[EM] More non-altruistic attacks on IRV usage.

[David L Wetzell]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Richard Fobes <ElectionMethods at VoteFair.org>
To: election-methods at electorama.com
Date: Tue, 22 Nov 2011 11:53:06 -0800
Subject: Re: [EM] More non-altruistic attacks on IRV usage.
On 11/22/2011 9:38 AM, David L Wetzell wrote: So how about it?  Can we try
to rewrite the consensus statement to
> include an endorsement of IRV3/AV3 and to make it more marketable to
> #OWS and other folks?

RF:IRV, and variations of it, are based on the mistaken belief that the
candidate with the _fewest_ first-choice votes is the least popular.

dlw:Or, it's easy to market.  Doesn't rely on folks putting a lot of
time/energy to rank all of the candidates and presumes people put most of
their energy into their top rankings relative to their lower-rankings.

RF:But just getting better results than plurality isn't persuasive
("marketable").  After all, plurality (FPTP) is such a low threshold, that
it can almost be tripped over and end up with something better.

dlw: There's plenty of real world evidence that IRV is quite marketable to
the US public.  What isn't persuasive are analysis based on
pseudo-experiments with Bayesian Regret analysis or rational choice theory.


RF:Note that the "declaration" leaves open the issue about the balance
between IRV's advantages and disadvantages.

You can sign the statement and say in your signature that you support
"IRV3/AV3, which is an improvement on IRV".  This is compatible with the
section about IRV that says some signers support it, and some don't.

dlw: All analysis shows that the perceived problems with IRV are seriously
attenuated with only 3 candidates.  This is why it's a shame not to add
IRV3/AV3 to the list of endorsed methods, since it always uses IRV with
only 3 candidates and addresses other concerns like precinct
summarizability.

Now to Kristofer Munsterhjelm:
KM:If the IRV-opponents are concerned about non-monotonicity or the lack of
Condorcet, neither the page nor the KQED page it links to mentions this. I
also hope that you're not implying that non-monotonicity or
lack-of-Condorcet objections are somehow disingenuous and that
IRV-opponents are all incumbents trying to protect their little domains.

dlw: No, but I think all those who oppose IRV on more
egalitarian/idealistic grounds, like yourself and most people I've
interacted with on this list-serve, need to be aware of the real-politik of
electoral reform and how others can use their arguments to hold back
electoral reform.

KM: While I don't find it that important, I can see how some could object
to the relative opacity of IRV. Plurality has its score (how many top votes
each candidate got), Range has mean score, and Minmax has the magnitude of
the worst defeat (where lesser is better). What does IRV have? It has the
round in which the candidate was eliminated, but that doesn't, by itself,
say anything about whether it was a squeaker or the candidate was a sure
loser.

(In a sense, this ties in with the sensitivity to initial conditions of
IRV. You might say "B lost in the second round, and the guy that was next
to last in the second round only survived by a single vote, so that was
close". But perhaps B would have led someone else (D instead of E) to win,
had he survived -- or perhaps defeating C instead of being defeated by C
would only have made B lose soundly in a later round?)

dlw: I agree that it's hard to summarize all the steps of pure IRV into a
helpful metric.  It'd be a lot easier with IRV3/AV3 to first summarize the
totals for all candidates and then to sort the total votes into ten
possible (complete or partial) rankings of three candidates.  The latter
could be summarized in a relatively small table and editorialized
relatively easily.

KM:It says nothing about the use of PR in a local setting to handicap
rivalry between the two major parties because we don't know that it will do
so enough to matter. More generally, it doesn't mention PR as it can't
cover too wide an area - there was an earlier objection that the
declaration was already too long.

(I do like PR, but I can see that logic.)

dlw: We know that it affected outcomes in IL from 1870-1980.  There's a
literature in political science on the import of state legislatures for the
US political system.
<http://www.amazon.com/State-States-4th-Carl-Horn/dp/1933116528>
And both electoral practice and theory suggests that the use of PR is
extremely important for how a political system works and so it's damn
tragic to spend so much ink on varieties of single-winner/stage elections
and not to mention PR at all!  Your logic is built on the wrong
presupposition.  The telos of electoral analytics is not to work out the
"best" single-winner/stage election rule so that we can make more progress
faster.  We are engaging in exercises of learning by doing that often focus
on marketing the need for electoral pluralism/experimentation to the
general public.  Electoral analysis can help these efforts, but they aren't
per se the engine of inquiry.  Cuz a lot of pseudo-experiments based on
clear-cut results that are due to non-realistic assumptions can create more
heat than light.

KM:If you think the statement is too dilute as it is, then wouldn't adding
another method make it less forceful still?

dlw:Sort of, but if one of the five methods was more likely to garner
institutional support for implementation then that would tend to make it
the leader of the pack?

KM:You could, as Richard points out, sign the statement and then say you
support IRV3/AV3 as an improvement upon IRV. If you want to see Plurality
gone, and think the main proposed alternatives would work, why not?

dlw: Why not simply call for greater electoral pluralism/experimentation
and make it clear that a key part of that is the use a mix of single-winner
and multi-winner and hybrid(multi-stage) elections?  Make clear that, while
certain election rules like "top 2 primary" are "bad", voters should
support any of a variety of proposed alternatives in their local elections,
including a modified form of IRV that mitigates the common electoral
analytical critiques of IRV.

dlw
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