[EM] France 2007: real-voter studies of IRV, range, range3, approval, plurality, top2runoff

[Warren Smith]

It turns out high-quality govt-funded and govt-cooperated studies were
made during the France 20007 presidential election, or 3 alternative
voting systems.
I attempted to summarize them here:
   http://rangevoting.org/French2007studies.html

This is exciting news.  The studies look like they clearly show the
following:

1. Score voting is adoptable and will win if put to a referendum.
2. Score{0,1,2} voting is more clear and more popular than approval
voting.
3. The studies said Score, approval, score{0,1,2}, median-based
score{0,1,2,3,4,5}, average-based score{0,1,2,3,4,5}, and Condorcet –
and pre-election head-to-head polls also indicated – that Bayrou was
the candidate France wanted, and would have defeated every rival head-
to-head. But the instant-runoff, non-instant top-2-runoff, plain
plurality election systems would have (and did) elect Sarkozy. This
was a failure of democracy which France in retrospect (based on later
polls and elections) appears to have regretted.
4. Rank-order ballots exhibit the largest (7.0%) spoilage rates (which
would be an enormous 60% if used for Borda).
Approval-style ballots exhibit the smallest (0.8%)  spoilage rates.
Score voting ballots have 1.1% spoilage rate,
while the official spoilage rates using plurality-style ballots were
1.44 and 4.20%.



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