On March 8, the Hawaii House passed HB 638 unanimously. It provides that in special Congressional elections, and county elections, Instant Runoff Voting will be used. In Hawaii, current law provides for only a single round in special Congressional elections. Here is the text of the bill. The preamble bill has an explanation of Instant Runoff Voting and mentions some other places that use it.
IRV = THE method to elect Stalin/Hitler clones when the mystified Middle is divided.
34 S–M–H
33 H–M–S
16 M–S–H
16 M–H–S
99
Gee – who has a mere 99 votes in 1st plus 2nd place ???
Gee – who has the highest approval ???
The U.S.A. marches on to political DOOM with IRV, NPV, closed primaries, etc. etc. — like lemmings going over a 20,000 foot cliff into a tidal wave ocean.
Re: Demo Rep’s response: This is exactly the attitude the two corporate backed parties have–that the “middle” they depend upon is “mystified”. If there is one thing I have learned from third party politics it is this: Republicans and Democrats would rather lose to one another than let anyone else into the game.
@Green
What you said was actually demonstrated in Vermont. Back in 2006, the Democrats didn’t originally plan to run a gubernatorial candidate, but when Anthony Polina ran for it as a progressive independent (While technically independent, he was for all intents and purposes a Vermont Progressive Party candidate) the Democrats decided to run a candidate to essentially kneecap him (yes, playing “spoiler”). It’s not established whether he would have won without such a kneecap, but it would have been close to the Republican challenger, much moreso if the Democrat didn’t siphon off about 19% of the vote.
Yikes. There is not a worse available electoral method than IRV!
IRV does *not* find majority winners. IRV does *not* eliminate the spoiler problem. IRV is nonmonotonic, removing voters’ right to know whether the effect of casting a vote for a candidate helps or hurts that candidate’s chances of winning.
I.e. IRV has all the same flaws as plurality voting plus several more serious problems.
Eventually HI will regret adopting this fundamentally unfair, complex, transparency, voting rights and verifiability-eviscerating electoral method.
IRV fails more of Arrow’s Fairness criteria than plurality does and is not precinct-summable, so must be counted centrally in one location only after all the ballots are ready to count, and is extremely difficult to manually recount or to manually audit for accuracy – so requires blindly trusting those easily hackable electronic counts.
Remind me never to move to Hawaii because I want my votes to be counted fairly and accurately. Vendors selling all new software and hardware will be thrilled.
For more information and links to the real story about IRV, see the IRV page on my blog http://kathydopp.com/wordpress/
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