A telephone poll was conducted in Australia of 1202 random people. professionally done, attempting to get random sample with corrections for sample biases with respect to gender, income, education.
QUESTION: "Currently, elections for the Federal House of Representatives, or lower house, use a preferential voting system. This is where voters indicate an order of preferences for all candidates, and these preferences are taken into account when deciding which candidate wins. [PAUSE]. An alternative system would be 'first past the post', where voters only vote for one candidate and the candidate with the most votes wins. Would you personally prefer...? [RANDOMISE A-B] A: preferential system B: first past the post system" RESULTS: A=37% B=57% don't know/neither=5%. I remind you that this is in Australia, the world's most-experienced instant runoff country, after over 80 years of use of exactly the system the question described in (A). To read the official poll report, see http://rangevoting.org/AustraliaNewsPollVoteStudy.pdf This is very damning. I compute, as a conservative estimate, 99.99995% confidence that that Australia would get rid of IRV and revert to plain plurality (FPTP) voting, if given this 2-way forced choice right this instant. Here is the computation in detail: Std.Deviation of a Bernoulli process = squareroot(N*p*q) where for us N=1202 independent random people, p=0.57 = prob(they prefer FPTP), and q=1-p. This is sigma=17.16 people which is 1.428% as a percentage. The gap from 57% to 50% is thus 7/1.428 = 4.9 sigma. Looking up 4.9 sigma in http://www.rangevoting.org/NormTble.html I compute the confidence this 57%-for-FPTP figure is really above 50% at 99.999952%. This estimate is conservative since we do not actually need to be above 50%, we only need to be above the midway point (47) between the 57% (for FPTP) and 37% (for IRV) counts from the poll. To learn about the French poll studies, see http://rangevoting.org/French2007studies.html The most interesting conclusion for the present purposes (of assessing "popularity" of different voting systems) is that they found that French voters want to have range voting, also called score voting, more than both the present plurality+top2runoff system and also more than approval voting. Unfortunately these particular poll questions were only answered by about 40% of the 2836 polled (the rest chose not to answer those questions) so there may have been self-selection bias. However, among the approximately 1100 who did choose to answer question 12, 75.1% said approval voting could be used for official presidential legislative or other elections, and 87.9% said that for score(0,1,2) voting. This yields a very high confidence, at least 7sigma for at least 99.999999999% confidence, that self-selecting-answering French voters prefer score voting versus approval voting. This is from Antoinette Baujard & Herrade Igersheim: Framed field experiments on approval voting, lessons from the 2002 and 2007 French presidential elections, ch.15 (pp.357-395) in Handbook on Approval Voting (ed. J.Laslier & M.Remzi Sanver) Springer 2010, especially pages 377 and 378. -- Warren D. Smith http://RangeVoting.org <-- add your endorsement (by clicking "endorse" as 1st step) and math.temple.edu/~wds/homepage/works.html ---- Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
