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

[robert bristow-johnson]

On 9/22/11 12:40 PM, James Gilmour wrote:
> I cannot comment on the quoted remark (cut) that prompted your post 
> and I know nothing at all about the activities of anyone at FairVote, 
> but you have hit on a real problem in practical politics in your 
> comment above  -  the problem of the weak Condorcet winner.  This is a 
> very real political problem, in terms of selling the voting system to 
> partisan politicians (who are opposed to any reform) and to a 
> sceptical public.

i remember Rob Ritchie arguing this case to me in 2009 (why "sometimes 
IRV is better than Condorcet").

> For example, with 3 candidates and 100 voters (ignoring irritant 
> preferences) we could have:
>     35 A>C
>     34 B>C
>     31 C
> "C" is the Condorcet winner.  Despite the inevitable howls from FPTP 
> supporters, I think we could sell such an outcome to the electors.
>
> But suppose the votes had been (again ignoring irrelevant preferences):
>     48 A>C
>     47 B>C
>      5 C
> "C" is still the Condorcet winner - no question about that.  But I 
> doubt whether anyone could successfully sell such a result to the 
> electorate, at least, not here in the UK.
>

even though there were 48 voters who preferred C over B, 47 that 
preferred C over A, along with the 5 that preferred C over both A and B.

that does not appear to me to be such a bad result.

> And I have severe doubts about how effective such a winner could be in 
> office. Quite apart from the sceptical electorate, the politicians of 
> Party A and of Party B would be hounding such an office-holder daily.  
> And the media would be no help  -  they would just pour fuel on the 
> flames.  The result would be political chaos and totally ineffective 
> government.
>
> The flaw in IRV is that it can, sometimes, fail to elect the Condorcet 
> winner.
and even if that is the root to the problem, the complainers will 
*still* revert to FPTP which has even less of a chance of electing the CW.

>    But IRV avoids the "political" problem of the weak Condorcet 
> winner.  I suspect that's why IRV has been accepted for many public 
> and semi-public elections despite the Condorcet flaw.
i believe the reason why IRV has been sold to some jurisdictions is a 
decision, early on by FairVote, that its simplicity is more saleable 
than Condorcet.  the concept of the transferred votes is an easy one.

and that IRV can well take care of the spoiler problem (and the burden 
of strategic voting motivated by a spoiled election) when the spoiler is 
like Nader, having no chance of winning, but gets sufficient votes to 
change the outcome.  we found out in Burlington in 2009, that while IRV 
relieved the liberal majority in town of the burden of strategic voting 
(we didn't have to make a painful choice between the Dem and the Prog), 
it actually placed a burden of strategic voting upon the GOP 
prog-haters.  those folks found out that by marking their guy as #1, 
they ended up *causing* the election of the candidate they disliked the 
most.  that's gotta make some people mad.  and if IRV had survived the 
repeal (it didn't), these folks would have to be thinking in 2012: "In 
this town full of liberals, I gotta choose between Liberal and More 
Liberal, because if I vote for the guy I really like, then More Liberal 
gets elected."  So IRV transferred the burden of strategic voting from 
the liberal majority to the conservative minority.

then FairVote deliberately conflates the ranked ballot with IRV, 
essentially presenting to lawmakers and the public that there is no 
other method of tabulating the ranked ballots other than the 
single-transferable vote (based *only* on the amount of support in first 
preference rank, IRV is opaque to one's second choice until the first 
choice is eliminated).

i think politicians or the voting public that can understand the concept 
of a Round-Robin tournament can understand Condorcet.  but if they 
believe religiously that only the simple "mark only one" ballot (the 
term they used here was the "single affirmative vote"), there is no 
convincing.  i think that they believe that electing the candidate who 
benefits from the presence of a spoiler is appropriate.  they may say 
that the people who get burned by a spoiler need to wise up and combine 
their forces in order to win elections.  that, essentially, means that 
we have no viable third parties or viable independent candidates and 
reinforces the two-party system.

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