[EM] IRV vs RCV

[Rob Lanphier]

On Fri, Dec 13, 2019 at 9:21 PM robert bristow-johnson
<rbj at audioimagination.com> wrote:
> but things are hard to change with election law.  while i like Ranked Pairs (using margins) better, i can see value in BTR-STV as a means to get a Condorcet-compliant method adopted as law.  We can say to the followers of FairVote that it's IRV with rounds.  And we can say it fixes the problem of risk of not electing the Condorcet candidate (if there is one).  it's Condorcet-compliant IRV and i wouldn't mind if they called that "RCV".

Yeah, I totally agree with all of this.  I also like Ranked Pairs, but
I suspect that all of the methods that pick a candidate out of the
Smith set are indistinguishable in real-world conditions.  My hunch is
that an analysis of the public elections that had ranked ballots would
reveal that all of them had a single Condorcet winner, and therefore
there would be no difference between the results of Ranked Pairs,
Schulze, Tideman, Schulze, or even Copeland.  So BTR-STV seems like a
fine compromise, since IRV has failed to pick the Condorcet winner in
at least one recent public election.

Rob