If you've ever been in a neighborhood restaurant at 6:30 in the morning, you would have probably met several men sharing coffee and a table; this is a ritual that usually includes the discussion of politics, in addition to the weather, local football, etc. And often when talking politics, there is a consensus about the poor quality of our representatives in Washington, DC.
Of course they aren't entirely serious, and they may be male-bonding a bit, but this is the conventional wisdom with today's presidential candidates in both major parties; we are disgruntled that big money raising events have lifted a few of our candidates to the "top tier", and that that has already lifted to the top of the polls those who will likely win their respective parties' nominations next year.
There are solutions available to voters for this dilemma, however. FairVote is a national organization that promotes electoral reforms, including IRV (Instant Runoff Voting). With IRV, you can rank all of the candidates on the ballot based on your preference-- this eliminates the time and money for runoff elections, but, more importantly, breaks the "winner-take-all" system in place today. There is a growing recognition in all levels of government to the value of this alternative to today's nasty and vitriolic campaigns among all candidates.
FairVote also promotes "proportional representation", "universal voter registration" and other improvements in the quality of America's electoral system. IRV is today's hottest reform, allowing we the people a closer and more honest representation from our future elected officials.
Great post. Instant runoff voting really is exciting, and D.C. is a place where it would make a lot of sense -- perhaps folding the primary into the general for one November election where everyone's votes would be counted when it matters.
ReplyDeleteD.C. and a lot of other places are also good for proportional representation voting systems -- ones that don't just open up choices in campaigns, but open up representation more in legislatures.
This post unfortunately repeats common myths about IRV. The truth is that better and simpler methods than IRV exist - and IRV is lethal to third parties, because voting for a non-major-party candidate is statistically more likely to hurt you than help you. The world needs Range Voting or its simplified form of Approval Voting. Here's why.
ReplyDeleteConsider this hypothetical election using IRV.
#voters their vote
10 G > C > P > M
3 C > G > P > M
5 C > P > M > G
6 M > P > C > G
4 P > M > C > G
C is the clear Condorcet (condor-SAY) winner, meaning he is preferred by a landslide majority over all his individual rivals. C is preferred over G, P, and M all by an 18-10 margin.
But... M wins, even though he also has fewer first-place votes (6 voters) than C with 8.
Also:
1. P is preferred to M by 22 of the 28 voters, yet he's the first candidate eliminated.
2. G also has more first-place votes (10) than M's 6.
3. So M either loses pairwise to, or has fewer first-place votes than (or both) every rival, but still IRV elects M.
The example above was intended to be "realistic," perhaps somewhat resembling the situation in the (now evolving) 2008 US presidential race with G="Green", M=McCain, C=Edwards, and P=Paul. But if you are willing to drop realism and construct artificial election scenarios, then this demonstrates how to construct arbitrarily-severe election examples of this kind: -- http://rangevoting.org/IRVamp.html#bad
IRV sounds initially appealing, because people picture a weak third party candidate who loses in the first round. The myth is that this takes away the fear of voting for your sincere favorite candidate, and gives third parties a fair chance to grow; but if that candidate or his party ever grows to be a contender, he is statistically more likely to hurt the party closest to his own than to win. It doesn't matter how unlikely you imagine the above scenario to be - it's still _more_ likely than the odds "Green" will win. And so third party voters will learn to strategically vote for their favorite major-party candidate, because it will more often be a good strategy than a bad one. You don't have to buy my math; you can look at decades of IRV usage in Australia's house, and Ireland's presidency. Both use IRV, and have been two-party dominated. So much for the myths that IRV allows you to "vote your hopes, not your fears", and eliminates spoilers. Now you can see why the Libertarian Reform Caucus calls IRV a "bullet in the foot" for third parties, and why Australian political analysts at AustralianPolitics.com say that IRV "promotes a two-party system to the detriment of minor parties and independents." Ironically, most of the many countries in the world who use a genuine _delayed_ runoff have broken free of duopoly. Yet third parties just worked to help replace that system with IRV in Oakland, CA. Talk about dooming yourself by ignoring history.
Electoral reform advocates (especially third parties!) should be demanding Range Voting - score all the candidates and elect the one with the highest average. Its simplified form, Approval Voting, is probably the most feasible to implement. It simply uses ordinary ballots, but allows us to vote for as many candidates as we like. Consider the benefits:
* More resistant to strategy: As we see above, IRV strategically "forces" voters not to top-rank their sincere favorite; the general strategy with IRV is to top-rank your favorite of the front-runners (typically the major party candidates). But with Range Voting and Approval Voting, this _never_ happens. The worst a voter may do is exaggerate his sincere scores to the max and min scores allowed. But with Range Voting, a vote for your favorite candidate can never hurt you, or the candidate, whereas with IRV it can hurt both. -- http://RangeVoting.org/StratHonMix.html
* The previous fact helps to explain why IRV results in two-party duopoly, just like plurality voting. -- http://RangeVoting.org/TarrIrv.html
* Spoiler free: Whereas IRV merely _reduces_ spoilers. -- http://rangevoting.org/FBCexecSumm.html
* Decreases spoiled ballots: Since voting for more than one candidate is permissible, the number of invalid ballots experimentally goes down with Range and Approval Voting. But IRV typically results in a seven fold increase in spoiled ballots when we started using IRV. -- http://rangevoting.org/SPRates.html
* Simpler to use: In 2006, the Center for Range Voting conducted an exit poll experiment in Beaumont, TX. There were 5 gubernatorial candidates, and voters were allowed to rate them 0-10 (or "abstain"). They all seemed to find the process as simple and intuitive. There were no complaints of complexity, or any questions for clarification. And the fact that spoilage rates go down with Range Voting, but up with IRV, shows that there is some objective sense in which RV is simpler. Voters literally make fewer mistakes.
* Simpler to implement/tabulate: A simple one-round summation tells us the results, whereas IRV's potential for multiple rounds can cause long delays before the final results are determined. A positive side-effect of Range Voting's simplicity is that it makes the necessary transition to manual counting, and away from voting machines, more feasible. And Range Voting can be conducted on all standard voting machines in the interim. Whereas IRV's complexity leads most communities implementing it to purchase expensive and fraud-conducive (electronic!) voting machines, the fraudster's best friend. -- http://RangeVoting.org/Complexity.html
* Greater voter satisfaction: Using extensive computer modeling of elections, a Princeton math Ph.D. named Warren D. Smith has shown that these methods lead to better average satisfaction with election results, surpassing the alternatives by a good margin. But IRV turns out to be the second _worst_ of the commonly proposed alternatives. This mean that all voters will benefit from the adoption of either of these superior voting methods, regardless of political stripe. -- http://RangeVoting.org/vsi.html
* Reduces the probability of ties: While they are not extremely common, they do happen. IRV statistically increases them, but Range Voting decreases them. -- http://RangeVoting.org/TieRisk.html
* In case you're going to say, "But IRV has more _momentum_ than Range Voting", you should consider this. -- http://RangeVoting.org/IRVsplitExec.html
* In case you wonder why groups like FairVote and the League of Women Voters support IRV, maybe you should consider all the misleading and even blatantly false claims they've made about it. -- http://RangeVoting.org/Irvtalk.html
Get the facts at RangeVoting.org and ApprovalVoting.org
And if you're in the market for a better system of proportional representation (http://RangeVoting.org/PropRep.html) than the antiquated STV system, check out Reweighted Range Voting and Asset Voting.
http://RangeVoting.org/RRV.html
http://RangeVoting.org/Asset.html
Clay Shentrup
San Francisco, CA
415.240.1973
thebrokenladder@gmail.com
If you're a Libertarian, you should consider two things.
ReplyDelete1) The Libertarian Reform Caucus calls IRV a "bullet in the foot", and advocates Range Voting (and its simplified form, Approval Voting).
http://reformthelp.org/issues/voting/range.php
2) Michael Badnarik, former Libertarian Presidential candidate, has endorsed Range and Approval Voting. He actually had Rob LeGrand, head of Citizens for Approval Voting, on his Austin-based radio program about a month ago to discuss this.
Beware of the false and misleading claims of IRV supporters. A scientific look at the issue of voting reform shows that IRV is not the answer. Not by a long shot.
Broken Ladder,
ReplyDeleteThank you for informing me of your voting system; to be frank, I wasn't aware of your organization until now. You have put alot of work into it, and I will seriously look at it more. Citizens for Approval Voting is located in my state's Live Music Capital of the World, Austin Tx, too! :))
Again, your recommendations are explained further at www.rangevoting.org and www.appovalvoting.org, for those who would like to check it out further; and for comparison purposes, please check out another alternative to today's voting system, www.instantrunoff.com for IRV info.
More ideas are welcome here! :)
My recommendation to start with the difference between executive and legislative offices.
ReplyDeleteFor executive offices, add the Condorcet family methods to the approval/range family and IRV, both of which are referred to above.
For legislative offices, you really have to decide between single-member districts and proportional representation before you can start thinking about specific forms of either. Otherwise you're putting the cart in front of the horse.
Of all the choices to be made about election methods, the one between proportional representation and winner-take-all is the most basic.
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ReplyDelete