At 12:00 AM 12/20/2008, Dave Ketchum wrote:
Authors of RR have their own primary goals and properly avoid the election methods wars that take place in EM, etc, - simply recommending that group's rules authors should be careful as to what methods they choose to define for their groups.
Robert's Rules are pretty clear: avoid making decisions, including elections, without a majority vote, and they don't fall into the trap of thinking that one gets a majority by excluding ballots without a vote for the top two.
When elections were by mail and when that was expensive, relatively, there were arguments for allowing plurality decisions, but Roberts' Rules never approved this, they only note that it requires a bylaw to allow it. The default rules would allow elections to take place at a special meeting, by majority vote of those attending, but not election by plurality.
The argument could be made that allowing election by mail can facilitate broader participation, but this then raises the plurality problem. Election at a meeting can take many ballots.
Hence the suggestion that using preferential voting would be better than election by plurality. But what they describe as "preferential voting," while the rules are single-transferable vote, do *not* elect by plurality, they merely make it easier to find a majority, and they suggest that voters be made aware that if they do not rank enough candidates, the election might fail to find a majority "and must be repeated."
FairVote has radically misrepresented this section of RRONR, and that misrepresentation has been taken up and repeated by election officials in places which have implemented IRV or RCV. The method described in RRONR is indeed "better than election by plurality," but what is being implemented is, in some of the applications, no better than plurality: it *is* plurality, almost always. That's with nonpartisan elections. There are subtle but crucial differences between what RRONR describes and what is being implemented: the most important is that election by plurality is allowed, and the dirty little secret is that IRV usually, with nonpartisan elections, where full ranking is not obligatory, does not find a majority if one did not exist in the first round; further, it only rarely -- no examples so far in the U.S. with nonpartisan elections! -- finds any winner other than the first round leader.
In other words, with all the jurisdictions that have implemented IRV, with nonpartisan elections, no results have been shifted from what Plurality would have obtained. But results almost certainly *have* shifted: most of these jurisdictions were ones that required a runoff election if a majority wasn't found, and runoff elections, depending on rules, do find a real majority, at least in some senses, and even when the method is open to write-in votes, majorities are normal.
IRV is replacing top-two runoff, not Plurality, usually, so the comparison with Plurality is a false one. And top-two runoff, while certainly not perfect, is different from IRV in a number of important ways. Regardless of theory, it seems that about one out of three TTR elections results in a "comeback" where the first round leader loses to the runner-up. Since IRV is not presenting us with these, in nonpartisan elections, we can be fairly sure that IRV is changing results from TTR (better) to Plurality (worse).
FairVote, in describing or giving examples of how IRV works, focuses on *partisan* elections, where vote transfers follow some relatively predictable pattern. Not as strong a pattern as they or voting systems theorists often predict, but still strong enough to shift results. So the Green candidate is eliminated and *some* of the votes go to the Democrat. Not all. Usually, it turns out, there are enough exhausted ballots that a majority still is not found. IRV is a form of election by plurality, merely a slightly more sophisticated one that can *sometimes* fix the spoiler effect.
And who benefits from that? Mostly the major parties, which is why IRV, where it is significantly used, is associated with strong two-party systems. What voting system is associated with multiparty systems?
Does FairVote want us to know? It's Top Two Runoff. Definitely, TTR can be improved; and the most obvious improvement that fits the most neatly into U.S. traditions is Bucklin voting, it was used here in a number of states, it was popular (with the public and with political scientists and with, apparently, the legal profession, see Brown v. Smallwood, where the Minnesota Supreme Court, outlawing Bucklin -- and, really, all forms of alternative voting -- was quite aware that it was disregarding public opinion and prevailing precedent and legal opinion. But they were the Supremes, you know, a majority can pretty much do what it wants; what's amazing is that decision still stands. Maybe this year or next....
But TTR would be improved by Bucklin voting if the majority requirement still stands. If there is no majority, then, presumably, the top two would face each other in a runoff, and this *might* also be done if there are two candidates gaining a majority, which is actually quite unlikely, and precedent would indicate that the candidate with the most votes would prevail. Another possible runoff would be between the Bucklin plurality winner and any candidate who beats that winner by pairwise analysis of the Bucklin ballots. This little trick would make Bucklin, overall, Condorcet compliant.
But underneath this there is one teeny problem that makes a great deal of voting systems theory moot; Lewis Carroll wrote about it over 120 years ago, and we've mostly ignored it. That will be another post....
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