[Election-Methods] RELEASE: Instant Runoff Voting

[Terry Bouricius]

Aaron,

Just four little points to what Aaron Armitage wrote...

1. <snip>
"You claim, in short, that using the same inputs differently makes them 
different inputs, and that producing the same kind of outcome differently 
makes it a different outcome."
<snip>

I believe James was arguing that while a voter's preferences in her mind 
might be the same, but knowing whether the ballot would be counted using 
one method or another set of vote processing rules (with or without 
later-no-harm protection, for example) will change how the voter will mark 
the ballot. Or put another way, two ballots with identical rankings on 
them may in fact reflect very different actual preferences by these two 
voters depending on which vote processing rule is going to be used. Thus, 
one can't simply say inputs (if one means actual voter preferences) are 
identical by looking at the rankings without regard to the vote processing 
rule in place.

2.  <snip>
"Under any definition of "one person, on vote" that Bucklin fails, IRV 
also
fails. But that wouldn't be a proper definition anyway."
 <snip>

Not so. A single transferable vote is very different than a Bucklin 
additive vote. Under IRV each voter has one vote for one candidate counted 
in the final tally. Under Bucklin, voter A may have one vote in the final 
tally, but voter B has two votes for two candidates in opposition. One 
court ruled that Bucklin violated the one vote-one person concept, while 
another court ruled that IRV upheld it. Since these were different courts, 
it certainly isn't conclusive, but the difference is significant. I 
personally think that methods like Bucklin and Approval might be seen as 
satisfying one-person one-vote (nearly as well as IRV) because a "vote" is 
an expression of the voters choice on the matter at hand, and all voters 
have equal rights to mark the ballot with no class of voters getting an 
automatic advantage.


3. <snip>
"Take an example. Louisiana uses the same election system that France 
does,
and it malfunctioned the same way in both places; a crypto-fascist got
enough votes to make it to the runoff, produced a fair amount of panic, 
and
duly lost to an opponent whose only real selling point was being the only
alternative."
<snip>

But the method is not IRV. In France with sequential elimination, all 
experts agree that le Pen would not have made it into the final runoff, 
and that Jospin would have been the finalist with Chirac. Louisiana is a 
better example, though still weak...since we can't know for sure how IRV 
in a single November election rather than the lower turnout October 
primary Duke passed through, would have changed voter turnout and 
outcomes.

4. My last point is one of general agreement with Aaron...I agree that we 
should try to use criteria definitions that allow all single-winner voting 
methods to be compared...but that is much trickier than it at first 
appears.