[Election-Methods] RELEASE: Instant Runoff Voting

[Kathy Dopp]

> Date: Fri, 20 Jun 2008 13:29:17 -0700 (PDT)
> From: Chris Benham <cbenhamau at yahoo.com.au>
> Subject: Re: [Election-Methods] RELEASE: Instant Runoff Voting -
> Since I regard? "IRV" (the Alternative Vote,?unlimited strict ranking?"version") as
> one of? the good methods, the best in my judgement of the methods that meet
> Later-no-Harm,?I am encouraged to respond? to Kathy Dopp's anti-IRV propaganda
> piece.
>

Chris,

All of your points have already been addressed in my paper or by Abd
ul Rahman Lomax on this list.

For example, re "later no harm":

"Later-No-Harm", that a lower preference cannot harm a higher
preference, is FairVote's favorite election criterion.

"Later-No-Harm", however, is incompatible with the basic principles of
majority rule, which requires compromise if decisions are to be made.
That's because the peculiar design of sequential elimination
guarantees -- if a majority is not required -- that a lower preference
cannot harm a higher preference, because the lower preferences are
only considered if a higher one is eliminated. But many think that
later-no-harm is undesirable because it interferes with the process of
equitable compromise that is essential to the social cooperation that
voting is supposed to facilitate. If I am negotiating with my
neighbor, and his preferred option differs from mine, if I reveal that
some compromise option is acceptable to me, before I'm certain that my
favorite won't be chosen, then I may "harm" the chance of my favorite
being chosen. If the method my neighbor and I used to help us make the
decision *requires* later-no-harm, it will interfere with the
negotiation process, make it more difficult to find mutually
acceptable solutions. On the other hand, the "harm" in Bucklin method
of counting votes only occurs if your favorite doesn't win by a
majority in the first round.

BTW, you are in point of fact, incorrect that some voting methods do
not meet Arrow's "independence of alternatives" condition, that is
unless, like Arrow, you are excluding all rating voting methods like
range and approval voting.  If I am wrong in this, then you will be
able to provide an example using the range or approval voting method
which does not meet this Arrows' condition that "the introduction of a
nonwinning candidate changes the outcome of who wins", not merely make
the claim without any supporting example.
--

All your questions are either already answered in my paper somewhere
or are deliberately not addressed in my paper because the topic of the
paper is restricted to the flaws and benefits of the IRV method and
only touches on other topics only as necessary to provide an overview,
as in the recent appendix supplied by voting system experts.  Please
re-read my paper again and I am certain that you will see this.

Thank you for correcting my grammatical mistake in using "criteria"
where I should have used "criterion".

Cheers,

Kathy Dopp