[EM] Polls: Australians want to abandon IRV (instant runoff voting); French want score voting

[Warren Smith]

A telephone poll was conducted in Australia of 1202 random people.
professionally done, attempting to get random sample with corrections
for sample
biases with respect to gender, income, education.

QUESTION:
  "Currently, elections for the Federal House of Representatives, or
lower house, use a preferential voting system. This is where voters
indicate an order of preferences for all candidates, and these
preferences are taken into account when deciding which candidate wins.
[PAUSE]. An alternative system would be 'first past the post', where
voters only vote for one candidate and the candidate with the most
votes wins. Would you personally prefer...?
   [RANDOMISE A-B]
A: preferential system
B: first past the post system"
RESULTS:
A=37%
B=57%
don't know/neither=5%.

I remind you that this is in Australia, the world's most-experienced
instant runoff country, after over 80 years of use of exactly the
system the question described in (A).   To read the official poll report, see
   http://rangevoting.org/AustraliaNewsPollVoteStudy.pdf

This is very damning.
I compute,  as a conservative estimate, 99.99995% confidence that
that Australia would get rid of IRV and
revert to plain plurality (FPTP) voting, if given this 2-way forced
choice right this instant.

Here is the computation in detail:
Std.Deviation of a Bernoulli process = squareroot(N*p*q)
where for us
N=1202 independent random people,
p=0.57 = prob(they prefer FPTP),
and q=1-p.
This is sigma=17.16 people which is 1.428% as a percentage.
The gap from 57% to 50% is thus 7/1.428 = 4.9 sigma.
Looking up 4.9 sigma in http://www.rangevoting.org/NormTble.html
I compute the confidence this 57%-for-FPTP figure
is really above 50% at
             99.999952%.
This estimate is conservative since we do not actually need to be
above 50%, we only need to be above the midway point (47) between the
57% (for FPTP) and 37% (for IRV) counts from the poll.

To learn about the French poll studies, see
     http://rangevoting.org/French2007studies.html

The most interesting conclusion for the present purposes (of assessing
"popularity" of different voting systems) is that they found that
French voters want to have range voting, also called score voting,
more than both the present plurality+top2runoff system and also more
than approval voting.  Unfortunately these particular poll
questions were only answered by about 40% of the 2836 polled (the rest
chose not to answer those questions) so there may have been
self-selection bias.  However, among the approximately 1100 who did
choose to answer question 12,
75.1% said approval voting could be used for official presidential
legislative or other elections, and 87.9% said that for score(0,1,2)
voting.   This yields a very
high confidence, at least 7sigma for at least 99.999999999% confidence,
that self-selecting-answering French voters prefer score voting versus
approval voting.

   This is from
Antoinette Baujard & Herrade Igersheim: Framed field experiments on
approval voting, lessons from the 2002 and 2007 French presidential
elections, ch.15 (pp.357-395) in Handbook on Approval Voting (ed.
J.Laslier & M.Remzi Sanver) Springer 2010, especially pages 377 and
378.

-- 
Warren D. Smith
http://RangeVoting.org  <-- add your endorsement (by clicking
"endorse" as 1st step)
and
math.temple.edu/~wds/homepage/works.html