Brian Olson wrote:
Someone needs to tell Thomas Friedman that "Alternative Voting" (IRV)
isn't all it's claimed to be.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/24/opinion/24friedman.html
It appears that FairVote's strategy is working, for some value of
working at least. In so insistently giving the impression that ranked
ballot is for IRV and IRV is for the ranked ballot, they're succeeding
in making people equate the two.
In effect, they're playing high stakes. By attaching IRV to the sensible
idea of a ranked ballot, they can get others to swallow the idea of IRV,
the method, more easily. However, this is indeed high stakes, because if
IRV fails (and as you point out, it's not very good), then that failure
can be transported over to the idea of ranked balloting itself. After
all, if IRV is ranked balloting and ranked balloting is IRV, then a
failure in one is a failure in both.
It appears that Friedman is more confused than actively championing the
IRV cause: common sense says that the advantage of a ranked ballot is
that you *can* make contingent choices, you can prefer one party (or
candidate) to another without causing a spoiler. However, (as we know,)
a ranked ballot helps little unless it's combined with a good method.
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