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

[Bob Richard]

Did the polling organization ask any questions about keeping AV but 
dropping the requirement that the voter rank all candidates?

--Bob Richard


On 11/6/2010 10:57 AM, Warren Smith wrote:
> 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 inhttp://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.
>

-- 
Bob Richard
PO Box 235
Kentfield, CA 94914-0235
415-256-9393


-- 
Bob Richard
Executive Vice President
Californians for Electoral Reform
PO Box 235
Kentfield, CA 94914-0235
415-256-9393
http://www.cfer.org

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