[EM] Easy fix to Alaska's ranked-choice voting

[Richard Lung]

Dare I say this easy fix needs a little "lateral thinking." I wrote of the monarchic hang-over, because single members offer the least choice of representation and present the greatest desire for rejection. (HG Wells, 1912: We no longer have elections, only Rejections. -- Like Hilary and Donald.) More seats per district make election more important than rejection; exclusion becomes less important with STV/PR in multi-member districts. 
So, it doesn't matter that STV/PR has an irrational exclusion count, a sort of Last Past The Post exclusion procedure. A good century of experience shows that large majorities of first preferences get elected. Even in Ireland after the seat numbers were whittled down by the largest party to over-represent itself, perhaps two-thirds the voters would elect their first preferences, and high order preferences elect the rest.

My suggested Senate two-member STV/PR was only a step in the right direction (easy fix) within the constraints of the Senate two-member system. Except for Hawaii 50, sibling states could pair into 4-member districts, which would be tolerably democratic.

There are two issues to this easy fix. A single-member district is as much a rejection as an election, and a rejection cannot be an election. Hence, go to STV/PR.
The worlds election systems do not have a rational exclusion count. Binomial STV remedies that defect, even in single-member districts, but single-member districts are "only half a democracy" (Robert Newland).

Regards, 
Richard Lung.

Re below: They should have had you, there, James!


[from James Gilmour]

I cannot comment on all implementations, but I do know that when STV-PR (RCV) was introduced for City council elections in Minneapolis a few years ago, voters were restricted to marking only three preferences because the tally machines used in the precincts for the precinct counts could tally only three columns.

James Gilmour
Edinburgh, Scotland

>> On 12 Nov 2022, at 12:16 pm, Kristofer Munsterhjelm <km_elmet at t-online.de> wrote:
>> 
>> On 12.11.2022 02:26, Colin Champion wrote:
>> On 11/11/2022 20:49, Forest Simmons wrote:
>> 
>> Since almost all RCV implementations limit the number of candidates that can be ranked on a ballot, the simplest decent  RCV method is ... Elect the uncovered candidate that is unranked on the fewest ballot
> Does anyone know why this truncation is imposed? If it’s to limit the amount of work needed to count the ballots, wouldn’t it make sense for Condorcet supporters to advocate a method which was countable in linear time? In practice this would presumably be Sequential Pairwise Elimination with an FPTP pre-ranking. If you insist on a quadratic time method and accept the corollary of ballot truncation, I don’t imagine it will work very well. Or am I missing something?

Forced ballot truncation clearly makes every voting method fail clone independence, so no, it's not just you.

As an extension of my Friendly Cover/Voting caveat (where it's difficult to call a winner because first preferences are all distributed among nobodies), forced ballot truncation probably also implies ISDA failure. Perhaps even Smith failure, or Condorcet in pathological cases.

-km
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