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by jrgoff 1324 days ago
Would you mind explaining more about what you mean regarding the recent Alaska election? The information I have found about it made it seem fairly reasonable and straightforward to me, but perhaps I am missing something.
1 comments

Here's a decent commentary:

https://www.reddit.com/r/EndFPTP/comments/x9oupk/2022_alaska...

> Two popular suspicions are now confirmed. Nick Begich was the Condorcet winner. Sarah Palin was a spoiler candidate - her presence caused Mary Peltola to be elected, by prematurely eliminating Nick Begich.

Here's another, that got down-voted to hell, because of the audience.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ForwardPartyUSA/comments/xb119e/its...

> If 2913 voters who supported Palin first and Begich second flipped their first and second preferences, they’d have gotten a more preferred result.

(i.e. they would have gotten Begich instead of Peltola, by having Palin eliminated first)

> Even worse, if instead 5825 of those same types of voters just decided not to vote, they’d have also gotten a better result. So merely participating in the election hurt them.

While I do prefer the winner it selected, it's not a great election method. Better than FPTP is a terribly low bar.

Condorcet has arguably worse features:

1. Even harder to explain to the average voter than RCV

2. Greater likelihood of nobody winning / needing to conduct new election

I am of the belief that RCV is not great, but that it is significantly better than status quo... and it is possible.

For 1, meh. Marking is the same and it is much closer to incentivizing honest reporting. For 2, everyone advocating for Condorcet has some favorite cycle-breaker. Mostly it doesn't matter; it's a lot more rare than non-monotonicity in IRV.

But my favorite is approval.

I see, that was helpful - thank you!