[EM] reply to Kathy Dopp

[Kathy Dopp]

>
> KD:Treating the first round of an IRV election  as an approval election
> to reduce the field to two candidates would be a great way to make IRV
> fairly count the choices of *all* voters rather than the hopelessly
> unfair way IRV counts only some voters' 2nd choices when their 1st
> choice is eliminated.
>
> dlw: It's not unfair if the other voters' 1st choices are among the
> remaining top candidate...

I see it as unquestionably UNfair that some voters have their 2nd
choice candidate eliminated prior to having their 1st choice candidate
eliminated -- and thus these voters never have their 2nd choice
candidate counted -- whereas other voters, if they support the least
popular candidates foremost, have more of their choices counted.

The fundamental unfairness of IRV methods is why it is nonmonotonic
and often eliminates the Condorcet winner prior to the final counting
round and does not eliminate the spoiler effect, despite the
disinformation told by Fair Vote to the contrary.


> Fair is not self-evident in practice...  We all tend to see the splinter in
> the eye of others' election rules and to ignore the plank in our own
> preferred election rules.

For any system to be fair, it would require treating the ballots or
votes of all voters the same. IRV does no such thing.  The
fundamentally unfair, unequal treatment of voters' votes is why causes
all the worst problems with IRV, including the way it eviscerates the
ability to conduct efficient post-election manual audits of election
outcome accuracy.

> dlw: I think we just got to keep the odds of non-monotonicity low enuf that
> it doesn't dysfunctionally affect behavior,

PIe in the sky idea that we could, or would want to, control or limit
how voters choose to vote.  If IRV's proponents honestly told people
to rank one of the top-two vote-getters first, or risk helping their
least favorite candidate to win the election -- just like with
plurality -- then perhaps we could avoid IRV's vagaries -- but at what
cost? And what would be the gains?  IRV has few gains, but great
costs. It is one of the few alternative electoral methods that I
believe to be a huge step backwards from plurality voting.  IRV fails
more of Arrow's Fairness criteria than plurality.

The reason I would only support your idea of using approval voting to
eliminate all but the top two candidates (as counted via approval
ballots), but would not support eliminating all but the top three, is
because IRV's flaws all rear their ugly heads when there are three or
more candidates in a contest. Witness the recent Burlington, VT
mayoral contest where your method of leaving the top 3 candidates in
the contest and then using IRV would still have eliminated the
Condorcet winner and elected a less popular candidate.


-- 

Kathy Dopp
http://electionmathematics.org
Town of Colonie, NY 12304
"One of the best ways to keep any conversation civil is to support the
discussion with true facts."
"Renewable energy is homeland security."

Fundamentals of Verifiable Elections
http://kathydopp.com/wordpress/?p=174

View some of my research on my SSRN Author page:
http://ssrn.com/author=1451051