Tired of only voting for only one candidate?
Then maybe you'd like Instant Runoff Voting. Or maybe you'd like another method of multiple choice voting called Condorcet. Confused by it all? Perhaps Scientific American can straighten it out for you. Or you'll find your answers here. I still think it's a little confusing. But some have no sympathy for the likes of me.
Drew If you cannot figure out how instant runoff voting works, and are confused by it, good! You probably shouldn't be voting if you're that dumb.
Cheri Where can I sign the IRV petition? Here.
Joe Is it any wonder the Republican party, the party that is reknown for being the party of the wealthy minority, is against a fairer way of voting? Could they be anymore transparent?
Tel Sammamish, WA I think IRV would be pretty great. It would encourage a much greater diversity of ideas in our political process by increasing the impact of small parties, though I don’t think it would immediately get small party candidates elected. Democrats and Republicans don’t like it because it would force them to recognize as legitimate points of view that are outside the small political spectrum that they occupy instead of, as is the current norm, disregarding them or villainizing small party candidates for “stealing” votes. Debate, including political debate, is enriched by a greater variety of ideas.
PS Toby Nixon, the State Representative for the 45th Legislative District supports I-318 and he’s a Republican.
posted by Ross Reynolds at 2:03 PM
2 Comments:
Great show! A few comments:
I think Steven Hill did a great job of explaining the value of a ranked ballot. However, in underplaying the weaknesses of Instant Runoff relative to Condorcet voting, he said some mislead on a couple of things:
1. It doesn't require paradoxical voting patterns to make Instant Runoff produce an anti-democratic result. Here's an example of Instant Runoff breaking down with a set of voters with rational preferences. In this example, Knoxville is chosen as the capital of Tennessee, even though it has weak core support and weak broad support. See the same example using Condorcet for a more rational result.
2. In close elections, Instant Runoff can result in chaos. It's much worse than other elections. A real world example of this was when the Debian GNU/Linux project picked its project leader. They used Condorcet, and so things were fine. However, using their ballots, it was easy to calculate what the result would have been under Instant Runoff. There was a very unstable result, where removing just one vote could make any of three candidates win. Worse, the new winner (Bdale Garbee) was ranked higher on the ballot that was eliminated than the old winner (Branden Robinson). So, in essense, there's a voter who liked Bdale Garbee better than Branden Robinson who's vote (ranking Bdale Garbee higher than Branden Robinson) would cause Branden Robinson to win in Instant Runoff.
December 16, 2004 10:39 PM
Thanks for the show! It was really a great thing to hear.
I agreed with the callers who gave the example about Bush, McCain, and Kerry, and suggested "Condorcet" or pair-voting.
I think that Steven Hill's comparisons between IRV and Condorcet were a little hypocritical. When he compares IRV to plurality, he says that IRV is better because it assures a majority and because second choices count. When he compares IRV to the Condorcet methods, he says that it doesn't matter whether the majority of supporters supported McCain over Bush and second choice votes shouldn't matter as much as "core votes".
His argument about "core votes" doesn't make much sense, anyway. In the example the caller gave, in which John McCain would have won the second-choice votes of voters who voted for John Kerry and George Bush, but he was eliminated early, smart people would lie and rank John McCain ahead of John Kerry, so that John Kerry is eliminated first and George Bush is defeated by John McCain. But if people vote strategically, that wouldn't mean John McCain has more "core support", it only means that IRV can fail when there's more than two "mainstream" candidates.
December 18, 2004 4:49 PM
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