On May 11, 2011, at 3:51 PM, [email protected] wrote:
James Green-Armytage asked
Quick question for everyone: Do you happen to know when the method
described in the subject line (eliminate the plurality loser until
there is a Condorcet winner) was first proposed?
by Plurality Loser, do you mean the candidate who was ranked 1st the
fewest times or the candidate ranked last the most times (all who are
unranked are tied for last place)?
i made mention of either in a paper i wrote in 2009 ("The Failure of
Instant Runoff Voting to accomplish the very purposes for which it was
adopted: An object lesson in Burlington Vermont") right after i
figgered out that the Condorcet winner was not the same as the IRV
winner (and happened to be the candidate i supported).
i would think that this would have preceded by anyone thinking about
Condorcet cycle for a minute.
Forest's attempt at an answer:
I don't know about "first proposed," but I know that we considered
it in passing
when we came up with the DMC proposal, one of whose many
formulations is to
eliminate the approval loser (or candidate ranked on the fewest
number of
ballots) until there is a Condorcet Winner.
We settled on Approval instead of Plurality as the basis for
elimination because
it seemed a lot better at the time. It turns out that DMC is
monotonic, for
example, while the Plurality based method is not.
Long before that (about ten years ago) I suggested a lot of
different tweaks on
IRV that would make it Condorcet compliant in an attempt to show IRV
supporters
how easy it would be to keep IRV from discarding the "true majority
winner."
i was impressed with the bottom-two runoff (BTR) in that it's such a
small change to the existing IRV method used in a few places (and used
to be in my place).
but i've been thinking that, while BTR or some other Condorcet
compliant IRV is better than a Condorcet non-compliant IRV, it's still
IRV and the actual method of tabulation does not allow for precinct
summability. if you demand precinct summability (for reasons of
transparency in elections), then it really has to be a simple
Condorcet method where you count pairwise tallies locally, post
publicly and transmit upward the pairwise subtotals. the election
should be decided solely by the totals from the pairwise subtotals.
if Ranked Pairs or Schulze is used, the difference between totals of a
pair of candidates, the "defeat strength", is part of the decision,
but it is a derived value from the pairwise totals.
Mike Ossipoff advised me to forget it, because (having been rebuffed
himself
after proposing all of these ideas and more) he had found out by sad
experience
that the hard core IRV supporters were too closed minded
i *know* i loosened a few IRV supporters here in Burlington. but,
unfortunately, the "Keep Voting Simple" side that brought us back to
Plurality and Delayed Runoff believe that God herself has ordained the
vote-for-only-one ballot. we won't be revisiting anything with a
ranked ballot again in my lifetime. i hope i'm wrong about that.
to even consider
anything other than pure Hare/STV/AV/IRV. Since that time I have
found a few
staunch IRV supporters that are willing to think about other
possibilities, but
on the whole Mike seems to have been right.
well, when a few more towns toss out IRV, i hope that FairVote gets
the message and starts promoting other tabulation methods than STV
with the ranked ballot. what makes me so mad is that Burlington
people that are IRV supporters (because they are election reform
people and do not believe in the two-party religion), these people had
no idea that there was another way to look at those very same
ballots. Fairvote essentially sold ranked-choice voting with IRV as
if they were the same thing. as if there *is* no ranked-choice voting
without IRV.
--
r b-j [email protected]
"Imagination is more important than knowledge."
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