At 06:25 PM 11/26/2008, Ralph Suter wrote:
To Greg Dennis:
I appreciate your efforts to express your arguments clearly and
defend them with good data. Nevertheless, I find them mostly unpersuasive.
Yes, we noticed. That they were unpersuasive. That Mr. Suter comments
on this is significant, given his history.
Data from previous elections won't settle the IRV versus Condorcet
debate. There have not been enough of them in the U.S.
My sense from my study so far is that, actually, we can find a lot of
information about IRV in the elections so far. But Mr. Suter is
correct that it is unlikely to be persuasive. Even if we find, for
example, Condorcet failure, it will be argued that the sample is
small and that this was just a fluke. I've found strong evidence that
IRV is failing to elect Condorcet candidates as tested in runoff
elections, and it will be argued that runoffs are defective because,
well, everyone knows that they have poor turnout which is obviously
bad, right? (Wrong, but it's a common idea.)
However, there is already enough data from U.S. IRV elections to
raise serious concerns. There is also now quite a bit of evidence
about the difficulty of counting IRV when an "instant runoff" is
needed. It is far, far from "instant," and it's expensive, especially
if there is a need to audit the results.
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.
IRV probably will look a little better from such elections,
particularly where it replaced Plurality. The tragedy is that IRV is
replacing Top Two Runoff, an older reform that actually works better
than IRV. Both of these methods suffer from Center Squeeze -- for the
same reason -- but TTR makes better choices in the last round (and
not only rarely, in roughly one-third of runoffs). Further, it's
fairly easy to fix the Center Squeeze problem, both so that there are
fewer runoffs and so that a compromise winner is more reliably
detected. In a word, use Bucklin for a primary. IRV with a true
majority requirement is better than IRV without it -- this is what
Robert's Rules of Order *actually* describes, not the IRV that is
sold by touting that as a recommendation. (And RRO also notes the
Center Squeeze problem.)
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.
It's easy to explain the basic Condorcet principle. It's not so easy
to explain about Condorcet cycles and resolution methods. It's also a
problem that Condorcet methods -- like *all* single ballot methods --
can elect by a plurality, even a small one. There is no doubt but
that a Condorcet winner is better than an IRV winner, but, of course,
IRV advocates argue that IRV chooses the Condorcet winner most of the
time. What's "most?" In partisan elections, in a strong two-party
system, nearly always. (Two-party systems are what makes Plurality
work reasonably well.) But in the nonpartisan elections where IRV is
replacing TTR, my estimate is one election out of roughly ten, there
is Condorcet failure.
Again, there are only two ways to fix the election-by-plurality
problem, and one of them is not only a Bad Idea, it's impossible in
the U.S., fortunately. That way is to require full ranking. This is
amount to requiring all voters to vote for every candidate but one.
So the "majority" is coerced. The other way is further process. Very
little study, to my knowledge, has been done on this among voting
systems experts, who have focused on deterministic methods, seeking
the Holy Grail of the best one. It's been found, or at least a major
characteristic of it has been found, but the single-ballot
restriction is serious. Why don't direct democratic bodies use
advanced methods to decide multiple-choice questions? Because the
single-ballot restriction is a terrible limitation, sometimes, when a
majority hasn't been found. In a deliberative body, they will
continue working on the problem until they find something better,
something a majority will accept. Or no decision is made.
Tell me, should we boil the Republicans in (1) Oil, (2) Milk, or (3)
Water? Let's use IRV. We've decided that the Australians really know
what they are doing, so, (a) It's against the law to not vote, (b) If
you don't rank all the candidates, your ballot is discarded. All,
right, folks, what are the results! Amazing, isn't it? We have a
majority for one of the choices.
In a decent election system, if you dislike all the candidates, you
can write in another and cause majority failure. So, perhaps, you
might, if you are a yellow-bellied Republican-lover, or maybe for
other reasons, write in "Nothing." Might even win. But if you haven't
been able to communicate with others who think the same way, you
might choose different other options, or at least different names. It
doesn't matter. There will be majority failure. (And this points out
why write-ins should be allowed in runoffs, as they are, by default,
in California and maybe in some other places.)
Runoffs with write-ins present the voter with a reduced set of
candidates, but they do not actually eliminate any candidates.
Determined voters can write the name in and may even win (as the
Mayor of Long Beach, California, did in a recent runoff election).
Usually the top two, even if not the best, will include the
compromise winner, and, if not, the preference strength violated is
likely to be small. Only in unusual situations will voters be
exercised to participate in a write-in campaign.
Runoff voting is a very important reform! Yes, it has a cost.
Democracy has a cost: participation.
I realize that many IRV supporters are fond of dismissing compromise
candidates as "bland" and with "little core support."
Yeah. Imaginative rationalization. "Little core support" is correct,
but means very little. "Core support" is a standard that was made up
to justify IRV, though it is also used to justify Plurality. If Core
Support is so important, why do we need IRV? *Usually,* it turns out,
"core support" correlates with overall support. But as has been
pointed out by another writer here, there are reasons why it could
happen otherwise, and it is not a defect of the candidate, it is a
product of the overall configuration of the political system and
political parties. Political parties create a lot of inertia, and
when one party moves too far to one side of the spectrum, and the
other does not respond by moving toward the center, a centrist
candidacy becomes possible, one where the candidate is in better
agreement with the majority of the electorate; but this candidate is
at one end of the spectrum in both major parties, and may easily fail
to win a majority in either. So the candidate must run as an
independent or third party candidate. And this party is almost
certain to be not as well organized as the major parties. Further, it
faces a huge problem: very many voters vote habitually by party
affiliation. Getting all the way to the top, in an environment like
that, is extraordinarily difficult. That's what's necessary with IRV.
With Top Two Runoff, the candidate must make it only to second place.
This is why top-two runoff is, outside the U.S., associated with
strong multiparty systems. IRV isn't.
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.
Mr. Suter has explained this to us before, but it's good for it to be repeated.
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.
How is it that one person -- or a tight group -- could make a major
decision like that? Essentially, because nobody in the group knew how
to put together an alternative to the CPR, which was organized quite
traditionally. The people with the money were used to being able to
control what happened with it, and using the traditional self-elected
board form allowed them to insure that the initial direct was as they
chose. It is a totally common situation.
Richie began discussing alternatives, to some degree, with supporters
of other methods only after, I think, these people started having
some impact on IRV implementation campaigns. The internet is changing
things. There are lots of discussions taking place in places where
Richie can't control. What he does, though, is pretty much what could
be expected. He knows a whole series of "sound bite" arguments:
brief, easily swallowed. He, or a surrogate, shows up where a
discussion is taking place, and he makes sure that the deceptive
arguments are presented. To refute these arguments takes more words,
you have to actually explain stuff, not just rely on knee-jerk
assumptions that people hold. (That's what spin-doctors do, they know
how to touch and use these assumptions.) And then, of course, Richie
can say he doesn't have time for this endless argument, and he
disappears. Each time, though, more people start to suspect that they
are being conned.
I predict that IRV implementations will become increasingly difficult
to get. And we may start to see some other experiments. There is an
obvious one: Bucklin. Wouldn't it be interesting if Duluth decided to
try again? They *loved* it when they had it. It's cheap, it's easy to count.
And, really, it's Open Voting, or Approval, turning totally into
Approval if a majority isn't found from higher preferences. So it
fixes the most common objection to Approval.
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.
Or simpler, actually. It's Plurality minus a rule. Period. The only
people who need to vote extra votes are minor candidate supporters.
But if people still want to express a favorite and avoid the failure
of the Majority Criterion -- that's an other knee-jerk assumption, by
the way, that Richie uses well -- there is Bucklin, which would work
pretty well as two-rank, and three-rank, it can handle many more
candidates than three-rank IRV -- the only thing we've had in the
U.S. so far, in the recent implementations.
Yes, I've found that nearly all people familiar with voting systems
agree that Approval makes a good first step, and, given that it costs
nothing to speak of, and is highly unlikely to do harm, compared to
the status quo, it doesn't impede further reform.
I personally favor using Range and analyzing it to see if any
candidate beats the Range winner by pure preference. If there is such
a result, or if the Range data shows majority failure (it must have a
means of indicating "acceptance"), there is a runoff which includes
the Range winner and a candidate who beats the Range winner. (This is
quite unusual, by the way, Range usually chooses the Condorcet
winner, from what we know in the simulations.)
This is a Condorcet-compliant method. If there is a Condorcet winner,
that winner will be in the runoff, unless voters deliberately conceal
their preference (and needlessly conceal it, by the way, it can be
made cost-free to specify all preferences, but that's a detail). And
all it takes for the Condorcet winner to prevail is that the voters
in the runoff confirm it. But usually, I predict, they will not. For
a number of reasons I won't mention now; basically, a Range winner
has a natural advantage in a runoff, because this is the winner by
preference strength, which correlates with voter turnout as well as
with the likelihood of a voter to change his or her mind. On the
other side, there are anomalies with practical Range voting that can
sometimes distort, to a degree, the real utilities extracted from the
votes. So sometimes the Range winner -- it's rare! -- isn't actually
optimal. And if that is the case, the Condorcet winner is likely to
prevail. The simulations show that runoff Range has better results
than Range alone.
The Condorcet Criterion is intuitively satisfying, but the intuition
turns out to be incorrect. The Condorcet winner is not necessarily
the ideal winner, this is merely the most common case. "Condorcet" is
based on pure ranking, which entirely neglects preference strength,
and it's easy to show that this neglect makes it impossible to detect
the optimal winner, the one who will most satisfy the voters,
overall. It's easy to show examples where every reasonable person
would agree that the Condorcet result is not only wrong, but
seriously wrong, harmful.
That result is quite unlikely in real political elections, because
pre-election process *usually* doesn't allow the situation where it
would happen to arise, compromises are made before the election, etc.
But given that it is actually easy to address these problems, if only
we recognize the problem and address it, and that "Condorcet winner"
is a valuable concept which can be incorporated into a good -- but
still simple -- method, I see no reason to risk bad elections. The
cost of them could be tremendous. Our unwillingness to address these
problems brought us a disastrous eight years, now ending, where even
conservatives recognized that a serious mistake had been made.
Open Voting. (Vote for as many as you choose. -- Approval Voting.)
Don't Eliminate Candidates, Consider Them All.
Every Vote Counts, Count All the Votes.
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.
Yes. I've seen it used. Very easy, very efficient, didn't even need
explanation. Just a series of options read out, and people were asked
to raise their hand if they would accept the option. The Condorcet
winner, from the outside, was one option, the status quo. Probably
over 50% of people preferred that. And about 70$ accepted it.
However, there was another option that was *unanimously* acceptable,
except for one person, and this group valued group unity. A motion
was immediately made to accept the most-widely accepted choice, and
the vote on that unanimously accepted it. I think the person who had
voted against it, at first, accepted it. This was really an example
of how the hybrid system I've designed would work. The "Range winner"
-- most broadly approved -- wasn't automatically selected. Open
Voting was used, but it was known at the outset that the majority
favored the status quo. The result was put for ratification, which
proved that *after the result was known*, this had become a unanimous
choice. (There were maybe seventy or eighty people at the meeting, it
was packed. It had been expected to be highly contentious.)
The key in any small group is to verify that *any* election method
has produced a decent result. A majority should always approve the
outcome, or it is not a democratic one. If people stand aside or
abstain, no problem. They don't care strongly, and the result isn't
going to displease them. (If so, they should not stand aside!)
If more precision is needed, some form of range voting would still
usually be easier and better than either IRV or IRRV.
Bingo.
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.
And the larger the election, the more difficult the IRV counting....
IRRV is easier, though with a lot of candidates, it gets tricky.
In the hybrid Range/Condorcet system I've described, the counting is
easy. And it is not necessary to complete the matrix, all that is
needed is the set of pairwise votes between the Range winner and the
other candidates, or maybe just the top few.
By the way, the very concept of single-winner public elections for
high office is flawed. It is far safer to elect such offices
deliberatively, using a representative system; and the representative
systems can, actually, be made fully and accurately representative,
Lewis Carrol made the basic suggestion almost 120 years ago, we now
call it Asset Voting. This could create a virtual Electoral College
that totally represents all the voter, who then deliberate and
negotiate and do whatever it takes to get a majority. And then the
same college can undo what they've done if they, pending the next
election, conclude that they made a mistake or conditions have
changed. No term of office. Really, this is a parliamentary system.
Do we imagine that any large business would hire a CEO for a fixed
four-year term? The U.S. system created a restrained monarch with
very substantial personal power and a term. It was just a tweak on
what we were used to. Strong executive, not continuously responsible
to the people. We can't fire him, impeachment is way too difficult.
When the board of a corporation decides that a CEO isn't working out,
they don't have to try and convict him -- unless they want to avoid
paying on his contract -- they just hand him his pink slip.
I'm certainly not proposing corporate practice as idea, but ... if
what we have as a public system were a good idea, wouldn't it be a
good idea for businesses as well? It isn't, period. Bad Idea. But
better than what we had before. We've just seen some of the damage it
can cause. It could have been worse. Of course, Bush isn't gone yet. Pray.
And lets try to make sure it doesn't happen again. This was not
Bush's fault. To the extent that it was anyone's fault, it was *our
fault.* We let it happen, by tolerating a poor political system.
It's not about the Republicans, or the special interests, or the
wimpy Democrats, or even Ralph Nader.... It's about the system, which
grew like Topsy, and, big surpise, it's never been optimized, we
don't even think, most of us, about what "optimal" would look like.
That's part of what I'm trying to change.
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.
I start all kinds of things, but I have a terrible time keeping
things going, part of the same psychic structure that allows me to
think outside the box and to see certain things that have generally
been overlook also makes it very difficult to follow up on the ideas.
In any case, I started the Election Methods Interest Group, some time
back, and a number of experts and other interested parties did join,
including some IRV supporters. The goal was to be such a forum, and
to try to come up with consensus reports, or at least to measure the
support for various ideas among a community of informed and interested people.
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/electionmethods/
This is an FA/DP organization. FA stands for Free Association. While
EMIG may report the results of polls on controversial positions, EMIG
itself will not take any controversial position. Joining it is Free
in many senses. Further, DP means that a delegable proxy structure is
set up. There is a Proxy Table. Naming a proxy on that table does not
bind the member in any way, it merely is a means whereby members can
allow another member to loosely "represent" them, we may use this in
estimating a preliminary consensus, or, in the other direction, the
proxy may inform them if there is some activity the member should
know about, in the judgement of the proxy. It's a way for, among
other things, someone who is too busy to watch mailing list traffic
can still join and participate in an indirect way. The goal was to
get some of the major experts to join, even if they don't have time.
They would name a proxy as someone they trust to more or less get it
right, or at least to let them know if something warrants their
attention. We did find that some experts joined. Now we need to
actually start using it....
This is an example of what a large consensus-negotiating and advisory
organization might look like, a small and very low-cost experiment in
that direction. Please don't depend on me to make it work. I'll try,
but I am *very* unreliable.
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