I felt like someone ought to weigh in as a skeptic about these new
voting schemes. There are a bunch of reasons why I'm not enthralled
with the idea of IRV (and even less by proportional representation):
1. It seems to me that a lot of people want IRV because they feel
like voting should be some kind of act of self-expression, rather
than a political decision-making process. I used to be more
gung-ho for extreme positions, and even voted for some third party
candidates in the past. But these days I'm more appreciative of
the fact that voting is meant to be part of political
decision-making and that even voting requires compromises. Seems
like compromise is becoming a dirty word in our political
discourse these days, but I don't think that's a good thing.
2. I'm skeptical of the claims that this is somehow going to provide
a magical solution to voting problems. Somewhat akin to point
number 1, are we asking too much of voting systems? For a while
now, there have been results in the economics literature that show
that voting schemes are ALL going to have some problem somewhere.
This isn't a problem that you can work around --- it's a
mathematical fact (Arrow's theorem). Yet still we see people
suggesting that some new voting fix is going to make everything
great (I'm thinking of Lani Guinear, if anyone still remembers
her...). Not to say that you can't have better and worse voting
schemes; but you'll never have a perfect one.
3. I'm worried about the outcome on bottom-of-the-ballot issues.
These are issues where there are often very, very few voters, and
we ALREADY have the possibility of bad outcomes when apathy
is combined with a strong-willed minority. What happens when we
add to this the problem of people voting in a self-expression
style, implicitly expecting that their votes will be moderated in
a run-off, but there is no run-off, because the turnout is so low?
4. How much is this going to cost, anyway? Don't we have bigger
problems, with another staggering budget deficit in the offing?
Best,
Robert
--
Robert P. Goldman
ECCO
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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