[EM] IRV letter

[MIKE OSSIPOFF]

Fairly recently messages have been posted here about IRV proposals for 
particular communties or states. A recent such message was about Utah. Could 
someone re-post the e-mail addresses at which I could write to the people 
considering those IRV proposals, or the e-mail addresses of the local 
newspapers there?

I tried to reply earlier today, but it turned out that I'd merely posted my 
letter to an IRV mailing list. That's ok too, but I want to write to the 
people who are considering IRV as a public proposal, and to the newspaper in 
the cities where that's being considered.

The IRV promoters will push their nonreform through everywhere they want to, 
if we're so busy discussing things more theoretical that we don't take time 
to communicate with the people who have only heard the IRV promoters and who 
are considering accepting their proposal. And, as I said, newspapers in 
cities where IRV is being considered.

We can stop IRV. IRV can't get adopted anywhere where people have heard of 
its problems. Anywhere where people have heard from anyone other than the 
IRV promoters.

Here's my letter that I'll be sending to everywere where I hear that there's 
an IRV proposal. Of course I may add to and improve the letter as I keep 
using it. Feel free to use any information in it, or to copy or forward the 
entire letter, or to quote or use it entire or in part in any medium:


I've heard that a party convention might use Instant
Runoff, and that Instant Runoff (IRV) might even be
discussed for public political elections in Utah. For
that reason, I'd like to describe some problems of
IRV:

For
any particular pairwise preference that you vote, IRV
may or may not ever look at that voted preference.

Say you vote Favorite in 1st place, and Compromise in
2nd place. Compromise can be immediately eliminated by
IRV, while your traveling vote is still on Favorite.
Then, having eliminated Compromise, Favorite later
loses to Worst, your last choice. That can and will
happpen in IRV. When it does, IRV has ignored your
voted preference for Compromise over Worst.

What would you say about a project manager who makes
irrevocable decisions based on only a small fraction
of the available information? That's what IRV does,
when it drops candidates based only on a count of 1st
place rank positions.

Two better methods are Condorcet, and Approval.
They're described at

http://www.electionmethods.org

and

http://www.barnsdle.demon.co.uk/vote/sing.htm.

Briefly, Approval says: Each voter may mark as many
candidates on his ballot as s/he wants to. The
candidate who gets the most marks wins.

With Approval, no one ever has any incentive to vote
someone else over his/her favorite. That can't be said
for IRV.

Condorcet uses rank-balloting, as does IRV. But
Condorcet looks at and reliably counts every pairwise
preference that you indicate in your ranking.

Condorcet reliable counts every pairwise preference
that you want to vote. Approval doesn't let you vote
all of your pairwise preferences, but Approval
reliably counts all the pairwise preferences that you
consider imortant enough to be the ones that you vote.
With Approval, you decide which of your pairwise
preferences will be counted. With IRV, IRV's
idiosyncracies decide that.

I liken Approval to a solid, reliable handtool. A rank
method is an automatic laborsaving machine. Condorcet
is a deluxe automatic machine. IRV is a shoddy,
defective automatic machine. You'd be much better off
with the reliable handtool than with the defective
automatic machine.

Let me mention a few IRV failure examples:

Example 1, 3 candidates:

40: ABC
25: BAC
35: CBA

B is the candidate who pairwise-beats each one of the
others. B would beat each one of the others in
separate pairwise contests. Condorcet would choose B.

IRV immediately eliminates B.

IRVists sometimes try to justify that by saying that
favoriteness is important. Then why don't they just
advocate Plurality?

But if IRVists say that favoriteness is important,
then ask them to justify this:

Example 2, 5 candidates:

63: ABCDE
75: BACDE
100: CDBEA
86: DECBA
73: EDCBA

We can simplify this if we delete all of the
preferences that IRV ignores, all of the preferences
that IRV never looks at:

63: AB
75: B
100: C
86: D
73: ED

It looks a bit sparse now, doesn't it, after we delete
the preferences that IRV never looks at.

A & D are eliminated and transfer their votes inward,
and then C has the fewest votes and is eliminated.

But not only would C beat each one of the others in
separate pairwise contests, but C is the favorite of
more people than any other candidate is.

That can be written more extreme (with the sparse
format):

Example 3, extreme case:

50: AB
51: B
100: C
53: D
49: ED

Now, not only would C beat each of the others in a
2-candidate race, but now C is favorite to about
_twice_ as many people as anyone else is. And yet IRV
still eliminates C, just as in the previous example.

These aren't contrived special examples. These are
robust scenarios. They work with a wide variety of
numbers. All this one requires is that favoriteness
taper away from the voter-median candidate. The two
examples show the wide variety of numbers with which
the scenario can happen.

Ask the IRVists to justify that.

IRVists talk about electing a majority candidate, but
IRV makes a false majority. Condorcet protects
majority rule. IRV will often violate majority rule,
as it does in the 3 examples above.

We want to get rid of the lesser-of-2-evils problem
that dominates so many people's voting. IRV, like
Plurality, will sometimes give people a strategic need
to bury their favorite by voting someone else over
him/her, to protect a lesser-evil from early
elimination.

Approval never gives anyone incentive to vote someone
else over his/her favorite. Condorcet meets the
criteria listed for it on our technical evaluation
page.

For the goals of majority rule, and getting rid of the
lesser-of-2-evils problem, Condorcet and Approval
bring genuine significant improvement. IRV doesn't.

IRVists like to say that sometimes it won't have the
problems I've described, that IRV "guarantees" that
sometimes you won't regret voting your favorite in 1st
place. Guarantees that contain the word "somtimes" or
"maybe" don't sound very reassuring.

Feel free to quote from this e-mail, in its entirity
or in part, in your paper, or anywhere else.

If you would, I request that this letter (or as much
of it as you have room for) be printed in your paper's
letters column.


Mike

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