On May 9, 2010, at 12:29 PM, Kathy Dopp wrote:
From: robert bristow-johnson <[email protected]>
To: election-methods Methods <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [EM] piling on against IRV
In truth, IRV and STV are an enormous step *down* from existing
plurality voting,
...
IRV/STV also finds majority winners far *less* often than does any
primary/general or top-two runoff plurality election system, unless
you apply your deceptive creative new definition of "majority" as
not
a majority of all voters who cast ballots, but of all voters whose
ballots are not eliminated from consideration by the final counting
round (some of them after *not* having had all their choices counted
whenever a subsequent choice was eliminated prior to a higher
choice.
so how does delayed TTR solve that problem?
In TTR, every voter is allowed to vote and all their votes are
counted. I'm surprised you didn't know that.
what voter, in the IRV election in Burlington 2009 was not allowed to
vote. other than 4 ballots (out of 8980) that were machine rejected
(3 of those ballots were later examined and hand counted) were not
counted?
TTR - all voters are allowed to participate
and which voters, in the IRV election, were not allowed to participate.
IRV/STV - the more candidates who run, the fewer voters can
participate in the final counting round, given the US system of
allowing up to 3 ranks on a ballot.
you are ignorant of the fact that in Burlington, all 5 candidates were
ranked (at least they were on the ballot i had). Burlington is not
San Francisco. we evidently have stricter ballot access laws. i
don't know what Burlington would have done if there were 25 mayoral
candidates on the ballot.
in comparison, i have seen 3 different TTR elections for City Council
in Burlington. none had more than 55% turnout on runoff day (in
comparison to the number of voters that came on the first election
day). the IRV election had 93% of the voters participating in the
final round. 93% turnout is a lot better turnout than 55%. every
voter that expressed an opinion of at least one of the two candidates
that made it to that final round participated in the actual choice of
the elected candidate.
It's a very simple concept to understand.
which you evidently don't. your arrogance, Kathy, is greater than
your ignorance. you greatly underestimate the people you talk to here
on this list. no one here is using those canards as criticism of
IRV. we know what they are.
we all expect that people fill out their ballots to express their
political interest (or, perhaps, they are trying to vote
strategically). none of us are stupid enough to buy into the canards
that you and the IRV opponents repeated over and over again that
somehow IRV "disenfranchises voters" or doesn't count their vote.
everyone's ballot entered the counting algorithm with equal status,
just as would happen in a fair "traditional" election. those whose
vote for candidates with low 1st-choice *lost* (the problem we have
with IRV is that the measure of electoral support depended *only* on
those 1st-choice votes, a problem not solved with the traditional
TTR). those who *chose* not to rank either of the candidates that
ended up in the final round, did not participate in the runoff just as
would have happened if they chose to stay home on runoff day in TTR.
they can blame no one else for their decision not to rank candidates
they evidently
Yes, truly the "later-no-harm" feature of IRV/STV is one of its
flaws,
eliminating the possibility of finding compromise candidates that a
majority of voters favors more than the elected candidates who can
be
opposed by a majority of voters, as happened, I believe, in
Burlington, VT where you live.
so now, *specifically* (regarding Burlington 2009) how would have TTR
solved that?
In TTR, in both elections, all votes are counted. I'm surprised you
didn't know that.
TTR: all votes counted
at least 38% fewer voters come to the polls on runoff day and get
counted with TTR. that is what our experience is.
IRV/STV: only votes cast for 1st choice counted for all voters.
how is that different from the traditional ballot?
only votes for subsequent choices counted if you voted for the
least popular candidates 1st.
how is that different than TTR? if you didn't vote for one of the two
most popular candidates, the only choice you have left in TTR is for
one of your "subsequent choices".
Otherwise your 1st choice vote harms your
subsequent and can cause them to lose.
but that would be no different (at least in the Burlington 2009
example) for TTR. those voters that had their "subsequent choice"
harmed by their first choice were the 1513 GOP Prog-haters that voted
GOP>Dem>Prog. but in TTR, they would not have had their 2nd choice,
the Dem, in the runoff anyway. so all they could do is vote again for
their 1st choice in the runoff and, *if* the turnout was the same (or
if the reduced turnout had a similar demographic), the election would
turn out no different. their favorite candidate would have lost to
the candidate they hated the most. the *only* way their interests
would have been served better is if, with reduced turnout (and with a
lot of money poured into the runoff election campaign), more of their
own voters would show for the runoff than their opponents, and then
they might have won. but, as we know from the ranked ballots of the
electorate that *did* come to the original election, the interests of
the majority of the electorate would have been served more poorly, the
3rd most popular candidate would have been elected instead of the 2nd
most popular.
You surely must understand that so I think you must be assuming
without any evidence to support your claim that voters would
strategize exactly the same if voting using STV/IRV versus plurality
TTR
not necessarily. i might expect that, in Burlington, the liberal GOP-
haters would be thinking about whether the Dem or the Prog was more
electable (that would be a difficult decision since neither candidates
were minor, like Nader) but i am not making any assumptions other than
the great majority of people would vote for their favorite candidate.
even though the voters were fooled by people like Terry into
thinking that "no votes are wasted" in STV/IRV and do not imagine that
they can cause their 2nd choice to lose by voting for their 1st
choice.
Where is your data or evidence to support your claim that the voters
in Burlington, VT would vote for their 1st choice IRV/STV candidate if
the contest were plurality?
what is your evidence that they would not? the burden of proof lies
on you for that. *you* need to show that, for a significant number of
voters, their single vote on the "traditional ballot" would be
different than their favorite candidate.
It seems to me that many voters would
have recognized that they needed to vote for one of the likely top two
winners in a plurality contest, whereas in IRV/STV they were fooled by
rhetoric such as Bouricius' into thinking they could vote honestly
without hurting their 2nd choice candidate.
yeah, but the Dems have less in common with the Repubs than they have
with the Progs. that's what the numbers say. that's why, in the
final IRV round the vast majority of Montroll votes got transferred
to
Kiss than those that were transferred to Wright.
who would have both gotten a far better result
NO THEY WOULDN'T! That is Your Lie. the interests of the Democrats
Oh.. I see that you are certain that you read the minds of all
Burlington, VT voters better than I do, so that you can make the
unlikely and unsupported claims that:
__________________________________
all the below is crap. just a distraction. Kathy is pretending that
it's some form of scholarship.
1. none of the voters in Burlington, VT were fooled by Terry's
rhetoric into thinking that their votes "would not be wasted" and did
not realize that in STV/IRV their 1st choice vote can cause their 2nd
choice to lose, (i.e. you assume all votes understood that their 1st
choice would hurt their 2nd choice in IRV/STV), and
2. none of the voters in Burlington, VT would be knowledgeable about
plurality voting (that they've used in VT for decades) to know to vote
for their favorite top-two contender if they wanted their vote to
count (I.e. you assume with IRV/STV voters understand how to
strategize by voting for one of the top-two candidates 1st perfectly,
but when using plurality voting, they're suddenly too stupid to
understand that they need to vote for one of the top two if they want
their vote to elect a winner).
So you assume that the voters in Burlington, VT are both (at the same
time) infinitely brilliant about IRV/STV and how it works, but
clueless about how plurality voting works. So voters are both
brilliant and utterly stupid at the same time.
I would call this a proof ad reductio absurdum that you are wrong.
__________________________________
alls i know is that the voters that came to the polls marked their
ballots as so (after the two more minor candidates were eliminated):
{ 1332 M>K>W
2554 M { 767 M>W>K
{ 455 M
{ 2043 K>M>W
2982 K { 371 K>W>M
{ 568 K
{ 1513 W>M>K
3297 W { 495 W>K>M
{ 1289 W
The three pairwise preferences are:
4067 M vs 3477 K
4597 M vs 3668 W
4314 K vs 4064 W <--- this is the runoff for either IRV or
TTR
both delayed-TTR and IRV elects the "wrong" candidate, because the
unambiguous majority-supported candidate does not go into the runoff
in either case. with reduced turnout on runoff day, TTR risks
electing the "wronger" candidate.
Kathy, i stand only on the facts.
Enough today of rebutting BS.
by supplanting it with your own BS.
"One of the best ways to keep any conversation civil is to support the
discussion with true facts."
you are sooo hypocritical (and disingenuous).
Physician, heal thyself.
--
r b-j [email protected]
"Imagination is more important than knowledge."
----
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