[EM] 02/01/02 - IRVing is superior in math, Steve Barney:

[Forest Simmons]

On Fri, 1 Feb 2002, Adam Tarr wrote:

> The way I would look at the IRV vs. ITTR (top two runoff) debate:
> 
> IRV advocates tout many advantages of IRV, but in reality it only has one clear 
> advantage over basic plurality: as long as two parties (candidates) stay 
> dominant, it prevents a spoiler vote.  ITTR shares this advantage, while being 
> much simpler and less prone to misinterpretation.

That's a clear, accurate, concise summary of the essentials.

> 
> But really, what's the point?  The original question seemed to be persuant to 
> what you should advocate as a reform to a manual runoff election method.  The 
> obvious answer is approval voting.  Easier to explain, no change in voting 
> equipment, cheaper, better.
> 

To us that's the obvious answer. But the Green Party and other potential
reformers are putting forth IRV initiatives here in Oregon and elsewhere,
and they are surprisingly resistant to Approval because it doesn't have the
IRV mystique.

One step in bursting their IRV bubble is to get the word out that it is no
better than ITTR. 

By the way, I looked up the page of Lorrie Cranor's dissertation with the
table comparing methods by different criterion:

http://www.ccrc.wustl.edu/~lorracks/dsv/diss/node4.html#SECTION00310000000000

Runoff beats IRV (alias Hare/STV/preference vote in the table) on one
criterion (the IIAC), and they come out the same on the seven other
criteria in the table. 

Forest