they will be
taken seriously, and, we might roughly predict,
they will win perhaps a third of the time. Unless
they are widely considered offensive or fringe.
So Le Pen in France wasn't going to win the
runoff, and neither was David Duke in Lousiana.
Neither France nor Louisiana allow write-ins in
the Runoff, (a separate issue, to be considered
on its own), which could fix the problem that
both elections passed over, almost certainly, the
Condorcet winner, forcing many voters to "hold
their noses" and vote for the lesser evil. Top
Two Runoff gives third parties (and independent
candidates) an opportunity to convince the public
they deserve office. IRV tends, strongly, to
elect the first preference leader; the vote transfers simply maintain the lead.
IRV in the primary for TTR, with runoff if there
is majority failure, would be better than
Plurality in the primary, I think, but that would
defeat the rationale for the reform to some
extent. Perhaps one-third of the time (it's been
a bit less), IRV finds a majority winner, so it
would avoid roughly one-third of runoffs, not
considered worth the expense, I'd predict.
However, there is a simpler method that would
probably find a majority winner about half the
time, though it's a bit speculative, and that is
Bucklin Voting. I see no sign that it would do
worse than IRV, but it is *far* easier to count.
Just count all the votes and add them up in stages.
And there is an even simpler method that might do
about as well: Approval Voting. Just Count All
the Votes, period. Stop discarding ballots with
overvotes, count the votes. It's clear that in a
two-party environment, it would fix the spoiler
effect about as well as IRV, but the benefit
continues even as third parties start to come up
in position, whereas that is precisely when IRV breaks down.
The biggest problem with Approval, of course, is
that it does not allow voters to cast that
contingent vote while still remaining able to
express first preference. That's why Bucklin may
be more attractive, it allows it. (Indeed, as
previously implemented, it required it. First
preference was required to be for one candidate
only. But I see no good reason for that. If a
voter actually wants to be able to equally rank
two candidates, I see utterly no reason to
prohibit it. These are really alternative votes,
because, in the end, *at most* one of them counts for the winner.
So, is IRV better than FPTP? Depends, doesn't it?
IRV produces the same results, for the most part,
as FPTP; where it does not, it is still highly
protective of two major parties and, as what is
really a Plurality method in disguise, it tends
to maintain a two-party system. And the
comparison between IRV and pure FPTP is a
deceptive one: that's not the real choice being
made. The real choice has been between IRV and
TTR, and FairVote has avoided making any
performance comparisons except for misleading ones.
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