[Election-Methods] Dopp: 1. "Does not solve the "spoiler " problem except in special cases."

[Steve Eppley]

Hi,

Most analyses of spoiling (and voters' strategizing to avoid spoiling) 
narrowly focus on the candidates who reached the general election 
ballot. The much bigger spoiling problem is during the nomination 
process, when candidates choose not to run in the general election due 
to concern they will make the outcome worse if they run. (Example: 
McCain in 2000, who chose not to run for President as an independent 
after failing to be nominated by the Republican party.) It's a 
deterrence of competition. It explains why parties each nominate only 
one candidate per office and it explains why few politicians who care 
about the outcome join minor parties.

That sort of analysis falsely makes spoiling in major elections appear 
rare, regardless of the voting method (even plurality rule). When 
analysis properly includes the deterrence of competition, the spoiling 
problem is rampant with plurality rule, top two runoff, instant runoff 
and approval.

The deterrence of competition is the worse problem, in my opinion. The 
effect tends to be only two parties that have a chance to win, each 
party nominating only one candidate per office, using badly flawed 
procedures (primary elections, for example) to decide which one 
candidate the party will nominate.

Furthermore, the two parties tend to become polarized. One name that's 
been given the cause of the polarization is the "center-squeeze effect." 
That is, candidates who want to win avoid moderate positions because 
candidates at those positions will tend to lose due to being sandwiched 
between the candidates to the "left" and the candidate to the "right." A 
much older analysis was the model of "two candidates under risk of 3rd 
candidate entry" (given plurality rule). That analysis was more 
realistic than the conditions in the median voter theorem. The median 
voter theorem leads to the prediction that when there are exactly two 
candidates competing on one issue dimension, they will both try to take 
the position of the median voter, given plurality rule or any voting 
method that reduces to majority rule when there are 2 candidates. The 
prediction of the more realistic analysis where more than 2 candidates 
can compete is that neither of the 2 major candidates will compete at 
the median position, since if either does, a 3rd candidate at a position 
a little further from the median can enter the race and win.

On the matter of polarization, Instant Runoff looks as bad to me as 
plurality rule and top two runoff.

Polarization of two big parties may create a false impression that the 
voters too are polarized. It may also increase actual polarization among 
voters, since voters won't hear as many moderate arguments.

One reason some people are clamoring to replace plurality rule with 
Instant Runoff appears to be occasional election outcomes like Bush in 
2000, when Nader was a spoiler. Most Nader voters preferred Gore over 
Bush, so Gore would have won if Florida had used Instant Runoff. The 
trouble with the argument is that in a close spoiled election, the 
number of voters who prefer the spoiled outcome is a large minority; 
there won't be a consensus that the spoiled outcome is worse. When the 
winner of a spoiled plurality rule election has a large minority of the 
votes, given only the votes it doesn't matter to the well-being of 
society which of the top two wins. It only appears to matter, since the 
combination of the spoiling and the polarization leads to a big 
difference in policy choices. The closeness of the vote totals means one 
cannot tell, given only the votes, which set of policy choices is better 
for society, so in my opinion the ever-present problem of nomination 
deterrence is much worse than occasional spoiling in general elections.

P.S. - I presume some people will say the 1992 Clinton-Bush-Perot 
election was spoiled, since some polls indicated Bush would have won if 
Perot hadn't run. In other words, that Perot took more votes from Bush 
than from Clinton. That may be. However, there was apparently a majority 
cycle, according to a poll by Gary Jacobson of UC San Diego. If Perot 
had dropped out, Bush would have won. If Clinton had dropped out, Perot 
would have won. If Bush had dropped out, Clinton would have won. So 
which one was the spoiler? Furthermore, the smallest of the three 
majorities was the majority who preferred Bush over Clinton. That means 
Clinton would have won anyway given the Condorcetian methods most 
popular among the members of this email list, if Jacobsen's numbers were 
right.

P.P.S. - Kathy Dopp's request for arguments about Instant Runoff was 
expressed in terms of support and opposition. Those terms are absolutist 
shorthands that omit the key information about what the item is being 
compared against. By the same reasoning that a voter could oppose 
Clinton (when compared against Obama) and support Clinton (when compared 
against McCain), someone could both support and oppose Instant Runoff. 
How should someone who believes Instant Runoff is slightly better than 
plurality rule and Condorcet is much better than Instant Runoff respond 
to her request? Preference orders are more informative than statements 
about support or opposition, since they reveal the comparisons being made.

Regards,
Steve Eppley
----------------------------------------
Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
> At 11:50 PM 6/11/2008, Greg wrote:
>> The FairVote document that debunks Dopp's claims is available at:
>> http://www.fairvote.org/dopp
>
> Or, more accurately, "attempts to debunk." Ms. Dopp is a voting 
> security expert, not an election methods expert, and some of her 
> statements can be flawed, especially if one focuses on technical 
> details. I'm going to break this response into a series of posts on 
> each separate topic, because otherwise it gets *way* too large.
>
> This first section is a good example.
>
>> De-Bunking Kathy Dopp's 15 Flaws of Instant Runoff Voting
>> 1. Dopp: "Does not solve the "spoiler" problem except in special 
>> cases…."
>>
>> Dopp has her “special cases” reversed. In fact, IRV solves the 
>> spoiler problem in virtually all likely U.S. partisan elections.
>
> Which does not contradict Dopp's statement. The problem is that 
> "special cases" implies "only rare cases," but, technically, IRV *may* 
> reduce the spoiler effect in ... a special case, i.e., when a minor 
> candidate is not in range of winning, but due to vote splitting, 
> causes the overall preferred major candidate to lose to one less 
> preferred. It does not deal well with the center-squeeze effect, where 
> there are three candidates in range of winning, and this is, I 
> believe, what Ms. Dopp refers to.
>
> Notice the "special case" in the anonymous response: it isn't "IRV" 
> solves the spoiler problem. There are three hedges: "virtually all," 
> "likely," and "partisan." The most operative of these restrictions is 
> "partisan." Whoever wrote this -- I suspect Rob Richie, and he is 
> certainly aware of this interchanges, since he commented on it on 
> Wikipedia, in Talk for the article on Instant=-runoff voting -- is 
> quite sophisticated. IRV, in the absence of the kind of vote transfers 
> that take place in partisan elections (where the large majority of 
> vote transfers from one candidate may favor a single other candidate), 
> does little to solve the remaining "spoiler effect," center squeeze. 
> It is debatable whether or not center squeeze should be called a 
> spoiler effect. I've done so in the past, but the phenomenon is 
> different, and I'd be happy with confining the term "spoiler" to refer 
> to minor candidates, not candidates who can actually win an election 
> or come close. In which case, indeed, Ms.Dopp's statement, as made, 
> would be faulty.
>
> But she is, in fact, talking about center squeeze, which is a real 
> problem, one of the two that are so notable that Robert's Rules 
> mentions them.
>
> Further, the response wants us to think of all U.S. elections when, in 
> fact, IRV is generally being proposed as a replacement for real runoff 
> elections. Which do not show the spoiler effect in anywhere near the 
> same strength as seen with Plurality. And where that spoiler effect 
> *is* in effect in runoff voting, IRV may well fail to resolve the 
> problem; indeed, usually it will.
>
> What has been missed in most discussion of the issue is that IRV, as 
> proposed in the U.S., is a plurality method. Don't confuse this with 
> Majority Criterion compliance. Plurality methods will elect a 
> candidate even though a majority of voters haven't voted for that 
> candidate, that's a simple description of it. Jurisdictions have 
> runoff voting because they value finding a majority vote for the 
> winner, and top-two runoff actually accomplishes this. The truth is 
> that it is impossible to guarantee a majority vote in a single ballot; 
> it is even impossible with a limited series of ballots, except that 
> with top-two runoff, because of the ballot design and voter habits, a 
> majority will almost always be found. (Most top-two implementations 
> allow write-in votes, so a maintained preference of voters in the 
> first election for an "eliminated candidate" can allow that candidate 
> to win. I've never seen it, but, usually, when the Condorcet winner is 
> eliminated, the preference strength, apparently, is not enough to 
> motivate voters to turn out and vote write-in. In other words, Top-Two 
> runoff, in real practice, works quite well, much better than 
> simplistic voting systems theory might predict.
>
>> Whenever a third party or independent candidate is unlikely to be one 
>> of the top vote-getters (true in over 99% of U.S. elections), IRV 
>> eliminates the spoiler problem completely.
>
> Actually, no. If you look at Australia, in the places where ranking 
> all candidates is optional, there is a lot of plumping. So there is 
> still a spoiler effect. FairVote has always implied that the 
> Australians use a uniform method, but, in fact, some places use STV 
> with an absolute majority requirement, and they guarantee that 
> requirement by voiding all ballots that don't fully rank the 
> candidates, and other places use Optional Preferential Voting -- which 
> is what is proposed for the U.S. -- and plumping -- we call it bullet 
> voting -- is common and, apparently, increasing, according to Antony 
> Green of ABC. Naturally, the majority requirement for OPV is relaxed 
> to "a majority of ballots containing votes for remaining candidates." 
> That's a plurality method. Regular STV, PV, is a majority method, but 
> it coerces the votes. Take your pick. (Or require a majority, as 
> jurisdictions which are using runoff voting do, and then use 
> preferential voting, of whatever kind, or Approval Voting, to more 
> efficiently find majorities and avoid *some* runoffs.
>
>
>> If a third party grows to the point that its candidates out-poll 
>> major party candidates, another issue that is related to the spoiler 
>> problem can occasionally arise. This is where supporters of a third 
>> party candidate may worry that by supporting their favorite 
>> candidate, they risk causing their less-preferred compromise choice 
>> to be eliminated from the final runoff, leading to the election of 
>> their least-preferred choice. In other words, the issue of whether to 
>> vote for your favorite choice, or to rank your compromise choice 
>> first can resurface in this unique circumstance. But this is 
>> extremely rare and no different than a candidate in a party’s 
>> political primary arguing “Vote for me because I am more electable in 
>> the general election.
>
> This argument presents center-squeeze as if it is a strategic voting 
> problem, when, in fact, center-squeeze is the problem, and strategic 
> voting is how some knowledgeable voters might attempt to fix it.
>
> The problem is not rare if there are three major candidates. In that 
> situation, there is no candidate that we would ordinarily think of as 
> a "third party candidate," which always refers to a minor candidate. 
> Three major candidates can occur much more commonly in nonpartisan 
> elections than in partisan ones, in a two-party system. And, remember, 
> IRV is mostly being proposed at this time for nonpartisan elections! 
> That is what it is being used for in San Francisco.
>
> (Continued with the next point, Dopp: 2. “Requires centralized vote 
> counting procedures at the state-level…")
> ----
> Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list 
> info