<div dir="ltr">How did the 2009 <span style="font-size:12.8000001907349px">Burlington Vermont Mayoral "fail"? It was one of the rare cases where it didn't elect the Condorcet winner, but unlike plurality, at least it didn't elect the Condorcet loser out of the three strongest candidates. IRV in this case gave a more representative result than would have been the case with plurality. And in almost all cases IRV does this.</span></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Tue, Oct 6, 2015 at 8:05 AM, robert bristow-johnson <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:rbj@audioimagination.com" target="_blank">rbj@audioimagination.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">On 10/1/15 1:33 PM, Sennet Williams wrote:<br>
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btw, We might consider keeping IRV distinguished from RCV.<br>
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yes, Sand you might well consider doing that.<br>
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might i suggest reading up in Wikipedia (maybe start at <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-member_district#Comparison_of_single-member_district_election_methods" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-member_district#Comparison_of_single-member_district_election_methods</a> ) and <a href="http://wiki.electorama.com/wiki/Special:AllPages" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">http://wiki.electorama.com/wiki/Special:AllPages</a> .<br>
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Ranked-Choice Voting (that which we do with a Ranked-Order Ballot) is *not* the same as IRV despite what apologists at FairVote would suggest.<br>
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while IRV may be better than simple plurality voting, it *has* problems and *has*, at least once, failed seriously in a governmental election (Burlington Vermont Mayoral 2009) which led to its repeal.<br>
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there are better methods than IRV, and every time IRV fails, it sullies not just IRV but all methods of ranked voting because sometimes ignorant voters and dishonest advocates conflate "IRV" with ranked voting. same ballot (or nearly the same), but different methods of evaluating or tabulating the ballots to discern whom the majority choice of the electorate really is.<br>
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I know that locally (in the bay area), four cities voted for "IRV." Instead, SF and Alameda county supervisors bought machines that can only count three rankings, and they call it Ranked Choice, and that is inferior to true IRV where only 3 rankings are allowed. An anti-IRV Berkeley council member did his own research study that proved that all rankings should be allowed, but the county made the final decision. Now it should be obvious that he was right, because both the Oakland and SF mayoral elections were so close that the # of expired ballots vastly outnumbered the top three ranked candidates, so there is no way to know which candidate was actually preferred by the most voters.<br>
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this has to do with the number of ranking levels available on a ballot with finite area on paper. 3 ranking levels when there are 20+ candidates is a problem. a voter might well find out after the election that they "threw away their vote" because none of the candidates they ranked ended up being one of the top contenders.<br>
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(From my observation, the final winner would not have won either election if all rankings had been allowed.<br>
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because you cannot have infinite area on a paper ballot (and i am still for the killing of trees to leave a paper trail for election integrity), the only solution to keep the number of candidates from outstripping the number of ranking levels are reasonable ballot-access laws. if your ballot has, say, 5 levels of ranking, then the ballot access laws (the number of petition signatures needed to get on the ballot) should be sufficiently strict to prevent, in a typical election year, more than 5 candidates (plus one write-in) on the ballot.<span class="HOEnZb"><font color="#888888"><br>
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r b-j <a href="mailto:rbj@audioimagination.com" target="_blank">rbj@audioimagination.com</a><br>
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"Imagination is more important than knowledge."<br>
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