[EM] Why I think IRV isn't a serious alternative

[Greg]

> Greg, you didn't actually say that IRV is good, you just said that it's
> unlikely to be bad.

Huh? One reason I think it's good in part because it's very likely to
elect elect the Condorcet candidate, if that's what you mean by
"unlikely to be bad." Some other reasons I think it's good is that it
resists strategic voting, allows third parties to participate, and
paves the way for PR.

> Why bother with something that's unlikely to be bad when we can just as
> easily get something without that badness?

You can't get rid of "badness." Every system is imperfect. IRV is
non-monotonic; Condorcet is susceptible to burial. So we're left to
balance the relative pros and cons.

> Oh, and actually it _is_ likely to be bad. See that first graph? See how
> over thousands of simulated elections it gets lower social satisfaction?

Brian, you're graphs are computer-generated elections that you made
up. They aren't actual elections that took place in practice, which
show a high unlikelihood of being bad. When your theory is a poor
predictor of the data, it's time to change the theory, not insist the
data must be different from what they are.

Greg


> On Nov 25, 2008, at 11:52 AM, Greg wrote:
>
>> I will believe that when I'm presented with a non-negligible number of
>> actual IRV elections for public office that failed to elect the
>> "right" winner. And for starters, you get to define what "right" is.
>> Preferably something of the form: in Election X, IRV elected candidate
>> Y but candidate Z was the right winner, because of [insert your
>> criteria and evidence here]. The more such cases you have, the more
>> convincing your argument. I've studied every IRV election for public
>> office ever held in the United States, most of which have their full
>> ranking data publicly available, and every single time IRV elected the
>> Condorcet winner, something I consider to be a good, though not
>> perfect, rule of thumb for determining the "right" winner. When you
>> present a case in which IRV did not elect the right winner, maybe I'll
>> agree or maybe I'll dispute your criteria, but at least then we'd be
>> off the blackboard and into the world of real elections.
>
>