At 12:20 PM 4/20/2013, David L Wetzell wrote:
If you're going to pit two election rules against each other by
using them both and then have voters decide between the cases when
they differ then you're going to have sample selection problems.
The "comment" seemed to assume public elections. Voting systems can
be tried in NGOs, and that's where the future lies, my opinion. It's
very unlikely that we will see major voting reforms take place in
governmental election systems without them having seen usage in NGOs.
Having said that, history isn't necessarily friendly to my idea.
Bucklin voting was all the rage in the period 1910-1920 and a little
later. Yet I never heard of it being used outside of public elections.
It worked in public elections, no pathologies were asserted at the
time other than that it allowed a runner-up in the first preference
votes to win the election. That was considered horrifying to the
Minnesota Supreme Court, which, effectively, interpreted the state
constitution as *demanding* plurality. Very strange.... (FairVote
later argued differently, but I'm quite sure they would have
disallowed IRV just the same.)
The only problem was that in nonpartisan elections -- party
primaries, much later -- it frequently failed to find a majority at
all. That wasn't Bucklin's fault; IRV would have failed even more.
The real fix to that problem would have been a runoff, and what was
*actually done* was to dump Bucklin and to use top-two, vote-for-one
in the primary, with a runoff when no majority was found. If they had
simply used a hybrid system, say a Bucklin primary, with a runoff
when needed, history might be different.
But Bucklin had been sold the same as IRV more recently: find a
majority without expensive runoffs....
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