I care little for IRV, which deserves an early death, but think of needs
of Condorcet, which also uses a ranked ballot.
On Tue, 8 Jul 2008 08:28:24 -0700 (PDT) Chris Benham wrote:
From Kathy Dopp's anti-IRV propaganda "report":
" 17. Unstable and can be delicately sensitive to noise in the rankings.
If an election is not
resolved after 3 rounds of IRV then one is deep in the ranking for many
people. This means
noise in the rankings. Do people really study candidates they don't care
much about? Thus
the noise in the ranking for the most ill-informed voters is determining
the outcome in deep
rank run-offs.
When a race is unresolved after 3 rounds of IRV, a better solution is to
hold a real run off
with the remaining candidates. Having winnowed the field, voters can now
properly study
their allowed few choices with the required care and presumably enough
will to make the
outcome not contingent on noise. Moreover, can you fathom how awful it
would be to fill
out a ballot ranking every candidate 10 deep? In Australia, voters are
required by law to fill
rank ever candidate running (generally 20) from 1 to 20. Do you think
there is anything
besides noise in the last ten? The saving grace on the Australian ballot
is that generally there
are only 2 questions, one with 3 to 4 rankings and one with about 20.
Not like our USA
ballots. Restricting the ranking depth of ranked choice ballots could
improve IRV methods
by reducing noise and making it easier for voters. "
No-one I gather is suggesting that in the US voters should be compelled
to fully rank, so all
this is silly crude stuff.
"In Australia, voters are required by law to fill rank ever candidate
running (generally 20) from 1 to 20."
Ranked voting is valuable via allowing voters to favor more than one
candidate.
It is wasteful and destructive if it demands that they "rank" candidates
beyond their desires.
The "generally 20" figure is false. For Australian IRV elections there
is rarely more than about
seven candidates.
The figure 20 is about right for elections to the Senate, which uses
multi-member STV
(corrupted into a quasi-list system).
Elsewhere in the paper we read that IRV is inadequate because it can't
guarantee that the
winner will be elected with the support of a majority of all the voters
who submitted
valid ballots.
Majority is a word that makes sense for Plurality elections.
Associating it with other election methods ranges toward useless and
destructive.
Demanding that every voter rank every candidate means that each
candidate must be ranked by 100% of the voters - a "majority" without
value for each.
Even with voters choosing how many to rank (or to approve in
Approval) getting ranked or approved by more than half does not mean a
useful majority - some other candidate could earn the win via stronger
backing.
"Restricting the ranking depth of ranked choice ballots could improve
IRV methods
by reducing noise and making it easier for voters."
The obvious way to reduce noise is to not demand it (discussed above) and
educate voters that introducing noise is wasteful and can be destructive,
Restricting ranking depth can accommodate inadequate equipment - which
should be replaced by adequate equipment - this should be a moderate
expense to accommodate the occasional voter who desires such.
But Kathy favours "restricting ranking depth" which of course has the
effect of making
this avowed aim much less likely.
And of course restricting ranking doesn't "make it easier for voters".
If truncation is allowed,
how could it?
In fact it just makes it harder for some voters. Say there are many
candidates and I judge
that 2 of them are the front-runners, I have a preference between them
but they are my
2 least favourite candidates. I am stuck with the same dilemma and
strong incentive to use
the Compromise strategy that I have in FPP. To have some hope of having
an impact on
the result I must insincerely rank my preferred front-runner above
second-bottom.
Chris Benham
--
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Dave Ketchum 108 Halstead Ave, Owego, NY 13827-1708 607-687-5026
Do to no one what you would not want done to you.
If you want peace, work for justice.
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