[EM] a response to Andy J.

[David L Wetzell]

On Mon, Oct 31, 2011 at 12:55 PM, Andy Jennings <elections at jenningsstory.com
> wrote:

>  6b. I think that IRV3 can be improved upon by treating the up to three
>>> ranked choices as approval votes in a first round to limit the number of
>>> candidates to three then the rankings of the three can be sorted into 10
>>> categories and the number of votes in each category can be summarized at
>>> the precinct level.
>>>
>>
>> I am not a big fan of IRV, though I find it better than plurality. Your
>> "improvement", however, would remove its primary selling points. There
>> would be incentives to truncate --- not use lower rankings --- and to bury
>> --- use the lower rankings to dishonestly promote easy-to-beat turkeys. I
>> suspect your proposed system would be opposed by many here as well as by
>> many inside FairVote --- two groups which don't agree on much.
>>
>
> David, thanks for bringing up this idea.  Sounds interesting.  I'm willing
> to consider it.  If you want to convince us on this list, then determining
> which mathematical criteria it passes and focusing on specific voter
> profiles where other methods do poorly would be a good strategy.
>

dlw: It's not the specific abstract criteria that matter so much.  I'm a
pragmatist.  I think experience has shown that IRV has an advantage in
replacing FPTP in the US.  But it's also been shown in practice that since
the number permutations with IRV(3) proliferates when the number of
candidates increases, it can slow down the time it takes to count the vote.
 My idea is that using a limited form of AV would solve that problem and
take a significant bite out of all of the things that AV-lovers prefer
about AV over IV.

I would like to see how it'd fare with a BR analysis.  I think that it's
more appropriate to compare the election rules with only 4 candidates,
instead of 7, as I think has been common in the past.  This is because even
if 7 were the average number of candidates in many single-seat elections,
it's not the number of serious candidates and I think the tacit assumptions
used to distribute the preferences of voters over all of the candidates
tend to assume that all of the candidates are serious candidates.

I'd like to see how much of the diff between IRV3 and AV in BR-scores could
be bridged by using IRV3/AV3.  Unfortunately, even though I've had a little
experience with Monte Carlo simulations in the past, it's been a while and
so I've hoped that I could get someone else to try it out.



> I would elaborate on Jameson's sentiment here.  I think this e-m list will
> be very willing to discuss your method, but most of us will probably end up
> not supporting it in the end.  That's just the law of averages, since the
> vast majority of methods ever designed have serious problems and we're
> pretty good at picking holes in methods here.  We're also biased toward
> simplicity.  And we know that hybrid methods have a particularly bad track
> record.  If you did get some of us to support it, it would probably take
> months of light discussion and constant revisitation to do so.
>

I'm a bayesian, not a frequentist.
My rule is simple.  2 stages: a limited form of AV to determine three
finalists then IRV with only three candidates, which is the case when it
typically works best.


>
> On the other hand, I think you would have a very hard time getting IRV
> supporters to even consider this method.  They don't seem very open to ANY
> changes to IRV at all.
>

I'm on pretty good terms with Rob Richie of FairVote.  I respect his
organizational leadership and their skill at marketing electoral reforms.
 He has indicated an openness to my idea.  It's not totally new.  If he
were to adopt it, for the practical reason mentioned above, then it'd be
easy to get others in line.


> Someone once proposed a small change to IRV called IRV-BTR where the step
> of eliminating the one candidate with the fewest first place votes was
> replaced with taking the two candidates with the fewest first place votes
> and eliminating the one that would lose in a one-on-one race between those
> two.  It stands for IRV-Bottom Two Runoff and it actually meets the
> Condorcet criterion.  It would probably be an acceptable compromise for
> many of the Condorcet supporters here.  But it has gotten no traction among
> IRV supporters.
>

Maybe they too are biased in favor of simplicity??
And I don't think the Condorcet criterion is *that important*, as I think
in political elections, our options are inherently fuzzy options and so all
of our rankings are prone to be ad hoc.

thanks for the feedback!
dlw

>
> ~ Andy
>
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