In the U.S. there have been three major advanced single-winner voting
systems tried.
Bucklin.
Top-two runoff.
Single transferable vote, recently called "Instant Runoff Voting"
because it supposedly imitates TTR.
All of these have been viewed as reforms, with enthusiasm, by
political scientists and others.
It has long been considered a defect in Plurality that there can be
majority failure. People were familiar with direct democratic
process, where a majority is *always* required to make a decision. So
finding majorities was always considered a plus.
STV is a venerable voting system reform, but mostly proposed and used
for multiwinner elections, where it's quite a decent method, though
not ideal. The Ware method, i.e., STV single-winner, was long
considered quite defective, I read scathing criticisms of it from the
19th century.
But in a two-party system, STV does eliminate the spoiler effect. It
breaks down badly with there are three major parties, and in
nonpartisan elections, it appears to imitate Plurality. (This was a
surprising discovery for me, from analyzing and comparing Top Two
Runoff with IRV in recent elections. TTR reverses the winner from the
preference order in the first round, about one-third of the time. IRV
almost never does (in nonpartisan elections), and frequently fails to
find a true majority. It does *not* emulate TTR.
Both Bucklin and IRV were sold as eliminating the need for real
runoffs. That was hype. No method can do that, i.e., always find a
majority with a single ballot. Sometimes the electorate simply is not
ready to make that choice. TTR almost always finds a majority, and
it's a real majority if write-ins are allowed on the runoff ballot.
(That is, if there are significant write-ins, and a close election
among the ballot candidates, there can be majority failure. But the
choice to compromise and terminate the election at that point, with a
plurality winner, seems to be solid and not challengeable. Only Asset
Voting, which creates a possibility of finding a "represented
majority" in further process, could fix this.
Asset Voting, while based on some fairly simple principles, has not
been tried in any public elections, anywhere, so, while we should
begin the coversation, the place for considering Asset Voting is in
non-governmental organizations. Asset Voting is so vastly superior,
in theory, to all other mere voting systems, that a major part of our
overall voting system advocacy should be promoting Asset methods for
use in NGOs. We will be preparing for the future, a very bright path.
As to public advocacy, only IRV has seemed to have serious traction,
but this was a political accident, and was really aimed, originally,
at paving the way for the use of STV in multiwinner elections, to
create proportional representation. The original goal was PR, not STV
or IRV. The choice to promote IRV was a tactical error, backfiring
because of the very serious defects of IRV.
But TTR is widespread, especially in nonpartisan elections for local
jurisdictions, plus some statewide contests.
I have not studied the history of TTR in public elections. I do know
that, where Bucklin, long-term in party primaries, seemed to not find
majorities, with common bullet voting, it was eventually replaced
with top two runoff. We should not go backwards.
An opportunity was missed when Bucklin was replaced with TTR.
Instead, it would have been superior to leave Bucklin in place, and
to hold a runoff when a majority was not found in the first round.
Bucklin would still be quite superior to the vote-for-one that became
the rule in TTR. Once there was a cost to bullet voting, i.e.,
majority failure and therefore a runoff, I strongly suspect that
additional approval rate would have increased.
One of the goals of a party primary is to assess the relative
strength of candidates. Vote-for-one only tests first preferences.
The data from that first ballot would be better if it's a ranked
ballot (or a ratings ballot as in Range), and would have been
improved simply by Counting All the Votes. I.e, Approval as the first round.
Range methods, I have seen, are excellent polling methods, I saw, in
2008, Range 2 polls (votes of -, 0, +, with individual abstentions
being 0) that were very accurate, showing what vote-for-one polls
could not show, strength of opposition as well as strength of
support. Those polls showed Obama as being clearly ahead with the
Democrats, with Clinton close behind. Clinton had many more positive
votes, but many more negative ones as well. In the Republican race,
Ron Paul, after debates, was a clear winner. In vote-for-one polls,
he did very poorly, probably because he was not perceived as a viable
candidates, and so people didn't want to waste their vote!
Bucklin should have been left, with a runoff added. Bucklin, if it
fails to avoid a runoff, has still collected far more data, and
candidates will know their real support much better.
In public elections, Bucklin seemed to almost always find true
majority support. It does this much more efficiently than IRV,
because of IRV's elimination of votes. IRV is vulnerable to the very
serious center squeeze effect (which can very much damage party
primaries, resulting in the choice of an extreme candidate who cannot
possibly win the general election; in general elections, the center
squeeze effect can easily result in the election of an extreme
candidate, whereas a centrist candidate would win in a direct
contest, even by a large margin.
Top two runoff is, of course, also vulnerable to center squeeze, it's
famous for it. At least, though, a real runoff will result in the
best choice from the top two, who will generally be the less extreme
of the two choices. When write-ins are allowed, it's possible to fix
the issue, but then a new spoiler effect can be created.
The fix would have been to keep and use Bucklin in both the primary
and the runoff. Bucklin is not vulnerable to the spoiler effect. The
runoff might well have only two candidates on the ballot, but voters
can freely prefer a write-in. If there were only a single round, this
could cause majority failure (part of the spoiler effect). But, then,
with an additional approval, they could play it safe and vote for one
of the ballot candidates.
We obtain a very powerful election reform by combining the most
widely used election reforms. Bucklin was tried much more widely than
IRV has recently been tried. TTR is quite common.
So, our strategy is twofold:
1. Promote Count All the Votes, i.e., Approval, as a very simple fix,
cost-free, that can greatly reduced the spoiler effect, and that is
clearly only a matter of giving voters a little more freedom of expression.
2. Preserve Top Two Runoff from attack by the Instant Runoff Voting
people. It is superior in terms of election quality, and the cost
savings, a major selling point for IRV, are speculative. It should be
known that IRV, in nonpartisan elections, is an expensive simulation
of Plurality. It absolutely not a reliable way of finding majorities.
We should make known the evidence for this, it's not just an opinion.
IRV has been deceptively sold.
3. Top Two Runoff with Count All the Votes becomes less vulnerable to
Center Squeeze. It's a minor fix, and how much it will help is
speculative, because it has not been tried. It's certainly not
perfect, but a clear improvement, and more equitable.
4. Top Two Runoff with Bucklin ballots is a serious improvement over
TTR with Count All the Votes, because it allows multiple approvals
while still allowing ranking. This will return to use the benefits
that we could have had, all along, if our system had synthesized the
two reforms, the better part of a century ago, instead of considering
them as competing.
Bucklin is Instant Runoff Approval. It's far more likely to find a
majority in a single ballot, and then, when it doesn't, a Bucklin
runoff is practically a dead certainty to do it. Without actually
tying the voter's hands.
Bucklin ballots are cheap to count. If no additional approvals are
added, it costs the same to count as Plurality. But we should simply
Count All the Votes, the information is well worth the counting cost.
Lower approvals should be counted even if the method has completed,
has found a majority, say, in the first round.
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