At 07:11 AM 11/8/2008, Chris Benham wrote:
Are you really comfortable supporting and supplying ammunition to a
group of avowed FPP supporters in their effort to have IRV declared
unconstitutional?
So many aspects, so little time ....
(1) Brown v. Smallwood outlawed preferential voting, period, in
Minnesota. Part of the current problem is that FairVote made a highly
suspect interpretation that tried to assert BvS as being only about
Bucklin, not about a sequential elimination method like IRV. This was
based on a comment in BvS that was practically dicta. Other parts of
BvS made it very clear that casting multiple votes in a single
election was considered unconstitutional by that court.
(2) Brown v. Smallwood was quite a questionable decision, neither
following the precedents of other courts, nor, in turn, followed by
other courts. So its application remained in Minnesota.
(3) As soon as the suit was filed in Minnesota, I recommended to
activists favoring other methods that resources be put together to
file friend-of-the-court briefs arguing (1) that BvS applied to all
forms of preferential voting and, specifically, (2) it did not
specially apply to methods that fail LnH, and, in particular, applied
to both IRV and to Bucklin. And that (3) the decision itself should
be totally overturned.
(4) The danger was that BvS would be confirmed based on LnH failure
of Bucklin, legitimizing *only* sequential elimination methods. Thus
Minnesota would get IRV, which, it turns out, is a very questionable
and, at best, shallow reform; but better and simpler reforms would
remain impossible.
(5) One exception: what might be the most sweeping reform of them all
is available with IRV as a base: Asset Voting. It was actually
invented by Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) as a tweak on STV. All that one
has to do is to assign any exhausted votes to the first preference
candidate on the exhausted ballot. However, this does not satisfy
LNH, technically, even though it clearly gives the voter maximum
power to influence the outcome. (The vote only transfers to the
"elector" if the vote would otherwise be wasted. Since it would go to
the first preference candidate, it cannot harm that candidate.
However, it fails LnH with respect to lower preference candidates,
under what would probably be rare contingencies.)
Politically, I'd prefer to see IRV outlawed based on a pure
confirmation of BvS, than to see the partial overturn based on a
specification of BvS as applying only to LNH failing methods. But
better than both these outcomes would be a simple overturn of BvS as
an abberant decision.
And, yes, that would allow Minneapolis to proceed. I've become *very
strongly* opposed to IRV, but one of the ways that the general public
is going to come to this position is to have examples in front of
them. IRV actually behaves badly, compared to top-two runoff, in
terms of the opportunities afforded to independent and third-party
candidates, who have *much* more chance of being elected under
top-two runoff than they do under IRV.
IRV will elect an "independent or third party candidate" when this
candidate was a frontrunner, and would have won under FPTP
(Plurality). Circumstances where other than this happens are limited
to spoiler-effect scenarios, where there is a strong third party
candidate, and what I might call distorted vote transfers.
It turns out that vote transfers generally reflect the opinions of a
subpopulation that, much more than theorists have expected, reflect
the general opinion. That is, if, say, 60% of all voters prefer A
over B and C, and C is eliminated, the C voters will generally favor
A over B by roughly the same ratio, i.e. 60% of the transfers will go
to A. Yes. This means that the plurality winner of the first round
will go on, after transfers, to win the election. From the experience
so far in the U.S., it *always* happens. But nearly all these
elections, so far, have been nonpartisan elections. In partisan
elections, it may shift. Or may not, we don't know. Historically, in
Ann Arber, there was a reversal of the first round result, due to the
strength of the Human Rights Party and thus vote transfers to the
Democratic candidate. We might note that HRP strength was ultimately
demolished after the victory.... but I'm not sure what that means....
(The HRP became, eventually, the Minnesota Green Party.)
With top-two runoff, something quite different happens. About
one-third of the time, the runner-up in the first round goes on to
win the election. Why?
Well, it really should be studied. There are two possible
explanations that come to my mind.
(1) A dark horse candidate that wasn't considered a possible winner
managed to make it to second place; then, once this candidate was
taken seriously and examined by the public, a decision regarding true
preference was made.
(2) Voter preferences didn't change, but voter turnout did. This, by
the way, will shift the result toward what Range voting would
produce. Reduced voter turnout has generally been considered a bad
thing. That may be a shallow oversimplification, or, quite simply,
not true. As long as the difficulty of voting isn't somehow biased
(i.e., for example, voting is made very easy in affluent
neighborhoods, and hard in poor ones), differential turnout will
result in a decision that is more broadly satisfactory (in social
utility terms). It is a sincere weighting of results according to
preference intensity.
In reality, I think that both these causes operate. Top-two runoff
gives minor candidates a much better opportunity to make their case
to the voters; they need only get to second place, not all the way to
first place. If the first election is IRV, however, it will be
resolved based on the votes as cast in a single poll, and, because of
the effect I've described above, it would be rare that a minor
candidate would win.
The campaign for IRV in the U.S. found it necessary to turn to an
economic and convenience argument in order to gain adoptions. In
selling this, it was implied that IRV was merely a convenient
short-cut to produce the same results as TTR. In San Francisco, the
voter information summary, that a majority would still be required to
win, was blatantly false, for the ballot measure itself removed the
language from the election code requiring such.
Majority election requirements are a major safeguard in a democracy,
and they've generally been swept away, when push came to shove.
Further, access to runoff ballots by write-in candidates has been
terminated. It was explicitly outlawed by San Francisco, and that was
tested in the California Supreme Court, and sustained.
Voting systems theorists have generally ignored these details,
preferring to stick to studying the simper single-round systems, and
analyzing TTR only with an assumption that voter preferences are
fixed things, and totally ignoring preferential turnout.
But the devil is in the details.
Because of differential turnout, Plurality is probably a better
method than general election theory, neglecting the effect of
preference strength on turnout, would predict. However, there is some
suppression of this effect, I'm sure, in general elections, where
many races are decided together. In a runoff election, there is more
focus, voters turn out if they care about the result of that
particular election.
By using Plurality with a majority requirement, and thus a runoff
election is a possibility, the spoiler effect can be detected.
However, even better methods for a first round are possible. It could
be Bucklin, for example, or even IRV; however, IRV's "failure to find
a compromise candidate" -- Robert's Rules strongest objection to
sequential elimination preferential voting -- would leave this method
unable to find a condorcet winner. Unless.
Unless write-in candidates are allowed in the runoff rounds, as they
were in Long Beach, California, and which is the norm in California
unless specific laws prohibit it. There, the mayor was prevented by
term limits from being on the ballot. She ran anyway, and got a
first-round plurality. Still not allowed to be on the ballot in the
runoff, she won with a plurality in the second round (there was
another write-in candidacy that prevented her from gaining a second
round majority).
This really should be understood. Majority vote, FPTP with a majority
requirement or the balloting is repeated, is Condorcet-compliant. All
the supporters of the Condorcet winner have to do is vote
consistently with their preference, which is true with any method.
And, yes, the number of ballots is theoretically unlimited, except
that in real practice they don't go on forever. However, Asset Voting
addresses this brilliantly, allowing *negotiation* to determine the
winner, additional polls would probably never be necessary, but the
salutary effects of top-two runoff would remain (because the winner
is utterly unconstricted, presumably, could even be a person who
wasn't on the original ballot.)
At present, I'm promoting one simple idea: the best method (most in
current use in the U.S. is Top Two Runoff, because it allows voters
to truly reconsider their votes, making it possible for a dark horse
to win, and actually doing this in maybe one election out of ten or
so. To replace this with IRV on the argument that it saves money is,
besides being quite speculative and quite possibly wrong, penny-wise
and pound-foolish, if we place value on democratic and majority-rule
values. IRV is a plurality method, it cheerfully (and usually in the
U.S., whenever a majority wasn't obtained in the first round, i.e.,
when votes are transferred) elects with only a plurality of the votes.
Will you have any complaint when in future they are trying to do the same
thing to some Condorcet method you like and IRV supporters help
them on grounds like it fails Later-no-Harm, Later-no-Help, and
probably mono-add-top?
Unlikely.
But I think I addressed this. BvS should be overturned. IRV should be
allowed in Minneapolis, though possibly some details should be
addressed. I particularly dislike that IRV is sold as somehow
respecting majority rule, because the practical result of IRV is
quite the opposite. Lewis Carroll addressed this over a century ago,
inventing what we now call Asset Voting as a method of enfranchising
the common voter, who easily doesn't have the knowledge to rank
multiple candidates, but knows the one candidate most trusted.
The problem of exhausted ballots gets swept under the carpet by IRV
promoters, who have attempted, generally, to minimize or distract
from it. IRV is sold as if all ballots will be fully expressed; but
in Australia, often cited as an example of how IRV works, that is
accomplished by considering ballots as spoiled that aren't fully
ranked, a provision that is unlikely to fly in the U.S. In areas in
Australia that use Optional Preferential Voting, ballot exhaustion is
common, and, of course, election by plurality is, likewise, and the
phenomenon of "comeback elections" turns into practically universal
election of the first round winner (i.e., the method almost exactly
duplicates Plurality.)
FairVote got stuck on IRV long ago, because of their long-term goals,
and generally disregarded the election methods community and all the
built-up expertise on the topic, in favor of political strategy and
promotion, decided centrally by the organization (and possibly by, in
effect, a single individual). As a result, they may indeed be showing
some success, but with a method vastly inferior to what is possible.
Bucklin was used, worked, and should do at least as good a job of
dealing with the spoiler effect as IRV. It's more likely to find a
majority (possibly one out of three majority-failure IRV elections
would find a majority, because Bucklin is more efficient at finding
majorities). It's cheaper to implement, because it is simply a
sum-of-votes method, precinct summable. Combine Bucklin with a true
majority requirement, you'd have quite a sophisticated method. And
there are many other possibilities.
Range, of course, is ideal, properly implemented, because it uses the
best method for evaluating election outcomes as the method itself.
And it can be made Majority Criterion compliant (though runoffs when needed.)
(Chris wouldn't agree about MC compliance, but by that, I mean that a
majority have approved the winner. They might have preferred someone
else -- but that is only theoretically a problem, it's quite unlikely
in actual practice unless voters have no knowledge of who is likely to win.)
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