[EM] IRV and STV

[Richard Lung]

I seem to have lost the e-mail criticising Wiki articles root and branch.

A theorem is used to assert that IRV must have an element of tactical 
voting.

But that is no more than to say that an ordinal count in single 
districts must have inaccuracies, at least manifest (and exploitable) in 
theory.

The main points have been missed by theorem pedantry.

Where to start?

IRV has an analogous fault to party lists. It manufactures a majority, 
which is not necessarily the democratic majority. It requires a 
transferable vote across party lines, to establish that fact. This of 
course is not possible with a dogmatic party list vote, in large 
districts, or an unfree preference vote that does not allow the election 
of more than one candidate, thus losing probably most of the first 
preferences, as wasted votes, unlike with STV in multi-member 
constituencies.

STV would give something like representation of all the people, not just 
a majority of them.

Britainand the USAhave ignored the simple truth of John Stuart Mill, 
which came home to roost, when Lani Guinier spoke of The Tyranny of The 
Majority.

That is the first limitation of Anglo-American “democracy” by supposition.

The second limitation is to give a special place to single member 
constituencies, which actually has no reasonable justification.

To use the jargon of Relativity, there is no special reference frame, by 
which single districts can be distinguished from multiple seat 
districts. Whereas “wasted votes” and “tactical/strategic voting” prove 
that choice is relative, like motion.

It is thought otherwise because conventional STV only applies to 
multi-member constituencies. IRV is tolerated as a second-best for 
single-member elections.

But it is possible to use the same rational count (a “binomial” count, 
that is both a rational election count and a rational exclusion count) 
for both single and multiple districts, ending any necessary distinction 
between them.

Moreover this removes the irritant, the mote-in-your eye criticism 
against STV as “non-monotonic” because binomial STV is a rational 
exclusion count as well as a rational election count.

Regards,

Richard Lung.

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