I'm sure everyone here knows what IRV is, but if you don't know what the Condorcet method is, it is a system of rank-choice voting in which each candidate is paired off against each other and whichever candidate defeats the most opponents is declared the winner. The problem I have with this method is that I believe that it would make it too easy for somebody to accidentally get elected. I think a lot of people by instinct would just bury the guy they don't like without really knowing as much as they should about the other candidates. In addition, the Condorcet method doesn't measure enthusiasm for a candidate. A candidate can get elected with very little base support, but everybody prefers him over the other guy. In this situation, I think candidates would just try to aim to be the compromise candidate. I think IRV is the best system of the two, but it has its problems as well. Lets pretend that the 2000 race used IRV and scrapped the electoral college. Let's also say that the people were more inclined to vote their conscience and we get the following initial tally. Bush: 43% Nader 29% Gore 28% Now, since the more liberal would-be Gore voters voted for Nader and since Gore and Bush have the closest ideology, most of the Gore votes would now go to Bush. In this case, Nader would still be the spoiler. How would you feel about a hybrid of the two systems. We could use IRV until we get at least 3 candidates with about 20% of the votes. At that point, we would use the Condorcet method to determine the winner of the remaining candidates. Using this hybrid system would solve the IRV problem and ensure that nobody accidentally gets elected and every winner has a reasonable minimal level of base support. Also, to avoid going off track, lets just say that we have the perfect way to implement this so that counting the votes is fast and reliable.

Quote: Original post by ManaStone
The problem I have with this method is that I believe that it would make it too easy for somebody to accidentally get elected. I think a lot of people by instinct would just bury the guy they don't like without really knowing as much as they should about the other candidates.

Voter retraining would certainly be needed, but I don't think "If you don't vote for Bush or David Duke, you're as likely to get one as the other" is a difficult message to get across.

Quote: In addition, the Condorcet method doesn't measure enthusiasm for a candidate. A candidate can get elected with very little base support, but everybody prefers him over the other guy. In this situation, I think candidates would just try to aim to be the compromise candidate.

Heaven forfend that people should find a compromise candidate. [wink]

Quote: Original post by ManaStone
Now, since the more liberal would-be Gore voters voted for Nader and since Gore and Bush have the closest ideology, most of the Gore votes would now go to Bush. In this case, Nader would still be the spoiler.

Let me get this straight, you're hypothesizing that the second choice for most Gore voters would been Bush? I don't think that is realistic. Your point still holds, however, because Nader would need an increase of 14% to tie Bush's first votes, which would be half of Gore's vote, but if Nader got half of Gore's vote, and Bush the other half, Bush remains 14% ahead of Nader. Nader would need to get three quarters of Gore's vote to tie Bush at 50%. Even with most of Gore's vote going to Nader, Bush could still win.

It seems to me that with this system in place, candidates would have an incentive to tell their supporters which candidate they should give their second place votes to. There would be no need to speculate about the relative ideological proximity of two candidates as they likely would make it explicit. The dynamics of that would be interesting. How would registered Democrats respond to requests from a Democratic candidate that they give their second vote to the Republican candidate and vice-versa? Would Republicans suggest Democrats for second votes or would they suggest Libertarians or Theocrats?


For what it's worth, this year the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will be using IRV as the voting system for the Oscars. And the Oscar Goes To:

Quote:
...
This year, the Best Picture list was expanded, partly to make sure that at least a couple of blockbusters would be on it. (The biggest grosser of 2008, “The Dark Knight,” was one of the better Batman adventures, but it didn’t make the cut.) To forestall a victory for some cinematic George Wallace or Ross Perot, the Academy switched to a different system. Members—there are around fifty-eight hundred of them—are being asked to rank their choices from one to ten. In the unlikely event that a picture gets an outright majority of first-choice votes, the counting’s over. If not, the last-place finisher is dropped and its voters’ second choices are distributed among the movies still in the running. If there’s still no majority, the second-to-last-place finisher gets eliminated, and its voters’ second (or third) choices are counted. And so on, until one of the nominees goes over fifty per cent.

This scheme, known as preference voting or instant-runoff voting, doesn’t necessarily get you the movie (or the candidate) with the most committed supporters, but it does get you a winner that a majority can at least countenance. It favors consensus. Now here’s why it may also favor “The Hurt Locker.” A lot of people like “Avatar,” obviously, but a lot don’t—too cold, too formulaic, too computerized, too derivative. (Remember “Dances with Wolves”? “Jurassic Park”? Everything by Hayao Miyazaki?) “Avatar” is polarizing. So is James Cameron. He may have fattened the bank accounts of a sizable bloc of Academy members—some three thousand people drew “Avatar” paychecks—but that doesn’t mean that they all long to recrown him king of the world. (As he has admitted, his people skills aren’t the best.) These factors could push “Avatar” toward the bottom of many a ranked-choice ballot.
...

Call me old fashioned, but I kind of think that all candidates should have to don mech-armour suits and fight it out in an epic battle on the moon. The last candidate standing wins.

Quote: Original post by LessBread

Quote: Original post by ManaStone
Now, since the more liberal would-be Gore voters voted for Nader and since Gore and Bush have the closest ideology, most of the Gore votes would now go to Bush. In this case, Nader would still be the spoiler.

Let me get this straight, you're hypothesizing that the second choice for most Gore voters would been Bush? I don't think that is realistic.

Why not? Don't you think that during the 2000 campaign, Gore was closer to Bush than Nader? The more liberal branch would have already gone to Nader.

Quote: Original post by Sneftel
Heaven forfend that people should find a compromise candidate. [wink]

The problem with compromising is that if you are starting from two polar opposites, you might end up with solution that doesn't fix the problem and just costs a lot of money.

Quote: Original post by LessBread
It seems to me that with this system in place, candidates would have an incentive to tell their supporters which candidate they should give their second place votes to. There would be no need to speculate about the relative ideological proximity of two candidates as they likely would make it explicit. The dynamics of that would be interesting. How would registered Democrats respond to requests from a Democratic candidate that they give their second vote to the Republican candidate and vice-versa? Would Republicans suggest Democrats for second votes or would they suggest Libertarians or Theocrats?

In Australia where we have IRV for most elections, voters will be handed "how to vote for party X" sheets at polling places with the suggested party ordering for that particular electorate. I don't remember much controversy over the suggestions by the major parties though; it's generally expected that they'll be the last candidates standing in the run-off anyway. The speculation is over how those who vote first for the minor parties would have allocated their preferences as that sometimes can be an election decider.

Quote: Original post by ManaStone

Quote: Original post by LessBread

Quote: Original post by ManaStone
Now, since the more liberal would-be Gore voters voted for Nader and since Gore and Bush have the closest ideology, most of the Gore votes would now go to Bush. In this case, Nader would still be the spoiler.

Let me get this straight, you're hypothesizing that the second choice for most Gore voters would been Bush? I don't think that is realistic.

Why not? Don't you think that during the 2000 campaign, Gore was closer to Bush than Nader? The more liberal branch would have already gone to Nader.

Objectively yes, subjectively no. The registered Democrats I spoke with in 2000 would not have voted for Bush ever, but maybe that's California. Just the same, I think the claim that most Gore voters would have picked Bush over Nader isn't realistic, but I do think that enough of them would have to put Bush over the top.

I also think it's wrong to describe Nader as a spoiler in your scenario. If he had a greater percentage of votes than Gore, that would make Gore the spoiler, especially if enough Gore voters ended up putting Bush over the top.

Quote: Original post by LessBread

I also think it's wrong to describe Nader as a spoiler in your scenario. If he had a greater percentage of votes than Gore, that would make Gore the spoiler, especially if enough Gore voters ended up putting Bush over the top.

Well, I think that the Nader voters would more likely vote for Gore than the Gore voters vote for Nader.

I think if we were to pair off Gore and Bush it wouldn't be unrealistic to something similar to the following break down of the Nader voters second choice.

Gore: 69%
Bush: 16%
No second choice: 15%

This would make Gore the winner by 48.01% to 47.64%.

Of course I pulled these numbers out of my ass and I could be completely wrong.

Quote: Original post by Phytoplankton
Call me old fashioned, but I kind of think that all candidates should have to don mech-armour suits and fight it out in an epic battle on the moon. The last candidate standing wins.

Can't really be any worse than democracy.

OTOH, the moon is far away and expensive to get too. Why simply have fight in a big open space on earth? Somewhere you could trash and no-one would notice. Australia, for instance. [grin]