[EM] IRV ballot pile count (proof of closed form)

[Abd ul-Rahman Lomax]

At 12:20 PM 2/8/2010, Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote:
>Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
>
>>Given that much better methods exist, have been tried and worked, 
>>and are much easier to canvass, WTF?
>
>If I were to guess: in part a desire to produce a stepping stone to 
>STV, and in part organizational inertia. FairVote bet on IRV and now 
>will "stay the course".

That's right. One of my first observations on this, when I became 
aware of the election methods list and the Approval voting list, and 
discovered the Center for Voting and Democracy, which had started as 
the Center for Proportional Representation, and which became 
FairVote, was that people trying to reform democracy didn't trust 
democracy, they would always gravitate toward nondemocratic 
institutions which are easily co-opted to become self-preserving and 
inflexible. Typical co-opt is by staff!

Yes, it's quite likely that they will stay this course right into the 
ground. Hitching proportional representation (a very good idea) on to 
single-winner STV (a quite bad idea) may have seemed like a good idea 
at the time, perhaps because of the "brilliant" invention of the 
name, "instant runoff voting," which itself suggested a strategy to 
spread the idea by attacking a vulnerable institution, but it was, in 
fact, not sustainable.

Some of the reasons why it is not sustainable were not necessarily 
known then. Who would have expected that IRV would closely imitate 
Plurality in nonpartisan elections? Lots of people seem to be 
surprised that IRV doesn't produce real majorities, but that one was known.

And the prior history of IRV in the U.S. should have been a clue. 
What was it replaced with? Often -- not always -- with top two 
runoff. Because of the desire for majorities....

>To address the former: the grail here would be a polytime monotone 
>summable multiwinner method that reduces to a good Condorcet variant 
>(or Bucklin/Range/etc) in the single-winner case. A multiwinner 
>method can be summable in two ways: summable with the number of 
>seats held fixed, or summable no matter what.

Well, Asset bypasses the whole shebang, by making what we think of as 
"elections" irrelevant. At least in theory. Everyone wins in an Asset 
election, or, if not, then there is someone very specific for the 
voter to blame: the candidate the voter voted for in first 
preference. (Asset may be STV with the Asset tweak for exhausted 
ballots, or it could just be vote-for-one. I, personally, would see 
no need or desirability to rank more candidates, provided my choice 
has a backup (a proxy should be allowed in case of incapacity), but 
some people seem to think otherwise. I'd rather not yank my vote away 
from my most-trusted candidate to put it in the hands of this 
less-trusted candidate, but then to return it to the most trusted if 
the less-trusted drops out somehow. .... rules in STV/Asset have not 
much been delineated.)

>What's important is that we don't know of such a method; but also 
>that the stepping stone strategy itself might be dangerous - if the 
>base method is bad, then it may fail to dislodge those whose 
>interest is in less democracy, and so the objective of moving to 
>multiwinner never gains any additional strength by the so-called 
>stepping stone.

My own decision about all this is that it's best to begin with NGOs, 
voluntary organizations that demonstrate how advanced methods work. 
The Election Science Foundation held an Asset election for its 
steering committee. It was quite interesting....