| Frequent visitors will recall that I have written in favor of Instant Runoff Voting, as have Jack and mataliandy. They will also probably recall that I am not wildly enthusiastic about it. To an extent, it's because I am cautious about any policy proposal that has become an "article of faith" as IRV has (IMO). Articles of Faith are not to be questioned - and often that includes honest assessments. Articles of Faith bring out a sort of "you're with us or you're against us" polarity among the true believers which I find both distasteful, dangerous, and antithetical to the democratic process. They also have the tendency to suck up those who agree with them in principle - just not as a matter of dogma - into accompanying true believer rhetoric that they may or may not agree with. IRV, for example, is often trumpeted as a means to the end of allowing third parties to rise into their imagined rightful place of political dominance.
This is not a view I share, as my support of IRV is simply the support of an enhanced democratic process for its own sake. I'm not inclined to predicate that support on my opinion of where that will or won't lead us. But because I have an almost knee jerk aversion to anything that strikes me as political dogma, political Articles of Faith creep me out, as I am concerned that they may be enacted (or rejected) without sufficient consideration or scrutiny. What are the disadvantages of IRV? Is IRV the only game in town, or are there other alternate voting systems that might be superior?
Given that the topic will come up during the upcoming legislative session - and out of concern that IRV's more dogmatic supporters may frown upon, or even actively disparage, any such analysis - I'm offering a snapshot of voting systems, as well as the potential pitfalls of voting reform, below the fold. Please chime in with opinions or corrections as I don't pretend to be an expert on this stuff. |
| Nobody likes the fact that a candidate can win an election with less than 50% of the electorate supporting them. Nobody likes the idea that a vote for one's preferred candidate, who may have no real chance of winning, could prove to help throw the election to the candidate you most abhor.
UVM Prof Tony Gierzynski's terrific study of IRV's implementation is a must-read, and lays out the pros and cons well. While the upside - that is, theoretically bringing a result that is a more accurate picture of the preferences of the voting public - is hard to refute, in this world nothing is perfect. In his piece shortly after the Burlington mayoral election, Philip at VDB reviews the study and gives a bulleted list of some of the drawbacks.
* In 1974, Ann Arbor adopted IRV, only to reject it two years later after a mayoral candidate took 49% on the first round, but lost subsequently by 121 votes.
* "The Thwarted- Majorities Paradox, in which a candidate who can beat every other candidate in direct-comparison may lose the election; the Multiple-Districts Paradox, in which a candidate wins every district individually but manages to lose the general election when the districts are combined."
* And finally, yes, the IRV result That Dare Not Speak Its Name: the "Perverse Outcome," in which increased votes for a candidate lead to that candidate's defeat.
More disturbing are the studies from San Francisco's experience with IRV, which suggests that non-whites, working class citizens, and the less educated were less likely to use their full voting ability at the ballot (meaning they were less likely to fully rank all the candidates and more likely simply to vote for their first preference). In a relative - but very real - sense, the more white, affluent and educated a population was, the more vote they got for their ballots. It's an ugly reality, but it does seem to be just that - a reality. It's hard to feel too thrilled about that result, and it clearly places a burden on supporters to simultaneously endorse a comprehensive voter education program if they are successful. The Burlington demographic spread in the study is less clear, but the following:
...suggests the same dynamics are in play.
This stuff matters, and it's not for the white, educated, affluent crowd to just blow it off as irrelevant (as they often do with inconveniences outside their demographic).
The other potential problem with implementation is (surprise, surprise), the Republicans. Consider the following:
Making such a profound change to the mechanics of Democracy should really have buy in from a majority in each party. Proponents should make it a priority to try to squeeze that Republican number up to at least 50% plus one (a bit ironic, that).
But what other options are there? If the IRV debate does come before the legislature again this session, should the debate on improving our elections system begin and end with IRV?
At the very least, folks should know that there are other models.
The Condorcet Method avoids some of the problems of IRV by selecting the candidate that wins against every other candidate in one-on-one pairings, instead of the way IRV goes to a second choice. From a voter's perspective it works like IRV as voters just rank their choices as 1, 2, 3, etc (both IRV and Condorcet are considered forms of "preferencial voting"). This pairing system makes the behind-the-scenes calculations mathematical, and by making it more arcane, could further exacerbate the understanding gap across demographic groups and limit voter confidence. Still, here's an example of a fascinating election where the Condorcet results were compared against what the result would have been if IRV had been in play - they are different, and in this case, common sense suggests (at a glance) that the Condorcet result was more democratic, highlighting the comparitively crude nature of IRV's elimination methodology.
Fusion Voting: The following comes from a great diary written by dcsohl, posted earlier this year at a GMD sister blog, the Blue Mass Group:
Fusion voting is an extension of FPTP that relies on parties. Parties are not essential to FPTP ["first past the post" - the current system -odum], but they inevitably creep in, and fusion takes advantage of this. In classical FPTP at a general election, each party nominates a candidate, and the winner is he with the most votes.
Fusion voting allows two parties to share the same candidate. So if the Green Party decides that they are splitting votes off of the Democrats (and enabling Republicans to win), they ordinarily have one alternative: Don't run.
With Fusion voting, they can nominate the Democratic candidate as their own. Now voters can "send a message" and vote for Gore on the Green ticket. If Gore gets 60% of the votes and half of them are Green-based, he can see that environmental issues are very important to a third of the country.
Advantages: "Sending a message"
Fusion is intriguing, but to those who see IRV as the shortcut to radical change through 3rd party ascendency, it probably won't be too appealing.
The most feel-good voting system has got to be Approval Voting. In this system, everybody can vote for as many candidates as they like. The totals are tallied and the most votes wins, but there is no voting "against" anyone, and as such it limits the problem in any system - but particularly in preferencial systems (like IRV) - of so-called tactical voting.
Tactical voting is when voters use their votes or preferencial rankings not to indicate their genuine preferences, but to try and strategically avoid distasteful outcomes. Under the current system, the manifestation of tactical voting is obvious. In preferencial systems, it becomes possible to marginalize potential rivals to one's first choice by voting for non-preferred candidates as a second choice. There were charges of this sort of tactical voting in the Burlington mayor's race, as GOP candidate Kevin Curley was reported to have actively encouraged some supporters to indicate Progressive Mayor Bob Kiss as their second choice in order to skew the runoff results for Democrat Hinda Miller (this despite the fact that Kiss would have been the honest, ideological second choice of few Republicans). There's no evidence that this ocurred on a scale to effect the election, but the potential for such sleaziness is there, and IRV proponents do themselves (and the democratic process) no favors by pretending it isn't.
Approval Voting makes this sort of mischief ineffective, but is opposed by IRV proponents such as the Center for Voting and Democracy because it leads to the most "feel-good" candidate who bugs the fewest people coming out on top, and therefore potentially squeezes out dynamic or challenging candidates.
In any event, it seems clear to me that the buzz in Vermont is entirely too binary; either the current system or IRV - and that the debate over IRV is too binary as well; you're either for it (and for more representational democracy) or against it. For my part, I support IRV (as I've said many times), but I also support a healthy, honest debate on the matter and recognize the unfortunate truth handed down by Arrow's theorem. From Science News:
Is there a best voting procedure? In 1952, Kenneth Arrow, a professor emeritus of economics at Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif., proved that no voting system is completely free from counterintuitive outcomes. Arrow looked at voting systems that satisfy two harmless-sounding properties. First, if everyone prefers candidate A to candidate B, then A should be ranked higher than B. Second, voters' opinions about candidate C shouldn't affect whether A beats B-after all, if you prefer coffee to tea, finding out that hot chocolate is available shouldn't suddenly make you prefer tea to coffee. These sound like reasonable restrictions, yet Arrow proved that the only voting system that always satisfies them is a dictatorship, where a single person's preferences determine the outcome.
The paradoxical behavior Arrow studied crops up all the time.
Or perhaps we're just faced with another social manifestation of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. Perhaps if you look too closely at any human institution, process or component, the results get a little... fuzzy.
All the more reason to move forward with deliberation and without dogmatic preconceptions or preconceived outcomes - but as always, to keep moving forward nonetheless.
For more (and there is much more), check out the Proportional Representation Library, and by all means come back and post on your favorite. |
