[EM] IRV's "majority winner". What if we let the people choose?

[James Green-Armytage]

James Gilmour wrote:
>My hypothesis
>is that politicians and the general public are likely to reject both the
>election result and the
>voting system if the voting system allows the "weak middle" to come
>through and win when that "weak
>middle" has the first-preference support of only a very small percentage
>of the voters.  

	I would say that such voters are just not thinking very carefully about
it. Sure, some people might find it strange for someone to win with 3%
first choice, but if they take the time to realize that such a person
would have won a one-on-one election against every other candidate, they
shouldn't feel that way. 
	Pegging a candidate as 'weak' or 'strong' based on their share of first
choice votes is superficial. Please read my essay "The Value of First
Choice Votes" for an illustration of this.
http://fc.antioch.edu/~jarmyta@antioch-college.edu/voting_methods/value_of_first_choice.htm
	Voters now are used to plurality, and so they are likely to look at other
systems in a way that is conditioned by the rules of plurality. However,
that doesn't mean that systems that are more similar to plurality (such as
IRV) are better, it just means that they are more readily acceptable to
people who are ignorant of better methods, i.e. Condorcet. 
	How hard is it to impress upon people the virtues of Condorcet? I don't
know. Surely many people are intellectually lazy about such things and
don't want to bother themselves with thinking about it. However, given the
importance of Condorcet for use in creating social compromise instead of
social bi-polarity, given the importance of Condorcet in creating genuine
competition in multiple-option votes, I think that it is well worth a try. 
	If IRV is the best we can do in some places, for the time being, I accept
that. It's still better than plurality, and it gets people engaged with
the ideas that different voting methods are possible and legitimate.
However, I'd rather not take the defeatist and elitist attitude that
Condorcet is over everyone's head and that we shouldn't confuse them by
suggesting it as an alternative to both IRV and plurality in the present
day.

James Gilmour also wrote:
>2.  More importantly, changing to a run-off election part-way through and
>asking questions about
>that, does not address the issues arising from the outcome of the
>Condorcet election. 
 

I reply:
	You seem to have forgotten how this thread began in the first place. Mike
Ossipoff wrote a post on May 14 called "IRV's 'majority winner'. What if
we let the people chose."
http://lists.electorama.com/pipermail/election-methods-electorama.com/2004-May/012867.html
	In that posting he wrote that in a runoff between the IRV winner and the
Condorcet winner, the Condorcet winner "will win every time."
	You then replied in a posting with the same subject on May 15,
http://lists.electorama.com/pipermail/election-methods-electorama.com/2004-May/012875.html
	and you took issue with precisely this idea. The discussion quickly
became a generic IRV vs. Condorcet debate for most people, but it
nevertheless began with the idea that the Condorcet winner would beat the
IRV winner in a runoff. Hence your dismissal of my postings as somewhat
off-topic is quite topsy-turvy. Actually my inquiry as to the expected
results of a Condorcet/completion winner vs. IRV winner runoff is the
original topic.

James Green-Armytage