[EM] Burlington VT reconsidering IRV 10 years after IRV failed to elect the Condorcet Winner

[fdpk69p6uq at snkmail.com]

On Thu, Dec 5, 2019 at 9:50 PM Greg Dennis wrote:

> It seems like a bit of revisionist history to portray the cause of the
> repeal to be the failure to elect the Condorcet candidate. As has been
> noted, the repeal effort was led by the Republican Wright and his allies
> who felt that he should have won because he had the most first choices.
>

The repeal effort was supported by both Republicans (who would win under
FPTP) and Democrats (who would win under Condorcet), no?

"We waited to bring in the signatures because we didn't want this to be
about [Republican] Kurt Wright losing after being ahead, or [Democrat] Andy
Montroll *who had more first and second place votes and didn't win*. We
wanted this to be about IRV."

https://www.sevendaysvt.com/vermont/burlington-residents-seek-repeal-of-instant-runoff-voting/Content?oid=2177125




> For what it's worth, there have been about 250 IRV elections in the US
> since San Francisco started using it in 2004, many of which were highly
> contested between three or more candidates, and that Burlington 2009 race
> remains the one and only one where the Condorcet candidate was not elected.
> It seems to me that if you care about the Condorcet candidate winning, IRV
> is a big step forward to that end.
>

But in how many of those elections were there more than two strong
candidates?  IRV electing the Condorcet winner in a bunch of uncontested
elections isn't especially impressive.


On Tue, Dec 3, 2019 at 10:54 AM robert bristow-johnson wrote:

> I want to figure out some good language to change this from regular-old
> IRV to Bottom-Two Runoff, Single Transferable Vote, BTR-STV .  If someone
> is good at writing legal language or if this BTR-STV has had legislative
> language written for it somewhere else, I would like to see it.
>

Has BTR-STV been used in the real world or analyzed academically?  There
are only two sentences about it on Electowiki.

I know Nanson/Baldwin methods have both going for them, and they're
Condorcet and relatively simple to explain to someone familiar with IRV:
"Instead of eliminating the candidate with the least number of
first-preference votes (which results in vote-splitting and discards some
voters' preferences), you eliminate the candidate with the worst average
ranking."


"In contrast to the Borda rule, our experiments with Baldwin’s and Nanson’s
rules demonstrate that both of them are often more difficult to manipulate
in practice. These results suggest that elimination style voting rules
deserve further study." http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.artint.2014.07.005
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