On 7/10/12 6:51 AM, Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote:
When runoffs are subjected to criterion analysis, one usually considers voters to vote in the same order in each round. If they prefer A to B in the first round,
now how is this known, without a ranked ballot?
and A and B remain in the second round, they'll vote A over B in the second round.
that is, if nothing changes their mind. during our big IRV slugfest we had in 2010 (as a consequence of the 2009 IRV election), one of the points of the opponents of IRV was that they felt they deserved the right to make up or even change their minds about A and B. even if they voted for A or B in the first round.
i, of course, felt it is a reasonable requirement that voters make up their minds about candidates by Election Day and that the downside of delayed-runoffs exceed this nebulous "freedom to change my vote" that the opponents touted. (one argument these folks made was that if their favorite candidate was eliminated in the first round, these voters would like to know who, of the remaining candidates in the runoff, their candidate might favor. i still don't see that as a compelling argument for delayed runoff.)
This may not necessarily fit reality. Voters may leave or join depending on whether the second round is "important" or not, and the same for later rounds in exhaustive runoff.
and this can be adequately dealt with using a ranked ballot. as long as all of the candidates are in the race up to Election Day, if it's important enough to vote during *any* round, it's important enough to rank it on a single ballot.
i know there is more to your post, Kristofer, but i have to decode more of it before i can say anything about it. at least in my experience, all non-IRV elections were either straight plurality, or had a top-two runoff. and, besides the problem of greatly reduced turnout for the runoff, it is not clear that the top-two vote getters should be the candidates in the runoff. indeed, my argument to Democrats who voted against IRV (to return us to plurality/runoff) is that the candidate who should have won the 2009 race (who was the Dem candidate, so we Dems felt screwed) would *not* have ended up in the delayed runoff, had that been the law at the time. so voting against IRV and returning to delayed runoff did nothing to solve that problem.
so i dunno how we do "better" delayed runoffs without using a ranked ballot in the first round to begin with. and if you do that, then what's the point (other than allowing voters to change their mind after Election Day)?
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