[EM] Election-Methods Digest, Vol 210, Issue 62

[Daniel Carrera]

On Fri, Jan 28, 2022 at 3:39 PM <culitif at tuta.io> wrote:

>
> The animosity in the voting theory community towards IRV reminds me of how
> those in the cryptocurrency community hate Bitcoin.
>

That's really interesting. I'm not into crypto at all (bewildered by it
really) so I had no idea that Bitcoin was disliked like that. What are the
issues with Bitcoin from the point of view of the crypto community? What
did they do?


I feel this community is in a similar position. You might not like it, but
> FairVote's success with popularizing IRV might be the thing necessary to
> push these more niche debates into a wider audience.
>

My goal is to replace FPTP with "anything". My goal is to replace FPTP with
something better. IRV is not better. But for me personally my animosity
toward FairVote is because they conflated the ballot "ranked choice" with
their preferred method. That really rubbed me the wrong way.


> My own introduction to this field came from that one CGP Grey video that
> explained IRV.
>

CGP Grey is great. Note that he doesn't specifically advocate IRV; he just
likes voting methods. He has videos on Approval, MMP, gerrymandering, the
electoral college, etc. He is a big fan of STV, but that's in part because
he is a big fan of PR (yay!).


The discussions about the various ways to handle ties or alternative
> systems sparked an interest in me to dig deeper and keep finding
> alternatives. Eventually I got to take a course with professor Marek
> Kaminski that finally let me dive into the mathematical foundations of all
> these methods and now, here I am, working a website to bring these
> discussions to a wider audience. But it all started with IRV and watching
> those pretty animated bar graphs for me.
>

Yeah, I see your point. I honestly can't remember how I got into voting
theory. It was a long time ago. It wouldn't surprise me if IRV was the
first method I discovered.

Cheers,
-- 
Dr. Daniel Carrera
Postdoctoral Research Associate
Iowa State University
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