Hi all,
There was a great show about Instant Runoff
<http://kuow.org/theconversation.asp?Archive=12-16> on KUOW, the NPR
affiliate in Seattle today. The guests were Steven Hill from the Center
for Voting and Democracy <http://fairvote.org> as well as the Republican
Party official who wrote the opposing view on the San Francisco
initiative that passed. The great part was that awareness of Condorcet
methods <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet_method> is growing.
They also have a blog to post your comments
<http://theconversationkuow.blogspot.com/2004/12/tired-of-only-voting-for-only-one.html>.
Here's what I posted on the site (with a couple of thinko fixes I just noticed):
Great show! A couple 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 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
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant_runoff#An_example>. 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
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet_method#An_example> 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<http://electorama.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=32>, 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.
Rob ---- Election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
