[EM] Instant Runoff story on KUOW (NPR Seattle)

[Rob Lanphier]

Hi all,

There was a great show about Instant Runoff
<http://kuow.org/theconversation.asp?Archive=12-16> on KUOW, the NPR
affiliate in Seattle today.  The guests were Steven Hill from the Center
for Voting and Democracy <http://fairvote.org> as well as the Republican
Party official who wrote the opposing view on the San Francisco
initiative that passed.  The great part was that awareness of Condorcet
methods <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet_method> is growing.
They also have a blog to post your comments
<http://theconversationkuow.blogspot.com/2004/12/tired-of-only-voting-for-only-one.html>. 



Here's what I posted on the site (with a couple of thinko fixes I just
noticed):

Great show!  A couple comments:

I think Steven Hill did a great job of explaining the value of a ranked
ballot.  However, in underplaying the weaknesses of Instant Runoff
relative to Condorcet voting, he mislead on a couple of things:

   1.  It doesn't require paradoxical voting patterns to make Instant
      Runoff produce an anti-democratic result.  Here's an example of
      Instant Runoff breaking down with a set of voters with rational
      preferences
      <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant_runoff#An_example>.  In this
      example, Knoxville is chosen as the capital of Tennessee, even
      though it has weak core support and weak broad support.  See the
      same example using Condorcet
      <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet_method#An_example> for a
      more rational result.

   2.  In close elections, Instant Runoff can result in chaos.  It's
      much worse than other elections.  A real world example of this was
      when the Debian GNU/Linux project picked its project leader.  They
      used Condorcet, and so things were fine.  However, using their
      ballots, it was easy to calculate what the result would have been
      under Instant Runoff.  There was a very unstable result
 
<http://electorama.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=32>,
      where removing just one vote could make any of three candidates
      win.  Worse, the new winner (Bdale Garbee) was ranked /higher/ on
      the ballot that was eliminated than the old winner (Branden
      Robinson).  So, in essense, there's a voter who liked Bdale Garbee
      better than Branden Robinson who's vote (ranking Bdale Garbee
      higher than Branden Robinson) would cause Branden Robinson to win
      in Instant Runoff.

Rob