I suggest that the social utility of RV is actually very low because the counting process is too opaque for most of society to have any confidence in its accuracy or fairness.
Well, totalling votes with Range Voting can be done just like plurality voting, both of which are easier and less error prone than IRV. And IRV being so complicated gives an incentive to use electronic voting machines for it, which as we know is just asking for trouble. Some facts:
Range voting works on every voting machine in the USA, including noncomputerized ones, right now, without modification and without reprogramming. But IRV cannot be made to work on many kinds of voting machines. When San Francisco adopted IRV it screwed up and was unable to announce all nontrivial election results, supposedly for weeks.
Adopting IRV will cause voter errors ("spoiled" ballots) to become 7 times more frequent (based on San Francisco numbers). But adopting range voting appears to decrease errors.
IRV makes ties and other nightmare-scenarios much more likely; Range voting makes them much less likely. http://rangevoting.org/TieRisk.html
IRV will (in plausible scenarios) elect candidate X in preference to candidate Y, even though based on the IRV votes, Y is pairwise-preferred over X (and over everybody else too) by an arbitrarily-huge supermajority of the voters. This appears to have happened in both the Peru 2006 election (but less dramatically; merely a "55% majority" rather than a "huge supermajority" was thwarted) and the Chile 1970 election (this time with about a 2:1 ratio supermajority being thwarted).
Raising a candidate in your IRV vote from bottom to top-ranked can actually cause him to lose!
Contrary to pro-IRV-propaganda, pathological IRV elections seem unpleasantly common in practice. Two of the last five Debian elections would have exhibited pathologies had they been held using IRV. (Note: The Debian elections are LARGE, and ostensibly contentious, and are perfectly RECORDED - they are a great source of election data).
Your models appear to assume that everyone understands what's going on and has confidence in the system.
Not at all. I did a Range Voting exit poll in Beaumont, TX, and voter behavior seemed reasonably consistent with various simulation parameters from our social utility efficiency calculations. I just asked voters to score the candidates as they would in a real election, and most of them didn't even appear to read the directions, and still had no problems just quickly scoring them and sauntering off to their...steer roping, or whatever Texans do (I'm from Kansas, so I have the liberty to talk like that about the midwest).
Any system in which the electorate does not have a high degree of confidence is doomed because the results will not be seen as a legitimate reflection of the common will. (Just look at American politics; the election mechanics are simple, but voter confidence is low.)
I agree with you there. We have to educate people about this in order to get them to use it. But consider that most people don't even understand how IRV works, or WHY it works, yet it just passed in four U.S. municipalities, including Pierce County, Washington, just south of Seattle. I ask people from Pierce county what they think about IRV, and they never seem to really understand it. They just feel happy that it was a piece of "reform". Pfft..silly voters.
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timeasmymeasure
Re: Erroneously?
Date: 2007-01-24 11:11 am (UTC)Well, totalling votes with Range Voting can be done just like plurality voting, both of which are easier and less error prone than IRV. And IRV being so complicated gives an incentive to use electronic voting machines for it, which as we know is just asking for trouble. Some facts:
Range voting works on every voting machine in the USA, including noncomputerized ones, right now, without modification and without reprogramming. But IRV cannot be made to work on many kinds of voting machines. When San Francisco adopted IRV it screwed up and was unable to announce all nontrivial election results, supposedly for weeks.
Adopting IRV will cause voter errors ("spoiled" ballots) to become 7 times more frequent (based on San Francisco numbers). But adopting range voting appears to decrease errors.
IRV makes ties and other nightmare-scenarios much more likely; Range voting makes them much less likely. http://rangevoting.org/TieRisk.html
IRV will (in plausible scenarios) elect candidate X in preference to candidate Y, even though based on the IRV votes, Y is pairwise-preferred over X (and over everybody else too) by an arbitrarily-huge supermajority of the voters. This appears to have happened in both the Peru 2006 election (but less dramatically; merely a "55% majority" rather than a "huge supermajority" was thwarted) and the Chile 1970 election (this time with about a 2:1 ratio supermajority being thwarted).
Raising a candidate in your IRV vote from bottom to top-ranked can actually cause him to lose!
Contrary to pro-IRV-propaganda, pathological IRV elections seem unpleasantly common in practice. Two of the last five Debian elections would have exhibited pathologies had they been held using IRV. (Note: The Debian elections are LARGE, and ostensibly contentious, and are perfectly RECORDED - they are a great source of election data).
Your models appear to assume that everyone understands what's going on and has confidence in the system.
Not at all. I did a Range Voting exit poll in Beaumont, TX, and voter behavior seemed reasonably consistent with various simulation parameters from our social utility efficiency calculations. I just asked voters to score the candidates as they would in a real election, and most of them didn't even appear to read the directions, and still had no problems just quickly scoring them and sauntering off to their...steer roping, or whatever Texans do (I'm from Kansas, so I have the liberty to talk like that about the midwest).
Any system in which the electorate does not have a high degree of confidence is doomed because the results will not be seen as a legitimate reflection of the common will. (Just look at American politics; the election mechanics are simple, but voter confidence is low.)
I agree with you there. We have to educate people about this in order to get them to use it. But consider that most people don't even understand how IRV works, or WHY it works, yet it just passed in four U.S. municipalities, including Pierce County, Washington, just south of Seattle. I ask people from Pierce county what they think about IRV, and they never seem to really understand it. They just feel happy that it was a piece of "reform". Pfft..silly voters.
CLAY