IRV protects the will of the voters
May 12, 2007
Letter to the Editor
Several years ago I would have vehemently argued against Instant Runoff Voting, but today I am of the opposite view. Three things changed my mind: the 2002 lieutenant governor's race where the winner received only about 42 percent of the vote; the avoidance of substantive issue coverage by the media and many politicians; and finally Burlington's successful use of IRV in their mayoral election just last year. And now I've been given a fourth reason thanks to Mr. Leader ("Instant runoff voting is a travesty," letters, May 7).
Mr. Leader uses an example with "45 percent Republican, 25 percent [Democratic], and 30 percent 'Out There.'" What he misses is with those numbers it's the Democratic politician who has become the "out there" candidate, and the previously "out there" has obviously become much more mainstream. This is a salutary effect of IRV as it allows the will of the people to guide the political process rather than the process being guided by the offers of the current established parties.
I'm a values/issues voter. I've done volunteer work for the Vermont Republican Party, and I've tried working with the Vermont Democratic Party. I've spent time with the Vermont Grassroots Party, the Vermont Green Party, and I've driven a Progressive candidate around. Nowadays I primarily vote other than Democrat or Republican from experience, and not, as Mr. Leader would label me, out of reflex. As I stated at the beginning of this paragraph: I'm a values/issues voter.
IRV is not intended to protect the political parties of any color: red, blue, green, orange or whatnot. IRV is intended to protect the will of the voters, and the fine example Mr. Leader provided is yet one more reason to support IRV.
Rama O.A. Schneider
Williamstown
Labels: democracy, IRV, legislation
4 Comments:
Great post, Drew. And yes, Vermont can be the nation's leader in affirming Vermont founders' support for majority rule. (They had runoffs initially,and still require that the legislature pick the winner if the voters don't elect a majority candidate.)
Time to rally around getting instant runoff voting in place for congressional elections -- the senate passed it, and now the house can act in January. The governor can decide whether he supports majority rule -- let's hope he follows the League of Women Voters, the Grange, Common Cause, VPIRG, John McCain, Howard Dean and many more in saying yes to majority rule .
Our current election method (plurality) is down-right undemocratic. We need a majority-rule method like IRV in place for 2008. I hope VPIRG can use its networks to rally support and get the bill through the House in January. I know the League of Women Voters and Common Cause are working the issue as well, but they don't have the people-power VPIRG can muster.
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.
Consider 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
Thanks all for the comments and thoughts.
For the record (one post made me think this was unclear) this is our news blog where we reproduce selections of news coverage that quote/cover VPIRG's work. So other than our quote, I don't think we can take credit or blame for the quality of the story snippet. If you want to hear our full throated arguments for IRV, you'll want to hunt down some of our democracy-tagged posts here www.vpirg.org/blog.
Broken Ladder, I've not heard of range voting before and will try and look into it. Certainly we are always interested in the most effective ways to ensure voter choice and majority rule. But I'm not sure I agree with all your characterizations of IRV. Our projections, and limited experience with the election system in Burlington lead us to believe that IRV is a very effective system, and certainly possible to administer using existing technology. I'm also not sure I can grant you "GCPM" scenario as realistic: A green party candidate as the #1 receiver of first place votes? I'm not saying a scenario couldn't emerge where any system, even IRV, elected an unexpected winner. But is seems a reach to say that because it's mathematically possible to devise a system where a 3rd or even 4th choice candidate wins that this is 'likely'.
Like I said, I'll take a look at your sites and we'll keep an eye out for other systems that can work. But for now we're going to continue backing IRV because we know it can work, we know it can be implemented and as a state with three major political parties where a majority of our current state-wide elected officials won their first race without a majority, we need a new election system now.
-drew hudson
VPIRG Field&Communications Director
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