[EM] hello from DLW of "A New Kind of Party":long time electoral reform enthusiast/iconoclast-wannabe...

[Andy Jennings]

>
> 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.

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.

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.  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.

~ Andy
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