The British blog www.anthonysmith.me.uk has an imaginative “flowchart” showing how a rational voter decides whom to vote for, under the run-of-the-mill system used generally in the United States as well as in most British elections. The British call that system “First Past the Post”. The most common U.S. term for it is the “plurality-winner” system.
The point of the anthonysmith blog post is to show that Instant Runoff Voting (which the British call the Alternative Vote system) is actually simpler for the voter than the old-fashioned system in current use in almost all our elections. See it here. Thanks to Bob Richard for the link.
How many math MORONS in the U.K. ???
IRV – Alt.V. = THE method to elect Hitler/Stalin clones to single offices when the muddled Middle is divided.
34 H–M–S
33 S–M–H
16 M–H–S
16 M–S–H
99
With IRV – M loses. H has a mighty 50-49 mandate. Take Cover.
How many regimes are left/right SEVERELY divided ???
——
Approval Voting for executive/judicial offices — pending Condorcet head to head math.
P.R. for legislative bodies — Total Votes / Total Seats = EQUAL votes needed for each seat winner — even in gerrymander rotted to the core jolly olde England for electing MPs.
Peaceful division of regimes if the robot party hacks can NOT get along — even with P.R.
So if there were 21 candidates, I would rank them, then write them on the ballot paper? What if I didn’t want to rank all the candidates? What if I wanted to rank two or more candidates the same?
What if I was prevented from writing preference for more than 3 candidates, even though I had faithfully executed the flow chart by ranking all 21 candidates. Couldn’t that result in election of someone with only 25% of those casting a vote, even though many others may have ranked the candidate in step 1 of your flow chart?
What if the mechanics of writing down the rankings was so difficult a task that 20% of voters who attempted to do so, failed to do so?
There is no flow chart for an election that uses a runoff system.
I appreciate the work that the author put into his graphics, but I honestly do not see much difference. Both require ranking of candidates. We already do this here stateside.
Things didn’t turn out to be so simple with the recent IRV election in NC:
http://irvbad4nc.blogspot.com/2010/12/ncarolinas-statewide-instant-runoff.html
48 days after the election, instant runoff voting produced a “winner” for the NC Court of Appeals, for the “Wynn”seat. Thanks to IRV, an experimental tallying method was used, the election was almost a tie, a recount was called for, and we had a plurality result, not a majority win.
After counting the IRV votes, the highest vote getter lost his 100,000 vote lead, and the contest became so close that a recount was requested. The declared winner won with 28% of votes from all ballots cast on election day. We do not know how many 2nd and 3rd choice votes each candidate got, as this data was not released to the public.</i<
(…)
How about having a 100 candidate IRV election for U.S.A. Prez — with 10,000 court cases and recounts per day — i.e. have TOTAL chaos (10,000 times worse than in 2000 with Bush v. Gore in Florida) ???
#2 Most elections don’t have 21 candidates.
What if I wanted to vote for multiple candidates in the first round of a top two election?
What about the dropoff in turnout that we see in runoff elections? For example, the turnout for the U.S. Senate election runoff in Georgia in December 2008 was only 55% of the general election turnout. Saxby Chambliss did not win a majority of the first round votes.
#1 – With Top Two, the General Election is between H & S. Now there is nothing that says the voters will vote exactly as they did the first time with the opportunity to campaign some more and the possiblity of new information about the candidates could be reveiled, good or bad. This is one of the reasons I do not like early voting.
I should have indicated in #7 I was talking about combining open primary with irv then top two.
The author’s argument would only be true if Instant Runoff Voting (“Alternative Vote”) really did incentivize a sincere ordering of the candidates.
But it doesn’t.
http://www.electology.org/irv-plurality
Voters typically make about seven times as many ballon-invalidating errors with IRV, proving that they demonstrably DO NOT find it simpler. They mess up 7 times as often with IRV.
ScoreVoting.net/SPRates.html
There is a vastly simpler solution that NEVER gives voters an incentive to betray their sincere favorite candidate. Score Voting, or its simplified form called Approval Voting.
#6 Some elections do have 21 candidates.
Your vote could be split between the candidates.
If Georgia used a Top 2 Open Primary, there would not have been a problem. And it really is not a problem that there was a dropoff for the runoff.
Well thank heavens there’s an expert to explain to us how simple IRV is.
#2: The reason “[t]here is no flow chart for an election that uses a runoff system” in Anthony Smith’s post is that his post is talking about real politics in the UK where he lives. There, the choice is between IRV (called “Alternative Vote” or AV there) and sticking with First Past the Post. No one there is considering a switch to a system where voters have to go to the polls two or more times for a single election. As far as I can tell, the only other election methods receiving some discussion as part of the current debate are various types of proportional representation.
If someone were to make a flowchart of how one would vote in a two-round runoff system, the part for the first round would be even more complicated than that for FPTP (basically involving voters’ expectations about whether their favorite candidates will come in first or second, and whether the other candidate among the top two is someone their favorite is likely to beat in a runoff). The part for the second round would be simpler, however, as there is really only one choice, whether to vote sincerely or to abstain (either as a protest or due to indifference).
The strategic considerations in voting in a two round runoff are similar to those Clay Shentrup (author of #9) and some other advocates of range voting claim apply to IRV. In reality, those considerations only rarely apply to IRV, but frequently apply to two round runoffs. This is mainly because in a two round runoff, a voter who tries to promote a weaker opponent for their sincere top choice in the first round still can vote sincerely in the runoff, while in an IRV election, supporting the weaker opponent over the true favorite in the first round would also do so in later rounds if the strategy was successful. Thus it takes much more precise and accurate knowledge of other voters’ intentions to know whether it is safe to make such a strategic vote in an IRV election than in the first round of a two-round runoff.
#12 During the lame duck period of the Labour government last year when Labour was proposing a referendum on AV, a counterproposal was to use a conventional runoff, one week after the election.
In a two-round runoff system, ranking is generally simpler since it can be largely incomplete. Very few voters will vote cynically in the first round, since it puts their own candidate at risk. Voters then have an opportunity to re-evaluate their choice in the runoff, and may have a more positive feeling of participation, than if their original 4th choice was deemed to have been elected.
To say that strategic exaggeration is only “rarely” advisable with IRV, since it rarely confeds an advantage, is like saying that seatbelt usage is only rarely advisable since you only rarely get into accidents. This is one of the most common statistical allacies made in election method debates.
http://www.electology.org/irv-plurality#TOC-ALWAYS-exaggerate
That refutes the basis for your view that stdategy is less if a problem for TTR than for IRV.
As my page also points out, empirical date from places like Australia shows that voters ACTUALLY DO THIS on a massive scale. Not because they undedstand the mathematics, but purely from intuition and/or the “how to vote” cards.
What percentage of *literate* voters mess up even writing 1, 2, 3, 4, etc. in ranking choices ???
— pending those 100 percent safe and secure E-voting machines from Heaven with public codes for all to see — to check on making correct rank order votes.
Use the same number only once.
Do not skip numbers.
Numbers in order.
Difficult for humans. A bit too simple for computer codes ???
This flowchart would be accurate only if providing honest rankings was the optimal strategy in an IRV election.
And that is not the case.
Dale Sheldon-Hess,
Great minds think alike, eh? 🙂
For unaware folks —
ALL election methods have problems with 3 or more choices.
A beats B A > B
Choice C comes along
C might beat A head to head.
BUT B may beat C head to head.
C > A > B > C
34 ABC
33 BCA
32 CAB
99
65 C > 34 A
66 A > 33 B
67 B > 32 C
Much more complex with 4 or more choices going head to head — especially in legislative body elections.
Win a Nobel prize in math to solve the circular problem — around since the 1780s (repeat 1780s).
Think Approval Voting for starters — for needed tie breakers.
Print out and paste on a wall near you.
#13: I either was never aware of or forgot about any proposal for a two-round runoff as an alternative to Labour’s IRV proposal during the tail end of the previous parliament. In any case, a one week interval between the two rounds would never work in the U.S. (and, I suspect, would be difficult in the UK, even with their simpler, less frequent elections). However, that died, and I’ll assume that if there was any, you would have mentioned any consideration of a two-round runoff in the current debate about the reform bill and AV referendum.
I agree that if it were feasible (i.e., didn’t cost too much and didn’t provoke too much resistance from election officials) and didn’t result in reduced participation due to election fatigue, multiple round runoffs would be preferable to IRV for single-winner elections. However, reducing the choices to just two for a second and final round (as was done in the “instant top two” system used in North Carolina, not just in election schemes with the runoff(s) separated in time) has too many negatives to overcome the positives of allowing voters a chance to reconsider with additional concentrated scrutiny of the remaining candidates. The 2002 French Presidential election is a prime example of what can go wrong with a two-round runoff system that multiple-round runoff systems, whether instant or delayed, prevent.
Anyway, to get back to the point, what the flow chart for a two-round runoff election would be, you give no evidence that voters don’t make the “cynical” calculations of how to vote in the initial round that they do in a first past the post election, just claim that behavior is rare. If that’s the case, why is there pressure on candidates not to run, and on voters to ignore “lesser” candidates from their political faction or ethnic group, so as not to split the vote? Or do you consider such behavior to be part of sincere voting?
IRV-Alt.V. has blatant outrageous UN-equal treatment of 2nd, 3rd, etc later choice votes.
Put in the nearest junkyard ASAP.
The Brits are being set up for major extremism IF the Alt.V. SCHEME is approved in May 2011.
You can always find isolated examples of seemingly “bad” results for any election method. The French runoff with Le Pen is commonly cited. But then you have IRV elections like San Francisco district 10. And you have the possibility of mind-blowingly bad scenarios like this one:
http://www.electology.org/irv-worst-case-scenario
On the whole, when you factor in issues like precinct summability, ballot spoilage, cost, and potential for escaping duopoly, TTR seems approximately as good or better than IRV.
ScoreVoting.net/HonestRunoff.html
In Bayesian regret calculations, TTR is comparable to IRV even when you don’t throw in the ignorance-decreasing effect of the runoff.
ScoreVoting.net/StratHonMix.html
There is really no comprehensive objective data that IRV is better than TTR, on the whole.
Beyond that, Score Voting and Approval Voting are simpler and far superior to EITHER type of runoff system.
ScoreVoting.net/CFERlet.html
#6 Very few elections have 21 candidates.
“And it really is not a problem that there was a dropoff for the runoff.”
Fair enough. If losing 45% of the electorate between rounds is not a problem in a runoff election, then neither are exhausted ballots under IRV.
Georgia could also have used IRV and avoided the severe dropoff in turnout. Under IRV, the people would not have had their November ballot reduced to only two choices: Democrats and Republicans.
#21 The “mind-blowingly bad scenario” that you show for IRV is mind-blowingly improbable.
IRV can NEVER elect the Condorcet loser of an election, but score and approval voting can. TTR can deliver worse election results than IRV.
# 23 Who is the Condorcet winner in # 1 ???
ONE educated guess.