[EL] Instant Run Off/Ranked Choice Voting vs Run Offs

[Graeme Orr]

Rob Ritchie of Fair Choice made the good points below in yesterday's post.

After over a century of experience of IRV ('preferential voting') in
Australia - nb I've only lived through half! - it seems to me that States
like Texas here are trying to kill two different birds with one stone.
Having either IRV or a two round run off mixed with party primaries is
asking for trouble.     Ranked choice in party democracy is simple and
fair, as voters by and large can differentiate sensibly (to them) between
parties.    In Australian single member electorates we have up to 7 parties
running (on average) yet still maintain a 2-3 party system.

But throw in half a dozen or more intra-party choices, and you skew the
entire ballot choice.   Especially since the US will never mandate full
ranking (what Aussies call full preferential voting, which is common in our
lower houses).    With ranked choice, votes will exhaust even within the
suite of candidates in their preferred party.  Conversely, with the run off
system, you have what the French would call the Le Pen effect, and which
Rob mentions, of perverse splitting of one of the major parties, leading to
an unrepresentative second round pairing off.

It's exceedingly rare for a party to win a seat Down Under with less than a
third of the '1' votes.   And it was the conservative side of politics that
first brought in not just instant runoff/ranked choice, but mandated full
rankings.  Because that side of politics was then more prone to splits.

In non-partisan races - eg smaller city local government - things
occasionally go skew-iff.  There, full rankings are not required (given the
lack of party cues).   The Rockhampton mayoral by-election this year had 17
candidates.  The frontrunner was on 25%, number 2 on 16%. With a long tail
of 15 other candidates between around 12% and negligibility. After second
and later preferences, the frontrunner was elected on 59% of the
non-exhausted rankings.

Graeme Orr, Professor, Law, University of Queensland, Australia

[Cut and pasted from Rob Ritchie:
(1) The results are the latest example of the "roll-the-dice" dynamics of a
single-choice voting system in a crowded field. The top two candidates
going to the runoff together earned only 33% of the vot
<
https://www.politico.com/news/2021/05/02/texas-special-election-too-close-to-call-but-gop-on-verge-of-lockout-win-485194
>e,
while Democrats were locked out of the runoff even though their candidates
together won more than that 33% total.

(2) If you run ranked  choice voting to get the contest down to two, you
could choose to avoid the runoff, but at least would have more certainty in
having representative candidates advancing.  Notably, our nation's 10th
largest city -- Austin, Texas -- yesterday voted 58% to move to ranked
choice voting for city elections as soon as legal questions involving state
law are addressed. That results means that, since November 2018, RCV has
won all 11 city ballots measures, by an average of 30 percentage points.
Coming up in 2021, new uses of RCV include the New York City primaries in
June, the Virginia GOP statewide nomination contest, and more than a dozen
mayoral elections in Utah, including the capital city of Salt Lake.

Rob]
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