[EM] The IRV-Disease has reached my town.

[robert bristow-johnson]

---------------------------- Original Message ----------------------------

Subject: Re: [EM] The IRV-Disease has reached my town.

From: "Chris Benham" <cbenhamau at yahoo.com.au>

Date: Mon, March 4, 2019 7:41 am

To: election-methods at lists.electorama.com

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> I think voting reform activists in the US should welcome IRV and push to

> make sure that there are

> no abominable "details" like restricted ranking or eliminating

> all-at-once all but the top two candidates.



i dunno what that means.



> Voters must be able to strictly rank from the top however many

> candidates they wish, and the eliminations

> must be one-at-a-time.



then you need tougher ballot access restrictions.  SF had more than a dozen candidates but only 3 levels of ranking.  i think that it is reasonable for the law to assign a fixed number of ranking levels, but it should be more than 3.  then the number of signatures required to get a
candidate's name on the ballot should be increased high enough that *typically* the number of candidates is no more than the number of ranking levels.  in Burlington Vermont, we had 5 levels and rarely more than 5 candidates on the ballot for mayor.


> In my judgement this is better than Approval  (or something

> strategically equivalent that uses ratings ballots

> with more than 2 slots) because it doesn't have any annoying defection

> incentive and properly meets

> "Mutual Relative Majority".
the problem with both Approval and Score Voting is that the voter must make a tactical decision about how high to score (or whether to approve) their second-choice.  it is inherently flawed in that manner.


> If  you are a fan of the Condorcet criterion, then I think it is fine to

> modify IRV by before each elimination

> we check for a Condorcet winner (among the so far remaining candidates)

> and when we find one we stop

> and declare that candidate the winner.
one way to do this is STV-BTR  ("Bottom Two Runoff").  so it's just like IRV, except when a candidate needs to be eliminated, it is not simply the guy on the bottom (of first-choice votes), the two bottom candidates are runoff
against each other, counting only how voters rank them relative to each other (like in the IRV final round), only the winner of that Bottom Runoff advances to the next round.  this STV-BTR is Condorcet compliant.

> If you want something more simple then I think Condorcet//Approval is

> acceptable.

>

> Voters simply rank the candidates they approve. Equal-ranking should

> preferably be allowed.
Yes!
> A candidate that pairwise beats all the others wins. If there is no such

> candidate then the most approved candidate wins.
in a ranked ballot, what defines an "approved" candidate?  all unranked candidates are tied for last place on a ballot.  is any candidate that is ranked at all "approved"?  that would change and
complicate the meaning of the ranked ballot.

> A bit better, but equivalent in 3-candidate elections and harder to

> explain, are Smith//Approval and (one of

> my favourites) Max Covered Approval.
i still think that Tideman RP using margins is the simplest meaningful method that elects the same candidate that Schulze (based on margins) elects when there are 3 in the Smith set.



both the rules and meaning for marking the ballots (Ranking Candidate A above Candidate B only means that if the election were held between only those two candidates, your vote is for Candidate A) and the decision algorithm (If more voters mark their ballots preferring Candidate A over Candidate B
than the number of voters marking their ballots to the contrary, then Candidate B is not elected)m should be simple for everyone to understand.  as simple as possible.
i still see no advantage of any method that is not Condorcet compliant over one that is.
--


r b-j                         rbj at audioimagination.com



"Imagination is more important than knowledge."

 
 
 
 
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