[Election-Methods] IRV hurts racial minorities?

[Juho]

On Jul 30, 2008, at 2:57 , Warren Smith wrote:

> To reply to Gilmour
> ("if you are serious about representation of minorities, you start by
> electing the representative assembly by a sound system of proportional
> representation")
>
> --that may be.  However, this web page was not addressing that
> question.  It was addressing
> the question: "which hurts/helps racial minorities: IRV or plurality
> voting? with no third alternative
> allowed")

If that is the intended question the page should probably say that  
clearer. Now it says most notably (around title and conclusion) that  
IRV hurts minorities (without indication that the claim is intended  
to apply only in comparison to plurality).

> To reply to Juho
> ("Eating ice cream causes drowning. There is plenty of evidence. Just
> check the summertime and wintertime statistics and be convinced.
> In this case one statistical IRV example seemed to justify the
> conclusions.")
>
> --The web page already addressed this issue.
> http://rangevoting.org/IRVraceMinorities.html

The page says: "So given this, we suggest to you that based on the  
data that we have, and until any evidence comes along to the  
contrary, you should conclude that IRV disfavors racial minorities."

This piece of text still seems to claim that an observed correlation  
(in the few observed cases) between racial minority representation  
and used election method justifies the claim that it is the IRV  
method that hurts minorities in the Australian case.
Well, the page says "until any evidence comes along to the contrary".  
Does this mean that as soon as any evidence to the contrary (maybe  
another IRV example from another country) appears, the conclusions of  
this page should be considered invalid?

> Juho: "I also didn't see any proposed theory on why IRV would hurt  
> (racial
> or other) minorities. Is there one?"
>
> --About 5 hypotheses have been proposed to me or by me about why.
> However, the web page intentionally does not discuss why because that
> would lengthen the page by a factor of about 5, plus I don't know  
> why anyway.
> It might be interesting to investigate why, but might be a lot of  
> work.

It would be good to have at least five short bullet points or  
references to give the readers to opportunity to evaluate or learn  
the reasons. (This would be a requirement for a scientific approach.)

Is the page intended to be science or rhetoric? If it is science then  
I'd expect it to present the claims and justification to be  
evaluated. If it is rhetoric then I guess anything that appears to  
make IRV look bad can be considered appropriate content.

I had some difficulties with this page (as well as with some other  
rangevoting pages earlier) to understand if it is science that may  
sometimes falls short of meeting all the requirements of the  
scientific method (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method),  
or rhetoric (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhetoric) that sometimes  
uses the scientific formula to convince the readers.

Note: I don't mean "rhetoric" in the sense of lacking content but  
"rhetoric" in the sense of "the art of speech" and "the art of  
convincing people".

> Juho "How about a single-member  district based theory?"
>
> --*Both* plurality and IRV involve single-member districts only.
> Therefore, we know
> that Juho's theory is not the explanation.

Ok, if the intention is to compare IRV and plurality. Then one should  
just correct the claims in the page to say so.

Juho



> -- 
> Warren D. Smith
> http://RangeVoting.org <-- add your endorsement (by clicking "endorse"
> as 1st step)
> and
> math.temple.edu/~wds/homepage/works.html
> ----
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