[EM] The deception at "irvfactcheck" Part 2.

[Abd ul-Rahman Lomax]

At 09:29 PM 6/9/2010, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
http://irvfactcheck.blogspot.com/p/there-is-lot-of-miss-information.html


>
><http://irvfactcheck.blogspot.com/p/there-is-lot-of-miss-information.html>Myths 
>and Facts about IRV
>

Continuing from Part 1, where the response to 1.2, first part of the 
first paragraph, was begun. That paragraph is repeated here for context.

>1.2 Is instant runoff voting prone to strategic voting?
>
>No. There is another side to voting that makes IRV simpler than most 
>other voitng methods, such as Plurality, Approval, Range, etc. While 
>every voting method is potentially subject to manipulation by 
>strategic voting in some situations, IRV is uniquely resistant to 
>such strategy (see 
><http://econ.ucsb.edu/graduate/PhDResearch/electionstrategy10b.pdf>James 
>Green-Armytage analysis for more) Under most voting methods, a 
>potentially beneficial voting strategy can be recognized by at least 
>some voters (who may gain an advantage over other voters). Thus, 
>voters may face a dilemma deciding whether to engage in strategic voting.

I provided a link to what is probably what they were referring to: 
http://fc.antioch.edu/~james_green-armytage/vm/svn.pdf

The comment that "strategic voting" causes some voters to "gain an 
advantage over other voters" is misleading. Strategic voting, indeed, 
may be how the voters can bypass the poor results of a method, 
resulting in an advantage to *most* voters. In the center squeeze 
situation, a result with IRV that is less preferred to another 
outcome by two thirds of the voters, can be fixed by some of the 
voters, who support the candidate who can be predicted to lose, but 
come in second place, voting for their second preference in first 
rank. It needn't take many. In a perfect center-squeeze situation, 
the candidate in the "center" is the first choice of (almost) a third 
of the voters, and is the second choice of all the other voters, 
sincerely. In Burlington, it wasn't that balanced, but the Democrat, 
the candidate in the center in Burlington, was preferred as shown on 
the actual ballot, to all other candidates, by a majority. It is this 
kind of outcome that caused election experts to long ago dismiss IRV 
as impossibly flawed, and it only survived in Australia and a few 
places for local political reasons. It supports a two-party system, 
making it safe from the challenges of upstart parties.

>For example, in a simple plurality election there is the 
>"lesser-of-two-evils" problem where voters often realize that voting 
>for their favorite candidate, who is likely to get very few votes, 
>may deny their second choice candidate enough votes to beat out that 
>voter's least preferred choice. Such a voter might find the 
>plurality election decision to be extremely difficult.

Not usually. It's only difficult under certain fairly unusual 
situations, and, except for those situations, the difficulty isn't 
about the election itself, it's about the importance of expressing a 
sincere preference. If you are a Green voter in in Florida in 1980, 
you probably knew what you were doing, you knew that if you voted for 
Nader, you were risking the election of Bush, and, my guess, you 
*accepted that* because you believed Nader when he said it didn't 
make a difference. This is a situation where, indeed, IRV makes 
voting somewhat easier. But there is quite a cost, in the long run, 
not only in tabulation expense, but also in overall satisfaction with 
outcomes. The dirty little secret: most all voting systems, in most 
elections, will come up with the same result. It really is the 
exceptions that are what we need to be concerned with. Plurality will 
usually choose the best winner, it is not totally stupid that this 
method is in such wide use. Top Two runoff fixes, like IRV, the 
spoiler effect, which only arises when there is a minor candidate who 
bleeds off more votes from one side of the major party divide than 
the other. Did that happen in 2000? I'm not sure at all. Maybe. Maybe 
not. There were other minor candidates besides Nader, some on the 
right, and there were other major problems with that election. And 
Nader was campaigning on a Tweedle-dum and Tweedle-dee platform. 
Would Nader voters in 2000 have added votes for Gore if the method 
had been IRV? It's not completely clear. But, I'd agree, probably. 
But so too would supporters of candidates on the other side have 
added votes for Bush.  We'll return to this election below.

>  Under IRV, this voter's ballot will automatically transfer to that 
> second choice candidate if the first choice is at the bottom, and 
> the second choice candidate can win with that transferred vote.

Sure. But the first choice might have won with votes from other 
voters. There are two ways to approach this, both superior to the IRV 
system, and both known from long before IRV. Condorcet methods will 
look at all the pairwise elections, looking at how all voters have 
ranked the candidates. The Democrat would have won in Burlington. And 
Bucklin, which is a kind of "instant runoff Approval voting," and 
which was actually also invented by Condorcet, all before 1800, if 
I've got that right, looks for the candidate who is most "approved." 
Voting choices in Bucklin are quite easy.

>  This makes the voter's task much simpler with IRV.

Sure. At the cost to the voter of the possibility of the first choice 
actually winning! The way I state it is that, to protect this voter 
from having to decide who else to approve, as in a Bucklin system (or 
straight Approval voting, where the choice is indeed more difficult 
-- but the voting method is terminally simple and cheap), the voting 
system takes the first choice out back and eliminates him or her. And 
none of this addresses the basic democratic principle of not making 
any decision without the support of a majority of those voting. With 
repeated ballot, the real Robert's Rules method, you vote for one, 
who is your favorite from among all those whom you consider realistic 
possibilities. Period. And if nobody gets a majority, the election is 
repeated. Without any actual eliminations. These elections are 
typically handled by voters using a blank piece of paper and writing 
the name of the choice on it. Voters can write any name they please. 
The voting system does not restrict or control them. That should be 
understood as the background, it is a highly sophisticated voting 
system that, among other things, is Condorcet compliant if a majority 
is required to win. Neither center squeeze nor the spoiler effect 
bother it. Because it takes as many "rounds" as needed, it is highly 
intellligent, amounting to recursive processing as voters make 
compromises, and it's easy to improve the efficiency of it. Approval 
voting, for example, works perfectly with repeated ballot, and 
Bucklin can collapse many rounds of repeated Approval voting into a 
single ballot.

Bucklin used in a runoff system would be *extremely* easy to vote. 
Just vote sincerely! If you just want to vote for your favorite, 
that's fine, but you might have to face the inconvenience of a runoff 
election. Your choice. If you would prefer the election of a second 
choice to a runoff, then vote for another, at a lower rank. Some 
voters will vote for many, and with Bucklin and other Approval 
methods, you can actually vote "anybody but...."

>  The default strategy is always to honestly rank candidates in the 
> order of choice.

This is a tautology. It says nothing more than "the default strategy 
is to honestly rank...." Definitely, that is not always the best 
strategy, and can be quite poor, in one particular situation, and 
that is where there are three major parties in partisan elections. 
Burlington, Vermont. IRV was a Bad Idea for Burlington in the first 
place, and voting systems theorists could certainly have told them, 
and some tried.

>  Of course, voters may still face strategic dilemmas with IRV in 
> some rare situations, but these are far less common than under most 
> other voting methods.

The "rare situations" are indeed rare, overall. But the fact is that 
the need for IRV at all is rare. What is the "need" for IRV? FairVote 
hit upon this sales pitch: find majorities without expensive runoff elections.

Does it work? It turns out that, with nonpartisan elections, which is 
the large majority of implementations and actual elections taking 
place with IRV, if there is no majority in the first round (which 
means that with Plurality, there would almost certainly have been a 
majority also, all it takes with both systems is for the voter to 
simply vote for their first preference, and the rest of the 
preferences don't matter), there never is a majority of votes found. 
FairVote has covered this up; originally by not mentioning it at all, 
and the San Francisco voter information pamplhet contained a clear 
error: it stated that the winner would still be "required to gain a 
majority of the votes." But the actual language of the code revision 
struck the requirement for a "majority of the votes." It should have 
been obvious, but ... who reads the actual language? Many don't. In 
North Carolina, where I lived for a time, I tried to get the actual 
language of state propositions. Even at the library, they thought I 
was crazy.... In California, they do send the actual language out, 
but who reads and understands all the implications.

Again and again, in FairVote propaganda, the fact that an "IRV 
majority" is usually not a real majority, when there are runoff 
rounds, has been covered up. To be fair, they may not have realized 
this fact. In Australia, in most places, voters are required to rank 
all the candidates, or the ballot is "informal." So, naturally, every 
election is won with what they call an "absolute majority." Even that 
language would be misleading here, because in many places here (and 
in Roberts's Rules) all cast ballots with marks are considered part 
of the basis for "majority," even if spoiled in some way. But in 
places where full ranking is optional, some places in Australia are 
like that, majority failure when an election goes into "runoff 
rounds" becomes common.

More recently, in response to repeated criticism, FairVote has 
started to claim that exhausted ballots in IRV elections, ballots not 
containing a vote for one of the top two, are "like" top two runoff. 
It is an entirely new, made-up argument. Runoff elections are 
separate elections, with a different set of voters. People decide 
whether or not to vote in a real runoff election, knowing who the 
candidates are, and having had additional opportunity to learn about 
them and consider them. If they don't care, they don't vote, but if 
they care, they do. When runoff elections represent a major 
difference for many voters, they can and do turn out in even higher 
numbers than the primary. FairVote claims that IRV is "fairer" 
because runoff elections have lower turnout. That's highly deceptive. 
When I pointed out that runoff elections sometimes have higher 
turnout, or as high turnout, as primaries, they laughed and 
derisively claimed I was crazy. But it depends on conditions. In 
Cary, NC, for example, the primary was a special election, held in 
October before the general election in November. If nobody got a 
majority of the votes in the primary, then the runoff was held with 
the general election. Turnout in primaries and runoffs, then, were 
about equal, which I found somewhat surprising. It means that more 
people than might be expected were turning out to vote in the 
primary! Obviously, they cared enough to vote!

The load of blarney that FairVote has been selling places like that 
is that they can have their majorities without "expwnsive and 
inconvenient runoff elections." It is essentially a lie, by now, 
since they no longer have the excuse of ignorance.

>  For example, under Range and Approval voting, giving any support 
> to a second choice may cause that voter's first choice to lose 
> (violation of the Later-No-Harm Criterion), causing some voters to 
> strategically truncate their true preferences. IRV complies with 
> the Later-No-Harm Criterion, and is thus immune to such strategic calculation.

And this is one of their biggest deceptions . Let's start with 
Later-No-Harm. This is a criterion invented by Woodall, probably 
desperate to find something supposedly good about the Alternate Vote. 
When Woodall's paper was being reviewed, a reviewer wrote that this 
criterion made him ill.

Why? Well, any voting system that satisfies Later-No-Harm is a system 
that prohibits the voter from revealing possible compromises until 
the voter's first choice is utterly eliminated. Yes. If you tell your 
neighbors that you might accept Red as the color to paint that fence, 
instead of your favorite Blue, you might end up with Red! So is the 
solution to never reveal a possible compromise until you are sure 
that there is no possibility of getting your favorite? This is what a 
LNH compatible system *requires.* Surely this is a tad ... selfish? 
Voting is a method by which people find broadly acceptable 
compromises. LNH compliance turns it into a method where people vote 
for and hold out for their first preference, not revealing their cards.

And the damage from that cuts both ways. Suppose that a group of 
neighbors have all voted for their first preference for that fence 
color. No preference has a majority. So what do they do? Well, one 
way this would be handled directly is to count and report all the 
first choice votes, then ask people to vote again! That, in fact, is 
standard parliamentary procedure! People will start to make 
compromises. If the voting method is approval (which I've seen 
actually used by organizations for this, where each choice is voted 
on separately, and people would vote for choices they found 
acceptable), it's pretty easy, with repeated ballot, to gradually 
lower your expectations, what's called the "approval cutoff." People 
can do this slowly or quickly, or even at the beginning, it's up to them.

What Later-No-Harm compliance means is that you are protected from 
"harming" your first choice by your first choice being eliminated by 
the method, your vote is otherwise concealed when other methods look 
at all the votes to determine the best compromise (according to the 
method). So instead of *you" supposedly harming your first choice, 
the method does, preventing your first choice from gathering second 
choice votes from other voters until they, too, are eliminated, which 
may be too late to keep your first choice from being eliminated. 
Those votes from others aren't counted at all, in the formal IRV 
method, they are completely negelcted, because the candidate has been 
"eliminated."

It's not true that your addition of another approval, in Approval 
voting, "harms" your favorite, though. What has actually happened is 
that you have, by adding the additional approval, equally "helped" 
both candidates. You only do this if you are willing to thereby elect 
that second choice. Your vote did not "harm" your favorite, because 
if you ballot is struck entirely, it would not cause your favorite to 
win, that is, not with approval.

With IRV, your vote for a candidate can cause the candidate to lose. 
How's that for "harm"?

Range Voting is a system where voters reveal their "relative 
satisfaction" with the possible election of each candidate. Perhaps 
they rate candidates on a scale of, say, 0-10. Quite obviously, if 
you give any ratings other than 10 for your favorite and 0 for 
everyone else, you might possibly help the candidate, you give a vote 
to, to win. Range is like holding an Approval election where you can 
cast fractional votes. Will you only bullet vote if you have the 
choice? ("Bullet voting" means to vote only for one candidate, 
regardless of the method. Pluralty requires bullet voting.)

FairVote asserts that voters will "strategically truncate" because of 
this possibility of helping some other candidate besides your 
favorite. Some will. Which ones? *The ones who have a strong 
preference for their favorite." But wait, if the vote was an accurate 
expression of preference, it was sincere, so it wasn't "strategic." 
This kind of contradictory thinking is underneath much of FairVote's 
facade. People will, in fact, not vote insincerely, but they will 
also make decisions based on what they perceive as realistic.

To go down to the nuts and bolts of social choice theory, there is 
generally no way to make people's "sincere preferences" 
commensurable, i.e., to assign some absolute number to their 
satisfaction, and then to add these numbers up to find an overall 
social satisfaction that actually maximizes this. Is my "half 
satisfaction" equal to your "half satisfaction"? But if we assign 
everyone one vote, and allow people to express their "degree of 
satisfaction," over some set of choices, it is fair to treat these 
expressions as commensurable. After all, they are voluntary.

But what we see from critics of Range is the idea that people will 
"exaggerate" their preferences in order to gain some advantage. From 
one perspective they certainly will, but this doesn't damage the 
outcome *seriously*. More accurately, this could only cause a poor 
outcome if most people vote very stupidly, which is true for any voting system.

The classic comment is that people will supposedly bullet vote in 
approval because of LNH failure of the method. This neglects the 
actual situations which voters face. The most common situation is one 
where there are only two frontrunners, plus minor candidates who 
don't really have any hope. This, in fact, is the only situation 
where IRV actually works with any reliability, fixing the "spoiler 
effect" -- to the vast detriment of minor parties, which can almost 
never win with IRV. They don't win in Australia, and they have minor parties!

In that situation, if you favor a frontrunner, you vote just for the 
frontrunner, and nobody else, unless maybe you like a minor canidate 
*almost* as much and don't care if your vote helps the other win, on 
the off chance you were wrong about "frontrunners."  That, by 
definition, is at least two-thirds of the voters or so, or quite a 
bit more if there is only one minor candidate. Then there are the 
supporters of the minor candidates. These are the ones who may add an 
approval for a frontrunner. These voters are not particularly worried 
that their additional vote will "harm" their favorite. So we can 
expect, with Approval, that most voters, under two-party conditions, 
will "bullet vote." It is harmless. It isn't "strategic voting," it 
is honest preference.

Now, there is another method that is in the Approval or Range class, 
and that's Bucklin. With Bucklin, you submit a ranked ballot. The 
votes are counted in rounds like IRV, except that each ranks' votes 
are added, in turn, to the totals for the candidates. You can vote 
for just one if you like. Or you can add approvals at lower ranks, 
and you can skip ranks (which is why it's really like Range voting, 
especially if one can vote for as many candidates as one chooses at 
any rank, something which -- just allowing multiple candidate votes 
in third rank origially -- allowed Bucklin to find true majorities 
with *many* candidates and only three ranks on the ballot.)

The ranks are counted, in sequence, until a majority is found. (This 
means a majority of ballots contain a vote for the winner; there may 
be many more votes cast than ballots, but the majority sought is a 
"majority of voters," not, to use the language of Brown v. Smallwood 
in Minnesota, a "majority of marks." It's odd that the MN Supreme 
Court, tossing out the very popular Bucklin method, correctly got the 
standard, but then proceeded to complain that there were more marks 
than voters, as if they had not just written what they wrote. That 
court had an agenda.

The advantage of Bucklin over Approval is that the voter does not 
have to equate two candidates where the voter actually has a 
significant preference. The Nader voter can vote Nader>Gore or even 
Nader>.>Gore (skipping the second rank) if they really want to 
emphasize the gap, without harm. Nader still has two rounds, then, in 
the last case, in which to win before the voter's ballot causes equal 
consideration with Gore.

Absolutely, some voters will refrain from adding additional 
approvals. These are the ones who strongly prefer their favorite! 
Those are, in fact, sincere Range votes, just counted in a different way.

What Bucklin does is to *defer* counting your lower preference votes 
until it's clear that your favorite is not going to win by a majority 
(before your lower ranked votes are counted). With Bucklin, the 
operative phrase is "not going to win by a majority," whereas with 
IRV it's "has been eliminated." Tell me, which would you prefer as a 
candidate? To risk the possibility of losing to another because of 
additional approvals, but at the same time to have the opportunity to 
gain those approvals yourself, and not be eliminated, or to be 
eliminated before additional votes for you can be considered?

IRV favors candidates with the most first preference votes. If we 
have a situation with three balanced candidates, as to first 
preference, it's a toss-up which is eliminated. If the eliminated 
candidate was *everyone's first or second choice," preferred by a 
two-thirds majority to each of the other two candidates, too bad. 
This is the consequence of elimination and of complying with Later No 
Harm. No wonder that reviewer felt ill.