To Greg Dennis:
I appreciate your efforts to express your arguments clearly and defend
them with good data. Nevertheless, I find them mostly unpersuasive.
You say in your latest post that IRV resists strategic voting and
Condorcet is susceptible to burial. But both of these beliefs have
been discussed extensively on this list over the years and as far as I
can recall, there has been no consensus about them. As for the latter,
there is little evidence that Condorcet's susceptibility to burying is
anything but theoretical. If used in actual public elections, it may
turn out that burying wouldn't be a problem at all. At worst, burial
efforts by supporters of some candidates might be slightly unevenly
offset by those of the supporters of other candidates.
IRV, on the other hand, presents unquestionably serious strategy
problems when a third party candidate gains enough support to strongly
challenge two major party candidates and all three have close to the
same amount of support (say between 25% to 40% each). In such cases,
many people would begin worrying about whether strategic voting would
be a good idea but would have trouble figuring out how best to vote
strategically, given how erratically IRV functions in such situations.
Voting for their second choices could even improve the chances of
their favorites, while voting for their favorites could reduce their
chances. Strategic voting could seem very desirable yet impossible to
know how to do. So maybe IRV does resist strategic voting, but that
may not be very comforting.
Data from previous elections won't settle the IRV versus Condorcet
debate. There have not been enough of them in the U.S. More important,
there haven't been any major federal or state elections (presidential,
senatorial, or gubernatorial) and very few major local elections
(mayoral or other) using IRV. These would be far and away the most
important kinds of test cases - i.e., the kinds of elections that
would matter the most and where voters would be most familiar with all
the candidates and therefore would find it easiest to rank them.
I also must reject your contention that IRV is easier to explain.
Condorcet, or what I prefer to call IRRV (Instant Round Robin Voting)
is every bit as easy to explain as IRV. IRV and IRRV both use the same
kinds of ranked ballots. The main difference (setting aside problems
involved in permitting or disallowing equal ranking and unranked
candidates) is that IRV uses the ranking data to simulate a series of
runoff elections whereas IRRV uses the same data to simulate separate
2-person contests between each candidate and every other candidate.
There's no need to talk about matrices and other technicalities about
data storage and calculation. Using the same kinds of simple examples,
it's just as easy to explain how IRRV works as it is to explain IRV.
And although the possibility of cycles makes explaining IRRV more
complicated, other kinds of problems make explaining IRV similarly
more complicated.
The concept of a candidate who beats all others in one to one contests
may even be much more intuitively compelling to most people than the
concept of a candidate who wins a series of runoffs. They might find
IRRV especially compelling after it is explained how IRV increases the
likelihood that a strong compromise candidate would be eliminated with
the result that the winner could be a very divisive candidate who is
strongly supported by a substantial minority but strongly opposed
(even hated) by another substantial minority. Is that really the kind
of outcome most people would prefer, knowing that the compromise
candidate would have defeated both of the others in an IRRV election?
I realize that many IRV supporters are fond of dismissing compromise
candidates as "bland" and with "little core support." But this is
little more than rhetoric designed to support their debatable
opinions. It's possible for a compromise candidate to be anything but
bland. Ross Perot (vis-a-vis Bush Sr and Clinton in 1992) and Ralph
Nader (vis-a-vis Bush Jr and Gore in 2000) both may have been very
good examples. John Anderson (vis-a-vis Carter and Reagan in 1980) may
have been as well. It seems likely to me that Anderson, Perot, and
Nader all would have had much better chances in IRRV elections than in
IRV elections and that all might have made better presidents than
Reagan, Clinton, or Bush Jr.
You worry that compromise candidates may tend to be people who speak
in generalities and refuse to say where they stand whereas IRV will
help insure that we know where the winner will stand. But you cite no
examples, which is surprising given how much importance you have
attached to basing conclusions about IRV on lessons from past
elections. Until you do cite some actual examples of dangerously bland
and platitudinous candidates who, in Condorcet elections, would
threaten more forthcoming ones, your worries are totally theoretical
and far from compelling. None of the examples I gave, not Anderson nor
Perot nor Nader, could have been accused of being bland or unwilling
to explain where they stood regarding major issues and their major
party opponents.
By the way, I happen to be fairly knowledgeable about the history of
FairVote, the leading organizational advocate of IRV, having attended
the organization's founding meeting in June 1992 when it was
originally named Citizens for Proportional Representation (CPR). At
the time, reforming single winner elections was barely on the
organization's radar screen. I'm not sure it was even discussed at the
founding meeting. However, a short time after the meeting, former
presidential candidate John Anderson got an op-ed published in the NY
Times arguing in favor of "majority preferential voting", the name he
then used for what is now called instant runoff voting, and soon after
that he joined CPR's board. (He wasn't at the founding meeting.) You
can read Anderson's op-ed at:
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E0CE7D91F3FF937A15754C0A964958260
A short time later, the organization's name was changed to Center for
Voting and Democracy (CVD). Anderson no doubt had something to do with
getting CVD more focused on reforming single winner elections, but it
was not until 1996 or so, four years after the founding meeting, that
CVD began taking the single winner election issue very seriously, and
it took another year or two for it to decide on Instant Runoff Voting
as the name for its favored single winner method.
I'm much less troubled, however, by the slowness of CVD to focus
seriously on single winner elections than by how it decided, with
virtually no public or even inter-organizational debate, to go with
IRV and to reject alternative voting methods, even though CVD at the
time had some notable supporters of other methods on its advisory
board. (That board included a number of highly respected voting
methods experts and political scientists, including Steven Brams and
Arend Lifphart, whereas the FairVote advisory board today has no such
people.) I personally asked CVD's executive director Rob Richie to
allow a debate at its 1997 national meeting between IRV supporters and
supporters of alternative methods, but he declined to do so, and he
has continued to refuse to sponsor or (to my knowledge) participate in
any serious public debates.
Furthermore, although an election for board members was held at the
1992 founding meeting, I later learned that the organization was
incorporated not as a membership organization but as a very
conventional board dominated nonprofit whose board members select
their successors. In other words, CPR/CVD/FairVote has itself never
been organized very democratically. It also has not operated very
transparently. It has never posted either its bylaws or the minutes of
any of its meetings on its website. We can only guess how its
decisions about IRV and many other things, including its name changes,
have been made.
Rather than participate in debates, Richie and other FairVote people
have argued, as you do, that IRV is more politically feasible. In
fact, they have argued this from the beginning, long before they began
having any success getting IRV adopted. Since then, only a very small
number of jurisdictions have adopted IRV. Furthermore, because of
serious and widespread voting system problems, IRV has been often been
implemented only with much difficulty and in ways that limit the
number of candidates permitted in any given election contest.
Given that supporters of Condorcet and other voting methods have not
yet been nearly as well organized or well-funded as IRV supporters,
I'm skeptical that IRV has anywhere near the unstoppable political
momentum you seem to believe it has. Condorcet and other methods have
gained increasing popularity in recent years for use in online voting,
especially among tech-savvy people. That popularity conceivably could
soon result in a new organization that seriously challenges IRV's
current momentum.
Finally, for me there are bigger questions right now than whether IRV
is superior to IRRV. Although I lean strongly toward the latter, I
doubt that either will be really feasible for major national and
statewide elections until problems with how elections are conducted
are much better resolved so that elections will be more secure and
accurate and able to reliably handle voting methods as complex as IRV
and IRRV. Given the current state of U.S. election systems and
equipment, there is only one alternative to plurality that is now
really feasible across the U.S., and that is approval voting, which is
nearly as simple to implement as plurality voting.
Another of my concerns is that virtually all advocates of voting
reform, including supporters of IRV, IRRV, approval, and range voting,
have neglected the question of which methods are most appropriate for
different voting situations. IRV advocates sometimes argue for using
IRV in all kinds of situations, even in small groups to decide such
things as what kind of food the group should order. But for most
small group purposes, approval voting would be much easier and quicker
to use and would produce more satisfactory results. If more precision
is needed, some form of range voting would still usually be easier and
better than either IRV or IRRV.
It may also be that approval voting or range voting would be better
for most but not all kinds of public single winner elections,
especially ones for lower level offices and primary contests where
most voters have difficulty acquiring enough information to do
confident rankings. It may be best to reserve IRV or IRRV or range
voting for a few of the highest level offices.
A new voting methods reform organization that seriously considers
these issues and allows for and encourages discussion as well as
research and experimentation about different methods and their
relative advantages and disadvantages in different kinds of situations
could conceivably transform the debate about voting methods. It could
result in much more effective efforts to get better methods adopted,
both for public elections and for all kinds of other purposes.
-Ralph Suter
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
[begin quote]
> 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.
[end quote]
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