Aussies call it “preferential voting” actually.

Tideman’s opinion is noted, but in order to scrutinize it we need to see his evidence – which you do not provide. I have heard a few of his arguments, and they are rather flimsy.

I think it’s great that you advise people to learn the esoterica of voting methods, I but wish that you would follow this advise. Remember, you started off the conversation with the false claim that IRV is free from vote splitting. And now you say that IRV is better than feasible alternatives, when Approval Voting is much more simple and feasible for a variety of reasons, and picks better winners. In light of the numerous problems intrinsic to IRV, it is not a good voting method, and not a good choice for those who want better democracy.

Update: range voting is discussed in the academic literature here: Nicolaus Tideman, Collective Decisions and Voting: The Potential for Public Choice (Ashgate Publishing, 2006): pp. 174-176 and 236-238. For what it’s worth, Tideman rates range voting “unsupportable” (his word), and rates IRV best among the methods that do not require heavy-duty algebra.

By all means, folks should check out range voting. While they’re at it, they should study up on the Condorcet principle, Borda Count, Arrow’s (im)possibility theorem, Smith Sets, and lots more esoterica. A semester or two of welfare economics would be nice; set theory is a prerequisite. It’s a great intellectual passtime.

At the end of your studies, come back to Clay Shentrup’s arguments (which you will find all over the blogosphere) and decide whether they actually make any sense.

While you’re away at school, folks promoting a very good reform (not perfect, but better than the feasible alternatives) will be making headway in the real world.

What we’re calling “instant runoff voting” (IRV) in this discussion is the special case of STV-PR where you are filling only one seat at a time. In Ireland you would probably call it the “alternative vote”, which is how it is known in the U.K., Australia and elsewhere.

The U.S. has many elected executive officials, and also single-member districts for most legislative bodies. The alternative vote/IRV (or — if you’re willing to believe Clay Shentrup — range voting, etc.) is very important here because so many elections are to fill one seat.

Hope this helps,
Bob

Lynne Serpe, as the rep. from the New America
Foundation, gave an excellent report on IRV to the
committee and fielded Mr. Alarcon’s questions
beautifully. Her report follows. I have added some
observations below.

Linda Piera-Avila

_________________________________________________________________

From: Lynne Serpe
Sent: Thursday, June 14, 2007 5:14 PM
Subject: Update: IRV in Daily News, Results of
yesterday’s Rules &
Elections Committee

Hello everyone,

Thank you to everyone who attended yesterday’s Rules &
Elections Committee meeting and/or sent in a letter.
The support
for IRV was abundantly clear!

-Councilmember Jose Huizar and Councilmember Bill
Rosendahl came to the Rules Committee to speak in
favor of IRV.

-Councilmember Wendy Gruel sent a staffer who read a
letter on a range of topics, including her support for
IRV.

-Representatives from the African American Voter
Registration Project,
Asian Pacific American Legal Center, Asian American
Action Fund, Common Cause, FairVote, LA VoteFIRE,
League of Women Voters, and the Southwest Voter
Registration Education Project all spoke in favor, as
did several community members, neighborhood council
members, and poll workers.

-I submitted letters of support from the San Fernando
Valley Young Democrats, California PIRG, Anthony
Thigpenn from
Scope LA and the Los Angeles Community College
District resolution on instant runoff voting.

- CM Garcetti’s office told me they received a large
number of emails as well.

As far as the three-member Rules Committee:
Councilmember Eric Garcetti made his support known.
Councilmember Zine made some very positive statements.
Councilmember Alarcon asked a number of questions and
is not yet convinced of the benefits of IRV. There was
no vote on the Huizar-Garcetti motion (nor any of the
other four motions on the agenda). Instead, as
recommended in Clerk Frank Martinez’ post-election
report:
http://cityclerk.lacity.org/election/2007%20Municipal%20Elections%20Afte
r%20Action%20Rpt.pdf he will be reporting back in
December on a range of topics, including instant
runoff voting.

______________________________________________________________

Linda’s observations:

Steven Hill spoke about San Francisco’s experience
with IRV and he offered assistance when/if LA adopts
the system.
Mike Feinstein spoke about how Santa Monica is
exploring the possibilty of using IRV. I also said a
few words. Ceil Sorensen attended in support.

A few years ago the League of Women Voters did not
support IRV. Now they do. I see this as a very
positive shift.

Mr. Alarcon’s objections centered around two points:
1) would IRV adversely affect minority community
voters?
2) runoff campaigns allow more time for voters to
gather information about the two final candidates,
including sometimes “necessary” negative information.

Now back to Lynne’s email:
_________________________________________________________________

THINGS YOU CAN DO:

1. Write a letter to the Los Angeles Daily News. They
had an article in
today’s paper (below): “Los Angeles may vote for
change: Instant
runoffs, new dates some proposals for combating low
turnout.” Letters
should be no more than 100 words and emailed to:
dnforum at dailynews.com

2. Write a letter to your Council member, mentioning
your support for
IRV and definitely mention that you live in his/her
district!

3. Contact your Neighborhood Council, asking if they
would be willing
to either: have me (or one of my interns) come speak
about IRV, or pass a resolution in favor of IRV if
they have already had a presentation.

You can find out which neighborhood council you live
in at:
http://www.lacityneighborhoods.com/page2.cfm?doc=home

Thank you,

Lynne Serpe

Deputy Director, Political Reform Program, New America
Foundation

213-480-0994 http://www.newamerica.net/politicalreform

***************

Los Angeles may vote for change
Instant runoffs, new dates some proposals for
combating low turnout
by Kerry Cavanaugh, Staff Writer, Los Angeles Daily
News, 06/13/2007

________________________________

To entice Angelenos back to the polls after record-low
turnouts in
recent years, the city is mulling a host of changes,
including new
election dates, more mail-in voting and instant runoff
voting.

In this year’s elections, 10 percent of registered
voters participated
in the March primary and 7 percent turned out for the
May general
election.

The reason?

In a hearing Wednesday, voter education groups cited
voter fatigue from too many elections, complicated
initiatives, language barriers,
negative campaigning, lack of interest in local races
and a growing belief that voting doesn’t matter.

“We really need to bring back what the importance is
of local
elections,” said Jimmy Valentine with the African
American Voter
Registration, Education and Participation Program.
“Your council
members, your school board members, those are the ones
that figure in your daily lives in your community.”

One proposal to increase voter turnout – or at least
reduce voter
fatigue – is instant runoff voting. The system, now
used in San
Francisco, allows voters to rank the candidates in
order of preference.

To determine the winner, officials tally first-choice
candidates. If a
candidate has a majority, he or she wins. If there is
no majority, the
last place candidate is eliminated and ballots that
listed the
candidate as the first choice are recounted using the
second choice. That elimination and recount process is
continued until a candidate gets a majority of votes.

Supporters said instant runoff voting would be cheaper
since there’s
only one election and it could increase participation,
since the number
of voters tends to decrease in local elections between
the primary and
final election.

Councilman Jose Huizar said he began pushing instant
runoff voting
after the last election when he went to vote for the
community college board trustee runoff, and was told
only two other people (beside him and his wife) had
voted.

“I asked myself, wasn’t I just here a few months ago
to vote for this
person?” Huizar said.

So far the proposal has support from Mayor Antonio
Villaraigosa and
several City Council members, but it’s still in the
discussion phase
and would require changing the city charter and
election code.

[Lynne's Note: The Daily News edited Kerry Cavanaugh's
article
incorrectly: the Mayor actually submitted a letter in
support of a
vote-by-mail/extended early voting proposal. He did
not weigh in on
IRV.]

http://www.dailynews.com/news/ci_6135443

Bascially it is multi-seat constuencies. Where you rank your candidates in order of preference. A Quota is set which is the the valid poll /seats.

When a candidate get elected their surples over the quota is distributed to the second ranked persons on the ballot.

If no one gets quota bottom person eliminated. and their second preferances reistributed.

The reason for PR was basically so that the protestant minority in the South would not be out voted by the catholic majority. They do it in the North of Ireland for same reason.

It produces pretty much the same amount of seats in the parliament as party support.
Not entirely sure how it differs from what you oppose above.

I read the piece you linked to at Fruits and Votes. In it, Matthew Shugart shows himself to be an election methods novice, apparently comparable in knowledge with those who have been studying election methods for a month or so. I correct his numerous misunderstandings here.

You incorrectly claim that reality does not match the appearance of truth in my claims. Every claim I’ve made is accurate and verifiable, but you yourself incorrectly claimed that IRV is free of the threat of vote splitting. I have addressed several similar misconceptions from other IRV advocates here as well. These common myths help explain why voting reformers have unfortunately chosen to support IRV instead of Approval Voting. But there’s no reason that we can’t change this with a public education campaign. You can help, by realizing how you came to the mistaken belief that IRV eliminates vote splitting, and working to better educate your fellow citizens.

Shugart says he searched for scholarly articles on Range Voting to no avail, but Google tells me that Stephen H. Unger, a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Columbia University, supports Range Voting. And RangeVoting.org was created in 2005 by a Princeton math Ph.D., and contains a profusion of scholarly scrutiny. If you think Warren D. Smith and the other contributers are not objective, then please demonstrate faults in their analysis. Anyone is free to provide scientific scrutiny of their arguments, and judge them on their merits (you don’t need to be a professional scientist or work for a university to practice science). Instead Shugart chooses to make the fallacy of arguing from popularity, instead of addressing the evidence. That is a surprising and disappointing thing for an academic to do. He also ignores that Approval Voting is a form of Range Voting, and has been advocated by numerous credentialed mathematicians.

The question isn’t “who are the zealouts?” – the issue is who is right. So far, all available evidence says we are.

There’s a difference between the appearance of mathematical proof, and the reality. The same is true of conceptual clarity, historical accuracy and respect for the facts. Clay Shentrup’s monologues are contain too much appearance and not enough reality.

Voting methods scholar and UCSD prof. Matthew Shugart has this to say about range voting:

There is a very large literature on electoral systems, not only that by political scientists, but also by mathematicians. (Strangely, the lits don’t always address one another, although there are distinguished scholars who publish in both fields.)

Approval voting, of course, has its advocates among the experts in electoral systems. However, despite its having been introduced almost thirty years ago (by Brams and Fishburn in APSR, 1978), it has not been used or even seriously proposed for any public jurisdiction during this time that I am aware of. There are good reasons for that, some of which Jack or I have already mentioned or that you can locate in the literature. Range voting, as far as I know, is advocated by no one not affiliated with the organization linked by a now-frequent propagator above. A search of the academic articles data bases in political science, economics, mathematics, and computer science turns up exactly zero articles on range voting. Until the method has been subjected to independent scholarly scrutiny, it simply is not worth being taken seriously –- at least here on a blog devoted to analysis of actual elections and to the discussion of scientifically sound alternative electoral systems for actual democracies. It does have its uses in other settings and, in fact, I oversaw the implementation of a range-voting system for a committee that selected some student award winners this past year.

Who are the zealots here?

And by that same proof, Dave’s claim that Range Voting advocates are “just plain unrealistic” is disproved. If anything, the use of math to prove their point makes them considerably more realistic than the IRV advocates, who have offered little more than rhetorical arguments.

Of course, being the public transportation advocate that I am, I have to answer the question Clay asks: “Why do so many IRV supporters refuse to listen to the facts?” with a parallel question: “Why does the Bus Riders Union still claim rail construction funds can be moved to operations, when it has been explained ad nauseum that they legally can’t?”

The answer to both is that zealots, once convinced their rhetoric is actually fact, cannot be dissuaded by the real facts.