[EM] Defeat Strength

[Forest Simmons]

The crux of the matter is Kristofer's last phrase ... "... how IRV has been
sold."

As Robert Bristow-Johnson has tirelessly pointed out, IRV has been sold by
false advertising. The public is easily deceived because they don't have
the logical maturity to see (for sure) that once a candidate is eliminated
in a runoff (instant or not), it loses its fallback potential. At most they
say to themselves, "It doesn't seem quite right, but who am I to question
these passionate promoters of democratic empowerment?"

It is totally unethical for IRV promoters to take advantage of voter
naïveté ... encouraging the misconception that IRV behaves more like a
double elimination tournament than a runoff.

IRV promoters can defend themselves, as shysters always do, with the slogan
"Buyer Beware", and "We told you it was a runoff... what did you expect?"
And, "If we have to tell some white lies to sell IRV, it's for the greater
good!"

But this brings up the question ... why not (???) actually propose an
instant double elimination tournament (IDET) that (compared to plain IRV)
gives more meaningful fallback safety. IRV-BTR can be thought of in those
terms, but there may be a psychologically better way of organizing it.

We should put the deceptive promise of IRV promoters right out in the open
for the voters to reject in favor of a method clearly designed with true
fallback safety in mind.

In the context of sports, double elimination tournaments are more
practical, hence more common than Round Robin tournaments.

It's always exciting to see the champion of the first round losers go up
against the first round champ. If the tournament is organized that way,
ordinary RCV ballots are still adequate for the simulation ... but the
public count is in the dramatic form of a double elimination tournament.

We should really take maximum advantage ... exposing this IRV promotion lie
... to leverage into adoption a better method.

The fact that it will never give a Burlington embarrassing result is, then,
the frosting on the cake ... not necessarily the main selling point!

What do you think?

-Forest

On Fri, Sep 9, 2022, 4:06 PM robert bristow-johnson <
rbj at audioimagination.com> wrote:

>
> On the street with my phone, so I'm terse...
>
> (Interspersed)
> *Powered by Cricket Wireless*
>
> ------ Original message------
> *From: *Kristofer Munsterhjelm
> *Date: *Fri, Sep 9, 2022 4:16 PM
> *To: *robert bristow-johnson;jamesgilmour at f2s.com;EM;
> *Cc: *
> *Subject:*Re: [EM] Defeat Strength
>
> On 09.09.2022 18:42, robert bristow-johnson wrote:
> >
> >
> >> On 09/09/2022 12:16 PM EDT James Gilmour
> >> wrote:
> >>
> >>
> >> In an STV-PR election (a.k.a. RCV), the voter's second and any
> >> subsequent preferences are contingency choices, to be used only in
> >> the contingency that the voter's first choice candidate cannot be
> >> elected (because of lack of support) or has already been elected to
> >> represent a full quota of voters (and so does not need the
> >> additional support).
> >>
> >
> > But James, we know that that is not always the case.  Burlington 2009
> > and now, Alaska 2022, are counter-examples that disprove that.
> >
> > In Burlington 2009, Kurt Wright voters were promised (as we all were
> > promised) that if their first-choice cannot win, their second-choice
> > vote is counted.  Wright was defeated and those voters' second-choice
> > votes were not counted.  Had their second-choice votes been counted,
> > a different candidate for mayor would have been elected.
>
> As I understand it, James considers an IRV ballot to be a kind of
> program instruction, so that e.g. voting A>B>C is a way of telling the
> voting method "I want my ballot to count towards A until he's
> eliminated; then I want my ballot to count towards B until/unless he's
> eliminated, etc".
>
>
> >>> and my point is, if we're fair, we can't define "eliminated" in a conveniently parochial way that suits our product instead of being consistent.
>
>
>
>  From such a perspective there is no failure because the voters gave the
> method certain instructions, and the method obeyed these instructions,
> and the winner was who was elected since that's what the procedure says.
>
> If I understand that right, then there's no promise of a vote counting
> towards B if A can't win,
>
>
> >>> there certainly is.  I quoted Howard Dean saying that.  I think FairVote says that explicitly.
>
> because B could be eliminated before A and so
> the ballot skips directly from A to C. Which leads to Condorcet failure, nonmonotonicity, and so on.
>
>
> >>> What difference does that make to the voter who is promised "Vote your hopes, not your fears."?
>
> >>> They are saying on their ballot "I am directing my vote to go for my fav A, but if my fav is defeated, then I am directing my vote to go to my fall back B."
>
>
>
>
> Since IRV passes both LNHarm and LNHelp, the procedural interpretation
> does happen to coincide with the (method-independent) idea that unranked
> candidates should be considered to rank below every explicitly ranked
> candidate, because that's the effect not ranking candidates has on the
> method. But if the method were different, the procedural interpretation
> would also come to a different conclusion.
>
> (However, I don't think the procedural interpretation is particularly
> common; at least it isn't how IRV has been sold.)
>
> -km
>
> ----
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>
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