[EM] New MN court affidavits by those defending non-Monotonic voting methods & IRV/STV

Kathy Dopp kathy.dopp at gmail.com
Thu Nov 6 17:48:05 PST 2008


> From: Greg <greg at somervilleirv.org>
> Subject: Re: [EM] New MN court affidavits by those defending
>        non-Monotonic   voting methods & IRV/STV

>
> As you acknowledge, IRV does not satisfy monotonicity when there are
> three (or more) candidates.

True. IRV does not, but plurality does.

> Top-two runoff is equivalent to IRV when
> there are three candidates.

Greg,

Your statement above is provably false and very simply so. IRV and
top-two runoff are nowhere even close to "equivalent".  Read my
affidavit from a month ago or my paper on the flaws of IRV or any of
Abd'ul's emails, or just think about it for a while.

>  So if you're going to claim IRV is
> unconstitutional due to non-monotonicity, you would, at least
> logically, have to deem top-two runoff unconstitutional as well.

Why because top-two runoff elections are provably monotonic?

You do know that that doesn't make sense right?

> The
> affidavit from David Austen-Smith that you are hosting on your site
> shows you a simple example of this:
>  http://electionmathematics.org/em-IRV/DefendantsDocs/11AffidavitofDavidAusten-Smith.pdf

Obviously it does not, and that is simple to see.  When one votes for
any candidate in either a primary or a general or a runoff election,
it INCREASES the chances of that candidate winning, unlike IRV.

Try getting any example that really shows that any plurality election
is nonmonotonic. You Can't.  Just proclaiming it to be so, is just a
simple lie.  Some IRV proponents might like to believe lies like that
which support their position, but we know that repeating the same lie
over and over is never going to make it true.

>>> Note also that other arguments by the "MN Voter's Alliance" would, if
>>> successful, would render *any* voting method that involves putting
>>> marks next to multiple candidates -- IRV, Bucklin, Approval,
>>> Condorcet, Range -- by its nature unconstitutional.

Yes. *IF* they are successful at convincing a judge that an obvious
falsehood that is simply disproven is the truth.

Any judge could be expected to be too smart than to fall for claims
that are so quickly and easily shown to be false.

Look, I'm asking for true comments of fact. Anyone have any of those
about these affidavits?

Kathy



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