[EM] A rant about IRV and its recent history in Alaska

[Steve Eppley]

RCV (a.k.a. Instant Runoff) clearly failed in Alaska in 2024 too.  The Republican Party learned an important lesson from the fiasco in August 2022: RCV can easily spoil.  So in 2024, one of the two Republican candidates who qualified for the general election dropped out to avoid the possibility of being a spoiler.  And the one who didn't drop out -- Nick Begich -- had similarly pledged to drop out if another Republican finished ahead of him in the primary election.

A lesson they haven't yet learned is that the kind of pledge that Begich made -- to drop out if another Republican finished ahead of him in the primary election -- can lead to spoiling too, because the candidate who drops out might be the one who could win in the general election.  Suppose Begich had made that pledge ahead of the August 2022 election.  Then he would have dropped out to avoid the possibility of spoiling Sarah Palin's victory.  But it was Begich, not Palin, who a majority ranked over Democrat Mary Peltola in the August 2022 election.

(Peltola's majority over Palin was very narrow.  That means RCV came close to electing the extremist.)

In France in 2024 they didn't use RCV, but a similar dynamic led to similar pledges to drop out.  To avoid spoiling that would help the right-wing party win in the final round of elections, candidates of centrist & left-wing parties agreed to drop out if they finished no higher than third place in the penultimate round of voting, to avoid spoiling the other's chance of defeating the right-wing candidate.  That's the same mistake as in Begich's pledge to drop out if another Republican finished ahead of him in the primary election.  The candidate who finished third might be the one who can win, and in this case the candidate who ought to drop out is the one who finished second (or possibly even first).

It's also possible that RCV spoiled in the 2021 New York City Democratic mayoral primary election, which was won by Eric Adams.  It eliminated Maya Wiley after the penultimate round of counting, and then counted Wiley's votes for either Adams or Garcia.  It's possible that Garcia was a spoiler and that majorities ranked Wiley over Adams and Garcia. (I don't know NYC political dynamics, but assuming a subset of voters pay attention mainly to candidates' gender & race, Garcia voters in that subset would tend to prefer Wiley over Adams, and Adams voters in that subset would tend to prefer Wiley over Garcia.)  But NYC didn't publish the voters' rankings, so the possibility that Garcia was a spoiler can't be checked, except perhaps by a "freedom of information" request to compel publication. (I wonder whether hiding the voters' rankings is a lesson learned by proponents of RCV after the Instant Runoff fiasco in Burlington Vermont in 2009.  After that fiasco, they changed its name
from Instant Runoff to Ranked Choice Voting, so I also wonder whether the reason for the change of name was to try to hide its track record of spoiling.  And I wonder whether they say an RCV election didn't spoil whenever the evidence to check it is unavailable.)

We can expect the Democrats too will eventually learn the lesson that RCV is prone to spoiling.  After that, I expect only one Democrat and one Republican will run in RCV general elections, plus third party or independent candidates who can't win and might be spoilers.  That seems like the existing two-party system... which might explain why so many Democratic & Republican politicians support (or don't oppose) RCV.  It would still have the same terrible flaw that any voting method that counts only one majority (or one plurality) has: the majority (or plurality) that gets counted can often be a coalition of minorities on different issues.  That undermines majority rule, undermines politicians' incentive to support majority-preferred policies, prevents government policies from being stable, incites political polarization, and empowers extremists by making their supporters' votes needed by the rest of their coalition.

Another possibility we could hope for, but which seems unlikely because it would require the Democratic party or the Republican party to place country over party, is that one of the two "big tent" parties would learn to completely "stand down" (not nominate a candidate) in elections they might not win, so that a "moderate" independent candidate could run and defeat the "greater evil" without a spoiler on the ballot to split the coalition against the greater evil.  We saw examples of this "stand down" strategy in Utah in 2022 and in Nebraska in 2024, when the Democrats chose not to nominate candidates for U.S. Senate... that allowed the independent candidates who ran (Evan McMullin in Utah and Dan Osborn in Nebraska) to assemble larger anti-Republican coalitions than any Democratic candidates had assembled in those states.  If those states had been swing states instead of solid red states, it's a good bet that the independent candidates would have won.  But good luck
persuading the Democrats to stand down in a swing state or swing district, which would be the opposite of the "50 state strategy" that some of them advocate.  The "Democrats stand down" strategy makes sense not only in solid red states & districts where a Democrat would be a sure loser; it also makes sense in states & districts where the Democrat isn't a sure winner if election of the Republican would be catastrophic. (Two examples of catastrophes are Trump 2025 and single-party domination of all branches of a state government -- such as in Texas or Florida -- or all branches of the federal government.)  By a symmetric argument, the "Republicans stand down" strategy can make sense for Republicans in states & districts where an independent candidate has a better chance to defeat the Democrat than a Republican would have.

If the Democrats hadn't nominated a candidate for President in 2024, I think it's likely that No Labels would have been able to persuade Larry Hogan to run.  Hogan was the popular two-term "moderate" Never-Trump Republican former governor of solid blue Maryland, and it seems likely that he would have been a Condorcet winner in 2024.  He declined No Labels' invitation because he knew the Democrats would nominate a candidate (expected to be Biden), which would have given Hogan no chance to win and only a chance to be a spoiler.  But in a Hogan versus Trump election with no Democrat on the ballot to split the anti-Trump coalition, Hogan could have been able to assemble a winning coalition: in addition to "lesser of evil" votes from Democratic-leaning voters, Hogan would have been favored by swing voters, moderate Republican voters, and some of the voters who vote R only because they've been led to believe the D party is socialist or whatever. (I think the only real questions
about whether Hogan would have defeated Trump are whether too many Democratic-leaning voters would fail to vote for the "lesser of evils" and either abstain or "waste" their vote on a sure-loser third party spoiler, and whether donors would have adequately funded Hogan's independent campaign.)

Years ago, an advocate of Instant Runoff presented empirical statistics (from Australia, I think) that seemed to show Instant Runoff doesn't spoil much in practice and rarely defeats a Condorcet winner.  But those statistics are misleading, because they neglect potential candidates who are deterred from running either to avoid being a spoiler or because Instant Runoff would create the false impression that they're very unpopular.  It also ignores the effect of voter preference information that the parties gain when STV Proportional Representation elections are run alongside Instant Runoff... information that can be useful for predicting Instant Runoff spoiling and avoiding the spoiling by standing down or by a party nominating only one candidate.  Particularly noteworthy is Instant Runoff's deterrent effect against potential Condorcet winners who would lose and appear to be very unpopular given Instant Runoff because they would be sandwiched between two other candidates, one
of whom would be classified as a spoiler if the Condorcet winner chose to run & lose.  An Instant Runoff winner who's said to be a Condorcet winner based solely on the candidates who chose to run and the actual votes cast, but who would have lost pairwise to a potential candidate who didn't run, should not be deemed the sincere Condorcet winner.

Greg Dennis asks "why leave out the November 2022 election where RCV elected the Condorcet winner Peltola?"  Because we're not claiming RCV always defeats the Condorcet winner.  However, was Peltola really the *sincere* Condorcet winner in November 2022?  It's impossible to know for certain, because RCV may have deterred potential candidates from competing, or the primary election may have prevented potential candidates from competing in the general election.

By the way, my definition of "spoiler" is narrower than RBJ's definition.  He calls X a spoiler if X, by running, causes the winner to change from some Y to some Z.  I call X a spoiler if both of the following conditions hold: (1) X, by running, causes the winner to change from some Y to some Z.  (2) The number of voters whose order of preference has X > Y > Z exceeds the number of voters whose order of preference has X > Z > Y.  In other words, X is a spoiler if X, by running, causes the election of a "greater evil" of most of X's supporters.  We can also define a counterfactual spoiler: someone who would be a spoiler if s/he runs, but chooses not to run.  Similarly, we can define a counterfactual Condorcet winner: someone who would be the sincere Condorcet winner if s/he runs, but chooses not to run.

Spoiling (which violates the IIA criterion) isn't necessarily bad.  For instance, if Scissors by running changes the winner from Paper to Rock, the additional preference information gained when Scissors runs may suggest Rock is better than Paper.  In this case, we should hope Scissors isn't deterred from running.

The possibility of rock-paper-scissors preferences shows that some spoiling and violation of IIA is unavoidable for ANY plausibly democratic voting method. (That means any voting method that tends to reduce to majority rule when there are only two candidates.  Cardinal voting systems offer no escape from this tendency, because voters in the majority who prefer Paper over Rock have an obvious strategic incentive to vote the maximum for Paper and the minimum for Rock when only Paper & Rock are running, which is equivalent to majority rule.)

--Steve

On 12/5/2024 12:34 AM, Greg Dennis wrote:
> Why leave out the November 2022 election where Peltola was the Condorcet winner against Begich?
>
> On Wed, Dec 4, 2024 at 4:46 PM robert bristow-johnson <rbj at audioimagination.com> wrote:
>
>     This is what we've learned from the 2-year history of Ranked-Choice Voting in Alaska.
>
>     The Instant-Runoff Voting method of RCV failed in Alaska August 2022 at everything that RCV is supposed to do for us (as it also did in [Burlington Vermont 2009](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1jIhFQfEoxSdyRz5SqEjZotbVDx4xshwM/view)).
>
>     Essentially, it was a spoiled election with all the bad things that come with a spoiled election.  In August 2022, Sarah Palin was a loser whose presence in the race materially changed who the winner was.  Had Palin not run, Begich would meet Peltola in the final round and defeat Peltola.  (We know this from the [tallies](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1y32bPVmq6vb6SwnMn6vwQxzoJfvrv6ID/view) from the Cast Vote Record.)
>
>     The definition of a Spoiler is a loser whose presence in the race materially changes who the winner is.
>
>     So then these voters for the spoiler, Palin, they find out that their second-choice vote was never counted.  Their favorite candidate was defeated and their second-choice vote was never counted.  If just 1 out of 13 of the Palin voters that marked Begich as their lesser evil (there were 34089 of them); if about 2600 of these voters voted tactically (the tactic is called "compromising") and marked their lesser-evil (Begich) as their first-choice vote, then Begich would have met Peltola in the final round and beaten Peltola.
>
>     They were promised that it was safe to vote for their favorite, Sarah Palin, but by doing so they caused the election of Mary Peltola.  But they prevented Begich from having a head-to-head with Peltola because Palin did instead and lost.
>
>     There were about 112000 voting GOP and 75000 Dem.  The GOP vote was split and RCV promised that it would resolve the split vote correctly, but it didn't.  IRV propped up the *weaker* of the two GOP candidates against Peltola and that candidate lost.  If, instead, RCV had put Begich up against Peltola, Begich would have won.
>
>     They were promised that RCV would let them vote their hopes, not their fears.  But they would have been better off voting their fears.  They were promised their second-choice vote would count if their favorite candidate couldn't get elected but that second-choice vote was never counted for these Palin voters.
>
>     More Alaskans, 87899 to 79461 (an 8438 voter margin), preferred Begich to Peltola and marked their ballots saying so.  But Mary Peltola was elected instead.
>
>     This November, again, more Alaskan voters marked their ballots that Begich is preferred to Peltola by nearly the same margin, 8354 (164117 to 155763).
>
>     Both times about 8000 more Alaskans said they would prefer Begich over Peltola to go to Washington and represent the state.  And, both times, Alaskan voters marked their ballots saying so.  Both times, Instant-Runoff Voting was used.
>
>     What was different?
>
>     Sarah Palin was in the race in 2022 and not in the race in 2024.  And different winners resulted.
>
>     --
>
>     r b-j . _ . _ . _ . _ rbj at audioimagination.com
>
>     "Imagination is more important than knowledge."
>
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> -- 
> *Greg Dennis, Ph.D. :: Policy Director*
> Voter Choice Massachusetts
>
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