[godelski]

Why do you push IRV rather than simpler methods with higher VSE like Approval or STAR? Shouldn't we be highly advocating for a system that does not fail the favorite betrayer criterion? And I think Arizona is the perfect example why transparency and low complexity is essential (higher VSE is an added bonus given these).

[tadmilbourn]

Simple...because it's being used in a significant (and growing) number of places. Approval and STAR are great methods as well. But they're not what's in use in Maine. Or NYC. Or will be in use in Alaska.

So, in the spirit of focusing where I can have the most impact, I've chosen to most directly support RCV.

First past the post is the enemy here. Not RCV, STAR, or Approval.

[godelski]

> because it's being used in a significant (and growing) number of places.

Which is because of advocation over the last (mostly) 2-3 years. We're only two states in, that's not significant momentum. FYI, we have approval in Fargo and Lane County/Eugene are close to passing STAR (I'd argue RCV hinders that effort due to confusion).

> First past the post is the enemy here. Not RCV, STAR, or Approval.

I'd disagree actually. The enemy is non-representative voting.

Why I'll actually fight IRV is because history. We've gone down this path before and had states/cities/counties use IRV and then revert back because it didn't solve the problems they set out to solve. So, what is different this time around? There's a "good enough" bar that needs to be met. IRV doesn't meet that.

[zestyping]

IRV is only better than FPTP in a limited set of circumstances, and can often be worse at selecting the winner.

Most importantly, IRV will not break us out of the two-party system, which is the root of many problems in American politics.

Are you aware that IRV significantly increases spoiled ballot rates, and disproportionately in low-income areas? It's actively harmful, roughly equivalent to knocking a couple percent off of the Black vote.

https://rangevoting.org/SPRates.html

https://www.yes2repeal.org/spoiled-ballots

Please reconsider your support for it. I am sure you have good intentions; my guess is that most IRV supporters probably aren't aware of the harm they're doing. I also thought IRV was an okay system (not perfect but better than plurality etc.) until I learned this information relatively recently.

[godelski]

> Most importantly, IRV will not break us out of the two-party system, which is the root of many problems in American politics.

I want to expand on why this claim is true, since IRV is frequently propositioned as a way to solve spoilers. Most importantly IRV does not pass the Favorite Betrayer Criterion[0] which states

> voters should have no incentive to vote someone else over their favorite

IRV only handles weak spoilers (e.g. Jo Jorgensen spoiling Trump) and not strong spoilers (e.g. Sanders spoiling Biden).[1] We're not actually concerned about Jorgensen spoiling Trump or Stein spoiling Biden. We're concerned with Sanders spoiling Biden (or vise versa). This is where the favorite betrayer criterion comes in.

IRV isn't even the best ordinal (i.e. ranking candidates) system because it fails the monotonicity criterion[2], which states

> A ranked voting system is monotonic if it is neither possible to prevent the election of a candidate by ranking them higher on some of the ballots, nor possible to elect an otherwise unelected candidate by ranking them lower on some of the ballots (while nothing else is altered on any ballot).

This is an extremely undesirable property and will continue to promote tactical voting. I can go into it more but maybe just check out Clay's works or ask him yourself since he's here in the thread. He's far more informed on this stuff than I am since he's an actual expert.

[0] https://electowiki.org/wiki/Favorite_betrayal_criterion

[1] https://electionscience.org/library/the-spoiler-effect/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monotonicity_criterion

[ClayShentrup]

If anything, this "momentum" argument says you get more value by supporting STAR voting and/or approval voting than a method that already has traction.

https://clayshentrup.medium.com/momentum-e5fd12ffce2a

[guicho271828]

Thanks for mentioning this. I am no expert in voting systems, but reading these, it seems rank-based ones are not theoretically nice. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_system#Recent_develo... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_electoral_system... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theore...

[godelski]

I have a strong preference of cardinal over ordinal systems, but I won't say all ordinal systems are flawed. I rather like condorcet methods but I think their complexity is too much of a barrier. I've started to come around to Election Science's similar decision of pushing for Approval over STAR because of this and I will gladly argue how STAR is far less complex than IRV (STAR has a max of 2 rounds and IRV will almost always have significantly more. The only time it has two rounds is if there are strictly 3 candidates).

[coryrc]

Why would the two parties allow something which would disrupt their duopoly?

That's why it's IRV.

[godelski]

I joke about a conspiracy theory of this being the reason that IRV is propositioned instead of a more representative and better system like cardinal voting but honestly I believe that the reason is just because it gained more momentum early on. There's been CGP Grey videos on IRV (which proposes the exact misunderstandings I'm discussing in these threads), Hasan Minhaj (ditto), and others. There's been no major celebrity that is advocating for cardinal style voting. And at the end of the day understanding why cardinal is better than ordinal is not trivial to understand, unless you understand information encoding but that's not common knowledge (though it should be here and I'm surprised it isn't).

[creata]

> And at the end of the day understanding why cardinal is better than ordinal is not trivial to understand, unless you understand information encoding but that's not common knowledge (though it should be here and I'm surprised it isn't).

Alright, mind sharing your explanation?