[EM] Countering FairVote propaganda on Wikipedia

[Kristofer Munsterhjelm]

On 2024-03-16 21:52, robert bristow-johnson wrote:
> 
> 
>> On 03/16/2024 3:45 PM EDT Closed Limelike Curves <closed.limelike.curves at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>> If y'all want to understand why FairVote has been so successful,
>> the most widely-read Wikipedia pages on voting systems+theory are
>> all extremely soft on IRV/Hare for a system with so many
>> pathologies.
>>

> I think the section "Pathologies of IRV" in the IRV article should
> be  scrutinized and possibly corrected.  It says...
> 
> "Systems which fail Condorcet but pass mutual majority can exclude
> voters outside the mutual majority from the vote, essentially
> becoming an election between the mutual majority.[citation needed]
> IRV demonstrates this exclusion of up to 50 percent of voters,
> notably in the 2009 Burlington mayoral election where the later
> rounds became a runoff between the mutual majority of voters
> favouring Andy Montroll and Bob Kiss. This can recurse: if a mutual
> majority exists within the mutual majority, then the majority becomes
> a collegiate over the minority, and the inner mutual majority solely
> decides the votes of this  collegiate."
> 
> Is the description about Burlington 2009 accurate?  I am not sure
> exactly what is meant by "mutual majority of voters".  The paragraph
> sounds very wonky.
It's not just wonky; I think it's wrong and generalizing too much from IRV.

Methods that pass mutual majority elect from the smallest set of 
candidates that a majority ranks ahead of the rest (not necessarily in 
the same order). A method can pass MM independently of whether it passes 
Condorcet.

What the author seems to be saying is that if a method passes MM but not 
Condorcet, then it has center squeeze. I don't think that's a given; 
center squeeze is more a feature of the non-Condorcet MM methods that 
have been proposed (such as DAC/DSC and IRV).

It would be more accurate to say that IRV itself determines the 
strongest wing of the strongest wing (recursively), and that's why it 
gets center squeeze. IRV gets its later-no-help/harm properties by 
successively shearing off information about candidates who are not part 
of the current "strongest wing".

So the paragraph could probably be replaced with one that talks about 
center squeeze itself: first, that it happens, and then why. Perhaps 
draw some ideas from the following page, which likens the elimination 
process to an "instant primary": https://betterchoices.vote/ConsensusVoting

-km