[EM] FWD - [instantrunoff] What must a IRV ballot ranking look like?

[Instant Runoff Voting supporter]

  ------------ Forwarded Letter ------------
To: <instantrunoff at egroups.com>
From: "Tom Ruen" <tomruen at itascacg.com>
Date: Thu, 7 Dec 2000 03:07:55 -0600
Subject: [instantrunoff] What must a IRV ballot ranking look like?

Hello IRV supporters,

I held an email election with 30 friends. We voted on a list of 24 fruit. I
told them to rank all fruit they liked and ignore the rest. As a last second
thought, I allowed ties in the ranking.

A number of people took up my offer for ties and only voted with numbers 1-3
or 1-5. One ballot even had 11 first place votes!

When it came time to evaluate the votes, I gave fractional votes on the
ties. This caused no problems in the process and I think it made ranking
easier to voters when there are many good choices.

For all your curiosity, I'll include the election result: There were 20
ballots returned. Votes are rounded to tenths when fractional. (I wrote a
little Pascal program to read the ballots from a file created from a
spreadsheet and then process the results.)

IRV process: (11 rounds - top 5 listed)
Round 1-2: (15%) Apple 3.0, Banana 2.4, Mango 2.1, Strawberry 2.1, Cherry
2.0
Round 3: (15%) Apple 3.0, Banana 2.5, Mango 2.1, Strawberry 2.1, Cherry 2.0
Round 4: (15%) Apple 3.0, Banana 2.6, Mango 2.1, Strawberry 2.1, Cherry 2.0
Round 5: (16%) Banana 3.2, Apple 3.0, Mango 2.2, Strawberry 2.2, Cherry 2.0
Round 6: (20%) Cherry 4.0, Banana 3.2, Apple 3.0, Mango 2.2, Strawberry 2.2
Round 7: (22%) Strawberry 4.3, Cherry 4.0, Banana 3.3, Apple 3.0, Pineapple
3.0
Round 8 : (28%) Strawberry 5.5, Cherry 4.0, Pineapple 4.0, Banana 3.5, Apple
3.0
Round 9 : (32%) Strawberry 6.5, Cherry 6.0, Pineapple 4.0, Banana 3.5
Round 10: (40%) Strawberry 8.0, Cherry 7.0, Pineapple 5.0
Round 11: (55%) Strawberry 11.0, Cherry 8.0
Round 12: (75%) Strawberry 15.0

I did this experiment both to educate my friends, and to test the process on
a real question of varied preference.

The reason I write is related to previously wondering how exactly that
people vote on a ballot with ranks. I read the answer is that the voter is
presented by a matrix of selections and can not vote more than once for very
row and column. I assume the number of columns (ranks) is probably fixed,
like 5 perhaps, no matter how many candidates there are.

I'm just thinking that the voting ballot itself can handle ties. If the
voter really has no preference between two candidates, then honestly, a tie
is the most accurate representation of preference. Why take away this
choice?

I'm also thinking the more we can do to reduce spoiled ballots and increase
the flexibility of the vote, the better.

I was wondering why I haven't seen this option discussed? Why not allow
voters to rank all their preferred candidates with any numbers 1-5,
independently? It seems to me that this is simpler than enforcing an
exclusive sequence ranking 1 2 3 on voters.

Why does IRV restrict voters to sequential ranking when this shows it is
fundamentally unnecessary? Are fractions really offensive? I mean it's not
any worse that fractional cents - $1.499/gallon of gas for instance?

Can any one address this? Thanks!

Sincerely,
Tom Ruen
Minnesota




-------------------------- eGroups Sponsor -------------------------~-~>
eLerts
It's Easy. It's Fun. Best of All, it's Free!
http://click.egroups.com/1/9699/1/_/13486/_/976309737/
---------------------------------------------------------------------_->

Kill the 'wasted vote' syndrome by ranking candidates (1, 2, 3) and
requiring a majority of votes to win.

To subscribe: instantrunoff-subscribe at egroups.com

For more information: www.fairvote.org, www.midwestdemocracy.org,
www.prairienet.org/icpr, www.instantrunoff.com

MAKE YOUR VOTE COUNT!