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Jill Stein is Shooting Herself in the Foot with Instant Runoff Voting

Green party presidential candidate Jill Stein recently gave an interview where she was asked, among other things (you should read the whole thing!) to talk about instant runoff voting. Her response parroted many of the incorrect claims we hear about IRV, but it's a more disappointing to hear it from Stein, since she is trying so hard, has so much against her and her party, and has so much to gain from picking a more-effective voting reform. Doctor Stein, this one's for you:

[If] you really wanted to vote for me, but you weren't sure I was going to win, it lets you go ahead and do that[.] Because it lets you vote for me as number one, if that's what you want to do, and it lets you vote your fallback, maybe your lesser evil choice, as number two. And what it does is set things up so if I don't win, your vote gets reassigned to your number two choice.

It's a win-win. It ensures there will be no splitting of the vote, that your vote might have unintended consequences, all these things that people are told to be afraid of[.] Instant runoff voting [...] ensures that the candidate that gets elected is the one that the most people can actually support.

The first paragraph contains a fair description of how IRV works, but every claim from the second one about the implications of IRV is false. An example similar to one I've used frequently:

• 45%: Romney > Obama > Stein
• 10%: Obama > Romney > Stein
• 15%: Obama > Stein > Romney
• 30%: Stein > Obama > Romney

This example (I hope obviously) doesn't reflect a likely outcome, I'd just like to use names, instead of bland identifiers (like A, B, C) to highlight what's going on here. First, let's take note that, in the example, 55% prefer Obama over Romney, and 70% prefer Obama over Stein; so, the candidate that "most people can actually support" is Obama. Second, note that the winner, by IRV's rules, is Romney. However, if Stein would have withdrawn from the race, then Obama would have won instead. That means there was a "splitting of the vote" (between Obama and Stein) which had "unintended consequences" (electing Romney).

I understand how Dr. Stein is able to come to these erroneous conclusions. If a third-party is small (as our third parties are now) and remains small (as our third parties do now) then under IRV it will always be eliminated from the election, well before it is able to act as a spoiler. That makes it easy—although incorrect—to conclude that they would never be spoilers. But, Dr. Stein, wouldn't it be nice if your party were to grow? And wouldn't it be nice if growing meant it could eventually win? That won't happen under IRV though, because if it grows, it will eventually become a spoiler, and the voters hate spoilers. Even the accusation of being a spoiler (I don't want to start a Nader/Gore argument) is enough to ruin a party's votes in subsequent elections for years.

A better voting reform target for the Green party (and indeed, all third-parties) is approval voting. With approval voting, there really are no split votes, no spoilers, and parties can grow, and grow until they win.

Untied Alternatives

C. G. P. Grey has another election-themed video out and, like the last one, I have one tiny nitpick from the very end of the video. First, the video:

Right near the end, Grey suggests using a preferential vote as a way to avoid the ridiculous series of ties and tie-breakers he discusses, and by preferential vote I presume (since he made a video arguing in favor of it) the "alternative vote," AKA, instant runoff voting.

The problem I have is that IRV is actually more likely to run into problems with ties than most other voting systems; including plurality. This is because each elimination done under IRV, even the ones far down the list who received very few first place votes, could potentially be a tie, and effect the final winner. As always, a quick example:

• 45%: A > (others)
• 25%: B > C > (others)
• 15%: C > A > (others)
• 15%: D > C > (others)

Candidates A and B lead, but candidates C and D tie for third place. But how you break that tie determines who wins the election. If you eliminate C first, then A wins, while if you eliminate D first, then C wins. And it can get much worse; if A and B were instead at 40% and 30%, then after the first tie-breaker, we could have had another tie. Since each tie—or near tie— result can require a recount and potentially a series of lawsuits, IRV has the potential to be a total nightmare as the elimination of each minimally-supported candidates is fought out in court (supported by whichever candidate up the chain benefits.)

This is all, of course, extremely unlikely. A near-tie in a Presidential election has only gone to the Supreme Court for review once (in 2000) and that hopefully won't happen again anytime soon. But we can say, thanks to computer simulation, that IRV elections are about 1.8 times more likely to have a results-effecting tie than plurality elections, even with just three candidates.

So yes, the electoral college is kind of silly, and the tie-breakers for it even more so. But IRV wouldn't help with that.

CES Interviews Dr. Kenneth Arrow

Hey folks, I've got a treat for you. Nobel-prize winning economist Dr. Kenneth Arrow, after who Arrow's impossibility theorem is named (and on which much of my writing has been based) has been interviewed by the Center for Election Science.

You can read the transcript, or listen or download here:

SignOn.org Petition in Favor of Approval Voting

There's a petition up at SignOn.org—a spin off of MoveOn—to push that group to advocate for approval voting. I'd ask any supporters and regular readers out there to add their names. (And no, I didn't create the petition.)

There's also a similar petition for score voting. Spread the word!

Texas Libertarians and Greens Use Approval Voting

A quick news item from Texas. Last week, both the Libertarian Party of Texas and the Green Party of Texas made use of approval voting at their state conventions. The Libertarians used it to vote for their US Senate candidate, while the Greens voted to use approval voting in all internal elections, both for officers and for candidate selection, and including requiring its use by county-level parties (no link available yet, but I will update this story if I get one.) These state-level minor parties join the Libertarian Party of Colorado in the use of approval voting, which they first endorsed in 2010.

This is a great step forward for voting reform advocacy. Every large group of people is hesitant to be the first to try out a new idea, but these brave steps—start with the primaries!—will, I suspect, continue to provide evidence for the effectiveness of better voting methods. I'm especially excited by the Green Party of Texas move, as many state-level Green parties (particularly California's) have advocated for instant runoff voting, which would not be nearly as effective as approval voting in helping minor parties get elected.

Two New French Voting Studies

In the last couple days, two new voting studies have come out of France, following the Presidential elections there. One (translation to English) and two (and also in English.) The first included a look at approval voting, and the second score voting, with a range of -2 to 2, and both suggest that France would have gotten a different, and probably better, result if they had used either of these methods.

Specifically, the first study found that, if approval voting had been used in the first round, that the two candidates to advance would have been Hollande (the Socialist leader who advanced in the real election, and went on to defeat incumbent center-right President Sarkozy) and the original fourth-place finisher, François Bayrou. Bayrou is an interesting character; he came in third in the previous election, and his Democratic Union party is considered a centrist group. The study also showed that, in a head-to-head match up, Bayrou would have beaten Hollande. This is some real-world data supporting the theory that approval voting does a better job of electing centrist candidates than plurality. They examined instant runoff voting as well, but got the same result as the plurality election, supporting that theory as well.

The second study looked at score voting. Again, Bayrou and Hollande led (and were the only candidates with net-positive scores!) while Sarkozy slipped back to fourth place. Their head-to-head challenges also found Bayrou to be a beats-all winner. They also found very little bullet voting.

These studies build on previous, smaller ones from the 2002 and 2007 elections, which found similar results. All told, this is some excellent real-world data adding further evidence to our theoretical expectations of approval and score voting.