[Election-Methods] Dopp:"17. Unstable and can be delicately sensitive to noise in the rankings."

[Chris Benham]

>From Kathy Dopp's anti-IRV propaganda "report":
" 17. Unstable and can be delicately sensitive to noise in the rankings. If an election is not
resolved after 3 rounds of IRV then one is deep in the ranking for many people. This means
noise in the rankings. Do people really study candidates they don't care much about? Thus
the noise in the ranking for the most ill-informed voters is determining the outcome in deep
rank run-offs.
When a race is unresolved after 3 rounds of IRV, a better solution is to hold a real run off
with the remaining candidates. Having winnowed the field, voters can now properly study
their allowed few choices with the required care and presumably enough will to make the
outcome not contingent on noise. Moreover, can you fathom how awful it would be to fill
out a ballot ranking every candidate 10 deep? In Australia, voters are required by law to fill
rank ever candidate running (generally 20) from 1 to 20. Do you think there is anything
besides noise in the last ten? The saving grace on the Australian ballot is that generally there
are only 2 questions, one with 3 to 4 rankings and one with about 20. Not like our USA
ballots. Restricting the ranking depth of ranked choice ballots could improve IRV methods
by reducing noise and making it easier for voters. "

No-one I gather is suggesting that in the US voters should be compelled to fully rank, so all
this is silly crude stuff.
"In Australia, voters are required by law to fill rank ever candidate running (generally 20) from 1 to 20."
The "generally 20" figure is false. For Australian IRV elections there is rarely more than about
seven candidates.

The figure 20 is about right for elections to the Senate, which uses multi-member  STV
(corrupted into a quasi-list system).
Elsewhere in the paper we read that IRV is inadequate because it can't guarantee  that the
winner will be elected with the support of a majority of all the voters who submitted 
valid ballots.
"Restricting the ranking depth of ranked choice ballots could improve IRV methods
by reducing noise and making it easier for voters."
But Kathy favours "restricting ranking depth" which of course has the effect of making
this avowed aim much less likely.
And of course restricting ranking doesn't "make it easier for voters". If  truncation is allowed,
how could it?  
In fact it just makes it harder for some voters. Say there are many candidates and I judge
that 2 of them are the front-runners, I have a preference between them but they are my
2 least favourite candidates. I am stuck with the same dilemma and strong incentive to use
the Compromise strategy that I have in FPP. To have some hope of having an impact on
the result I must insincerely rank my preferred front-runner above second-bottom.
Chris Benham


      Start at the new Yahoo!7 for a better online experience. www.yahoo7.com.au
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.electorama.com/pipermail/election-methods-electorama.com/attachments/20080708/00566136/attachment-0002.htm>