As I've done some research on Bucklin -- not in libraries, unfortunately -- I've been coming to the conclusion that Bucklin should receive more attention than it has.
It is a very simple method; it can be summed by precincts. It can be counted with any election equipment that can handle multiwinner Plurality -- i.e., standard equipment -- like regular Approval, It's easy to understand and vote (more about that below). And it has reasonable behavior, quite similar to Approval; but it is Majority Criterion compliant. The version of Bucklin that I'm familiar with is what was used in Duluth, because it is described in Brown v. Smallwood, the complete decision is available on the internet, and is worth reading. In this version, first and second rank votes were limited to one candidate or the ballot was spoiled. The third rank -- there were no more ranks -- allowed voting for any number of candidates. I would change that only in one way: I'd allow multiple votes in any rank, so a voter could vote exactly as in Approval, *or* could choose to exclusively rank. Then, if the votes for first rank fail to find a majority winner, the second rank votes are added in. And if no majority winner is then found, the third rank votes are added in. I think that in these elections, plurality victory was allowed; it simply becomes less likely that there will be majority failure. Contrary to FairVote propaganda about Bucklin -- most information on the net was helpfully supplied by FairVote -- Bucklin appears to have been very popular, and no examples are known where it produced a poor result. The case in Brown v. Smallwood was one where the result overturned by the court was clearly just, and the reversal -- a long time after the election -- was very poor public policy. Problem is that the voters counted on the system, thus very likely did not first rank with standard plurality strategy. It is highly likely that, had the election been Plurality, Smallwood would also have won. So, essentially, the court cheated the voters. For what? That the election method was allegedly unconstitutional need not have been sufficient reason to reverse the election; the court could instead have required a new election. However, they awarded it to the first-preference winner. I smell a rat. There was a request to reconsider, and the Court issued an additional ruling on that, simply reaffirming their original decision. But the petition is interesting. It was asserted that the majority -- strong majority -- of legal opinion at the time did not agree with the Court decision. There was also a dissenting opinion in the decision, pointing out that there had been no legal opinion that Bucklin -- it was actally called, I think, preference voting -- violated the one-voter, one-vote principle, and the FairVote claim that this was the basis of the decision is, shall we say, oversimplified. A number of attorneys in positions of public trust have issued opinions that Brown v. Smallwood applies to Instant Runoff Voting, and we will probably see, soon, court challenge of the Minnesota implementation of IRV. My own opinion is that Brown v. Smallwould *does* apply to any system of alternative votes indicated on the same ballot, and there is plenty of evidence for that in the decision itself. The only legal opinion I've seen that confirms the FairVote position on this is from lawyers who are advocates for IRV. On the other hand, it is also my opinion that Brown v. Smallwood was a corrupt decision, and my amazement is that it was allowed to stand. Given that Bucklin was quite popular in Duluth, I conclude that, probably, a major party that did not want to see Bucklin spread, through it's control of the state legislature and the court, was able to shoot down Bucklin, and they had too much power at the state level for the local supporters of Bucklin to prevail. Since Brown v. Smallwood was never confirmed anywhere else, as far as I've been able to find, the precedent from it applies only to Minnesota, and a new consideration in Minnesota might quite possibly overturn it. I'm a little worried that IRV advocates may be able to influence that decision to focus only on the specific form of "runoff" involved in Bucklin, rather than the more general alternative vote situation, and the alleged problem that later preferences expressed can hurt your first preference. That is the tack that I'd expect them to follow; so it might be important for Approval advocates to see that a friend of the court brief is filed on the more general aspects of the situation. There is no substantial legal opinion -- outside of interpretations of Brown v. Smallwooed -- that Approval violates one person, one vote, since, in the end, only one vote counts, the one cast for a winner, or, alternatively, *no* vote on that ballot counts, i.e., affects the result. The necessary argumentation was already presented in Brown v. Smallwood by the dissenting justice. Now, what about this claim that later preferences expressed can hurt your first preference? It is, of course, true; that is, if the voter chooses to add a candidate to a lower rank, that vote could help that lower-ranked candidate to beat one's favorite. However, how realistic is this possibility, under what conditions would it actually occur? First of all, FairVote claims that Bucklin was abandoned because, allegedly because of this harm, most voters did not add lower rank votes at all. This is like the IEEE situation with Approval. The IEEE implemented Approval, I've seen it believably alleged, when there was a possible dissident candidate who might win through vote-splitting. So the Board implemented the method to protect their desired winners. Then, when the danger passed, the continued existence of Approval as a method could have allowed dissident candidates to more easily garner votes, and maybe win. So it was removed, and the reason given was familiar: most voters weren't using the additional vote possibility. But that is no reason at all to drop Approval. If *every* voter, in an election, does not use the additional votes, there has been no cost, nothing was wasted. With hand-counting, Approval *may* incur some additional counting cost, *but only to the extent that voters use it.* No use, no cost. Approval, however, fixes the spoiler effect. The effect we are so unfortunately familiar with takes place when a candidate with no chance of winning the election flips the result from one party in our two-party system to the other. In such a context, if voting for multiple candidates is allowed (in a single-winner election), most voters, I would predict, vote only for their favorite. *By definition, most voters' favorite is one of the two frontrunners.* Now, when only two candidates are in range of winning, votes for other candidates are essentially moot for victory purposes. So for this alleged "harm" to take place, the voter must be considering voting for both frontrunners. Like voting for Bush and Gore in 2000. This is, more or less, quite similar to staying home! And this alleged effect is the number one reason commonly given for why Approval is a poor system, and likewise Bucklin. No, voters in Duluth loved Bucklin, unless those appealing the decision were essentially lying. I'd love to find some newspaper articles on it. Bucklin was working. No election method can magically create a majority winner, unless voters are coerced into voting for a candidate that they might detest. Forcing voters to rank all candidates can be exactly this. "You *will* cast a vote for Adolf Hitler or Genghis Khan. But, hey, you are the voter, sovereign. You can choose." No, thank you. I prefer what Robert's Rules prefers: if an election does not discover a majority who have essentially voted Yes to the result, it has failed. RR actually dislikes top-two runoff, it favors repeated balloting until a majority winner is found. Yes, that can be quite a nuisance, but, silly parliamentarians, they happen to think that majority rule is important, and that no decision is valid without the assent of a majority. Unless the bylaws -- *contrary to their recommendations* -- allow plurality elections. This should be the interpretation of truncated ballots: "I would prefer that the election fail than that any of the remaining candidates be elected." Should the *voters* be able to assert that outcome? (It is a variation of None of the Above, and that variation actually exists in, I think, standard Robert's Rules elections, where a blank ballot submitted by a voter is considered, essentially, a No vote for all the candidates; it can prevent the plurality winner from prevailing. And this, then, I recently realized, causes the common FairVote claim that voting for a second preference cannot harm your first preference to not be true. In Vermont, IRV legislation was proposed some time back. Vermont requires a majority of ballots cast, I'm not sure of the exact definition, it may exclude blank ballots. If no candidate gains a majority, the top three candidates are presented to the House for election by secret ballot. Not the top two. So this is closer to the Robert's Rules procedure, where there is no candidate elimination at all. The House stands in as surrogates for the voters. (Don't trust a representative, don't elect him or her!) So, if I add a second preference to my IRV ballot, and my first preference is eliminated, my second preference vote could put that candidate over the top to gain a majority. Whereas if I had not, and no candidate gains a majority, my second preference -- who, with IRV, must be in third place for this to happen -- would still have a chance of being elected by the House. Likewise with Robert's Rules and further election process. In the Vermont IRV legislation, a ballot instruction was included, and that instruction repeated the claim that a lower preference vote could not harm your first preference. That ballot instruction was not true. I don't think the IRV legislation came close to being passed; if it had, I wonder if the problem would have been caught. In approximately 1996, FairVote invented the name "Instant Runoff Voting," and managed to make this the common term in the United States. They use the term to cover many different forms of Preferential Voting, with different rules and conditions. Thus, even if an implementation, such as in Hendersonville, North Carolina, isn't what would be called "IRV," they can, and do, claim the "victory." But, of course, Bucklin is also worthy of the name "Instant Runoff Voting." It proceeds in rounds, just like IRV. If there is no majority winner in the first round, then there is a virtual runoff, an Approval election. The claim that Approval hasn't been used in the U.S. is bosh. Bucklin "runoffs" were Approval elections. On the one hand, FairVote wants to make us think that Approval is an untried method, never mind many centuries of use (like 500 years?) in Venice, never mind elections of the Pope for centuries, and, of course, never mind Bucklin. On the other hand, when it suits some of them, it is claimed that early U.S. presidential elections were a form of Approval. If so, it's nothing like any form of Approval I've seen. The essence of Approval is that one may vote for or against all candidates; in the simplest implementation, a blank is considered a No vote. In the early elections, in the electoral college, electors had two votes to cast, and there would be two winners. That's not Approval, that is multiwinner Plurality (actually, majority, a majority was required), with two votes for two winners. Routine, actually. FairVote has promoted the article written by Nagel on the so-called Burr Dilemma, which is an invented and imaginary dilemma that supposedly would face electors in that situation. In fact, both candidates won, with no sign of defection. The problem is that the electors voted as promised, in the party system that had developed, so both candidates were tied, both with a majority, throwing the election into the House, where the rules were different, in order to choose which one would be President. Not Approval at all, but Nagel simply states over and over that it is. Makes one wonder about "peer-reviewed" publications.... by political scientists. (The scientists aren't at fault, really, it's the *process*, a familiar theme of mine.) (Nagel argues that the dilemma does exist in Approval elections that are pure approval, and Warren Smith seems to have bought this argument. But if one looks, as I did above, at the scenarios where such a supposed conflict would exist, it doesn't make sense. Smith also seems to think that Approval is vulnerable to the Burr dilemma, but Range is not. He seems to forget that strategic voters in Range will typically vote approval-style; Range gets its performance improvement over Approval from, actually, very few voters voting intermediate votes. In fact, from my own study, it appears that *one voter* may bring substantial improvement from a certain point of view. Thus if the Burr Dilemma actually applied in any significant way to Approval Voting, it would also apply to Range. But it does not.) I find Bucklin interesting because it solves the spoiler effect through an Approval-type mechanism, but it begins, in the first round, as a standard majority-required election, as it was originally implemented, and, even if multiple votes are *allowed* in the first rank, voters don't have to use that option, allowing flexibility if it *does* happen that there are three front-runners. Bucklin, because it satisfies the Majority Criterion, may be more palatable than pure Approval. It might even be enough for it to have only two ranks, instead of three. Bucklin ballots could also be analyzed pairwise, for other interesting possibilities in hybrid Approval/Ranked methods. But right now, Approval is probably the method to advocate for immediate implementation -- except that Bucklin, with its history, *might* be easier to get. And some would argue it is a better method. ---- Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info