On Jan 11, 2010, at 4:16 PM, robert bristow-johnson wrote:
On Jan 11, 2010, at 1:19 PM, Dave Ketchum wrote:
On Jan 11, 2010, at 11:45 AM, robert bristow-johnson wrote:
On Jan 11, 2010, at 8:54 AM, Kathy Dopp wrote:
...
Plurality is far better than IRV for many many reasons including:
1. preserves the right to cast a vote that always positively
affects
the chances of winning of the candidate one votes for
and more often than not, *hurts* the credible candidate that is
politically more aligned with the candidate one votes for.
50,000 voting for Nader elected W in 2000. that is a matter of
fact.
Plurality does that only when you vote for one who has a
possibility of winning.
what do you mean. Florida voters that voted for Nader (who had no
chance of winning) were far more likely, if they would come to the
polls at all, to vote for Gore over Bush if that was the choice
presented to them. *Gore* had a possibility of winning (and many
say that he won, according to the law) and needed 530 more votes in
Florida and the history of the first decade in the 21st century
would have turned out far different. there were thousands of Nader
voters in Florida and the fact that the election was decided by
plurality (and that W managed to prevent the rest of the Florida law
from taking effect) meant that the secondary choice of the great
majority of these Nader voters was harmed by their primary vote (and
only vote) for Nader.
Going thru this carefully:
Kathy said "positively affects".
r b-j said something, which I chose to ignore.
I responded to Kathy, pointing out that, since there was no chance of
there being enough FL votes for Nader for him to win, voting for him
did not affect his chances of winning - in other words there is no
expectable positive effect in voting for such candidates as to their
chance of winning.
Then your talk of voting for Nader affecting other candidates chances
is outside the topic Kathy started for this.
Sometimes doing that prevents voting for the one you prefer but
expect to lose.
yes. sometimes that is the case and one must accept that he/she is
in the minority.
2. allows all voters the right to participate in the final counting
round in the case of top two runoff or primary/general elections
but IRV does that in an instantaneous way UNLESS some voter
changes their mind about their alternative candidate. IRV or
Condorcet (or any ranked ballot) requires the voter to choose
*and* *commit* to not just their favorite, but their fallback
candidate on the same Election Day.
With Condorcet the voting is all done on one election day, and all
that the voters rank are considered in the counting.
While the candidates and voters must do their preparation before
that one act of voting, that single voting round should be all that
is needed for the counting and deciding on winner.
Note that primaries may be used, but there is no need for them such
as is true for plurality - multiple candidates for a party can be
voted for in a Condorcet general election, with voters ranking such
candidates if and when they choose.
but, between the lines here, the opponents of IRV (or any ranked-
order ballot) want the Progs and Dems to together field a single
candidate (like there would have to be a Prog/Dem nomination caucus
at Burlington High School and *one* candidate comes out of that).
that, in my opinion, is an insult to both the Progs and the Dems.
they are different parties, they can field their own different
candidates (or, if a single person is most preferred by Progs and
Dems and is nominated by both town party caucuses, then that
candidate can still just register once at City Hall). (in New York
state, a single candidate may run under multiple party banners and
that state accumulates votes for that single person, even though
they are cast under different columns.) i dunno what Kathy Dopp
thinks of NYS.
but, it doesn't matter. even if the Prog and Dem are different
candidates, the political alignment between the two parties is
undeniable. i believe that Burlington voters (and we'll see if this
is still the case in March) do not want a minority GOP candidate to
win solely because the liberals in Burlington split their vote. the
anti-IRVers insist that this is the price we must pay for having two
separate liberal parties.
In NY, or any other place doing Plurality, groups such as liberals
have a difficult challenge in preparing for election:
Get together and give a single candidate a better chance of
winning.
Divide up the group's votes among multiple candidates - likely
causing all such to lose.
With IRV the multiple candidates are a bit less of a disaster since a
voter can vote for more than one. Still trouble since the counters
only look at one of such candidates on any ballot at any instant.
With Condorcet as many of the multiple candidates as desired can be
voted for by any voter, with the same or different ranks, and all be
seen by the counters at once.
3. preserves voters' right to understandably verify the election
outcomes because the counting is simple enough for them to do,
precinct summable
so does Condorcet.
And Condorcet gives a more accurate view since the ballots more
completely state voters desires and all that they say gets counted.
the ranked-order ballot gets just the right information from the
anonymous voter. Approval and traditional FPTP do not ask enough
questions and Range demands too much information from the voter.
the ranked ballot in IRV is not the problem with IRV. it's the way
IRV interprets the ballot info, counts the votes, and declares the
winner that is the problem.
That IRV does not permit candidates to share a rank is a minor
annoyance.
4. preserves the right for local precinct control of the counts
or in
the case of election contests that cross county lines, local county
control of the counting process
so does Condorcet. i like precinct summable too, but it isn't
the end-all requirement for an honest election.
5. is far less costly than the IRV counting process
not in Burlington. once the infrastructure was set up (the ballot
scanning machines didn't have to be changed at all, the difference
is that the precinct results (that had a record for how each
ballot looked) were transferred to city hall and a computer did
the rest. because of FoI laws, this record is available for
public scrutiny and has been scrutinized.
Topic seems to be that a second look at a ballot is required in IRV
after it is determined that the top rank lost. In Condorcet all
the looking is done in one pass.
well, no. in Burlington the ballots are physically scanned once.
the data for each individual ballot is parsed and re-examined for
each IRV round. for Condorcet, they would be scanned once and you
*could* write the code to parse each ballot once and rack up
pairwise totals for all candidate pairs, one ballot at a time. but
you also could parse the whole ballot data (all of the ballots)
again and again for each candidate pair. it's just a matter of how
one likes to write their code, that wouldn't matter in any case.
the computer might not report results until all of the parsing is
done (and it has the result), or it might do it as the parsing is
done so some people can have some election-night excitement watching
the totals increase (like watching a race). but, for a town the
size of Burlington VT (the largest town in the state, but VT ranks
dead last in the size of the largest town in the state) it should
take a second or two for a modern PC to do the whole thing no matter
if it's one pass for the whole thing, or one pass for each candidate
pair.
What matters is effect, not how smart programmers are as to details.
The first look at an IRV ballot is concerned only with a voter's top
rank. Later looks skip over losers and respond with remaining top
rank. This looking costs, though perhaps not much as described above.
The possible excitement tangles with the secrecy laws - reporting in a
manner that identifies how ANY ONE voter voted needs preventing
(needed protection of voters).
Dave Ketchum
--
r b-j [email protected]
"Imagination is more important than knowledge."
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