Pierce County, Washington (which contains Tacoma) rejected two anti-Instant-Runoff Voting measures on November 7, 2007. Voters had approved IRV in 2006. The County Council then put a measure on the 2007 ballot asking if the voters want to postpone IRV until 2010. That was rejected by a 34%-66% margin.
Voters also rejected a related ballot measure, asking the voters if they want to limit a voter’s options under IRV to just three choices. That lost 38%-62%.
Voters approved a third measure, which says that voters should be limited to only 3 choices in IRV elections until the technology has been improved. Thanks to Phil Gardner for this news.
Major defects of the Instant Runoff Voting (IRV) Method, 30 May 2007
Times are ROUGH and TOUGH — like 1860 or 1932. The *middle* is very divided.
34 H W S
33 S W H
16 W H S
16 W S H
99
Place Votes Table
1 2 3
H 34 16 49 99
S 33 16 50 99
W 32 67 0 99
99 99 99
With IRV, W loses. H beats S 50-49.
Head to head (Condorcet method) —
W beats H 65-34
W beats S 66-33
W WINS.
IF the first 2 place votes are *YES* votes (as in Approval Voting), then —
H 50
S 49
W 99
W WINS
IF the Bucklin Method is used (add place votes to get a majority), then adding the place 1 and place 2 votes —
H 50
S 49
W 99
W WINS
H Hitler, S Stalin, W George Washington (American General in the 1775-1781 American Revolution and the first U.S. President)
IRV is super-dangerous since it ignores most of the data in a place votes table — regardless of the New Age mindless math MORONS hyping IRV in various places — especially for executive / judicial offices.
IRV WILL nominate / elect HITLER / STALIN TYPE extremists —- who will claim a mighty IRV majority *mandate* for their EVIL stuff — while defeating compromise candidates — especially for offices like President, Governor, mayor, etc.
———
ALL voting methods have problems with 3 or more choices. See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_system
Example – divided majority
26 AB
25 BA
49 Z
To the previous poster, you are basically correct about how poor a voting method IRV is. But the only concrete and meaningful way to express that is with Bayesian regret. Some typical figures are here:
http://RangeVoting.org/UniqBest.html
In general, Range Voting is better than Approval Voting (actually just a type of Range Voting) is better than Condorcet is better than Borda is better than IRV is better than plurality. Plus there are scores of other voting methods that aren’t talked about much.
Clay Shentrup
San Francisco, CA
clay@electopia.org
415.240.1973