[EM] how strong is support for IRV on this mailing list?

[robert bristow-johnson]

On 10/31/11 2:31 PM, Jameson Quinn wrote:
>
>
> 2011/10/31 robert bristow-johnson <rbj at audioimagination.com 
> <mailto:rbj at audioimagination.com>>
>
>      even Rob Ritchie cannot continue to claim that IRV worked just
>     fine, or better than all other alternatives, in that case.
>
>
> Richie has claimed to me that
>
> 1) Even if Approval had elected the Democrat in Burlington, it would 
> have resulted in Approval being repealed, because the Democrat was a 
> poor candidate who deserved to lose and had a minority of strong 
> supporters.

now that is incendiary.  :-\    because there is content in that which 
is independent of the election method.  if the Dem candidate was 
elected, most of the Progs would be satisfied and far more of the GOP 
would have been than were with the outcome of the IRV election.  this 
Dem (Montroll) would have, admittedly, been the centrist (which i don't 
see to be a problem ihherently) but centrisity is not a sufficient 
reason for choosing an election method. the reason to elect the 
Condorcet winner is that this is the candidate favored by the voters 
over any other candidate when the voters are asked to choose between the 
two.

nonetheless, most politically-inclined Burlington residents that i have 
talked with, both sides of the liberal/conservative line, feel that the 
"poor candidate who deserved to lose and had a minority of strong 
supporters", a fiscally-responsible geek, would have been far better for 
the city than the Prog who was re-elected.

i hope that you're accurately portraying Rob here.  now, he *has* told 
me that IRV is the only reform that is politically realistic that has 
the best hope of electing the Condorcet winner.  so for him to associate 
IRV with Condorcet and to disassociate IRV from Approval BECAUSE THEY 
ELECT THE SAME CANDIDATE (good or bad) at least in Burlington in 2009, 
is, to say the least, disingenuous.

> 2) Approval would have elected the Republican in Burlington. (This is 
> to me not implausible; it could result from a chicken-dilemma 
> situation, and the numbers in Burlington were close enough that it 
> wouldn't take too much for this to happen).
i've never felt that Approval is at all immune to burying tactics (by 
not voting for clones who are not your favorite) and if voters mostly 
bullet-voted for their fav, it would also devolve to plurality.  the GOP 
candidate was the plurality winner (33%) of the first-choice votes.  the 
Prog had 29%, and the Dem had 25%.

> 2a) That would have resulted in Approval being repealed.

i don't think that Approval is likely to be adopted in the first place.

>
> Of course, if you combine these hypotheticals with what actually 
> happened, it appears that Richie thinks that repeal of reform was 
> inevitable after a contentious election like Burlington. Which could 
> be true, but seems to me to be remarkably convenient to the pro-IRV 
> stance.
>
well, they *are* trying to avoid "inconvenient truths" regarding IRV 
that the Burlington 2009 made a textbook example of.  by not electing 
the Condorcet winner, it caused it to fail being spoiler-less, that 
means it transferred the burden of strategic or tactical voting from the 
(liberal) majority (who didn't have to make a painful choice between the 
Prog and Dem) to the most conservative minority group (i like to call 
them the "GOP who are Prog-haters") who found out that by marking their 
favorite candidate #1, they actually caused the election of their least 
favorite ("In this liberal town I gotta choose between Liberal and More 
Liberal, because if I vote for the guy I really like, More Liberal gets 
elected").  and it also demonstrated non-monotonicity and IRV is 
inherently not precinct-summable (which transparency advocates care about).

-- 

r b-j                  rbj at audioimagination.com

"Imagination is more important than knowledge."