[EM] Re December 2024 Brookings report: "The future of the instant runoff election reform"

[Ralph Suter]

Thanks for mentioning this report, Rob.

It's very long, about 6500 words not counting footnotes, but has a lot 
of very useful detail and is very well written. I recommend it to 
everyone interested in the current politics of election reform in the 
U.S., even if you're opposed to IRV, as I am, and favor Condorcet, 
approval voting, and other election methods over IRV. The article also 
helps make clear why IRV, despite its shortcomings, is still far better 
than plurality voting, which IRV advocates have failed to convincingly 
enough explain to voters and which in turn is the main reason IRV was 
rejected by voters in 2024 except in DC and, just barely, Alaska.

One of article's weaknesses is that it lumps top two and other top-N 
methods together as similar kinds of reforms and says nothing about why 
the spoiler problem is especially problematic with top two but 
increasingly less so with other top-N methods and how how approval 
voting would produce much better top-N methods. It also says nothing 
about Condorcet and other ranked voting methods or about approval and 
other alternative non-ranking methods. However, there has been so little 
effective advocacy of Condorcet and other methods in the U.S. that the 
author had little reason to mention them, especially since he was 
focused on methods that have been widely advocated and voted on in 
recent referendums and by state legislators. Including a discussion of 
alternatives to IRV and alternative top-N and other methods would have 
required either a much longer and more complicated article or a separate 
article.

I'm copying this to the Brookings email address, so maybe the author, 
Darrell M. West, will consider writing a separate article. If he reads 
this and may consider writing a separate article, I strongly urge him to 
write to Rob.

-Ralph Suter

On 5/20/2025 3:01 PM, election-methods-request at lists.electorama.com wrote:
Message: 1
> Date: Mon, 19 May 2025 15:30:17 -0700
> From: Rob Lanphier<roblan at gmail.com>
> To:election-methods at lists.electorama.com
> Subject: [EM] December 2024 report: "The future of the instant runoff
> 	election reform"
> Message-ID:
> 	<CAK9hOYknuSJ5Oce+1peVHw71yaGzBkapctXO84PzQ2AE4Zv_1Q at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
>
> Hi folks,
>
> I thought y'all might be interested in this report from Brookings:
> https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-future-of-the-instant-runoff-election-reform/
>
> I'm curious what y'all think of the report.
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