[Election-Methods] A Better Version of IRV?

[Kathy Dopp]

> Date: Sun, 06 Jul 2008 23:36:32 +0000 (GMT)
> From: fsimmons at pcc.edu
> Subject: [Election-Methods] A Better Version of IRV?
> To: election-methods at lists.electorama.com
> Message-ID: <e4afed032228c.48715700 at pcc.edu>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
>
> There is a lot of momentum behind IRV.  If we cannot stop it, are there some tweaks that would make it more liveable?

Hi Forest.

I think we can stop that madness.  I believe that the LWV, US will no
longer be seriously considering supporting IRV since my writing a
report on IRV's flaws - and that other State LWV groups and other
State legislators where IRV was being considered are stopping their
push for it.

However, to answer your "if" question ...

> Someone has suggested that a candidate withdrawal option would go a long way towards ameliorating the damage.
> Here's another suggestion, inspired by what we have learned from Australia's worst problems with their version of IRV:
> Since IRV satisfies Later No Harm, why not complete the incompletely ranked ballots with the help of the rankings of the ballot's favorite candidate?

But that would still leave the problem of having to count IRV
elections centrally and alot of the other worst flaws of IRV
(including its lack of fairness, cost, tendency to promote secret
electronic vote counting, etc.  Please peruse my report when you have
a chance (It is only 11 pages plus appendices and endnotes and is
well-organized to make it easy to read.):

http://electionarchive.org/ucvAnalysis/US/RCV-IRV/InstantRunoffVotingFlaws.pdf

> The unranked candidates would be ranked below the ranked candidates in the order of the ballot of the favorite.

While that might be a slight improvement, the better idea would be the
one suggested in my paper (I heard it first from Charlie Strauss) that
also fixes some of the counting problems of IRV elections. I.e. Let
all the candidates (before election day) pick their own ranked choices
of other candidates - and not the voters.  This system has many
advantages over IRV including:

1.  gives the minor party candidates more political power

2.  simpler ballots that do not confuse voters - i.e. voters only need
vote for their top choice

3.  The RCV ballots can be counted and summed much more easily because
all the ballots of voters who voted for an eliminated candidate are
counted the same way - no need for individual ballot examination and
sorting, etc.  I.e. Only the voters' first choices are needed to be
summed for each precinct and reported to the central facility as
always, to know who wins.

4. Much much easier to manually count and audit.



> If the candidates were allowed to specify their rankings after they got the partial results, this might be a valuable improvement.

Having the candidates only rank "incompletely ranked" ballots would be
an election nightmare, but having candidates rank all the other
candidates and having voters only give their first choice, would work
better than IRV, but I still think other voting methods are available
that are superior.

I believe that my email contacts with the LWV and with US Election
Officials and others who have now been apprised of my report on the
"17 flaws and 3 benefits of IRV" will have the effect of stopping IRV
from creating very additional serious problems with US elections.

Look at the mess in San Francisco and WA now.  Most election officials
will not want to emulate those messes.

The push for manual audits to verify the accuracy of machine counts,
will make IRV virtually impossible to implement.  Election integrity
advocates, once they understand all the problems IRV causes, will
oppose it.

It is amazing to me that anyone would consider supporting IRV when it
does not even solve the spoiler problem except in one case, and there
are an amount of possibly subtotals that could be used to count votes
for each precinct equal to the sum from i = 0 to N-1 of N!/i! where N
is the number of candidates.

The only reason some people supported IRV initially is because it is a
very seductive idea until one actually sits down and thinks about all
the implications of using it.

If you know any legislator or election official who is contemplating
using IRV, simply attach a copy of my peer-reviewed report on the "17
flaws and 3 benefits of IRV" to them.  Since I wrote this paper, I
personally know of at least two US States where legislators have
changed their minds about supporting IRV and are no longer supporting
IRV.  If we get my peer-reviewed report on IRV out to all the
decision-makers, I feel certain we can avert another mess similar to
the 2002 HAVA bill.

As usual the group Common Cause is causing problems with US election
systems while raising money to allegedly solve the election problems
because Common Cause has officially endorsed IRV just like Common
Cause was instrumental in pushing through the HAVA bill in 2002.  The
leadership of Common Cause never seems to adequately think about the
election reform positions they take prior to taking them and yet are
very slow to drop their bad positions once they take them. Sigh.

Kathy