[EM] [CES #3650] FairVote folks are not the friendliest bunch

[Jameson Quinn]

On the center for election science mailing list, someone just forwarded a
comment from a prominent member of FairVote. Stripped of the extremely rude
ad-hominem attacks, this is the actual content of what he had to say:

... in the process of trying to pass your preferred system somewhere, you
> will discover why IRV is superior to those systems.
>
>
So, according to this person, IRV has some secret advantage over all other
systems, which is obvious to anyone who's done real-world activism, but not
obvious from a theoretical perspective. In fact, it's apparently so
theoretically non-obvious that it can't even be stated coherently to someone
who hasn't done real-world activism.

This argument seems designed more to end the conversation than to actually
convince anyone. But despite the pathetic rudeness with which it's stated, I
suspect that there is actually some content here, something which deserves
discussion. I can guess what the secret advantage is, partly from having
read some of this person's other statements in "Gaming the Vote".

If I'm right, the claim is that voters, and especially politicians, are
intuitively concerned with the possibility of someone winning with broad but
shallow support. In Approval, Condorcet, Majority Judgment, or Range, a
relatively-unknown centrist could theoretically win a contest against two
high-profile ideologically-opposed candidates. The theory is that the
electorate would be so polarized that everyone would explicitly prefer the
centrist to the other extreme, but because the voters don't really expect
the low-profile centrist to win, they might miss some important flaw in the
centrist which actually makes her a poor winner.

If I'm right that this is IRV's secret, unanswerable advantage... then I
must say I'm not too impressed. This concern from the voters, or even from
the candidates, is probably irrational; IRV has pathologies which will
probably be much more common in practice. But OK; people are sometimes
irrational, and it is certainly possible that this kind of result, which is
impossible under plurality, seems scarier to people than Plurality's
familiar pathologies which are reproduced in IRV.

So OK, say people really have an outsized fear of this problem. Does that
mean that IRV is the only good voting reform which actually has a chance of
passing? Well, given how IRV advocates often use dishonest arguments, and
especially how they often lose anyway --- even in high-profile battles where
they start out with an advantage, such as the AV referendum in the UK ---
I'd say that claim is very dubious.

Still, I'd agree, advocates of other systems should have very clear talking
points to respond to the "mushy-centrist argument". There should be a single
sentence which people can repeat every time they're faced with the argument.
If each of us is reinventing a new counterargument every time this issue is
raised, then voters will not get a coherent message they can understand.

Here are my responses to "mushy centrist" concerns (which can also be cast
as "majority criterion" concerns), for my two favorite systems:

A mushy centrist doesn't have an unfair advantage under Majority Judgment,
as Balinski and Laraki have shown (centrists and extremists have more
balanced chances under MJ than under any other system in their empirical
study of real voter behavior). And in SODA, it is 100% impossible to
accidentally elect an unknown centrist; the centrist can't win unless some
other candidate explicitly decides that she should.

Jameson Quinn
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