Comment Re:A far cry from instant runoff/ranked voting (Score 1) 416
Your quote of the Greens is spot on, but you will admit that it has nothing to do with the IRV system but rather, as I said earlier, a lack of education.
That is partly right and partly wrong. It is probably the case that most of them do it naively. However, even if they did have better education, they would still do it, because it's strategically advisable. It gives them a better expected value. That's a very cleary and obvious insight from simple statistical analysis, which I pointed out to you at:
www.electology.org/irv-plurality
Also the number of seats won by a minor party will always be low due to the size of the electorates. Major parties are obviously more likely to take seats. It isn't meant to be a proportional system, we have that for the upper house.
Yes, a minor party will win fewer seats than a major party. That's a tautology. The issue is, why do IRV governments tend to feature just two "major" parties. It's not a matter of not having PR. Most of the 27 or so countries that use Top-Two Runoff have three or more viable parties in their single-seat elections.
ScoreVoting.net/TTRvIRVstats.html
That was actually pointed out by Maurice Duverger, in what is known as "Duverger's Law", one of the most famous things in voting theory.
ScoreVoting.net/DuvTrans.html
We also believe that the use of cardinal voting methods, Score Voting and Approval Voting, would plausibly lead to more than two parties, due to important tactical differences. For instance, if you prefer Green>Labor>others, and you tactically give Labor a 10, that in no way gives you an incentive not to also give Green a 10. That allows candidates to win if they have the sincere support, even if voters thought they had no chance.
Whereas if that voter tactically ranks the candidates Labor>Green>others, then that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Trying to get the lesser evil there ensures that the voter's sincere favorite party will be unlikely to grow. (Nevertheless, the voter is still incentivized to rank Labor in first place, since it's more likely to help than hurt.) I made another attempt to explain that more visually, in this crude Youtube video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTN4cJsZLkw
One thing to consider is the "bundling" of issues. Right now, for every "binary" issue, one party generally takes one side. So if someone tells me he supports gay marriage, I can generally assume he's in favor of a public health care option. Why? Because the party that supports gay marriage is the Democrats, and they also generally support social programs, whereas the Republicans want (at least they say they want) lower taxes. But what if I want lower taxes and I think gays should marry. It's politically nearly impossible for that view to come about, even if it better represents the electorate, because both views virtually prevent you from winning the nomination of either major party. Why can't a party come about that speaks to different combinations of these issues? Surely there are more than two groups of combined issue-positions that people could roughly consider themselves a part of.
It happens because of tactical voting.
Also, your comments are about third party and minor party representation is still misleading. Take for example the Tasmanian Legislative Council. According to you, since they are elected via IRV, they should be mostly ALP or coalition. Yet when your look at the results [tas.gov.au] you will see that 11 of the 15 seats are independents!
You may (or may not?) have noticed that we mentioned this at ScoreVoting.net/AustralianPol.html.
We conclude that third parties are almost totally unsuccessful in Australian IRV seats (1 seat out of 564) but independents have won 33 seats (5%)... Lieberman and Jeffords [the USA's Congressional independents] both were major party members their whole political careers (Dem & Repub respectively) until, as Senators, they left their parties due to disputes. This did not prevent their re-election as Independents.
According to Australians who helped us, the Independents usually got there, just like in the USA, by having disputes with their major parties causing them to part ways. (And in many cases these divorces were only temporary.)
But it again seems that you're mixing up two distinct issues. One thing is the fact that a voter's best tactic with IRV is to top-rank the favorite of the perceived "frontrunners". That is, that a voter should do it. The other issue is how many voters actually do that, regardless of the underlying incentive.
That 95% of AU's IRV elections are won by one of the two major parties is not a refutation of anything I said. Approval Voting is massively better regarding two-party domination, mainly because:
1) It obeys Favorite Betrayal Criterion, meaning it doesn't give the incentive IRV does, to not cast maximum support for one's sincere favorite candidate.
2) Even if the previously described voter naively gives Labor an intended-to-be-tactical vote -- there's no reason that should cause that voter not to also cast a sincere maximum vote for Green.
You might have your little beef with FairVote whoever they are, but nothing stopping you putting your position up with citations on wikipedia.
I don't see any great value in that. We can create our own wiki site, and hold it to a vastly higher standard of scientific accuracy. I consider ScoreVoting.net to be the best election methods information site in the world, and I don't particularly care to waste time doing research and pumping facts into a wiki page that will just be wiped out by some unscrupulous person with an agenda that has nothing to do with promoting the highest standards of scientific objectivity.
Keeping up with FairVote is also difficult because of resources. They came about back in 1993, as "Citizens for Proportional Representation", and got funding, and then had time to grow and spread FUD.
The article I mentioned cites three references. "Collective Decisions and Voting" by Nicolaus Tideman, "Single transferable vote resists strategic voting"
The Tideman "strategy resistance" figure is severely flawed. It in no way counters, or even addresses, the statistical points I made about IRV. Instead, Tideman just picked 6 (as I recall) arbitrary election method criteria, and gave various voting methods points based on which ones they passed or failed. Warren Smith says:
This [Tideman's measure] is a magic way of assigning any voting method a number from 0 to 10 with greater numbers being "better." It incorporates statistics from 87 real ranked-ballot elections. Unfortunately I must criticize this as very flawed. It probably is a somewhat better measure of voting-system quality than a random number – but not by much.
My suspicions of this number were first stimulated when I observed that, according to Tideman's measure, the "strategy resistances" of Plurality, Range, and Approval voting were 6.3, 4.0, and 3.9 respectively (table p.237) where larger numbers are better. These three numbers are ordered exactly oppositely to what I would expect based on, e.g, the fact that Approval was the only voting method in that table explicitly designed to be strategy-resistant (albeit Tideman's measure, insanely, gives it the worst strategy-resistance score of all the 25 voting methods in table 13.1!)
If Tideman had any clue, he would have known better than to use (arbitrary) criteria to measure strategy resistance. Instead he would have looked at the impact on Bayesian Regret, the measure of a voting method's actual performance.
http://scorevoting.net/PropDiatribe.html
[gatech.edu] and "An investigation into the relative manipulability of four voting systems" [wiley.com].
That article is about four systems: Borda, Coombs, Hare, and plurality. All of them are highly susceptible to tactical voting. One of my major points was that Score Voting and Approval Voting are simpler and vastly superior to IRV. But this article does not compare the relative merits of IRV and e.g. Approval.
Your argument is remains uncited and the amount of intellectual dishonesty coming from you does your argument no favours.
What do you mean "uncited"? The arguments I'm making are all either straightforward totally verifiable mathematical calculations, or computer simulations (the source code of which can be downloaded from our site), or they are just common knowledge that can be easily verified via a quick Google search. The examples of IRV disobeying monotonicity for instance. Those don't need to be "cited". They are just mathematical proofs. You can see for yourself that they are correct. Or like when I called the AU party offices -- I even cited the phone number I called.
http://scorevoting.net/AusIRV.html
There is absolutely no dishonesty. The entire purpose of our organization is to do research and education, and serve essentially as a FactCheck.org for voting methods. I did make one honest mistake, when I typed "House of Representatives" and I actually was thinking of the entire set of IRV offices, which includes the House. But of course I acknowledged that when you brought it up, and it was absolutely not intentional.