[EM] hmmm. Maybe I missed something before SF passed IRV then called it RCV?

[VoteFair]

On 7/4/2017 4:43 PM, Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote:
> ...
> The blowup scenario could go like this:
> - IRV is used in more and more places
> - Voters think it's now possible for a third party to grow
> - Third parties grow until they're competitive with the two main parties
> - IRV gets confused in an election and elects the wrong candidate
 > ...

Excellent point.

This is a good reminder as to why some people in the United States think 
that instant-runoff voting is a good method.  They do not think beyond 
the two-party system, except to hope that third-party candidates can 
sometimes win.  But when single-mark ballots are gone, the bias in favor 
of just two main political parties will disappear.

It's also related to the issue of "fixing" the U.S. electoral college 
system.  The "fixes" assume that there will be only two dominant 
presidential candidates.

What's really needed in the U.S. is to fix the PRIMARY elections.  Those 
elections need to accommodate four or five or even seven popular 
candidates, not just two popular candidates.

Until primary election methods are reformed, both the Republican and 
Democratic political parties will continue to be controlled by people 
with money who hire election-method "experts" who create 
campaign-donation strategies that take advantage of plurality counting 
(of single-mark ballots).

(Their strategy to elect a Republican president in 2008 by donating 
money to an African-American in the 2008 Democratic primary election did 
not work out so well for them.)

And yes, either approval voting or pairwise counting (any Condorcet 
method) would work well in U.S. in primary elections -- because the 
winner is always from the correct political party.

Happy Fourth of July!  (U.S. Independence day)

Richard Fobes