On 9/22/11 12:40 PM, James Gilmour wrote:
I cannot comment on the quoted remark (cut) that prompted your post
and I know nothing at all about the activities of anyone at FairVote,
but you have hit on a real problem in practical politics in your
comment above - the problem of the weak Condorcet winner. This is a
very real political problem, in terms of selling the voting system to
partisan politicians (who are opposed to any reform) and to a
sceptical public.
i remember Rob Ritchie arguing this case to me in 2009 (why "sometimes
IRV is better than Condorcet").
For example, with 3 candidates and 100 voters (ignoring irritant
preferences) we could have:
35 A>C
34 B>C
31 C
"C" is the Condorcet winner. Despite the inevitable howls from FPTP
supporters, I think we could sell such an outcome to the electors.
But suppose the votes had been (again ignoring irrelevant preferences):
48 A>C
47 B>C
5 C
"C" is still the Condorcet winner - no question about that. But I
doubt whether anyone could successfully sell such a result to the
electorate, at least, not here in the UK.
even though there were 48 voters who preferred C over B, 47 that
preferred C over A, along with the 5 that preferred C over both A and B.
that does not appear to me to be such a bad result.
And I have severe doubts about how effective such a winner could be in
office. Quite apart from the sceptical electorate, the politicians of
Party A and of Party B would be hounding such an office-holder daily.
And the media would be no help - they would just pour fuel on the
flames. The result would be political chaos and totally ineffective
government.
The flaw in IRV is that it can, sometimes, fail to elect the Condorcet
winner.
and even if that is the root to the problem, the complainers will
*still* revert to FPTP which has even less of a chance of electing the CW.
But IRV avoids the "political" problem of the weak Condorcet
winner. I suspect that's why IRV has been accepted for many public
and semi-public elections despite the Condorcet flaw.
i believe the reason why IRV has been sold to some jurisdictions is a
decision, early on by FairVote, that its simplicity is more saleable
than Condorcet. the concept of the transferred votes is an easy one.
and that IRV can well take care of the spoiler problem (and the burden
of strategic voting motivated by a spoiled election) when the spoiler is
like Nader, having no chance of winning, but gets sufficient votes to
change the outcome. we found out in Burlington in 2009, that while IRV
relieved the liberal majority in town of the burden of strategic voting
(we didn't have to make a painful choice between the Dem and the Prog),
it actually placed a burden of strategic voting upon the GOP
prog-haters. those folks found out that by marking their guy as #1,
they ended up *causing* the election of the candidate they disliked the
most. that's gotta make some people mad. and if IRV had survived the
repeal (it didn't), these folks would have to be thinking in 2012: "In
this town full of liberals, I gotta choose between Liberal and More
Liberal, because if I vote for the guy I really like, then More Liberal
gets elected." So IRV transferred the burden of strategic voting from
the liberal majority to the conservative minority.
then FairVote deliberately conflates the ranked ballot with IRV,
essentially presenting to lawmakers and the public that there is no
other method of tabulating the ranked ballots other than the
single-transferable vote (based *only* on the amount of support in first
preference rank, IRV is opaque to one's second choice until the first
choice is eliminated).
i think politicians or the voting public that can understand the concept
of a Round-Robin tournament can understand Condorcet. but if they
believe religiously that only the simple "mark only one" ballot (the
term they used here was the "single affirmative vote"), there is no
convincing. i think that they believe that electing the candidate who
benefits from the presence of a spoiler is appropriate. they may say
that the people who get burned by a spoiler need to wise up and combine
their forces in order to win elections. that, essentially, means that
we have no viable third parties or viable independent candidates and
reinforces the two-party system.
--
r b-j r...@audioimagination.com
"Imagination is more important than knowledge."
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