If you require mandatory ranking then you could use a Condorcet approach,
right? My math whiz friend says that you only need very minimal assumptions
to get a Condorcet ranking out of the voting, if each voter ranks each
candidate.
I’m not a Condorcet expert by any means, and this subject may have already
been beaten to death on this list. But my best understanding of it is that
you run each candidate against every other candidate in head to head races,
and the one who beats all the others in these head to head races is the
Condorcet winner. It makes sense to me to treat such a Condorcet winner as
the winning candidate.
If every voter ranks every candidate then you can derive the head to head
results as long as each voter’s preferences are transitive (if that’s the
term). But you still have the possibility that A will beat B who beats C who
beats A. We’ve never had that happen in faculty voting on new hires, but you
need a way to break the tie if you get such a “cycle.” Perhaps someone can
tell us whether there is a jurisdiction that uses Condorcet voting, and how
likely it is that you will get a cycle.
Mark Scarberry
Mark S. Scarberry
Professor of Law
Pepperdine Univ. School of Law
Malibu, CA 90263
(310) 506-4667
From: election-law-bounces@mailman.lls.edu
[mailto:election-law-bounces@mailman.lls.edu] On Behalf Of Rob Richie
Sent: Saturday, May 07, 2011 8:22 AM
To: JBoppjr@aol.com
Cc: David@holtzmanlaw.com; election-law@mailman.lls.edu
Subject: Re: [EL] a "thumping" in the U.K. AV referendum
Hi, Jim,
There are a couple issues here.
1. Some American jurisdictions have implemented instant runoff voting with
a limitation on rankings tied to current voting equipment inflexibility --
three rankings in such cities as Oakland, Minneapolis and San Francisco.
That means it's possible that you could rank three candidates who don't end
up in the final two in the IRV tally.
This limitation on three rankings is subject of a federal lawsuit against
San Francisco, but it is a losing case -- by summary judgment at the
district level and soon from the 9th circuit, based on the tenor of oral
argument. The plaintiffs' argument is dependent on seeing each round as a
"separate election," which is not the case. If plurality voting is okay,
with voters limited to one ranking, then giving voters to backup
opportunities to cast a decisive vote is okay too.
2. More broadly, most implementations of IRV don't limit rankings, but
allow voters to abstain from ranking every candidate. If you rank some
candidates and then choose not to rank remaining candidates, you are
expressing indifference to those remaining candidates -- essentially saying
you wouldn't have voted if those were the only candidates running. If we
grant voters the right to abstain, you can see how that decision to abstain
from ranking is no more of a dilution of the will of the voters than saying
that all the people who don't vote at all should be counted against the
winner.
Australia has mandatory voting -- and mandatory ranking in its IRV
elections. So if you want to force people to express an opinion, you can --
but I suspect a lot of Americans might resist that notion, as abstention is
one means of expressing a political opinion.
Given Jon. Huntsman's potential presidential candidacy in a very divided
presidential field next year in which "winners" of early contests may have
low percentages of the vote, there's value in taking a look at an IRV
election in which he participated: at the 2004 Utah state convention with
several thousand votesrs See coverage of that race here:
http://archive.fairvote.org/irv/utahindex.html
And the actual count, round by round, here -- there were eight candidates
and the field narrowed to two, with those two going onto a primary because
neither earned 60% to win the nomination outright:
http://archive.fairvote.org/irv/utahresults.htm
best regards,
Rob Richie
On Sat, May 7, 2011 at 10:13 AM, <JBoppjr@aol.com> wrote:
As I understand it, the result of "ranked-choice" is that some voters
are left out, even potentially a lot of them, if they did not "rank" any of
the remaining candidates. How can this result in an election that reflects
the will of the voters? Jim Bopp
In a message dated 5/6/2011 6:51:56 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time,
David@holtzmanlaw.com writes:
In Los Angeles, the League of Women Voters advocates using the
“alternative vote.” We call it “instant runoff” or “ranked-choice” voting.
Many politicians do resist it, since the existing system has served them
well. Nevertheless, some members of the L.A. City Council, just two shy of
the number needed, were willing to put it to a vote in March.
Voters here would likely have embraced the change, because ranked-choice
ballots allow better expression of voters’ preferences, and instant runoffs
(elimination of last-place candidates until a candidate receives a majority
of the votes for candidates who remain) make elections fairer — and spare
everybody the costs of a separate runoff election day.
While the British Prime Minister belittled the proposed election method as
“only used by Australia, Fiji, and Papua New Guinea,” he left out
neighboring Ireland, and paid no attention to the method’s success in San
Francisco and Oakland, and at UCLA, where the Undergraduate Students
Association Council recently voted unanimously to retain it.
-- David A. Holtzman
President, League of Women Voters of Los Angeles
(I wrote this in response to the L.A. Times story,
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-britain-election-20110506,0,3383863.story)
On 5/6/2011 2:15 PM, Rob Richie wrote:
Yes, indeed. British voters sent a message that they don't want a voting
system that will cost them 250 million pounds, give some voters more votes
than other voters and give the currently despised Liberal Democrats ongoing
power to control government. Now what they would think about the alternative
vote as it actually is, who knows...
One must accept the voice of the people on this, of course, and it does
demonstrate that new voting rules can have difficulty withstanding
over-the-top miscategorization, particularly when coming from people (like
the David Cameron for the Conservative Party and some of the "old lions" of
the Labour Party that opposed AV) that people want to believe in.
For folks recognizing the origins of our electoral rules in Britain,
however, there is an important story to be told in reading the article Rick
circulated to the bottom. For one, the genie is out of the bottle as far as
a neat-and-tidy two-party system there. The Scottish National Party won a
majority of seats in Scottish assembly elections, for example, and the two
major parties (just like in last year's elections) continue to share a
growing share of votes with other parties (last year, a third of voters
didn't vote for the two major parties, and more than half of districts were
won with less than 50%).. Plurality, "top of the heap" voting isn't meant
for such a political reality, so the conversation about what to do about it
will continue whether the Tories want it to or not.
Second, the UK is far ahead of us in using alternative voting systems in
key elections. Scotland and Wales used "mixed member" proportional
representation (MMP_ yesterday, for example. MMP is an intriguing method
developed with American leadership in Germany after World War 2 that
combines winner-take-all districts elections with proportional voting, one
also adopted in a national referendum in New Zealand in 1993. Northern
Ireland yesterday used the choice voting, AV-type single transferable vote
system to elect its regional assembly and local governments, as Scotland
does in its local elections as well. Next year, London will elect its mayor
with a form of the alternative vote (simplified to voters having two
rankings and candidates needing to finish in the top two to win) and MMP for
city council.
So onward, despite a lot of disappointment in our reform world,
Rob Richie
On Fri, May 6, 2011 at 4:21 PM, Rick Hasen <rhasen@law.uci.edu> wrote:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/may/06/av-over-yes-campaign-routed
--
Rick Hasen
Visiting Professor
UC Irvine School of Law
401 E. Peltason Dr., Suite 1000
Irvine, CA 92697-8000
949.824.3072 - office
949.824.0495 - fax
rhasen@law.uci.edu
http://law.uci.edu/faculty/page1_r_hasen.html
William H. Hannon Distinguished Professor of Law
Loyola Law School
http://electionlawblog.org
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FairVote
6930 Carroll Avenue, Suite 610
Takoma Park, MD 20912
www.fairvote.org rr@fairvote.org
(301) 270-4616
Please support FairVote through action and tax-deductible donations -- see
http://fairvote.org/donate. For federal employees, please consider a gift
to us through the Combined Federal Campaign (FairVote's CFC number is
10132.) Thank you!