If anyone disagrees that IRV is superior to our current system, please point out how and why.
********************* Take a three candidate election, 1 liberal, one conservative, one independent. For simplicity, use 12 voters (in real life you would need to expand the percentages) 5 prefer the liberal candidate, with the independent candidate as a second choice. 4 prefer the conservative with the independent as a second choice. 2prefer the independent with the conservative as a second choice. 1prefer the independent with the liberal as a second choice. Clearly the independent would be the most agreeable choice with all voters. However the independent looses in the first round of instant run-off because they received the lowest initial votes (lowest primary votes). The people who voted for the independent has their second choice votes instead, and one of the others get elected. This is just one simple example of that system failing in the almost identical way our current vote for 1 system would. In the current system, people would say the independent wont win, and split that vote among the other two, with a resulting statistical near dead heat much like republicans and democrats currently have in the nation. When you run the numbers in various ways, most of the time BOTH systems works, sometimes BOTH don't. But as a whole, I don't see IRV as superior because it has as many failings as the vote for 1 system we currently have-at least when I did the math. (Might not be saying much there) But I think you would need to look at the probability of each failing and compare those. In practice each system will work AND fail in different ways. For the city to look at adopting a new system, I would like failure comparison (since that's what we're trying to fix) not just advantages of each, or the failures of one and not the other. Tom Holtzleiter Kingfield _______________________________________ Minneapolis Issues Forum - A Civil City Civic Discussion - Mn E-Democracy Post messages to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe, Unsubscribe, Digest option, and more: http://e-democracy.org/mpls
