Who and why would anyone oppose Instant Run-off Voting?

From Wiki: "Instant-runoff voting (IRV) is the American English term for a voting system used for single-winner elections, in which voters rank candidates in an order of preference. If no candidate is the first preference of a majority of voters, the candidate with the fewest number of first preference rankings is eliminated and that candidate's ballots are redistributed at full value to the remaining candidates according to the next ranking on each ballot. This process is repeated until one candidate obtains a majority of votes among candidates not eliminated. The term "instant runoff" is used because the method is said to simulate a series of runoff elections tallied in rounds, as in an exhaustive ballot election."

What are the concerns for those opposed?

The IRV works directly off a single election. Rather than vote for a single person, you rank your candidates, and software keeps re-allocating the votes of the candidate with the fewest votes until there is a more than 50% winner. Most of the voting machines in use are already capable of tallying IRV elections.

Lots more conservatives would vote for libertarians if they had a real choice between that and republicans.

Lots more liberals would vote for the green party if they had a real choice between that and democrats.

The people in power would never agree to it because it would force them to be responsive to their base instead of to corporations. They could no longer threaten that "voting third party is throwing your vote away."

DLC types would have to actually address criticism, instead of dismissing it with "so you're just going to let Palin be president in 2012??!!11!!?"

who would be against helping 3rd parties? the 1st and 2nd, that's who

There are a lot of people even here at the "underground" that I believe prefer to resort to "you're throwing your vote away" rather than addressing valid criticism of the current administration. I think they prefer that women and the GLBT community have no other options.

because the major parties would just take the votes after the run off system eliminated the smaller party.

> ...but wouldnt all voters favor it?

What difference does that make? The entrenched powers hold the
power to design the electoral system and they like the current system
just fine.

Tesha

To take two examples. Both Carol Mosley Braun and Barack Obama won three way Democratic primaries they most assuredly would have lost in the case of instant run off. The main reason that so many southern states have run offs is because they wanted to be sure that blacks couldn't win statewide races.

Which may well be true. But while sometimes going with plurality may allow a good minority candidate to win despite a racist public, it will also generally allow a minority of the voting public to impose its candidate against the will of the majority--at least if you have a three-way race.

is more significant than Clinton's 49% to 43% victory in 96. I think margin of victory is more important than being over 50%.

that every Perot voter would have gone to Dole?

That would mean that the American public, considered as a whole, would rather have had Dole than Clinton, but Clinton won anyway. Don't you think that poses problems of democracy for the electoral system?

(This is a hypothetical; I'd bet that if that election had been conducted via IRV, Clinton would still have won, and easily.)

If people wanted Dole they could have had him, by voting for him. I see no majic in a majority.

The instant run off voting seems like a good idea, but it really isn't if the candidate with the most votes ends up losing, even if he's not our candidate.

Otherwise it's great.

How 'bout "Approval Voting" instead?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approval_voting

it's not particularly hard to audit. I come from a country which has a similar electoral system and fraud is not a big issue.

http://instantrunoff.blogspot.com/2008/07/instant-runoff-not-understood-by-voters.html

And no. It isn't easy to audit. Not in any meaningful way.

http://instantrunoff.blogspot.com/2008/11/instant-runoff-voting-counting-by-hand.html

http://www.instantrunoffvoting.us/tallyIRV.html

You can rig anything if you have a mind to. There is absolutely no reason they need to be hand counted. It can be, and is, implemented electronically and already used, in San Francisco for example (where we use the method to elect supervisors).

They recently started doing IRV in the Twin Cities and some were complaining about having to hand-count the ballots.

For example, in this particular case the outcome was a positive one, but in a two-way election in NY-23 Scozzafava could have easily beaten either Owens or Hoffman, and in ordinary circumstances under first-past-the-post elections that's what she would have gotten. IRV would encourage the kind of three-way that actually emerged, and would generally bring about the democratically problematic if politically useful result that ensued: the moderate candidate, squeezed from both sides, losing out to one of the ultimately less preferred candidate of the left or the right.

Still probably better than what we have now. But I'd feel more comfortable introducing it if our politics weren't as polarized as it is.

I'm not taking a stand here as I haven't studied the issue extensively but there apparently some reasonable arguments against it. Whether these arguments make it better or worse than the current system is open to question.

Wikipedia lists some claimed disadvantages: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting#Potential_disadvantages_of_IRV
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting#Claimed_disadvantages

Some of the arguments against it.:

• The complexity of the vote count could lead to greater use of computerized voting equipment.
• It fails the Monotonicity Criterion.
  
• It fails the Condorcet Criterion.

The first problem could probably be eliminated by requiring manual counts or machine counted paper ballots with required audits using good statistical sampling.

Apparently, the Monotonicity and Condorcet failures both can sometimes lead to failures to elect the true favorite, either inadvertently or through gaming of the system by strategic voting. In some circumstances candidate X can be helped by votes against X. Experts seem to disagree on how big a problem these two failures are in the real world.

I think the Condorcet method would be preferable to the instant runoff.

And then the process would become muddled even further.

I think if we're going to use a preference ballot, we'd pretty much have to disallow write-ins.

Use 2000 as an example. My first choice was Gore. He was far and away my first choice. My second choice, by a smidgen was Nader. Why should that second choice be elevated to a first choice simply because my first choice didn't work out? I think, I know this is scary, that people should vote for their first choice and have that count.

by 2% of the voters, it would have elevated Gore to the top and that 2% that was lost to Gore would have been given to him, the more popular candidate.

If it had been in place in 2000, Nader would have been eliminated, then the 2nd choice of nader voters would have been allocated (probably mostly to Gore). If you voted for Gore first then your 2nd vote for Nader would never have been counted because he would not have been in the 2nd round.

but second choice votes are still being weighted equivalent to first the fact they were Nader's and not Gore's is irrelevent.

Arent you assuming that those that voted for Clinton vs. Bush all were first choice over Nader. I dont agree. Many people voted for Clinton even though he was their second choice. Because there wasnt IRV, they felt they had to vote "second" choice to be effective.

I would have voted for Nader, with Gore as second.

My vote for Gore was not a vote indicating support for him in any meaningful sense. He was OK. In 2000 (but not 2004), I thought Nader offered vision and solid ideas that were otherwise missing from the race. No way I was going to vote for him, though, because a vote for Nader was - in effect - a vote for Bush because it would have taken away a vote that otherwise would have gone to Gore. IRV would have given me (and others) the freedom to vote my conscience without risking giving the election to Bush.

A first round with perhaps 20% of the vote going to Nader sends a very different message than the non-IRV election in which he won 3% of the vote. I'd also guess that the majority of that 3% would have gone to Gore as a second choice - in which Florida probably wouldn't have mattered and we would have had 8 years of Gore, rather than 8 years of Bush.

I'll have to think through whether I would prefer primaries without IRV. That may be a different question - but as to general elections I definitely support the freedom it gives me to vote for my true first choice, not just the one I think is a necessarily evil to keep the real evil out of office.

IRV could dismantle the 2-party lock on the system, could do away with the "lesser evil" vote, and allow a whole bunch of fresh blood in to shake up the status quo.

I don't know why objections always arise on systems that have been tried and proven when we suggest doing it here.

Has it really been tried and proven? The fact that other countries have used it doesn't prove much. We've been using our current system for over 200 years. Does that mean that it is tried and proven?

Are you certain that the correct candidate has always won in New Zealand?

I'm not necessarily against it. I actually lean towards the idea, but it's not as cut and dried as some people think.

about anything, however, if it works better than most, isn't it worth experimenting with? Here's a wiki article on it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_and_use_of_instant-runoff_voting

Also at the bottom of the article are places in the USA that have used it. btw talk to me in math speak and you might as well be talking to a fence post. I'm awful at math.

but the OP was asking why some people object to it and I was giving an answer to that. As you said, no system is perfect, which is what I was pointing out.

There are apparently some valid mathematical objections to it. Listing places that have used an imperfect system doesn't prove that it is less imperfect.

It's definitely something to look at, but the decision should be based on the mathematics (something I'm not really qualified to judge) and not simply on the fact that others have used it since we really don't know how often those real world examples have returned valid versus invalid results.

I think IRV would be great for most state or local races - even congressional races.

My concern with presidential races is that IRV could encourage fragmentation and interest-group capture. If dozens of candidates are running, each with their own agenda, then the major candidates are going to have to pander to each group to get their votes. And there's also the risk that with too many candidates, the final challengers could be minor candidates.

The reason I think this is a bigger concern at the presidential level is that presidential races tend to attract many more third-party candidates due to the visibility of the race. IRV is fine if you're dealing with just 3 or 4 candidates - if you're dealing with dozens, I have a lot more qualms about it.

Most of the splinter groups will vote for the major candidate as their second choice.

it's not "one person one vote" so I dunno that we could have that.

"instant runoff" voting is far too confusing here in America.

Secondly people make different choices than they would otherwise make if allowed to hear more from the candidates and get a second chance to think about the options between candidate A and candidate B in an ACTUAl runoff.

IRV= cheating the voter out of a second chance to decide.

For the people that are products of our educational system. It is too hard for some to just pick between A, B, C and D. Now you expect people to rank A-D in order of preference?

all from the already well-entrenched two major parties. IRV would eliminate the so-called "spoiler" argument used against third-party candidates, and it would also go a long way toward opening up elections to a wider range of viewpoints than the two corporate parties normally allow the electorate to hear. It would also make it a lot harder to game the system. Therefore, as far as the powers that be are concerned, IRV must never be allowed to happen. I think it would be great.

But we have this notion that if the difference is too small, then somehow there isn't a winner. Imagine the exhausted Olympians if we made them run the races again when a person only wins by a second or two.

It's a shame that Saxby Chamblis won, but let's imagine that it had been the Democrat who won on election day 2008. Would we have been OK with it going to a second election because the margin was too small? And without Barack Obama bringing out the black, young, or whomever it was that only went to the polls to vote for Obama, the Democrat would have lost the second election. But you might think that he would have still won with the instant runoff, except that there is a model in which he would have lost, despite having a simple majority the first time around.

Seriously, I took my usage from Tony Blair. It's reflected in this from Wiki:

In British English, majority and plurality are often used as synonyms;

I didn't think of a less than half being a majority until I heard Tony Blair refer to their majority.

are only two candidates. With three candidates then majority means greater than 50%. However, some still refer to the winning margin as the majority. That's how I see it, but no guarantees.

Blair actually used the possessive to refer to the majority of the winning party, as opposed to the majority of all votes cast. So he said: "....blah, blah, Labour's majority will guarantee that progressive policies can continue..."

are good arguments on each side.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topics&forum=203

and you'll find that some DUers regard IRV as the work of the devil. They will be only too happy to tell you at greta length why they regard it as undemocratic and evil (not my personal opinion, but if you want their reasoning, you'll get it there).

The answer to both questions is simple enough.

IRV is generally supported not as an ideal voting system, but as a system that is more likely to get "the candidate I like best" elected. People who liked Nader try to sell it to Gore voters by saying that it would have helped Gore win (and thus they bring in some supporters), but their real notion is that it would have resulted in far more people voting for Nader. IRV is usually pushed by people farther left and right than the bulk of the population who want to see a way to improve their electoral chances.

Since the vast majority usually prefers one of the two main parties... they have little interest in establishing a new system that makes it more likely that someone else will win.

Let's take the next presidential election as an example. With only two candidate to choose from many progressives are apt to not vote. This may allow the republicant a chance at the election. If we have IRV, where the left feel they can demonstrate their displeasure with the right of center Democratic party and they still may vote second for Pres Obama. But w/o this option, they may stay home and hurt Pres Obama's chances. IRV would have probably given Gore the win. IRV allows minorities to speak out and still not waste their votes.

It isn't a question of "which system is best?"... it's "which one is most likely to get my candidate elected?"

I find that compelling when my candidate can't possibly win (or even "place" or "show")... but how do you get a population to change a centuries-old system on that basis?

I'd rather just educate people that you ARE NOT "wasting your vote" by picking the best candidate. We should encourage more people that it's your civic DUTY to vote... even if you write in a candidate that didn't make the ballot.