[EM] Utah Republican Party Scraps IRV Voting Method

[Kathy Dopp]

On Thu, Jan 7, 2010 at 10:08 PM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax
<abd at lomaxdesign.com> wrote:
Abd ul, Just a few comments and a correction re. Burlington.

>>
> (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.

Most people who oppose IRV/STV today support proportional
reprentation, but IRV has not achieved that in most places it has been
tried and there are other methods, such as the party list system,
cumulative voting, etc. that achieve it without being nonmonotonic and
without the spoiler effect and without the complex
transparency-eviscerating central counting that IRV/STV produce.

IRV/STV do not count all voters' 2nd choices, even when voters' first
choice candidate loses, and so is a fundamentally unfair method that
tends to elect extreme right or left candidates and eliminate the
centrist majority-favorite candidates, just like it did in Burlington,
VT mayoral contest.


> 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.

Correction - In Burlington the Democrat was the centrist
majority-favorite (Condorcet) candidate and the Republican acted as a
spoiler, causing the Leftist candidate to win.  Republicans have not
won any mayoral election in Burlington for over a decade and was the
spoiler.  Almost all the folks who voted their true preference for the
Republican, caused their last choice (the most liberal candidate) to
win.

For a simple short understandable film explaining the vote counts in
Burlington that was just finished today, see this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPCS-zWuel8

> 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!)


IRV does poorly wherever there are three strong candidates and the
spoiler problem pops up.

Kathy

>
>



-- 

Kathy Dopp

Town of Colonie, NY 12304
phone 518-952-4030
cell 518-505-0220

http://utahcountvotes.org
http://electionmathematics.org
http://kathydopp.com/serendipity/

Realities Mar Instant Runoff Voting
http://electionmathematics.org/ucvAnalysis/US/RCV-IRV/InstantRunoffVotingFlaws.pdf

Voters Have Reason to Worry
http://utahcountvotes.org/UT/UtahCountVotes-ThadHall-Response.pdf

Checking election outcome accuracy --- Post-election audit sampling
http://electionmathematics.org/em-audits/US/PEAuditSamplingMethods.pdf