[EM] Utah Republican Party Scraps IRV Voting Method

[Abd ul-Rahman Lomax]

At 07:55 PM 1/7/2010, Kathy Dopp wrote:
>I've answered that question on this list before and Abd ul also answered it.
>
>There are *many* good alternative voting methods that do solve the
>spoiler problem, are monotonic, and elect majority winners and are
>precinct summable. I don't know of any alternative voting methods as
>bad as IRV/STV (although there must be one somewhere), so I would
>probably support almost any alternative method that lacks the
>multitude of flaws that IRV/STV have.  Abd ul has convinced me that
>regular top-two runoffs are good too.

Top two runoff, of course, shares the center-squeeze problem that IRV 
suffers from, but, interestingly enough, that problem may not be as 
serious if write-in votes are allowed in the runoff, as they are by 
default in California and perhaps some other jurisdictions.

Not widely known is the fact that the spoiler effect is connected 
with partisan elections. IRV in nonpartisan elections seems to 
reproduce Plurality closely. With top-two runoff in nonpartisan 
elections, the runner up in the primary wins roughly one-third of the 
time, per a study by FairVote. However, with IRV, these "comeback 
elections" hardly ever occur.

IRV does fix what I call the "first-order spoiler effect," where a 
minor party candidate draws away votes from a major party candidate, 
causing the less popular of the major party candidates to win. 
However, as a recent Burlington election shows, IRV can award victory 
to a candidate who would, by the votes expressed on the ballots, lose 
in a direct contest to an eliminated candidate, because of the 
peculiar significance that IRV gives to the first choice. It is 
entirely possible that without the promise of IRV as a fair system, 
the same configuration of candidates would not exist, and the more 
popular candidate would have won.

There is another system that uses the same ranked choice ballot as 
IRV, but that is probably much better at handling the center squeeze 
situation, and that was at one time widely used in the U.S. (Far more 
widely than the recent IRV fad.) That's Bucklin voting. It could be 
called "Instant Runoff Approval." It's much easier to canvass than 
IRV, the totals for each rank are simply collected from each 
precinct, and the handling, if there is no majority in first 
preference, is simple addition; the difference from Approval is that 
the approvals are ranked, so additional approvals are only considered 
if nobody gets a majority in first preferences.

Why was Bucklin rejected? Partly, it may have been for similar 
reasons to the prior and present rejections of IRV. IRV has been sold 
on a false promise: to find majorities without runoff elections. 
Bucklin was sold in the same way, and it fails to find majorities 
reliably for the same reason as IRV fails: people don't rank enough 
candidates. This has been a known problem with STV for more than a 
century, and whenever a candidate doesn't get a majority in first 
preferences, it is *normal* for IRV to never find a majority even 
after vote transfers, the IRV "majority" is a faux majority, a new 
invention, a "last round majority," based on an entirely new concept 
of a majority that isn't the traditional one: a majority of ballots 
case. Bucklin is based on "majority of ballots cast," as are standard 
repeated ballot systems. All ballots are considered.

Bucklin, because of the lack of "candidate eliminations," which 
really means ballot eliminations in actual practice, is more 
efficient at finding majorities, however, because it will find votes 
concealed under votes for a leading candidate. We tend to think of 
partisan elections, for some reason, where a voter for one of the top 
two candidates would one rarely also approve one of the other top two.

But in nonpartisan elections, which are the vast majority of recent 
IRV applications, a supporter of one of the leading candidates might 
well express support for another leading candidate. Not highly 
partisan supporters, but general voters. IRV conceals these votes, 
Bucklin finds and counts them.

The error with prior implementations was in the false promise: when 
it was realized that Bucklin wasn't actually finding majorities in 
some of the places where it was used, because of enough voters doing 
the traditional vote-for-one thing, Bucklin was dumped entirely. It, 
as also happened with IRV in some prior situations, it was replaced 
with top-two runoff, which usually finds a majority. Instead, Bucklin 
should have been used as a method of avoiding unnecessary runoffs.

I like to think of this as the voter's strategy. With Bucklin, I will 
unconditionally vote in first preference for my favorite. There is 
never a reason not to. (With IRV, there can be circumstances where 
voting for your favorite will turn out to be foolish, it can cause a 
much worse outcome, it can even cause your favorite to lose. That's 
what non-monotonicity means.)

Then, as to adding other, lower-ranked approvals, the question I'd 
ask myself: Would I prefer this candidate to the delay and expense of 
a real runoff election? If so, my preference is not very strong, and 
I'll add another approval or more approvals. (Another reason for an 
additional approval might be to try to get a second better candidate 
into a runoff, thus taking less risk of a poor outcome.)

My guess is that using Bucklin would eliminate more than half of 
runoff elections, and with some good runoff algorithms, based on real 
election history, it could eliminate even more. (For example, suppose 
that Candidate A gets 49.9%, and no other candidate gets more than 
25%. It is so unlikely that a runoff would elect other than A that 
it's not worth the effort. Sometimes a cutoff is set at 40%. But that 
is too simplistic, what matters more than the absolute percentage is 
the lead that must be overcome to shift the result. 40% A, 39% B, 21% 
C is not at all decisive between A and B.)

Using Bucklin for party convention elections, where holding a runoff 
isn't impossible, would be more efficient. Bucklin with top-two 
runoff if a majority is not found (or some similar criterion in 
intention), and with write-in votes allowed, doesn't suffer from the 
spoiler effect, and would quite likely settle on a majority winner 
very quickly. If the convention-goers want to be sticklers and only 
vote for their favorites, they only punish themselves....

Range voting (Score voting) is even better, but should include 
approval indication, or it can, like other single-ballot methods, 
come up with a candidate who won't be supported by a majority. Range 
voting with runoffs when needed is actually an ideal voting system. 
Bucklin, however, has a long history, was very popular when used, and 
is a bit simpler to vote, probably.

It was called American Preferential Voting when used, the political 
scientists of the time (early 20th century) were very aware of single 
transferable vote, and considered it inferior when used for 
single-winner elections.

(Single Transferable Vote is considerably better when used for 
multiwinner elections, though there are better methods still, for 
sure. True multiwinner STV has been rejected after use in the U.S., 
but not for good reasons. It was rejected because it resulted in fair 
representation for minority groups. I urge election activists opposed 
to IRV not to jump for the temptation of praising those rejections as 
wise. They weren't. They were racist and prejudiced in other ways 
against the fair choices of the voters. In Ann Arbor, MI, IRV was 
rejected on arguments similar, apparently, to some of those being 
advanced in Burlington now: it deprived the Republican of his 
"rightful" victory over the Democrat, which had been previously 
happening because of vote splitting in a college town between the 
Democratic candidates and the Human Rights Party candidates. However, 
the situation in Burlington is pretty different: the problem there is 
that there are three major parties there, and IRV does very poorly in 
that context. It worked in Ann Arbor, and, for that reason, a 
referendum on it was scheduled for when the students were on break, 
mostly out of town!)