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

[robert bristow-johnson]

On 11/26/11 6:58 PM, matt welland wrote:
> On Sat, 2011-11-26 at 16:56 -0500, robert bristow-johnson wrote:
>> the counterexample, again, is Burlington Vermont.  Dems haven't sat in
>> the mayor's chair for decades.
> Is this due to a split of the liberal vote by progressives or other
> liberal blocs? Or is it due to a truly Republican leaning demographic?
Burlington is, for the U.S., a very very liberal town with a 
well-educated and activist populace.  it's the origin of Ben & Jerry's 
and now these two guys are starting a movement ( http://movetoamend.org/ 
) to get a constitutional amendment to reverse the obscene Citizens 
United ruling of the Supreme Court.

the far north end of Burlington (called the "New North End", also where 
i live) is a little more suburban in appearance and here is where the 
GOP hangs in this town.

the mayors have been Progs with an occasional GOP.  it is precisely the 
"center squeeze" syndrome and IRV didn't solve that problem. and without 
getting Condorcet adopted, i am not sure how it will be reversed.

> Also, do folks generally see approval as better than or worse than IRV?
they don't know anything about Approval (or Score or Borda or Bucklin or 
Condorcet) despite some effort by me to illustrate it regarding the 
state senate race in our county.

to attain some measure of proportional representation w.r.t. geography, 
state senate districts are either divided ( 
http://www.leg.state.vt.us/lms/legdir/districts.asp?Body=S ) or, in the 
case of our county, have an unusually large number, 6, of state senators 
all elected at large.  this means that besides running against Progs and 
GOP, the Dems are running against each other.  as a consequence, even 
though we are allowed to vote for as many as 6, everyone that i know 
(bullet) votes for 1 or 2 or maybe 3.  effectively, it is no different 
than Approval voting.

but the only voting methods folks generally see here are FPTP, FPTP with 
a delayed runoff, and IRV.  and, thanks to FairVote, nearly everyone are 
ignorant of other methods to tabulate the ranked ballot than the STV 
method in IRV.
> To me Approval seems to solve the spoiler problem without introducing
> any unstable weirdness and it is much simpler and cheaper to do than
> IRV.
unless one were to bullet vote (which would make Approval degenerate to 
FPTP), there is no way to express one's favorite over other candidates 
that one approves of.  it forces a burden of tactical voting onto voters 
who have to decide whether or not they will vote for their 2nd favorite 
candidate.  i've repeated this over and over and over again on this 
list.  while Score voting demands too much reflection and information 
from voters, Approval voting extracts too little information from 
voters.  both saddle voters with the need for calculation (and strategy) 
that the ranked ballot does not.  both Score and Approval are 
non-starters, because of the nature of the ballot.  but a ranked ballot 
is not a non-starter, even if we lost it recently here in Burlington.  
we just need to unlearn what FairVote did and decouple the concept of 
ranked-choice voting from IRV.

-- 

r b-j                  rbj at audioimagination.com

"Imagination is more important than knowledge."