> Greg, you didn't actually say that IRV is good, you just said that it's > unlikely to be bad.
Huh? One reason I think it's good in part because it's very likely to elect elect the Condorcet candidate, if that's what you mean by "unlikely to be bad." Some other reasons I think it's good is that it resists strategic voting, allows third parties to participate, and paves the way for PR. > Why bother with something that's unlikely to be bad when we can just as > easily get something without that badness? You can't get rid of "badness." Every system is imperfect. IRV is non-monotonic; Condorcet is susceptible to burial. So we're left to balance the relative pros and cons. > Oh, and actually it _is_ likely to be bad. See that first graph? See how > over thousands of simulated elections it gets lower social satisfaction? Brian, you're graphs are computer-generated elections that you made up. They aren't actual elections that took place in practice, which show a high unlikelihood of being bad. When your theory is a poor predictor of the data, it's time to change the theory, not insist the data must be different from what they are. Greg > On Nov 25, 2008, at 11:52 AM, Greg wrote: > >> I will believe that when I'm presented with a non-negligible number of >> actual IRV elections for public office that failed to elect the >> "right" winner. And for starters, you get to define what "right" is. >> Preferably something of the form: in Election X, IRV elected candidate >> Y but candidate Z was the right winner, because of [insert your >> criteria and evidence here]. The more such cases you have, the more >> convincing your argument. I've studied every IRV election for public >> office ever held in the United States, most of which have their full >> ranking data publicly available, and every single time IRV elected the >> Condorcet winner, something I consider to be a good, though not >> perfect, rule of thumb for determining the "right" winner. When you >> present a case in which IRV did not elect the right winner, maybe I'll >> agree or maybe I'll dispute your criteria, but at least then we'd be >> off the blackboard and into the world of real elections. > > ---- Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
