[Election-Methods] Fwd: [election_leaders] Is IRV Hurting Minorities in Fair Vote Home Town?

[Abd ul-Rahman Lomax]

At 10:49 PM 7/23/2008, Kathy Dopp wrote:
>Thought this list might be interested in this "real world" example of IRV.
>It turns out that Fair Vote Director Rob Richie's home town of Takoma
>Park Maryland, the home base for IRV, has Zero (0) zilch NADA minority
>representation. And voter turnout flat out sucks.

IRV was a fish bicycle in Takoma Park and it is rather obvious that 
it was only implemented there because of probably intense lobbying by 
a resident, Mr. Richie.

Takoma Park has, more often than not, unopposed elections. An 
election with three serious candidates is rare.

This is the big secret: IRV is being implemented in jurisdictions 
with nonpartisan elections. With nonpartisan elections, IRV 
duplicates, almost always, the results of Plurality. Voting systems 
experts seem to have missed this entirely, probably because they 
mostly think in terms of factions, which applies to partisan 
elections, not necessarily to nonpartisan ones.

It would be speculative to predict this result from an abstract 
consideration of how voters form and vote preferences, though 
theoretical justification is possible. But it's an obvious phenomenon 
when one studies the actual elections taking place.

There have been 32 IRV elections in the U.S. since 2004. Of these 9 
went to Instant Runoff. In every one of the instant runoff elections, 
the leader in the first round went on to win the election, and, in 
every one, the runner-up remained the runner-up after vote transfers. 
That is almost 18 opportunities to see vote transfers cause some 
reversal. (In some of the Takoma Park elections, there was only one 
candidate on the ballot, so "runner-up" doesn't mean much!)

There has been a lot of hot air generated about runoff voting (real 
runoffs). But real runoff voting, about one time out of three, 
results in a "comeback election," where the runner up in the primary 
wins the runoff. Why isn't IRV doing this, supposedly it "simulates" 
runoff voting?

But it does not simulate runoff voting, which includes an opportunity 
to reassess the candidates with a narrowed field. In addition, 
differential turnout means that the voting population changes. The 
kind of voting systems theory that Range Voting is essentially based 
on -- which considers preference strength to be important -- would 
lead us to conclude that this improves results, as the decision to 
vote or not vote is a presumably sincere decision, on average. When 
runoffs have involved very high preference on the part of large 
groups, such as the Lizard vs. Wizard election in Louisiana, runoff 
turnout can exceed that in the primary.

So: the most democratic voting system we have in actual use, top-two 
runoff (and it is even more democratic when write-ins are allowed in 
the runoff; in Long Beach, the mayor was recently re-elected in a 
runoff election in spite of ballot rules -- term limits -- preventing 
her name from being on both ballots, the primary and runoff) is being 
replaced by a system, that in nonpartisan elections, actually closely 
simulates Plurality. Which is a decent election method, more so in 
practice than in theory. It probably gets it right about 90% of the time.

The arguments being used for Instant Runoff Voting have been crafted 
to be politically effective, not to be cogent and accurate. We see 
that arguments which, in debate after debate, have gone down in 
flames, continued to be advanced as if nothing happened, and this is 
typical for a political campaign. If it works, if it creates support, 
use it. Truth? What's that? It's all opinion anyway, right?

This is a very old argument, isn't it?

Who is actually looking at the real election results? Certainly not 
FairVote! No, they focus on arguments they can win -- whether or not 
the arguments are true or not, it only matters how they arguments 
sound to the naive. We've seen, again and again, that legislators 
don't take the time to actually understand how voting systems really 
work. If they did, they'd happen upon a curious fact: Voting system 
in use, all of them, could be drastically improved simply by counting 
all the votes, instead of discarding and considering spoiled, ballots 
with more than one vote per officer to be elected. All voting 
equipment can do this (because it must be able to handle multiple 
winner elections). It's just a matter of counting them.

These votes would solve the spoiler effect (because the spoiler 
effect takes place when a minority candidate draws off enough votes 
from a major party candidate, so that the less-preferred major party 
candidate wins by a plurality. Spoiler effect disappears, *mostly*, 
with top-two runoff, and probably with Approval just as well as with 
IRV. -- those considering this tend to assume that all minor party 
voters will vote for their favorite among the top two, but Optional 
Preferential Voting in Australia -- much more like what is being 
proposed here than the standard Preferential Voting which FairVote 
uses to claim is the "Australian system" -- shows this not to be 
true. Ballot truncation is common. My expectation is that you would 
see roughly the same number of additional Approvals for major party 
candidates with Count All the Votes Approval as with IRV. No method 
guarantees a majority, not even top-two runoff if write-ins are 
allowed. But majority failure is common with IRV (7 out of 9 of those 
instant runoff elections) and rare with top-two runoff.

TANSTAAFL. You want a majority winner? You have to pay for it, with 
occasional runoffs. My estimate is that with a good election method 
(Approval or Bucklin, which I call "instant runoff Approval," it uses 
the same ballot as the "IRV" Ranked Choice Voting in San Francisco, 
but the counting is much, much easier, simple totalization), about 
half of the runoffs, even with many candidates, will be avoided. One 
could expect, in such a situation, about one election out of six, 
roughly, to require a runoff. And in roughly one election out of 
twelve, the first-round result reverses. Yeah, these statistics may 
be inconsistent, the whole matter requires further study, and it's about time.

(IRV isn't a good method for this because it does not count all the 
votes, it leaves some concealed, underneath votes for the top two. 
This is also the reason why it cannot find a "compromise winner," 
i.e, why it experiences Condorcet failure under some conditions.)