[EM] A turd by any other name
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 Also apparently Larry Diamond, a Stanford University democracy expert (as cited by Friedman), who sounds like probably a smart and nice guy who mostly specializes in growing new democracies around the world, and that's great, but for all the international cultural issues he's probably dealt with maybe we could help him out a little with this one little detail. If you want to get people started out right with the best methods we know of right now, IRV ain't it. I posted this to the NYT comments section. dunno if the moderators will accept it. Friedman and Larry Diamond need an adjustment on a point of election theory. Alternative Voting, also known as Instant Runoff Voting, is actually a pretty bad reform only barely better than the current system. Burlington VT enacted IRV for their mayoral elections but in 2009 on only the second time they used it the system got the wrong answer and elected the wrong person. A year later they repealed IRV. Virtual Round Robin elections, often known as Condorcet's Method, don't have that flaw and are just as easy or easier to implement than IRV. A few people have latched onto IRV and promoted it a lot, perhaps somewhat staking their reputations on it now, but really for the same amount of work we could have much better reforms. Brian Olson http://bolson.org/ Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] A turd by any other name
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. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
