October Op-Eds Weave RCV Spell over Minneapolis

Minneapolis is conducting their local elections by ranked choice voting (AKA instant runoff voting) for the second time this November. I've already written about this a number of times. But with the election drawing closer, RCV proponents are getting op-eds published in an attempt to hype the systems purported advantages.

Please indulge me while I reiterate my refutations of these common, and false, RCV talking points.

• RCV does not "ensure majority outcomes": With the large number of candidates running for mayor, and the inability of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor party to settle on an endorsement, there is an extremely high likelihood that the winner of that election will not have a majority of the votes cast, since a large number of votes will be exhausted. But be on the lookout, because reported results will likely conceal the total number of ballots cast, as they did in the 2010 Oakland mayoral election, giving only the number of "continuing ballots" in the final round.
• RCV does not "encourage more respectful campaigns": We know this because of experience in California. It does seems that the first couple RCV elections are more respectful, but this is solely because of RCV advocates' claiming this to be true, and uncertain politicians being afraid that they might be right. But after having some experience with the new system, trying some negative ads, and seeing the effect on their polling, the politicians realize they've been tricked, and go back to their old ways.
• RCV does not eliminate "fear of a wasted vote": This is the most persistent RCV myth, because it appears true at first glance. And it is true... when there are only two significant candidates. Since most elections have only two significant candidates, it can take quite some time for the truth to come out. But we only need to look at Burlington, VT to remind ourselves. It's unclear if we'll see it in Minneapolis this year though. I give it about 1-in-5 odds of occurring.

I do agree with the op-ed authors that this is perhaps the most important test of RCV yet. And I've already made one testable prediction about the outcome of these races: That the mayoral race winner will not win a majority of the votes cast. And now, I'd like to add a second testable prediction, one for which I have even higher confidence: There will be a higher percentage of spoiled ballots for this election than there were in the 2005 election (the last one before the change to RCV). This op-ed didn't repeat the claim, but previous ones had implied (falsely) there was only one spoiled ballot in the 2009 election. The actual rate was over 4.1%, while the 2005 rate was less than 1.1%. I expect similar performance this year.

Those are my claims. If any RCV proponent would like to make a friendly wager of it, you can step up in the comments.

Yee Paper on Visualizing Voting Methods

Just a quickie (I know, I haven't posted that Egypt piece I promised; turns out, just because you don't know a lot about a foreign country's politics, doesn't mean they're simple) and not something that's new if you've been following us closely, but Ka-Ping Yee has a nice, simple, short paper based on his previous work, titled "Disadvantages of Transferable Vote Systems". This one is restricted to just plurality, IRV, and approval, and comes out strongly for approval. Also, the pictures look pretty sweet, so check it out.

In Minneapolis, Someone's Not Being Truthful

UPDATE: I've figured out where O'Connor is getting his number from.

Way back in 2010, I wrote a post about the final, official, report for Minneapolis' inaugural Ranked Choice Vote, conducted in 2009. It was an entirely boring election with entirely predictable results, and RCV did no worse or better than any other election method would in such a situation. The most-damning part of the report though, was how RCV seemed to have caused a quadrupling in the percentage of spoiled ballots, from 1.06% to 4.1% (see page 18 of the report.)

So imagine my surprise when I see in my RSS feed an OpEd from the Minneapolis StarTribune claiming that only one single ballot was spoiled. And imagine my further surprise when I see that it was penned by Patrick O'Connor, Minneapolis' interim elections director during that 2009 election, the same Patrick O'Connor mentioned by name (on page 1) of the very report that so grandiosely contradicts his statements published today.

Did Mr. O'Connor simply not read the report he commissioned four years ago? Or is he intentionally spreading falsehoods about it? I think Minneapolis deserves to know.

C.G.P. Grey is Wrong (on One Important Thing at the End of His IRV Video)

You've probably seen a couple of the snappy, well-enunciated videos produced by C. G. P. Grey; he's done pieces on the evil of pennies, the problems with copyright, and various aspects of British history, as well as a number of videos on political theory. I want to talk about his video The Alternative Vote Explained. The Alternative Vote is the British name for what Americans may better know as instant runoff voting, or perhaps as ranked choice voting, which are all mechanically identical; I will refer to it as IRV here. The first three minutes of the video are an excellent explanation of the method, including cute fuzzy animals in an easy-to-follow example. But right at the 3:00 mark, Grey makes an egregious mistake.

Grey claims that IRV's crowning achievement is that, unlike plurality voting, IRV doesn't have spoilers, but that isn't true, and it's very easy for me to show it. Consider first his "spoiler-proof" example. Gorilla and Leopard are running for office; Gorilla is about to receive 45% of the vote, and Leopard 55%; Leopard is going to win. But at this point, Tiger enters the race, and 15% of voters move from Leopard to Tiger, making the vote totals Gorilla 45%, Leopard 40%, and Tiger 15%:

Under plurality, that makes the winner change to Gorilla, and that's bad. Grey's claim, and this much is true, is that under IRV, those 15% of Tiger-favoring voters can have their votes reassigned to their second choice, Leopard, putting everything right with the world by making Leopard the winner again.

Persuasive Tiger

But what happens if Tiger is a bit more convincing? Consider the case where Tiger convinces not just 15% of Leopard voters to rank him first, but 30%. That makes the standings Gorilla still at 45%, Leopard 25%, and Tiger 30%:

This leads us into some uncharted territory, because now it's Leopard who is eliminated, and we don't know where Leopard's voters would now go for their second choices. But we can make some educated guesses. Taking a look at the video's earlier example (at the 1:47 mark):

We can see that there is a large contingent—amounting to 25%—of Owl-loving voters, who find themselves torn between Gorilla and Leopard. (Pedantic aside: You can imagine that Leopard gets 15% and Tiger 30% if you want to align this example with our alternate "persuasive Tiger" scenario.) If Owl were running in this race, those 25% of voters would have listed him first. But since he is not, they instead voted for other candidates. It seems that 3 out of 5 owls chose to vote for Gorilla (Turtle's 5% plus Gorilla's 25%, plus 15% from Owl, equals the 45% Gorilla is currently enjoying) while the other 10% are supporting Leopard. There is clearly a split in the Owl community about who the best non-Owl choice is. Suppose that the remaining 10% of Owl supporters, after the elimination of Leopard, re-join their brethren by supporting Gorilla as their second choice in this election, while the other Leopard voters all throw in with Tiger:

That would be a logical assumption. And it means that the final standings are now Gorilla 55%, Tiger 45%:

Let's take a look at that again: If just Gorilla and Leopard run, then Leopard wins. But if Tiger chooses to run, and is able to convince a few more Leopard voters to vote for him, then not only does Tiger still fail to win, he makes it so that Leopard doesn't win either. He actually makes it so that Gorilla wins, which is the exact same problem that we saw with plurality. In other words, we have a candidate who doesn't win, but by entering the race, can change the winner. This is the very definition of a spoiler and it (yes, once again) shows that IRV does, in fact, have spoilers.

Calling C.G.P. Grey

Let me thank Grey for his enlightening videos and his clearly-superior-to-my-own abilities with graphic arts (images not used with permission, but I assert that my usage would qualify as Fair Use.) But this portion of his video is promoting a demonstrably wrong version of the facts, but one which has nonetheless gained a large amount of mindshare and garnered a frightening number of repetitions, both before Mr. Grey's video and more so since. I call on Mr. Grey to address this error, and if he is interested in creating videos to promote actually spoiler-free election method reforms, I would like to point him to approval voting.

The United Kingdom and the Alternative Vote

If you follow international news, you may be aware that, as part of the agreement for a new government, the Liberal Democrats have argued for a national referendum on the alternative vote, or what we would call in the United States (and what I will call in this post) instant runoff voting. Now, I'm no fan of IRV. But I think that, if the UK went this way, they might actually come out a bit better for it.

At first, I will be ignoring any non-outcome-based effects (i.e., costs) and holding everything else equal. And under these conditions, IRV would provide slightly better outcomes than plurality, given the assumption that a significant number of voters vote honestly rather than tactically. And, examining the election data for the UK, it seems that more voters are honest. There are two reasons that this may be the case.

One, the UK is a parliamentary system rather than a presidential one, so there is an extra layer of dis-connectedness between voters and the executive branch. This means there's less incentive to rally around or against the prime minister, and less direct control over them, meaning there is (or at least there is perceived to be) less to gain by voting tactically (this is, I think, a large reason for the LibDems success in the last several years).

Two, compared to the US, there is practically no polling done in the UK, except on the national level. And knowing that, say, 23% of people plan to vote for the LibDems, tells you practically nothing about what percentage of people will be voting for them in your local election, fancy new attempts to model such things not withstanding. Without that information, it's difficult to know how to vote tactically. Election results bear this out: there are a great many constituencies where tactical voters could have easily swayed the outcome in their benefit. So, given that there is and will continue to be significant honesty, the IRV results could be slightly more satisfying, based on Smith's simulation data.

But only slightly. And the elections will be more costly to count (perhaps only a little, perhaps 20% more). And this election marked a strong shift towards rallying around the party's would-be prime ministers (featuring the first-ever debate among them). And there's also a rising interest in local polling, partially caused by interest in IRV's possible benefits. Taking everything into account, there will likely be less election-satisfaction in the future no matter what, and if IRV is passed, it will probably be blamed on it, as a great deal of money will have been spent with little to show for it; which surely won't endear voters to the politicians who fought for— and over-sold the benefits of—it.

I wish someone with Nick Clegg's ear would tell him about approval and score voting. It would not be appreciably more costly, and would lead to markedly better outcomes (and probably more LibDems) regardless of voter honesty.

First and Second, or First and Last?

When I find myself trying to persuade others of the advantage of approval and score voting, I often end up arguing with proponents of instant runoff voting. And after debunking the claim that IRV is immune to spoilers, their typical follow-up response is to bring up "bullet voting".

Bang!

"Bullet voting" means that, even if a voter has the option in a voting system to rank or rate multiple candidates, they choose to only rank one. And so, their ballot is effectively equivalent to a plurality voting ballot. Since plurality is bad (a fact we can all agree on), any system that incentivizes it will also be bad.

My opponents argue that, if enough voters choose to approve of (or to give maximum points to) a second candidate—one other than their honest-favorite—that these voters could cause a worse result for themselves than if they had not done so. In other words, they could cause their true favorite to lose by approving multiple options; therefore, voters have an incentive to approve only one candidate, hence bullet voting, hence plurality-level results.

"You Missed"

The truth is, they've actually pointed out the greatest strength that cardinal voting systems (like approval and score) have over ranked voting systems (like IRV and Condorcet systems): you might accidentally cause your second choice to win. But how is this an advantage? Because in those other systems, the risk is that you might accidentally cause your last choice to win! That's what the existence of spoilers in these systems mean, that when voters choose to support their true favorite above all others, they risk throwing the election to the candidate the hate the most; that, or they can play it safe, by supporting an acceptable, but not fantastic, candidate, at the expense of removing all hope for their true-favorite to win.

Meanwhile, while you sit in the booth contemplating your approval ballot, trying to decide whether or not to "bullet vote", your fear isn't of your least-favorite candidate winning, but of your second-favorite candidate winning. Now, that's still not going to be an easy choice, but your prospects seem much better when your choice is between 1st and 2nd rather than between 1st and last.

Betrayal and Clones

Why do I call this blog The Least of All Evils? It's a play on a well-known phrase that seems to come up a lot around election time every year. Many voters—and perhaps you've been one of these voters—have found themselves standing in the election booth, looking at a Democrat and a Republican, and also perhaps some other third choice, and said to themselves "I really like this third option; but I know they haven't being polling great, and I really hate the Democrat (or the Republican), so in order to prevent the worst candidate from winning, perhaps it's best if I vote for the lesser of two evils." And so either voters take such a tactical position—and third-party candidates become self-fulfilled prophecies of failure—or voters stick to their honest views—and third-party candidates become spoilers.

Making the tactical choice is an example of favorite betrayal, which is hands-down the most common type of strategic voting, and is probably the most damaging as well, so it shouldn't be surprising if a student of voting theory might try to design a voting system to combat it. (And yet, the Wikipedia article for the favorite betrayal criterion has been deleted.) This is the crux of my problem with instant runoff voting: that it cannot guarantee immunity to favorite betrayal and, more so, that it markets itself by lying that it can.

A Brief Digression

Let me change gears for a moment and talk about primaries again. I said before that the sole reason for political parties to exist is to hold primaries, in which they try to determine which of several similarly-minded candidates would best serve their members while still wining the election. What if a party were to consider two completely identical candidates, and they found themselves tied for first-place in their party's primary, could the party run both candidates? Of course not! At best, everyone will vote for the same candidate and any effort spent on the other will be wasted, and at worst the votes will be split perfectly equally, and the party will have done nothing but increase the share of votes they need to win from half to two-thirds. Having this sort of problem crop up in a voting system is called susceptibility to cloning. (I should note that there are voting systems, such as the Borda count, that have the opposite problem, where a party's best strategy is run as many similar candidates as possible; this is sometimes called "teaming", but we'll refer to both collectively as "cloning" here.)

Now, why have I brought up cloning? Because there is an interesting piece of mathematical work [PDF] that shows that no voting system based on ranked order ballots (which is the kind of ballots used in instant runoff voting) can be immune to both favorite betrayal and to cloning. So given the choice between a voting system that prevents the worst type of tactical voting, and one that can protect elections from the Star Wars Clone Army, instant runoff supporters have decided that the science fiction ravings of George Lucas are a bigger threat.

Accidentally On Purpose

Now, back to favorite betrayal, and how instant runoff supporters lie that they can fix it. Here's their claim (from FairVote.org's "How Instant Runoff Voting Works"):

IRV allows all voters to vote for their favorite candidate, while avoiding the fear of helping elect their least favorite candidate.

Now, this is simply not true; I can provide simple examples illustrating it, and point to real-life elections where it was not the case. If it's so obvious, why the lie? Perhaps it's not intentional; perhaps they are simple confusing favorite betrayal with independence of clones?

To fall for this lie, you only need to make one unstated, seemingly-intuitive, but regrettably false, assumption: that everyone's true favorite is functionally a clone of another candidate. Allow me to sketch an example. Lets assume there's a Republican, a Democrat, and a Green running in an election. If you assume that every Democrat-first voter has the Green candidate as their second choice, and every Green-first voter has the Democratic candidate as their second choice—which seems to be close-enough to true that it shouldn't really effect the outcome of the election—then instant-runoff voting performs flawlessly! That's because you've treated the Green and the Democrat as clones; you could just as easily had two identical Democrats running in the election, and the voters would have acted the same way. But the problem is this: it only takes one, single, solitary voter to throw the election into a situation where a large number of voters will find that they have accidentally elected their least-preferred candidate, which they could have avoided if they'd strategically betrayed their favorite and voted their second-favorite first, just like so many voters do today under plurality. This is because instant runoff is immune clones, but is not immune to favorite betrayal. And all it takes is one Democrat who likes the Republicans better than the Greens (someone like Al Gore, to name one example.)

A Whole Lot of Work, For Nothing

Because of its susceptibility to favorite betrayal, instant runoff voting will ultimately result in the same two-party-dominated system as we have under plurality; the proof is in the Australian House of Representatives, which has used instant runoff for decades and is as two-party-dominated as the U.S. House of Representatives. (Note that the Liberal and National parties are universally considered to be the same party, to the point that they don't run candidates in the same elections unless Labor isn't running.)

A better answer is approval voting and score voting. Approval voting and score voting are immune to both cloning and to favorite betrayal. They do what no other voting system can, because they don't use rank order ballots, which means they are the only systems which can actually help third parties, and the only system which can help us escape from two-party politics. If you are a third-party supporter, or if you are simply fed up with feeling you are forced to pick the lesser of two evils, then your number-one political priority should be to enact approval or score voting. Even if all politicians are scum, you should at least have your choice among The Least of All Evils.

Oscar Update

As we discussed last summer, the Oscar for best picture is moving from a field of 5 to a field of 10, and the vote is done by instant runoff. Here's the 2009 best picture nominees, vs. IMDB's "Top Rated Titles".

Academy	IMDB
Avatar The Blind Side District 9 An Education The Hurt Locker Inglorious Basterds Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire A Serious Man Up Up in the Air	Avatar Up Inglorious Basterds District 9 Fantastic Mr. Fox Star Trek

The IMDB list is a little truncated, since they only list by decade, and only the top 50 of the decade, so its hard to find IMDB's best 10 films for any one year (maybe they don't want to step on the Academy's toes). You'll note, there's a good amount of overlap this year, which isn't too surprising since the nomination step uses a "name five" approval-style ballot, in which each voter names up to five films, without ranking them. The ten most-often-named films become the nominees. Top-5 is mathematically similar to IMDB's score-based voting system; at least, the two are more similar to each other than either is to the instant runoff voting (IRV) used for the final round.

But which picture will win? It's tempting to say Avatar, since it's IMDB's top rated film of the year, but we know that IRV has somewhere between a 5 and 15% chance to exhibit non-monotonic behavior, in which the true first-choice is eliminated before the final round. And that's with three strong contenders; the odds get worse the more there are, and I think at least four of these can be considered "strong contenders".

But what does "true first-choice" mean? For me, it means consensus. If you put all the Academy voters in a room and told them to watch a movie, which movie would engender the greatest total happiness for the crowd? That's the question that score voting (and IMDB) asks. But supporters of IRV instead speak of something they call "core support"; they say that it's most important for a winner to have a large following of fanatics, voters who like them best of all. They don't use the word "fanatic", but it's appropriate. Instant runoff repeatedly removes the choice with the fewest fanatic followers and shuffles them off to their next favorite group; it's fair to call them fanatics because other options that you may also like are never considered until your number-one is eliminated. In other words, IRV doesn't offer you much of an opportunity to offer a compromise, because its almost always the compromise that gets eliminated by non-monotonic behavior. So the question is, is Avatar a compromise? Does it make everyone mostly happy, or does it make only a few people very happy? Luckily, IMDB records that data too! Maybe we'll examine that next time.

Also, remember that the Academy hates science fiction, and animation. In which case, maybe Inglorious Basterds has a good chance...

Comics

I have two mostly-written posts waiting in the wings, but they have to take a back-burner to this.

I love the webcomic xkcd, and considering the topic of this blog, today's comic is very special to me. But then I read the hover text: "I favor approval voting or IRV chiefly because they mean we might get to bring back The Bull Moose party."

Okay; approval voting I'm in favor of. It's a minimalist form of score voting (score where the only allowed scores are 0 and 1), which is good, and since score voting is free of both candidate cloning and favorite betrayal, it could actually allow third parties, like The Bull Moose party, to have a real chance at victory.

But IRV is not good. IRV is strongly susceptible to favorite betrayal, and so is only a marginal improvement over plurality, in that all those third parties, like The Bull Moose party, will still be spoilers (yes, IRV has spoilers) before they become winners. (And that marginal improvement is before you start to account for the significant increase in complexity while counting the election, the potential cost of new machines, and non-intuitive results stemming from non-monotonicity issues.)

But, I have hope: xkcd's author and fans tend to be rather logical (you have to be in order to get all the jokes!) Hopefully this proof will convince them. And if not, this image might.

CRV On the Biggest Elections of 2009

The Center for Range Voting is putting out a press release of sorts, covering the big elections of 2009: NJ Governor, NY-23, and the Afghan presidential election.

The take away: while IRV would have fixed some of the problems in NJ, score voting would have fixed all of the problems in NJ and in NY and been significant help in Afghanistan. (The release also recommends asset voting for Afghanistan.)

Life Imitating Art: New Jersey Edition

My last post centered around a set of example elections that serve to highlight the short-comings of instant runoff voting (IRV). Going into this Tuesday's election, we have two highly-publicized real-world elections that also perfectly highlight how IRV fails: the New Jersey governor race and special election for the US House seat for New York's 23rd district. Here, I will cover the New Jersey race

In New Jersey, Democrat John Corzine and Republican Chris Christie are very nearly tied, while Independent Chris Daggett has faded into the background after reaching a peak of about 14% in earlier polls. On the 5th of October, a piece was printed in the Times of Trenton claiming that IRV is the panacea for this problem, an article which was recently quoted on and supported by Independent Political Report, a pro-third-party website. But IRV would not be a good choice for the independent candidate in this election, and would elect the same winner as plurality would. Let's walk through the logic.

First, the data. Political Wire points us to the latest FDU Public Mind Poll. One of the questions they asked was whether the voter would vote for Corzine (D) or Christie (R); the answers fell for Corzine, 44% to 43%; but while 4% were undecided, 6% named Daggett, even unprompted. They also asked the question naming all three possibilities; at that point, Daggett's support climbs to 14%, but then Christie takes the lead, 41% to 39%.

What does this tell us? Daggett's support is significant, and comes about 2:1 from otherwise-Democratic voters. But even if we were to double his vote share to 28%, while pulling in at the same 2:1 proportion, the election would go 29% for Corzine with only 28% for Daggett (with 36% going to Christie, giving him a clear win.) With double support, Daggett still comes in third! And since IRV decides who to eliminate based on first-place support, there is no way that Daggett can avoid being the first of these three to be eliminated if this election were held under IRV. We do see, however, that once he is eliminated, his supporters second-choice votes could change the outcome from Christie to Corzine. In other words, IRV isn't pro-third-party; in this election, it's pro-Democrat.

Digging deeper into the FDU poll, we find a different set of questions, which might shed some more light on what's happening here. Instead of posing the election as an either/or choice, they ask whether the voter views the candidate favorably or unfavorably, and whether that view is somewhat strong or very strong. The results are illuminating. I'll leave the names out (as well as the percentages for "no opinion" and "haven't heard of the candidate"); with just this information, which candidate do you think voters would most want to win?

Secret Name	Very Favorable	Somewhat Favorable	Somewhat Unfavorable	Very Unfavorable
Mystery Candidate A	15%	24%	17%	37%
Mystery Candidate B	17%	24%	20%	24%
Mystery Candidate C	6%	22%	15%	8%

Looking at just these numbers, who hard to tell which candidate "deserves" to win. B has the most "very favorable" ratings, and A has the most "very unfavorable"; but B has more "somewhat unfavorable". Meanwhile C has the fewest "somewhat unfavorable" and by a large margin the fewest "very unfavorable", but also the fewest "very favorable". Really, the choice is between two options that much of the electorate will absolutely despise and a few will cheer, and one choice that won't ruffle any feathers but will only have a few ecstatic celebrations. Is it more important to make a few people very happy at other's expense, or is it better to shy away from the extremes to have an overall slightly-satisfied balance? To give in to extremes, or to reach an equitable compromise?

I think the answer is to compromise. I think the preferences of the voters of New Jersey would be most closely matched by electing Candidate C; and that candidate (if you haven't already figured it out), is Daggett. But under plurality, as well as under IRV, voters are pushed away from the real compromise.

There are several ways to take the FPU data and interpret it as a score voting election. I chose to take "very unfavorable" = 0, "somewhat unfavorable" = 1, "no opinion" = 2, "somewhat favorable" = 3, "very favorable" = 4 (and "haven't heard of" = X; see rangevoting.org's front page.) These values give final scores of Corzine = 1.6, Christie = 1.9, and Daggett = 2.0. Now, you may or may not agree that that's a fair rubric for scoring (if you have suggestions, please share in the comments), but to me it doesn't seem like a score that could even be coming from the same electorate that intends to vote 44% for Corzine, 43% for Christie, and 6% for Daggett. It seems to me like a large number of Daggett supporters are going to begrudgingly vote for Corzine, even though they don't like him. Those people will be wide-open to the false promises of IRV, when what they really need is score voting.

How To Decide: Where to Go For Dinner

Let me propose a situation to you: you, and eight friends of yours, all live on the same street in some city or large town. As a crazy random happenstance, you are all precisely equally distant from your nearest neighbors: two blocks away. The nine of you decide that you're going to go out for a big dinner somewhere along your street, and there are two more-or-less identically good options: you could go to ApricotBug's, over on the west end of town, or you could go to Beryl Thursday's, closer to the east end.

How do you decide? Well, let's suppose you decide to put it to a vote, since that seems most democratic. Let's further suppose that, since the restaurants are more-or-less identical, everyone simply votes for the one closest to their house. Three of you live west of ApricotBug's, four of you live east of Beryl Thursday's, and two of you live in between. Let's vote!

You can easily see that everyone west of ApricotBug's votes for it, everyone east of Beryl Thursday's votes for it, and the two in between split their votes one and one. Beryl Thursday's wins, 5 to 4.

Notice that, even though each of you used a selfish algorithm (or to put a positive spin on it, an honest, true-to-yourself algorithm) to decide how to vote (the option that minimizes your own travel time), that as a group you also voted for the globally-minimum amount of travel; it would take a total of 45 blocks traveled for everyone to get to ApricotBug's, but only 41 blocks for everyone to get to Beryl Thursday's.

Continuing with the story: You have so much fun, you decide to do it again next month. However, a new restaurant has opened down the street, CBIM (Can't Believe It's (Already) Monday).

How does CBIM change the voting?

If we used the well-known method of plurality voting, we can see that the vote for ApricotBug's stays at 4, but the 5 votes that originally all went to Beryl Thursday's are now split 3 for it and 2 for CGIM. Which means that, now, ApricotBug's wins.

This is no longer the globally-optimal solution, and if you think about it, it's really kind of stupid that adding more options, particularly an obviously bad choice like CBIM, would ruin the vote like this.

What to Do, What to Do...

After much existential gnashing of teeth, you decide to use "instant runoff voting" (because one of you heard about it on the internet and, at first glance, it sounds pretty good!) With IRV, you can pick additional options beyond just your first choice, and if your first choice doesn't win, your vote will be moved over to the next in line.

Everyone west of ApricotBug's and your friend who lives right next to it will vote A > B > C. Also, the two friends closest to CBIM will vote C > B > A. For the three in the middle, two vote B > A > C and one votes B > C > A. (Count the distances yourself if this isn't clear to you.) So which restaurant wins now? IRV tells us to eliminate the option with the fewest first-place votes. That's CBIM. We then move those votes to the voter's second choice, which in this case is Beryl Thursday's for both voters.

Those two votes puts Beryl Thursday's back over the top, which is good, since we know that it's the globally-optimal solution, with respect to total distance traveled. So it sure seems like IRV has improved things for us. (If you're curious, CBIM would have taken 81 blocks; almost twice as bad as ApricotBug's!)

Next month rolls by, and gosh darnit, you've all gotten really attached to this big night out, so you're going to do it again! One minor change though: CBIM had a little problem at their original location (it was too popular, so it wasn't large enough) and so the owner relocated four blocks over (a total distance of 53 blocks for everyone to reach.)

No problem; we'll let IRV handle this! It's still 4 for A > B > C, and 1 for B > C > A, but now we're up to 3 for C > B > A and down to 1 for B > A > C. That's 4 first-place votes for A, 3 for C, and two for B. Uh oh...

Now we're back to the exact same problem we had before under plurality. None of you or your friends have moved. ApricotBug's and Beryl Thursday's haven't moved. The only thing that changed is a that a third fringe option has moved to a slightly-more-acceptable position. The mere presence of CBIM spoiled the vote under plurality, and now its mere presence has spoiled the election in the exact same way under IRV.

Perhaps you're thinking to yourself that, no, some of the CBIM fans will see what's going to happen, and they'll instead vote for Beryl Thursday's first. But they could have just as easily done that under plurality voting; why would IRV be different? And even if it is, for some unexplained reason, different, why should they have to choose among the lesser of two evils, between ApricotBug's and Beryl Thursday's, when in their heart-of-hearts, they want CBIM? Wasn't IRV supposed to fix that problem?

IRV Isn't a Good Idea

If you think IRV is a good idea because it will allow third parties to win elections, you are wrong; it will be just like under plurality. If you think IRV is a good idea because it fixes the spoiler problem, you are wrong; it will be just like under plurality.

In the real-world, we don't have access to simple metrics like "fewest total blocks traveled" to guide us in choosing our political leaders; we only have everyone's biased, greedy, short-sighted, and misinformed opinions. I believe that, deep down, we all want what's best for everyone, but that, obviously, opinions differ on what that is. If IRV can't properly decide which of three kitsch restaurants to hang out at in a simple, one-dimensional scenario like this, I guarantee that it won't do any better in the real world.

Coming Soon!

Next up, I'll have a dinner-vote using score voting, and then maybe we'll try a two-dimensional example, which will show the problems with Condorcet methods.

IRV Has a Surprise For You!

Caught this over at Instant Runoff Voting on Blogspot. It's educational!

Award Season

I've been trying to come up with some sort of clear conclusion to draw about the Academy Awards vs. IMDB's Top 250, but I keep running into the problem that I don't know half the movies on both lists, and when I try to generalize anything from conclusions based on what I do know, I run into this wall of uncertainty (another reason that I was hoping for comments, but oh well.) But, before I give it all a rest, I'd like to talk about another award-slash-voting-system: science fiction's Hugo Awards.

According to their description, the Hugo Awards (like the Academy Awards) uses a two-step process; nominations and final voting. The nomination process for the Hugo's uses approval voting (good on them!) but with a limit of five titles on each persons ballot (oh well, no one's perfect) with the top five being nominated. The final voting step is instant-runoff (uh oh!) with one important exception.

In addition to the nominees, Hugo voters are allowed to rank "no award" anywhere on their ballot. After determining the IRV winner by the normal method, the potential winner is compared pairwise to "no award" (obviously, if "no award" was the IRV winner, there is no award). In other words, for each ballot it is determined whether that ballot ranks the potential winner higher or "no award" higher, irrespective of the rankings of all other nominees. If more ballots prefer "no award" than prefer the potential winner, then there is no award.

This "special case" highlights one of the more damning aspects of instant runoff: it does not, despite its advocate's claims, always pick a majority-preferred candidate, but rather, sometimes, one of the other candidates is preferred over the "winner" by a majority of voters. (This, among other issues, happened in Burlington, Vermont's most recent mayoral election.)

These sorts of pairwise comparissons—looking at a more-than-two way race as a series of one-on-one contests—is the heart of another ranked-order voting method (or rather, a family of such methods) called Condorcet's method; and as ranked-order methods go, based on Bayesian regret, Condorcet is better than IRV (not a tall order since IRV is the second-worst method, only ahead of plurality). If the Hugo awards are so fearful of "no award" getting an unfair pairwise chance against the IRV winner, I wonder why they don't use an entirely pairwise method; surely there must be some overlap with judges of a science-fiction contest (geeks) and open-source programmers (more geeks), and the programmers use Condorcet for their elections.

Of course, I recommend that both of them move to score voting; however, the approval-based nomination step is a great idea for the initial round of a two-step process (although on average the approval votes alone would likely get a better result than the final IRV round, barring the fact that the two-round process gives everyone a chance to go read any nominees they missed before the decisive round.)

Finally: I try to keep my personal views on any actual issues out of my writing here, and focus only on the process by which groups can make more-democratic decisions. But if Anathem doesn't win Best Novel, I will riot in the streets.

Presented

Recently, I gave a brief presentation to the local chapter of the Green Party. I wouldn't call the following a "transcript", but it does hit the same points.

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Between 1996 and 2000, the Green party increased their share of the votes in the presidential election by over 400%. But between 2000 and 2004, despite flagging support for the incumbent Republican, a lackluster Democratic challenger, and an increase in public support for the Green stance on virtually every policy issue, the Green party share of votes dropped by 96%. How is that possible?

Because Nader, and the Green party, was branded as a spoiler. When you spoil an election, your support dries up as voters go back to voting for the lesser of two evils. This is a known problem with our current plurality election method, one that economists, mathematicians, and political scientists have known about for years, and they have also known for years of alternative election methods that don't suffer from this problem. And yet, it doesn't seem to come up as something worth fixing.

Thankfully, recently, there has been some movement towards trying different election methods. Unfortunately, one often-proposed method, instant-runoff voting, which is a plank in the Green party platform, does not fix this problem. I'm here to show you some methods, called approval voting and score voting, that do fix this problem. Allow me to show you some examples.

This is a simple example with just nine voters; four vote for option 'A', and five for option 'B'. B wins. But what if we add a new option, 'C', that appeals primarily to the B-voters.

C doesn't win, but now, neither does B, so C spoiled the election. This is basically what happened in Florida in 2000. Instant-runoff voting (IRV) claims that it can fix this problem. On an instant-runoff ballot, instead of listing only one choice, you can list several choices in order. The candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated, and votes for them are re-allocated to the voter's next choice in line, and you repeat this until one candidate has a majority of votes. So, in our example, C has the fewest votes, so it's eliminated, and the votes go to the voter's second choice, which we know from before is B. B now has five votes, and wins, as they should have all along.

This looks great; it looks like IRV fixed the problem. But you still haven't won any elections. Support for a new party grows slowly over time; you don't go from zero to victory. So let's give C one more of B's votes.

Okay, now, you're doing really well; you've actually got more votes than one of the major parties. But now, we have to ask a question that we haven't answered before: what's the second choice of these last two B voters? If one of them (let's call him "Al") has A as his second choice, we get this:

Now, A wins. Remember, without C involved in the vote, B would win. But because C is here, A wins. So C is, again, a spoiler. And here you'll still lose 96% of your support in the next election.

A better option is score voting or approval voting: I'll do an example with approval since it's a bit simpler. With approval voting, instead of indicating just one candidate, you can indicate as many or as few as you want. So, those first two votes for C can come without in any way diminishing B's five votes, as can the third; and as your support continues to grow, maybe you convince some of A's voters to approve you as well, until you win. Without ever being a spoiler.

Score voting is only slightly more complicated, in that it gives you the option to explicity state a willingness to compromise, by letting you give each candidate a score in some range, such as zero to ten. So you could say, for instance, I give C my full approval at 10, but I'd be pretty satisfied with B as well, so I give it an 8.

Either way—score or approval—no spoilers, no abandonment by the electorate, and so your support can continue to grow until you actually win.

Now, what I want from you is I'd like to promote this idea to the rest of your party; your national conference is in July, perhaps something there. Also, IRV has had some pilot programs conducted, in California, Vermont, North Carolina; I'd would like to ask for your support in getting some sort of pilot program using score voting here.

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Then there was a brief question-and-answer period. I was asked to reiterate the example of how a spoiler happens under IRV (the important part is that not all B-first voters will vote C-second), to speak to IRV's "success" in San Francisco (before IRV: one Green elected to council, after IRV: one Green elected to council. Change: zero), and to discuss briefly proportional representation (also a good idea.)

Overall, I thought the experience was very positive, and I will be put in touch with some local Green party members who are also voting-reform advocates. It was also recommended that I contact Ralph Nader directly.

The presentation took just five minutes, with five minutes more for questions and discussion. If you would like to give a similar presentation in your area, feel free to use everything I've said; the images are quite easy to reproduce on a chalkboard or whiteboard.

Constitutionality of Instant Runoff

Earlier this week in the Minnesota Supreme Court, a case questioning the contitutionality of instant runoff voting was heard. There hasn't been a ruling yet, but the suspicion is that the judges will find that IRV is constitutional, and the plaintiffs are already preparing an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.

This may be surprising, but I agree with the judges (supposed) decision. Just because IRV is a bad system (and I think it is) that shouldn't make it unconstitutional. Plurality is a bad system too, and we've been using it since before the constitution was even ratified. Part of the argument was that IRV violates the principle of "one person, one vote", since you can indicate more than one candidate for a position on your ballot; this is also one of the major arguments used against approval voting. But it's a spurious argument. A "vote" isn't necessarily one candidate's name, but rather it is the expression of one voter's will via their ballot. The principle of "one person, one vote" is meant to be taken as no voter should have a greater (or lesser) impact upon the outcome of the election than another; if I could submit two ballots in a plurality election, that would be as bad as if could submit two ballots in an IRV (or approval or score) election. But as long as everyone's ballot is treated identically, and everyone can only submit one ballot, than the "one person, one vote" principle is still followed. Counting a voter's choice toward their second choice after their first is eliminated isn't "changing their vote", it's following their will; as the defense attorney said "You have cast that second choice ballot."

There is additional complaint over multi-winner elections (such as for the school board), which I assume are using some variation of Single Transferable Vote (STV). STV is the grandfather of IRV, and can involve moving around fractions of a vote (if the quota to be named a winner is, for example, 300 votes, and a candidate, let's call them "A", gets 310, then 10 of those votes are re-distributed in proportion to all 310 "A" voter's second choices; so if 180 of them had candidate "B" as their second choice and the rest had some other candidate(s), then B gets 10*(180/310) = 5 and 25/31 votes); apparently, some people feel that these fractional votes mean their vote is carrying less weight (and thereby violating "one person, one vote"), but that's not the case either; those fractional votes will always have come from voters who have already had one of their earlier choices chosen as a winner; the alternative is to drop the extras, penalizing voters for picking a choice that was too popular by not allowing them any say in who the other winners should be in the election. And how would that not be disenfranchisement?

So yes, while I think approval and score are much better systems than instant runoff, I also think all of them are legal under the constitution (and that all of them perform better than plurality.)

(While I'm here though, I feel I should mention that there is a proportional score-voting-style system, called reweighted score voting, which could be used for the sort of multi-winner elections that STV is used for. But I'm not aware of much research into its benefits versus STV; my suspicion is that it will be better, but not so dramatically better than score and approval are as compared to instant runoff.)

Strategy

I got into a bit of an argument discussion in the comments of this article about instant runoff voting over at Independent Political Report. I hope I was able to provide some compelling arguments to the folks there, but I stopped myself short of getting down into the weeds about strategy in different systems, and which ones are more susceptible to strategic manipulations. But I did promise to talk about it here.

One of the commenters at IPR asked the following:

Wouldn’t a 100% strategic vote be identical for all voting systems? With range voting, you could just give someone a 10 out of 10 and everyone else a 0 out of 10 or not vote for them.

The short answer to the first question is "no", they're not all the same, and to the second, while you could vote that way (often called "bullet voting"), it's usually not going to be your best strategy. But these questions (well, one question and one statement) are blind to another strategic consideration, one that takes place outside the voting both and long before the election. We'll cover that at the end.

Strategy for Score Voters

While the strategy for different voting methods are different, they do all share some similarities. Most of them involve first figuring out who the two front-runners are, since that's the "real" fight and each voter is going to want to maximize the effect their vote will have on its outcome. You do that by reading the polls. Polling, and the feed-back effect polls have on opinion and voter turnout, is a whole other subject, but for now, let's assume that polls will nearly, but not perfectly reflect voter's opinions (after all, if they were perfect, we could just skip the vote entirely.) Additionally, there's a chance that there may not be two clear front runners; there may be a three-or-more-way tie for first, or a clear front runner and tie for second. We'll discuss that complication later too; for now, assume we can determine two clear front runners.

For score voting, once you've figured out who the front runners are, you vote like this: Give your most-preferred candidate among the two front runners the maximum score. If there are any candidates you prefer more than that candidate, give them the maximum score too. To the other front-running candidate, give the minimum score. If there are any candidates you prefer less than that candidate, give them the minimum score too. If there are any candidates between these extremes, give them a score scaled linearly between them. Most of the time this means that most voters will give most candidates one of the two extreme scores. In other words, highly-strategic score voters look a lot like voters in approval voting elections, but not exactly; we'll come back to that.

The practical upshot of this is, you can always give your honestly-most-preferred candidate the maximum possible score, while still having the greatest possible effect on the "real" fight between the two front-runners. This may not seem important right now, but keep it in mind, because we'll come back to it too, soon.

Strategy for Plurality Voters

Strategy under plurality should be familiar to everyone. Like score, you determine who the two front-runners are. You vote for whichever of the two you prefer. If there's another candidate you prefer more, then too bad; if you vote for them, you might accidentally give the election to your least-preferred candidate.

Theoretically, if the spread between the two front-runners is wide enough, you could throw away the tiny effect you could have on that contest, and toss your vote to your honest-favorite as a show of moral support. It's strategically not the best plan, but in that situation even the best plan isn't very good for you (no one you like has a chance to win!), so maybe you don't care, maybe communicating your dissatisfaction with both likely winners is more important to you; but this line of thinking feeds into the outside-the-ballot-box strategies which we'll discuss later. So keep it in mind (I know, it's a lot to keep in mind; stay with me!)

Strategy for Instant Runoff Voters

Again, determine the top-two. Among those two, rank your favorite first, and your least favorite last. Rank all the others in between those two. You will note that, in contrast to what IRV advocacy groups claim, it is not in your best interest to rank your honest-favorite first (unless they are in the top two), but rather to rank them second. This is because (again, in contrast to advocates claims) it is possible that your honest favorite could be a spoiler for your preferred top-two candidate, an issue I discussed at length in my posts on non-monotonicity (part I and part II).

Now, if the spread between the top-two candidates is large, or if support for your honest-favorite candidate is low (less than 25% if there are three candidates in the race, and progressively less and less if there are more candidates), you can safely communicate your dissatisfaction with both likely winners buy ranking your honest-favorite first. The percentage values are different, but the logic is the same as under plurality: if your honest vote doesn't really matter, you can afford to be honest. But if the "real" contest is close, your best bet is to betray your favorite, and rank them lower. In this way, highly-strategic instant-runoff voters look very similar to plurality voters.

Instant Runoff is to Plurality as Score is to Approval

Strategic IRV looks like plurality, and strategic score looks like approval; it's an interesting result, and one that is well supported by Warren Smith's Bayesian regret study (representative result graphic). And the values aren't just close, they are exactly the same; a surprising result that Smith went on to prove mathematically.

I want to reiterate this: the correct strategy for IRV gives identical results to plurality voting when all voters follow it. So the only potential improvements we could see under IRV would come from voters choosing to vote honestly instead of strategically. At this point, IRV advocates claim that voters will be more honest; but there's no evidence to support that. Indeed, since this strategic favorite-betrayal is the leading reason for two-party dominance in a government, and all nations that have used IRV have seen their elections stay two-party dominated, we can presume that favorite-betrayal is, in real life, common. And that honesty is relatively rare.

Thinking Outside the (Voting) Box

Voter strategy is just part of the equation though; candidates and political parties have strategies too, under the umbrella of "strategic nomination". Under plurality, for instance, parties absolutely must make sure that they have only one candidate in the race: if they run more than one, the candidates will likely split the vote, and so neither will win. This is why we have party-primaries. In addition, recently parties have realized that they can support candidates who are similar to their opponents, in order to split their vote and ensure their own success (for instance, Republicans buying ads for Green party candidates to defeat their Democratic rival), a tactic so underhanded that even some politicians find it despicable!

IRV fares better, but only slightly better: if there's only one strong opposition party, then running two or more identical candidates can't cause the party any problems. However, since under our current system there is only one strong opposition party, and since all the candidates from the same party are quite similar, IRV advocates have stretched this truth to claim that, under IRV, any number of parties can run as many candidates as they want, without suffering any repercussions, and therefore third parties should help them get IRV enacted. But this claim isn't true; it only seems true given the context of our current two-party environment, and a false appeal that what's true for two must be true for three or more. The truth is, IRV will continue to keep us locked in to a two-party system; although you may be allowed to vote for your favorite among a large homogeneous selection of Democratic and Republican clones. Anything riskier, and they would find themselves in the same vote-splitting catastrophes that plurality suffers from.

There's also consideration of the "nursery effect". Political parties, as a general rule, don't spring up over-night; they grow slowly over several election cycles. Under plurality, they grow and grow until they spoil an election by splitting a vote, and then voters abandon them in droves (the Green Party received 4% as many votes in 2004 as they did in 2000, for instance). Under IRV, the pattern will be the same. Parties will grow, they will spoil elections, and they will be abandoned. The only difference is that they will grow larger before they spoil an election (at least 25% rather than Nader's paltry 2.7%.)

It's that critical point, where a party has grown large enough to be a spoiler, that we must focus on. How well an election method performs in "run of the mill" elections is completely unimportant; in such elections, any method that's ever been seriously proposed will work as well as any other. It's performance in messy, close, near-tie elections that matters; these are the times when polling will flounder, and determining the top-two contenders will be hard. And at these critical points, plurality and IRV will often punish honest voting, electing the wrong candidate because of a spoiler, and pushing voters back towards the two well-known parties.

But what about score and approval voting? Under these methods, any number of parties actually could run any number of candidates without fear; no need for primaries. There can't be any spoilers, and so nothing will force a "lesser of two evils" decision and keep us locked in to a two-party system. Instead, third parties would grow, and grow, until they... win. And in those messy, close, near-tie elections, your best strategy is... honesty.

Strategy Strategy

So which method is "most prone to strategic manipulation"? You've read the strategies, judge for yourself. But know that there's no objective data to back up claims one way or the other, and intelligent people on both sides have written similar descriptions and they all still disagree about what it means. But here's the thing: It doesn't matter. That question is a mere distraction, taking attention away from the actual important question: which method gives us the best results? If you think two-party domination is definitively bad then the answer is clear: score voting or approval voting. If you examine the only marginally objective measure of effectiveness, Bayesian regret, then the answer is clear: even if you cling to the (unsubstantiated) claim that IRV encourages more honesty than score or approval, score and approval still perform better (likely because they avoid two-party domination). This is the only way that new parties (and the fresh ideas they represent) can grow without being cut-off at a critical point; so that they can continue to grow, get elected, and put their ideas into practice. IRV can't do that. (In fact it's been proven that no rank-order method can.)

Mu

Strategy is the wrong question. It leads to pointless, subjective, and unsubstantiated arguments. Effectiveness is what matters. An end to two-party dominance is what matters. And score voting is the only logical answer.

Mistakes Squared: North Carolina

Prompted by a reader comment, I did some research on North Carolina's instant runoff voting pilot program, and I am simply stunned. It's no secret that I'm not an IRV fan; it fails to fix the "spoiler" problem, it fails to help third party candidates, and it fails in a host of other ways. But what they're doing in North Carolina goes beyond even that. They've actually managed to create a system that is even worse than IRV.

Attack of the Clones

One of the few things IRV actually has going in its favor, and one of the few ways it actually improves over plurality, is that it is immune to "cloning". To abuse cloning under plurality, you prop up candidates who are ideologically identical to your opponent; i.e., clones. All else being equal, this will lead to voters splitting their ballots among the clones, hopefully (for you) more or less equally. So, instead of you losing 40% to 60%, if you introduce a clone, you'd win 40% to 35% and 25%. In practice, things are a bit more complicated, and usually results in, for example, Republicans paying for Green Party ads to shave a couple points off the Democrat in a close election (or Democrats paying for Libertarians).

IRV actually fixes the cloning problem, because 100% of the clone-first voters will have your original opponent as their second choice. So, when the clone is eliminated, you're back to losing 40% to 60%, where you should have been all along.

Short Circuit

But North Carolina added two short-cuts to the IRV process. One, they limited a ballot to listing at most three candidates. This re-introduces the threat of cloning, because if there are four ideologically similar candidates on the ballot, a voter can't list them all, so the incentive to list one of the major two parties highly is even stronger than regular IRV. Two, rather than eliminating just one candidate at a time, as is normally done for IRV, North Carolina has decided that they will eliminate, all at once, all except the top-two. This makes the already vanishingly-small odds for a third-party candidate under IRV an order of magnitude worse, as there's only one opportunity for second- and third-choices to cascade together.

Consider an election where two "third" party candidates each have 17% support, and lets say they are effectively clones of each other, with the voters for each listing the other as their second choice (even if all they agree on is "anyone but the Republicrats"). The two major parties evenly split the remaining votes at 33% each. Even though the third-party coalition has a 34% total—more than either major party candidate has—both third party candidates are eliminated immediately. Even though under normal IRV, only one of them would have, and then one of the major party candidates would have been. Every third party effectively becomes a spoiler for every other third party, while the major party candidates are insulated.

Gentleman's Agreement

What this amounts to is a gentleman's agreement between the two major parties whereby they agree not to prop-up third party candidates as spoilers (even if it's cost effective, it just feels like cheating I guess), while simultaneously making it harder for a coalition of third parties to act together against them (which is unlikely under IRV, but still more-likely than it was under plurality). And thanks to IRV's inability to eliminate the spoiler effect, they can continue to have a virtual guarantee that their duopoly will continue.

As much as I rail against it, I want to state that, by the metric of Bayesian regret, IRV is an improvement over plurality (at least, as long as some voters vote honestly rather than strategically.) This is probably also an improvement (I haven't run the simulation) but certainly less of one than normal IRV.

It Can Always Get Worse

Even if this systematically-assured lack of change weren't enough, NC still has to deal with all the normal problems of IRV: difficulty counting, costly machines and software, inability to centrally count, etc.. But there's one thing that's even worse: North Carolina wants to use IRV in multi-seat elections.

First, a brief history lesson: IRV was invented as a single-winner analog to a multi-winner method called "single transferable vote". It's actually been pretty successful and effective. But NC is not using STV, they're using a home-grown and absolutely insane system that is so convoluted I can't even begin to analyze it (mostly because I start crying before I can finish reading the description).

A New Hope

There is hope, though. This is just a pilot. If NC is open to the idea of trying new voting methods, maybe they can be convinced to give score voting a try. Heck, maybe they could be convinced to try actual instant runoff voting and single transferable vote too, instead of these abominations. Almost anything looks good when compared to plurality, but time is running out on this opportunity; lets get some real options out there for North Carolinians to look at, and let them make an informed decision.

Let's Talk

First, let me say that I still get absolutely thrilled whenever I get comments; I've only been at this for a few months, and I've been really squeamish about publicizing it. I got one comment though in response to my last post about how IRV fails to fix the spoiler problem or grant success to third parties. And it really got me thinking. So let's talk:

IRV has elected Progressive Bob Kiss as the mayor of Burlington, VT and Ross Mirkarimi, a Green, to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. While score/range voting is a worthy system, third parties in this country have enough problems with credibility without trying to advocate for a voting system that has never been used anywhere in the world.
--Anonymous

I Owe It All to IRV?

This comment bring up two points, and they're both worth responding to. The first is the assertion that IRV does fix the spoiler problem and allow third parties to succeed, as evidenced by Bob Kiss of the Vermont Progressive Party winning the election. I have three responses to that. One, if that's true, than plurality voting also fixes the spoiler problem, because plurality elected Bernie Sanders mayor of Burlington, VT in 1981 when he was the Progressive candidate. Obviously, that's ludicrous; if plurality was immune to spoilers, none of us would be wasting our time trying to fix the problem. No, the truth is, that Burlington (and San Francisco as well) is something of an exception in American politics, in that it has a very strong "third" party that is already capable of winning elections. But IRV has virtually nothing to do with their success.

My second response to this first point is a bit more flippant, but makes the same point: in Burlington, the Republicans are the third party; something that I went into more detail with in the too-long post I referred to in the previous post. (Mental note: maybe I should try to turn Burlington's Republicans on to score voting. Or would that be overly antagonistic?)

Third, and more substantive, if IRV were actually any help to third parties, then you would expect a country that has used IRV for years, like Australia, to actually have some in their legislature. But of the 150 Australian legislators, currently every last one is a member of one of two parties. (Technically, the Liberal party and the National party are different, but the two have been in a tight coalition since 1922, and are currently working on a merger plan that has already succeeded in the state of Queensland. In the minds of virtually every Australian, they are a single party. Furthermore, the three "independent" representatives were all, at one time, members of the National party, before leaving over intra-party disagreements; a situation very similar to "independent" US Senator Joseph Lieberman's position with the Democratic party.) And let's not forget senator Bernie Sanders; the same Progressive who won a plurality election to become mayor of Burlington also won a plurality election to become a senator from Vermont; by this logic, plurality is better for third parties than IRV!

But It's Doing Nothing Right Now!

The commentator's second point is that, even if IRV isn't helpful at fixing the spoiler/two-party problem, it's still a better idea than anything else out there because it's actually being used already. This is, one, foolish, and two, a bit disingenuous. It's foolish to put all of this effort into making a huge change, knowing that it doesn't actually fix the problem. Besides being a clear waste of effort, it creates a hostile environment for any future real improvements; once an electorate has been bitten by a false "fix-all" solution like IRV, they become much more shy about trying some other solution. Many locales that try IRV find themselves slipping back into the even-worse world of plurality; North Carolina, for instance, has a pilot program that is facing some strong motions this week to go back.

Besides, the truth is score voting has been used for a very long time, and is a system people are already quite familiar with: from Olympic judging, to movie and restaurant reviews, to Hot or Not. We use it every day; we just haven't used it to democratically elect our leaders. At least, not recently. But the two longest-running democratic governments in world history did. For 500 hundred years, Sparta used a (loud and very analog) score voting method for all their elections, and for another 500 years, Venice used a three-valued (+1, -1, 0) score voting method. IRV, on the other hand, was first used in 1893. Call me in three or four centuries.

The Real Winner

But really, it's not important which idea is older, or was used for longer. Even clearly showing that IRV can't completely fix the spoiler problem doesn't show that it's, overall, no good. Taken alone, each of these arguments can be brushed off as simple anecdotes, and we want data (and the plural of anecdote is not data!) Spoilers are bad, because it means a lot of people get something they strongly don't want; two-party domination is bad, because it restricts voter's choices to "the least of two evils" and we often don't want either. But how bad? Which is worse? How often is it a problem? Warren Smith's insight was to try to side-step all the anecdotes, and directly measure "how bad"; that's the idea behind Bayesian regret. And even he was honestly surprised at just how overwhelming the data was.

Now, maybe the simulation is flawed. But maybe it's not. But it's certainly compelling enough to suggest that score voting would be something worth trying. Meanwhile, everything CRV has said would happen with IRV, has happened, including spoilers and continual failure for third party candidates. So again, I would urge you: if you're supporting IRV because of spoilers, or because of third parties, you should STOP supporting IRV. Other options do a better job of fixing the issues you care about.

But if you're still not convinced, I'm game to continue the debate, so keep the comments coming!

FairVote's Flash

As I mentioned, off handily, in an earlier (and far-too-long) post, FairVote has a not-too-shabby video showing off how instant runoff voting "fixes" the spoiler problem.

At the start of the video, we're presented with two candidates, A and B, and shown the results of the election between them: seven for A, eight for B; a narrow win for B.

Then, the plot thickens, and a new candidate, C, who agrees on most issues with B, is introduced. Three of B's voters, and one of A's, decide they prefer C, and we are shown the TERRIBLE TRAGEDY of how C's presence caused A to win instead of B, a clear SUBVERSION OF THE DEMOCRATIC ORDER. And I agree; that's terrible. Adding a candidate who is not a winner themself should never change who the winner of the election is. Academically, this is called independence of irrelevant alternatives, or colloquially, the spoiler effect.

"Luckily" (according to the video), instant runoff voting saves the day, because it eliminates C, and redistributes their votes back to A and B, and the victory returns to it's proper place, with B.

But I have a question for FairVote.

What if C was just a bit more popular, and managed to convince just one more of B's supporter's to vote for them?

Now, B, having the fewest first-place votes, is the candidate who is eliminated. And, depending on B's voter's second-choices (which we don't ever see in video) either C or A may win. If two or more of the four prefer A over C, then A wins. Which is the same SUBVERSION OF THE DEMOCRATIC ORDER which instant runoff voting was supposed to guarantee never happened again; an "irrelevant alternative" changed the outcome of the election. That should never happen!

IRV's advocates are trying to popularize a false notion (or maybe they're just trying to deal with their cognitive dissonance) that there's some magic cutoff for "significance", beyond which a candidate doesn't count as a spoiler. But if it quacks like a duck, then it's a duck. I believe they may be confused because they (and all of us) are most familiar with plurality voting, and under plurality third parties virtually never get more than about 15% of the vote. There's a good reason for that value; it's that the difference between the Republican candidate and the Democratic candidate in any election is virtually never more than about 15% of the vote. Third parties tend to grow, until they get big enough that they spoil an election, and then they're destroyed in a terrible backlash (Nader has yet to recover from Gore's loss; come to think of it, neither has Ross Perot from Bush I's). The only thing IRV changes is what that cutoff-limit is; it goes from about 15% to closer to 30%. But don't let them trick you: it's still there, waiting for a fatted third-party to grow large enough to sacrifice itself upon its altar, and SUBVERT THE DEMOCRATIC ORDER by spoiling an election.

If you're an IRV advocate because you want to eliminate the spoiler effect, or because you want third-parties to have an actual chance of wining elections, then you should STOP being an IRV advocate. There are other voting methods that better achieve your ends. Score voting actually does completely eliminate the spoiler effect, which means third-parties have a real chance to win.