You got me thinking, Ross, about how both ranking and rating methods give you the opportunity to rank or rate somebody you’ve never heard of over someone you detest. I wonder if there’s any empirical data that show such a voter tendency. I think it’s good to always include the option to abstain from voting on a particular candidate in these vote-for-more-than-just-one-if-you-want methods, as well as the none-of-the-above, and all that should get counted.

I have another concern. I read on your website that it would have been possible for Daggett to have won the election in NJ while he was polling around ten percent. I have a problem with that. If only ten percent of the electorate has this candidate as their first choice, why should he win?

Here I try to fit my explanation of how IRV does not really help third party candidates into 10 minutes of Youtube goodness. I’m probably not very good at this, but it’s my first try.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7OSaDInPU8Q

“Centrism” is, by definition, having the least total distance in “issue space” between the candidate and the voters. So it is, by definition, the most representative. Maybe you’re thinking that in a “liberal” area a “centrist” wouldn’t represent the people. But here we mean “centrist” as in, “relative to THAT electorate”.

You said..
>As I understand it, FairVote promotes PR as well as IRV.

Yes. They began as “Citizens for Proportional Representation”, and I believe their long-term goal is to get PR in multi-winner positions. But because (non-proportional) IRV is the single-winner form of (proportional) STV, they see IRV as a useful “stepping stone” to STV. And as such, they have used a lot of misleading and severely flawed rhetoric to sell voters on IRV. Regardless of whether STV is a good-enough proportional method (proportional score voting and asset voting are better), IRV is *not* good enough for single-winner districts. I have already listed a litany of problems that it has, that score voting and approval voting do not have.

> IRV wouldn’t skew the results towards any outcome, although it would open up the field for more than two viable candidates.

Both of these claims are false. IRV has specific mathematical properties that cause it to elect “extremists”. You can see that visually demonstrated here via Voronoi diagrams.
http://scorevoting.net/IrvExtreme.html

And IRV does NOT “open up the field” to more than two candidates. With IRV, the best strategy is to top-rank one’s favorite front-runner (and as we’ve seen in Australia, many voters will strategically exaggerate like that even if they don’t understand the mathematics of it or whether it’s actually helpful). You are falling here to the “two-and-a-half candidate” fallacy here. IRV *does* mitigate voters’ fear of voting for a *weak* “half candidate” like Ralph Nader in the 2000 election. But if that third party actually grows, voters eventually will have an incentive to top-rank their favorite front-runner, regardless of who their real favorite is.

This happened in Burlington, where politics are so shifted to the left, that the Republican effectively acted as the “third party”, and the Democrat and the Progressive mayoral candidate BOTH would have beaten him. A group of voters who preferred GOP>Democrat>Progressive could have gotten an improvement from Progressive to Democrat if they had insincerely top-ranked the Democrat.

And if logic doesn’t work for you, try facts. Australia’s House of Representatives has used IRV since around 1918, as I recall, and it has been consistently two-party dominated, save for a rare exception. Our Congress is around 0.19% non-major-party whereas Australia’s House is around 0.08% non-major-party. Negligible difference.

As I have already explained here at length, score/approval voting FIX this problem, because once a voter top-ranks his favorite of the front-runners, he has no reason to fear ADDITIONAL votes for candidates he likes better than that front-runner. So those Republicans in Burlington could have given the Democrat a 10 and the Progressive a 0 if they knew that the Democrat and Progressive would be the top-two candidates, to try to make sure not to get the “lesser evil”. But then they still would have been free to safely give the Republican a 10. But NOT with IRV.

I agree with you that there’s no way to know full-well how a given voting method is until it’s been played out for quite some rounds worth of real-life politics.

Of the few countries that use IRV, Australia’s the biggest and longest running example of it. They call it “preferential voting” there, been using it for decades, and they’ve got the classic two parties barely distinguishable bickering endlessly over trivialities with impunity.

Ranked Choice Voting is just the latest new word in the States for Instant Runoff Voting. They are one and the same. The IRV proponents recently took to calling it RCV, perhaps due to the fact it can take many days to get the results from “instant runoff”.

There are slightly different variants of IRV going, though. They vary from poor to very poor.

Only Ranged Voting (or Score Voting, as it’s sometimes called) allows for competitive bids from third parties. Only Range Voting would actually give Daggett a real chance at winning.

Minneapolis is doing RCV Ranked Choice Voting, right now as we speak.

RCV is very similar to IRV. So let’s just wait and see what happens. I am on the ballot in Ward 8, along with 4 other candidates.

I can tell you what has happened so far. The vast majority of the incumbents have flat out refused to debate the challengers. Ironically, we call ourselves the pro-democracy “insurgent” campaigns.

You would swear there was no elections going on. The establishment politicians are probably hoping that the electorate are asleep. The media here is helping by doing virtually no reporting on the races.

We can only hope that the electorate are angry enough to go to the polls and vote a pox on all their houses.

That would backfire 180 degrees on the establishments desire to keep everyone asleep.

Well, gotta go and vote.

Easy as 1-2-3

Also, it is possible to game a range voting system – just vote for your favorite front runner as high as possible, then vote for everyone else very low.

“Not to mention, the type of candidate who will win in IRV tends *not* to be the centrist candidate, but the candidate who best represents the majority faction.”

That’s right. IRV advocates are not trying to change the generally accepted principle of majority rule for single-winner elections. IRV wouldn’t skew the results towards any outcome, although it would open up the field for more than two viable candidates.