[EM] Legacy IRV limitations

[Toby Pereira]

 Richard, quite a few of your "misrepresentations" are simply cases where you disagree. I think Greg Dennis has already addressed a couple of them but things like "Score voting would be a reasonable choice in elections" and "Approval voting would be suitable for general elections" should not be included in your list.
Toby
    On Monday, 18 December 2023 at 18:37:02 GMT, Richard, the VoteFair guy <electionmethods at votefair.org> wrote:  
 
Examples of what I believe are significant misrepresentations from the 
FairVote organization are:

* Overvotes cannot be counted, and it's not worth attempting to count them

* The candidate with the fewest transferred votes is always the least 
popular candidate

* The winner in Burlington VT was the correct winner

* Electing the Condorcet winner is not important, and Condorcet methods 
are not worth considering

* Ranked choice voting counting rules should use the wording supplied by 
the FairVote organization or the Ranked Choice Voting Resource Center 
(even though that wording is awful, and seemingly worded to make it 
difficult to change to anything better)

* Ranked choice voting software must be backwards compatible with prior 
elections in Australia (even though their ballots require a voter to 
write numbers in a box, and their counting process is based on shortcuts 
that arose to minimize how many times each paper ballot had to be looked at)

(There might be others, but the one Michael Ossipoff presents is not one 
of them.)

For comparison, the biggest misrepresentations from the fans of STAR 
voting are (off the top of my head):

* Ranked choice voting is vulnerable to vote splitting (this is a big lie!)

* Ranked choice ballots cannot be counted in ways that are fair (which 
is implied by presenting IRV as if it's the only way to count ranked 
choice ballots)

* Claiming they "officially" support a method for counting ranked choice 
ballots ("Ranked Robin") yet never mentioning that method as a possible 
alternative to IRV (when they villify ranked choice ballots)

* STAR voting is resistant to tactical voting and strategic nomination 
(which ignores the case in which a large minority offers two similar 
candidates and tells their voters to top-rank both of those candidates 
and bottom-rank all other candidates)

* Summability is still important (even though we now have very fast 
fiberoptic speeds instead of slow modem speeds)

* Monotonicity failures should never occur, and are worse than other 
failures (including Condorcet failures)

* Pairwise counting is not important (even though STAR voting's second 
step is to do pairwise counting between the top two)

* STAR voting is a better kind of ranked choice voting

Here are some misrepresentations from the Election Science Foundation:

* Score voting would be a reasonable choice in elections

* Approval voting would be suitable for general elections

* The simplicity of Approval voting justifies not pursuing any method 
that uses ranked choice ballots

* Ranked choice ballots cannot be counted in ways that are fair (by 
presenting IRV as if it were the only option)

(I might be forgetting one or two more.)

Finally here's a misrepresentation that applies to all three organizations:

* Our organization taught the voters in such-and-such city (or state) 
about the evils of vote splitting so our organization's preferred method 
should be adopted in this city (or state) and no other method should be 
considered by the voters or elected officials


  
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