Mar 2, 2010 IRV REPEALED because democracy matters in Burlington VT! Twitter: #btvirv Facebook: Repeal IRV
Why do you say that IRV nevertheless elected the “wrong” candidate?
In a head-to-head race, the votes suggest that the Democrat would have beaten the Progressive by a margin of 46% to 39%. Subject to the same caveat that voter and candidate behavior might have been different, the votes thus suggest that voters preferred the Democrat to both the Progressive and the Republican. Yet the Democrat finished third in the IRV results.
As shown in [the 2009 Burlington mayoral] election, IRV does not "solve the spoiler problem," does not "allow voters to vote their true preference without fear of inadvertently electing a candidate they cannot stand," and it does not elect candidates "actually preferred by a majority."
These and other pathologies are not rare. IRV in this election did not serve as a "bulwark of democracy" – rather the opposite.
We shall show by considering Burlingon's 2009 mayoral election that all the claims by Bouricius and FairVote are false.
http://rangevoting.org/Burlington.html
| Wright, Kurt |
| Aswad, William |
| Atkins, Kenneth |
| Bissonnette, Clement |
| Donovan, Johannah |
| Larson, Mark |
| Lorber, Jason |
| Ram, Kesha |
| Weston, Rachel |
| Wizowaty, Susan |
| Zuckerman, David |
Ward 1: 405 keep, 264 repeal
Ward 2: 428 keep, 185 repeal
Ward 3: 510 keep, 292 repeal
Ward 4: 1203 repeal, 606 keep
Ward 5: 793 keep, 545 repeal
Ward 6: 490 keep, 477 repeal
Ward 7: 1006 repeal, 437 keep
BURLINGTON ELECTION TOTALS
Elections highlighted in red are similar. IRV election years shows clear decline in voter participation.
~1993: 10269, BROWNELL WINS
~1995: 11756, CLAVELLE WINS
~1997: 5518, CLAVELLE WINS, NO MAJOR CANDIDATE
~1999: 9941, CLAVELLE WINS
~2001: 6208, POOR WEATHER 26” SNOW
~2003: 5959, CLAVELLE WINS, NO MAJOR CANDIDATE
~2006: 9865, IRV 37% OF REGISTERED VOTERS
~2009: 9013, IRV 27% OF REGISTERED VOTERS
1 comment:
An excellent argument against IRV.
I worry though that this argument also seems to work on ANY attempt to move beyond plurality voting. Under plurality, since you can only vote for one choice, your opinion on all the other choices can be inferred as against. But any other voting system, IRV included, allows voters the option to provide more information, if they choose. But it is always a choice: choosing not to provide the additional information is allowed, and yes, not doing some can come back to bite the voter in the end.
If this voter honestly had no opinion between Wright and Kiss, then his voice was heard (aside: accept for the "majority of continuing votes" nonsense, although that was not an issue in this election, thankfully.) And if he did have an opinion on that contest, but chose not to express it, who's to blame for that?
The problem with IRV, since it sometimes proceeds in a chaotic and difficult to predict way from round to round, is that it's hard to know ahead of time what that final, most-important pair will be. Perhaps many voters assumed (rationally, I would say) that Montroll and Kiss would be the top-two candidates, in which case "bullet-voting" for either of those two would be a perfectly acceptable, and perfectly informative, vote. But unexpectedly, Montroll was eliminated early, in the penultimate round.
Plurality is known to have serious issues with spoilers, with limiting third parties, etc. IRV has serious problems as well; all the same ones as plurality (to a fractionally-less vital degree) plus others, such as this. And while there are many other voting systems, some of which do not suffer the spoiler-prone and two-party-reinforcing problems of plurality and IRV, those methods will still invite voters to provide more information, which, if they chose NOT to provide it, could come back to bite them.
Thankfully, many of those methods are also less chaotic than IRV, which should help guide voters to share their opinions on relevant candidates, because a candidate's relevancy will be more-obvious (and more-persistent; IRV's eliminations are perhaps the harshest technique used in any commonly-studied voting method). Perhaps this will alleviate problems, like in the video, where a voter feels as though they have been cheated of the opportunity to participate in the election.
To recap: yes, IRV is not living up to expectations. But PLEASE remember that, while IRV is bad and plurality is bad too, that doesn't mean that all voting-system reform is worthless. Plurality and IRV and widely considered the TWO WORST possibilities. Once (hopefully) IRV is repealed, I encourage Burlington to press on. Approval voting would be an excellent step forward; score voting would be even better. But even other ranked-choice methods, like one of the Condorcet methods, or the Borda count, or cumulative voting, would be better than either plurality or IRV.
Check out rangevoting.org for information on approval and score voting
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