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

[Ralph Suter]

To Greg Dennis:

I appreciate your efforts to express your arguments clearly and defend 
them with good data. Nevertheless, I find them mostly unpersuasive.

You say in your latest post that IRV resists strategic voting and 
Condorcet is susceptible to burial. But both of these beliefs have 
been discussed extensively on this list over the years and as far as I 
can recall, there has been no consensus about them. As for the latter, 
there is little evidence that Condorcet's susceptibility to burying is 
anything but theoretical. If used in actual public elections, it may 
turn out that burying wouldn't be a problem at all. At worst, burial 
efforts by supporters of some candidates might be slightly unevenly 
offset by those of the supporters of other candidates.

IRV, on the other hand, presents unquestionably serious strategy 
problems when a third party candidate gains enough support to strongly 
challenge two major party candidates and all three have close to the 
same amount of support (say between 25% to 40% each). In such cases, 
many people would begin worrying about whether strategic voting would 
be a good idea but would have trouble figuring out how best to vote 
strategically, given how erratically IRV functions in such situations. 
Voting for their second choices could even improve the chances of 
their favorites, while voting for their favorites could reduce their 
chances. Strategic voting could seem very desirable yet impossible to 
know how to do. So maybe IRV does resist strategic voting, but that 
may not be very comforting.

Data from previous elections won't settle the IRV versus Condorcet 
debate. There have not been enough of them in the U.S. More important, 
there haven't been any major federal or state elections (presidential, 
senatorial, or gubernatorial) and very few major local elections 
(mayoral or other) using IRV. These would be far and away the most 
important kinds of test cases - i.e., the kinds of elections that 
would matter the most and where voters would be most familiar with all 
the candidates and therefore would find it easiest to rank them.

I also must reject your contention that IRV is easier to explain. 
Condorcet, or what I prefer to call IRRV (Instant Round Robin Voting) 
is every bit as easy to explain as IRV. IRV and IRRV both use the same 
kinds of ranked ballots. The main difference (setting aside problems 
involved in permitting or disallowing equal ranking and unranked 
candidates) is that IRV uses the ranking data to simulate a series of 
runoff elections whereas IRRV uses the same data to simulate separate 
2-person contests between each candidate and every other candidate. 
There's no need to talk about matrices and other technicalities about 
data storage and calculation. Using the same kinds of simple examples, 
it's just as easy to explain how IRRV works as it is to explain IRV. 
And although the possibility of cycles makes explaining IRRV more 
complicated, other kinds of problems make explaining IRV similarly 
more complicated.

The concept of a candidate who beats all others in one to one contests 
may even be much more intuitively compelling to most people than the 
concept of a candidate who wins a series of runoffs. They might find 
IRRV especially compelling after it is explained how IRV increases the 
likelihood that a strong compromise candidate would be eliminated with 
the result that the winner could be a very divisive candidate who is 
strongly supported by a substantial minority but strongly opposed 
(even hated) by another substantial minority. Is that really the kind 
of outcome most people would prefer, knowing that the compromise 
candidate would have defeated both of the others in an IRRV election?

I realize that many IRV supporters are fond of dismissing compromise 
candidates as "bland" and with "little core support." But this is 
little more than rhetoric designed to support their debatable 
opinions. It's possible for a compromise candidate to be anything but 
bland. Ross Perot (vis-a-vis Bush Sr and Clinton in 1992) and Ralph 
Nader (vis-a-vis Bush Jr and Gore in 2000) both may have been very 
good examples. John Anderson (vis-a-vis Carter and Reagan in 1980) may 
have been as well. It seems likely to me that Anderson, Perot, and 
Nader all would have had much better chances in IRRV elections than in 
IRV elections and that all might have made better presidents than 
Reagan, Clinton, or Bush Jr.

You worry that compromise candidates may tend to be people who speak 
in generalities and refuse to say where they stand whereas IRV will 
help insure that we know where the winner will stand. But you cite no 
examples, which is surprising given how much importance you have 
attached to basing conclusions about IRV on lessons from past 
elections. Until you do cite some actual examples of dangerously bland 
and platitudinous candidates who, in Condorcet elections, would 
threaten more forthcoming ones, your worries are totally theoretical 
and far from compelling. None of the examples I gave, not Anderson nor 
Perot nor Nader, could have been accused of being bland or unwilling 
to explain where they stood regarding major issues and their major 
party opponents.

By the way, I happen to be fairly knowledgeable about the history of 
FairVote, the leading organizational advocate of IRV, having attended 
the organization's founding meeting in June 1992 when it was 
originally named Citizens for Proportional Representation (CPR). At 
the time, reforming single winner elections was barely on the 
organization's radar screen. I'm not sure it was even discussed at the 
founding meeting. However, a short time after the meeting, former 
presidential candidate John Anderson got an op-ed published in the NY 
Times arguing in favor of "majority preferential voting", the name he 
then used for what is now called instant runoff voting, and soon after 
that he joined CPR's board. (He wasn't at the founding meeting.) You 
can read Anderson's op-ed at:
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E0CE7D91F3FF937A15754C0A964958260

A short time later, the organization's name was changed to Center for 
Voting and Democracy (CVD). Anderson no doubt had something to do with 
getting CVD more focused on reforming single winner elections, but it 
was not until 1996 or so, four years after the founding meeting, that 
CVD began taking the single winner election issue very seriously, and 
it took another year or two for it to decide on Instant Runoff Voting 
as the name for its favored single winner method.

I'm much less troubled, however, by the slowness of CVD to focus 
seriously on single winner elections than by how it decided, with 
virtually no public or even inter-organizational debate, to go with 
IRV and to reject alternative voting methods, even though CVD at the 
time had some notable supporters of other methods on its advisory 
board. (That board included a number of highly respected voting 
methods experts and political scientists, including Steven Brams and 
Arend Lifphart, whereas the FairVote advisory board today has no such 
people.) I personally asked CVD's executive director Rob Richie to 
allow a debate at its 1997 national meeting between IRV supporters and 
supporters of alternative methods, but he declined to do so, and he 
has continued to refuse to sponsor or (to my knowledge) participate in 
any serious public debates.

Furthermore, although an election for board members was held at the 
1992 founding meeting, I later learned that the organization was 
incorporated not as a membership organization but as a very 
conventional board dominated nonprofit whose board members select 
their successors. In other words, CPR/CVD/FairVote has itself never 
been organized very democratically. It also has not operated very 
transparently. It has never posted either its bylaws or the minutes of 
any of its meetings on its website. We can only guess how its 
decisions about IRV and many other things, including its name changes, 
have been made.

Rather than participate in debates, Richie and other FairVote people 
have argued, as you do, that IRV is more politically feasible. In 
fact, they have argued this from the beginning, long before they began 
having any success getting IRV adopted. Since then, only a very small 
number of jurisdictions have adopted IRV. Furthermore, because of 
serious and widespread voting system problems, IRV has been often been 
implemented only with much difficulty and in ways that limit the 
number of candidates permitted in any given election contest.

Given that supporters of Condorcet and other voting methods have not 
yet been nearly as well organized or well-funded as IRV supporters, 
I'm skeptical that IRV has anywhere near the unstoppable political 
momentum you seem to believe it has. Condorcet and other methods have 
gained increasing popularity in recent years for use in online voting, 
especially among tech-savvy people. That popularity conceivably could 
soon result in a new organization that seriously challenges IRV's 
current momentum.

Finally, for me there are bigger questions right now than whether IRV 
is superior to IRRV. Although I lean strongly toward the latter, I 
doubt that either will be really feasible for major national and 
statewide elections until problems with how elections are conducted 
are much better resolved so that elections will be more secure and 
accurate and able to reliably handle voting methods as complex as IRV 
and IRRV. Given the current state of U.S. election systems and 
equipment, there is only one alternative to plurality that is now 
really feasible across the U.S., and that is approval voting, which is 
nearly as simple to implement as plurality voting.

Another of my concerns is that virtually all advocates of voting 
reform, including supporters of IRV, IRRV, approval, and range voting, 
have neglected the question of which methods are most appropriate for 
different voting situations. IRV advocates sometimes argue for using 
IRV in all kinds of situations, even in small groups to decide such 
things as  what kind of food the group should order. But for most 
small group purposes, approval voting would be much easier and quicker 
to use and would produce more satisfactory results. If more precision 
is needed, some form of range voting would still usually be easier and 
better than either IRV or IRRV.

It may also be that approval voting or range voting would be better 
for most but not all kinds of public single winner elections, 
especially ones for lower level offices and primary contests where 
most voters have difficulty acquiring enough information to do 
confident rankings. It may be best to reserve IRV or IRRV or range 
voting for a few of the highest level offices.

A new voting methods reform organization that seriously considers 
these issues and allows for and encourages discussion as well as 
research and experimentation about different methods and their 
relative advantages and disadvantages in different kinds of situations 
could conceivably transform the debate about voting methods. It could 
result in much more effective efforts to get better methods adopted, 
both for public elections and for all kinds of other purposes.

-Ralph Suter


greg at somervilleirv.org wrote:

[begin quote]

  > 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.

[end quote]