[Election-Methods] Fwd: [LWVTopics] IRV Voting

[Kathy Dopp]

Friends,

I need help to rebut these points about IRV voting that are being
spread via a US League of Women Voters' email list  that is tracked by
persons in the US office of the LWV (and apparently the LWV of Mass.
has already officially taken a position in favor of IRV voting).

Thanks. I'll forward your comments back to the LWV list. I do not
follow this issue sufficiently to respond without help, as I'm
focusing on figuring out how to do post-election  audit discrepancy
analysis now.

I removed all but the pertinent points that need response from someone
with more expertise in this issue than I possess.

I added a few comments in []s.  Please help me because I do not have
information on this topic at my fingertips and do not have time
currently to research a reply.  Thank you.


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From:  <LWVTopics at yahoogroups.com>
Date: Sat, May 10, 2008 at 7:22 AM


There are 3 messages in this issue.

Topics in this digest:
1a. Re: IRV Voting is a really Bad Idea
   Posted by: "Steve Chessin" steve.chessin at alum.mit.edu steve_chessin
   Date: Fri May 9, 2008 10:43 pm ((PDT))

Kathy doesn't say what voting method she prefers, but it's well-known
among electoral experts that there is no such thing as a perfect voting
system.  The mathematical proof of this is known as Arrow's Impossibility
Theorem, after Stanford economist Kenneth Arrow, who received the Nobel
Prize in 1972 for proving his theorem in 1951.  Pathological scenarios
can be constructed for all voting systems, including whatever ones Kathy
may prefer to IRV.

Yes.  I prefer IRV to all other systems for electing a single winner to
an executive office because it elects a majority winner in a single
election without the need for a separate expensive runoff election.  It
eliminates the spoiler effect, and it encourages positive
issue-oriented campaigns instead of mudslinging opponent-attacking
campaigns.  It is also easy to understand and easy to administer.  Exit
polls of voters show that they vastly prefer IRV to two-round runoff
elections, and this is across all ethnic groups.


I'm not sure how Kathy defines "support", but it must be different from
how I would define it.  IRV uses the same basic logic as a traditional
runoff election to find a majority winner.  Any argument along the
lines Kathy presents is equally true of IRV AND traditional runoff
elections.  Imagine a traditional runoff election (or IRV election)
with three candidates, A, B, and C.  If A gets 48%, B gets 46% and C
gets 6%, the runoff would be between A or B.  Now let's say all the C
voters prefer B over A, so B ends up with 52% to A's 48%.

I think Kathy's statement is based on the following scenario, in which
someone might claim that C (the one who got 6%) is actually supported
by the MOST voters.  Here is how that reasoning would work:  It COULD
be that all of the supporters of B would prefer C over A and all the
supporters of A would prefer C over B, thus (according to this view) C
is in some sense "supported" by 94% of the voters (all of A and B's
supporters).  But in this scenario C is still only the first choice of
6% of the voters, and I don't think most people would support a system
that would declare the winner of a 3-way race the candidate who was the
first choice of only 6% of the voters.

>I belong to an email list which discusses various alternatives for
>voting schemes, and although I don't pay close attention to this list,
>it is generally agreed on the list that IRV does not work and that
>other approaches might work better.

Well, given that that list (if it's the one I think it is) is made up
primarily of advocates of other systems (Condorcet, Borda, Approval,
Range, to name a few), I am not surprised that they agree that "IRV
does not work" and that their own pet approach works better.  But all
of them agree that our current election method, plurality elections
(complete with the spoiler problem), is the worst method.

The vast majority of informed opinion (not just that of the
IRV-dislikers) is that IRV is the best option for single-seat
elections.  For example, the organization of political science
professors, the American Political Science Association, has
incorporated IRV into their constitution to elect their own national
president.  While the members of Kathy's list [Note: I never said that
this was "my" list] have their pet methods,
none of those methods are actually used for governmental elections
anywhere in the world.  In contrast, IRV is used in the United States,
and has been used for generations in places like Australia and
Ireland.  Also, none of the pathological scenarios the IRV-dislikers
like to put forth have ever surfaced as a problem.

>Also some other reasons not to promote IRV (besides the fact that it
>often ends up putting candidates into office that are not supported by
>- or even are opposed by - a majority of voters) include:

It is theoretically possible to have an election in which NO candidate
has majority support, like a rock, paper, scissors endless loop, but IRV
is FAR more likely to elect a true majority choice than our current
plurality election method with its rampant spoiler problem.

>1. It can be very difficult and time-consuming to count manually, and
>so makes auditing elections very difficult.

[Notice his response to my comment begins by employing a
misinterpretation of my comment.]

IRV has been counted easily and quickly in recent U.S. elections in
places like Burlington, Vermont, and Cary, North Carolina.  Auditing
can be more complicated, simply because there is more information from
each voter to double check, but can also be more thorough.  San
Francisco and Burlington, for example, posted a record of every
ballot's set of rankings on the Internet, allowing anyone to tally
those elections themselves.


>3. IRV makes it virtually impossible to conduct post-election exit
>poll discrepancy and vote count pattern analysis to detect suspicious
>patterns that are consistent with vote miscount and voter
>disenfranchisement. I.e. IRV makes any problems with vote count
>integrity harder to detect.

This is false.  Exit polls can and have been conducted for IRV
elections.  The fact that voters are giving more information about
their preferences does not make detecting misconduct any harder.

[He is incorrect in making the above statement, but I do have the
expertise to rebut this one incorrect statement.]

As explained previously, there are no perfect voting methods, although
I believe that IRV is the best method.  Many of the advocates of other
reforms seek to denigrate IRV in hopes of advancing their favorite
reform method.  (I note that none of them have been successful in
getting any jurisdiction to adopt their methods.)

As to IRV not achieving its "claims":  There are two claims often made
for IRV that may be somewhat over-stated.  Although political
scientists and courts have recognized IRV as a majority voting method,
it is possible that some voters will not rank either of the two
finalists in the runoff count.  In this case, it is possible that the
runoff winner will have less than 50% of the votes cast in the original
election.  This is the same dynamic as in a traditional runoff
election, in which some voters don't show up at the second election,
and the runoff winner may end up with fewer votes than 50% of those
voting in the first round.  This "non-majority" winner is FAR less of a
problem with IRV than it is with our current plurality elections, or
with separate runoff elections (where turnout generally drops
sharply).  Thus, while IRV will elect a majority winner among those
voters expressing a preference between the final winner and the other
candidates, one could claim this does not assure a majority winner
among all the voters.

The second claim of IRV that may be over-stated is that it eliminates
the "spoiler problem."  While compared to our current voting method,
IRV indeed solves the spoiler problem when independents or third
parties run against two major parties.  However, concerns about
"spoilers" could possibly resurface in some scenarios when there are
three or more major parties.  But none of those scenarios have appeared
in practice in those countries that use IRV and have more than two
major parties.

>I took a spreadsheet once and it took me just a few minutes very easy
>to create examples when IRV voting doesn't work as anyone would want
>to. I  recommend taking a few minutes to try that yourself before you
>recommend IRV again.

As Arrow's Impossibility Theorem shows, it is impossible to invent a
perfect voting method, as reasonable and desirable features that one
would want in a voting method are mutually exclusive.  IRV does better
than most in real world experience, and virtually all elections methods
experts agree it is superior to plurality elections we use currently.
While it is easy to construct pathological scenarios for any voting
system, none of the pathological scenarios for IRV have ever been
observed in practice.

>Fair Vote is a misnomered organization.

It saddens me that Kathy thinks this.  I would suggest people visit
www.fairvote.org and come to their own conclusions.

>"Sophistry" is a statement or claim that at first glance sounds good,
>but upon closer examination is found to be incorrect or inaccurate.

And not applicable, I hope, to anything I've said about IRV.

>Kathy

(Kathy, it's customary to include one's League after one's name.)

--Steve Chessin
LWV Los Altos - Mountain View Area (CA)

--

Thanks for helping respond to this person who is trying to push the
LWV to support IRV and needs to have some of his comments rebutted.

Cheers,

Kathy