Hi, Paul K wrote about my suggestion to drop the V from IRRV: > I had something of the same notion (and being more nearly > an average voter than a voting methods scholar, I agree > with this). > > But... for the same reason there shouldn't be a "V" on > the end of IRV. It should be IRO for instant run off.
Years ago, some people did refer to it as IRO. But runoff is the correct term; it's not two words. Despite that, I agree IRO is a better name than IRV. IR would be too short, probably, since IR already means infrared and perhaps dozens of other things too. > If there's a V on the end of IRV, we need a V on > the end of IRRV to keep FROM confusing everybody. I apologize if I missed an earlier argument that justified that opinion, but I don't understand why I should believe that's correct. To keep from confusing people, the title or intro of a document or letter could refer to it as the Instant Round Robin voting method, and then abbreviate it as IRR. > This was why earlier I argued that we should keep "voting" > and "vote-counting" methods separate. I "vote" the same > way whether its IRV or IRRV - the difference is in the > counting, and that's what we're already suspicious > about... In a technical sense, yes, we would vote the same way-- assuming IRV permits candidates to be ranked as equally preferred, which we IRR advocates would permit for both IRR and IRV. But the candidates to be ranked would likely be very different. Under IRV, I expect we'd still see what we see today: two big parties that each nominate one candidate apiece--requiring primary elections to winnow their contenders down to one--plus a few third-party candidates who are sure to lose, and the two big candidates will continue to be polarized by their need to get off-center votes to be nominated and their need to stay fairly true to that off-center base in the general election (to get their base to show up to vote on election day). If a candidate were reckless enough to position himself in the middle, he'd be sandwiched by surrounding candidates and lose and appear unpopular given IRV's way of measuring popularity. (Like John McCain, Condorcet winner in 2000, would have appeared relative to Bush and Gore, if the voters' preference orders in 2000 had been tallied by IRV.) Under IRR, on the other hand, parties would not have a strong incentive to nominate only one candidate, and there'd be strong incentives to nominate more than one: they could increase turnout of their supporters on election day by nominating a diversity, they could avoid the fratricide of primary fights, and they could avoid putting all their eggs in one basket. To be successful, candidates would need to adopt centrist compromise positions. This would allow voters to rank less-corrupt centrists over more-corrupt centrists, electing less-corrupt centrists. I couldn't ask much more of a voting method, since elections are such crude instruments. Democracy is not about being fair to each voter, as one member of this list recently asserted during our discussion of the electoral college; it's about aligning the incentives of society's leaders with the well-being of the people. --Steve ---- Election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info