[EM] IRV vs Plurality (Dave Ketchum)

[Abd ul-Rahman Lomax]

At 02:31 PM 1/16/2010, robert bristow-johnson wrote:
>and FairVote.org will point to experts that strongly advocate IRV.
>big fat hairy deel.

They will. Anecdotal. Look, a lot of experts follow the EM list. Have 
been for a long time. Very few who aren't politically committed in 
some way, such as Terry Bouricius, who is actually more of a 
politician than an expert on voting systems, will defend IRV here. I 
can only think of Chris Benham, who is from Australia, and we all 
know what that means. He's upside-down.

(Seriously, Chris is quite knowledgeable, but he's pretty isolated. 
IRV has been considered unacceptable by experts since the 19th 
century, I found criticism from political scientists from that 
century. It was not adopted in Australia because it was an ideal 
system, it was adopted because it saved the day for a party in power, 
eliminating the spoiler effect, defanging minor parties and thus 
eventually killing them.)

>whether it's here or on the Burlington blog or longer ago at the
>Fairvote site (that i have since gotten tired of), i have never
>appealed to authority in evaluating or advocating any method.

It's just a fact, and it's relevant, whether you appeal to it or not. 
FairVote has really poisoned the air, citing Tideman, for example, 
when criticising other methods but never mentioning that Tideman 
considers IRV unacceptable.


>>I'm thinking over the opposition material. It might look rabid to
>>someone who isn't aware of the problems,
>
>but i think i *am* aware of the salient problems.

You are only aware of some of the problems, not enough to realize 
that IRV may actually be worse than plurality in some situations. 
Which happen to be most of the implementations, i.e., nonpartisan elections.

>   but despite that,
>i support the goals that we had in adopting IRV.  i still don't
>support "correcting" IRV by reverting back to FPTP, given that is the
>choice presented (the reverted rules would include a delayed-runoff
>for less than 40%).

The only problem with the 40% is that it's the wrong margin to be 
looking for. Or it's inadequate. 40%/39% is very different, runoff 
required, than 40%/30%, which is probably an unrecoverable margin. 
Depends. In particular, it depends on data which isn't on the primary 
ballot. Hence, make the primary ballot a preferential ballot, but 
simply use a better method to analyze it.

Or, at least, allow additional approvals in the primary. Count All 
the Votes. Look, Robert, if you can't get behind that slogan, you 
will continue to irritate both the election integrity experts and the 
voting system experts....

>   and "voting security" concerns have been
>persuasive.  even with IRV, with a reasonably small number of
>credible candidates (and assuming the worse case, that "write-in" is
>always the same person, without yet checking), there are a finite
>number of ranking permutations, and there can be a ballot for each.
>continued below...

I'm going to cut to the chase, here. Robert, you have failed to 
understand what happens in the first counting. All votes in the first 
rank must be counted and reported, period. Even write-in votes must 
be counted, but they can generally be reported as a sum, and only if 
the sum is large enough that it is all for one candidate, would the 
instruction have to go back to the precinct to break down and 
separately report the category. It goes back to all precincts 
reporting any write-in votes! Normally, that would be all of them.

You cannot tell which votes should be reported, in advance, based 
solely on local precinct data. It's quite possible that the winner 
has no votes in the local precinct at all, is just unpopular there. 
Are you saying that dark horses should be ignored, that write-in 
candidates should be ignored?

So, consider Burlington. Three major candidates. How many minor on 
the ballot? Three? That's six, plus write-in. You must report all 
combinations, but you may collapse where there are empty ranks, 
because, with the IRV counting methods, A>(blank)>B is equivalent to 
A>B is equivalent to (blank)>A>B.

"Credible candidate," quite simply, must be ignored by the method. 
Data for any combination of 7 candidates including Write-in, which is 
lumped tentatively, must be tabulated into all of the relevant 
patterns (after collapse of equivalent ones as described). So with 
RCV, three-rank, you would have:

three candidate combinations:
7*6*5 = 210.

two candidate combinations:
7*6 = 42.

bullet votes or equivalent:
7

Total 258 piles. Now, go to San Francisco. 23 candidates on the 
ballot, plus write-ins. I'm not even going to do the math. Simpler to 
just transmit the raw ballot images, with computers. Or the counting 
is done at each precinct, centrally directed, and it is far more 
complex than precinct summable methods. Approval, very simple. 
Bucklin all ranks can be counted and reported as sums. Range the 
same. IRV. Arrggh. No. Real life elections in the U.S.? Major delays. 
When an error is made, it can require going back and starting over!

All this for a method that produces, for all practical purposes, 
exactly the same results as plurality in nonpartisan elections? You 
have to be kidding. FairVote sold a pig in a poke. With the help of 
people like you. In the beginning, it was quite understandable, and 
the data to understand the uselessness of IRV in nonpartisan 
elections didn't exist. I believe I discovered that in 2008, one 
could look at Talk for Wikipedia articles related to instant runoff 
voting. I never saw it asserted before. I didn't expect it. Did 
anyone? Perhaps someone can find a prior reference.

Now, you mentioned in the remainder, what I deleted, late ballots. 
IRV provides many opportunities for these late ballots to shift a 
result. Basically, if you are going to use IRV, counting before all 
the ballots are in is setting up a possibility or even probability of 
extra work, which means extra expense. Actual IRV expense figures are 
showing up and it isn't a pretty picture. IRV was oversold that way, as well.

With summable methods, late ballots can simply be counted and 
reported and the results can be summed. It is not the only argument 
against IRV, by a long shot, but it's important.