Pointed, polite questions for FairVote

[Lonán Dubh]

This Thursday evening, my county's chapter of my (3rd) political party is hosting a representative from PropagandaName, so that they can talk to use about Ranked Choice voting, trying to get our support.

I'm planning on... well, not heckling per se, but keeping them honest.  I'm going to be doing my best to get the people at this meeting on our side, pushing for Score voting (I'd like to convince them, too, but I doubt it possible, due to the Sunk Cost fallacy).  To that end, I would like any suggestions for questions that can demonstrate the flaws in their chosen method.

So, if you had the opportunity, what would you ask such a person to convince their audience that IRV isn't a good solution?

The only one I have so far is:

"If RCV is so great for third parties, why is it that there hasn't been an Australian Prime Minster from any party but Labor or Liberal for even one month, these past 75 years?"

[NoIRV]

Here is another fact: if at least 75% of voters vote either A or B top, then it is mathematically certain that either A or B will win. Many voters will naively vote A top and B bottom or vice versa to get maximum possible impact. But in a Score Voting election, those voters are free to also score third parties top or near top, so those are more likely to win.

Personally, I would recommend our "flag-bearer" system to be 0-9 Score Voting with No-Opinion allowed, and a soft quorum of fake 0-votes equaling 0.5% of the total real electorate.

[Toby Pereira]

One of the main things that people like about IRV is the later no harm criterion compliance. So it might be worth looking at this - http://rangevoting.org/LNH.html I quite like this bit:

"2. Now, one might argue that LNH is desirable with strategic=dishonest voters. Because LNH hopefully will encourage the strategists to provide honest second choices. Without LNH, they'd lie more.

That's a sensible idea. But if that is your view, and your goal is to motivate voters to provide honest 2nd choices, then it is better instead to use as your criterion, the straightforward "with this voting method, providing an honest 2nd choice, is never a strategic mistake, i.e. never forces the election result to worsen in that voter's perspective." That would be exactly the criterion that truly would motivate honest 2nd choices. Call it the "HSC criterion" (motivates Honest Second Choices). But since instant runoff voting (IRV) disobeys that superior criterion, the IRV propagandists at FairVote have always hidden this issue. Instead, they very carefully word their LNH criterion, which we now see is the wrong criterion for their very own declared goal, so that IRV obeys it. Then they act as though LNH=HSC, i.e. act as though LNH were the correct criterion, hoping nobody notices this sleight of hand. And then they take the deception even further – in the FairVote web page on this (local copy) they actually declared that this wrong LNH criterion was actually the pre-eminent criterion which should "far outweigh" all others in importance for judging voting systems – and if you disobey it, your voting method is doomed and should never even be considered.

This is absurd.

3. And as long as we are worried about motivating honest 2nd choices, why aren't we worried about honest first choices even more? The "HF criterion" would be, say, "with this voting method, honestly scoring your 1st choice candidate with the maximum allowed score (or top ranking), is never a strategic mistake, i.e. never forces the election result to worsen from that voter's perspective." Well, IRV disobeys HF. (So do Borda, plurality, and every Condorcet method.) Range and approval both obey HF. It seems intuitively clear HF is more important than HSC, which in turn is more important than LNH. So the very chain of reasoning FairVote is using, when redone correctly, actually leads us to support approval& score voting, and not support IRV – exactly the opposite of the conclusion FairVote drew! "

[NoIRV]

So what happened?

[Lonán Dubh]

It actually went quite well. I was able to point out that most of the benefits accredited to IRV weren't from IRV itself, but confounding factors.

I was also able to call into question whether we as a party should support IRV because it won't support us.

There was no time for visual aids, so a lot of the membership didn't quite understand how it works (or breaks), but I did bring a few copies of my analysis of the claims regarding IRV/range (with citations) that I gave to my people, and also the guy himself.

The county chair wants me to write something up, so I'm definitely going to get the last word. That last word, I think, will be that:

(1) we should support them in their efforts to repeal state law mandating Top Two primaries for local elections

(2) we should support them in their efforts to repeal state law mandating single seat elections for multi-seat bodies

(3) we should Not support their efforts to further IRV, but should push for Score/RRV instead, but that fighting it might waste political capital/good will that we would need if we can bring the state FairVote chapter around, or at least keep them from fighting us as payback

(4) we should actively seek out the other small parties in the state to build bridges and get mutual support for the above positions.

I rather liked the guy from FairVote, he was very well educated on the topic, and genuinely wants what's best for people (as I think we all here do), and was happy to get a copy of my analysis/response. With any luck, that might be my in to convincing the state chapter to perhaps push Range in some of their future initiatives. Not terribly hopeful on that, realistically, but more than I was before.

On Dec 16, 2017 17:52, "NoIRV" <xyzxyz...@gmail.com> wrote:

So what happened?

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Center for Election Science" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to electionscience+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

[Steve Cobb]

Would you have found flyers useful? Just sent you an email with a PDF of our glossy flyer targeting third parties. Other handouts can be found here:

http://electology.org/handouts

On Sunday, December 17, 2017 at 3:21:34 AM UTC+1, Ciaran Dougherty wrote:

It actually went quite well. I was able to point out that most of the benefits accredited to IRV weren't from IRV itself, but confounding factors.

I was also able to call into question whether we as a party should support IRV because it won't support us.

There was no time for visual aids, so a lot of the membership didn't quite understand how it works (or breaks), but I did bring a few copies of my analysis of the claims regarding IRV/range (with citations) that I gave to my people, and also the guy himself.

The county chair wants me to write something up, so I'm definitely going to get the last word. That last word, I think, will be that:

(1) we should support them in their efforts to repeal state law mandating Top Two primaries for local elections

(2) we should support them in their efforts to repeal state law mandating single seat elections for multi-seat bodies

(3) we should Not support their efforts to further IRV, but should push for Score/RRV instead, but that fighting it might waste political capital/good will that we would need if we can bring the state FairVote chapter around, or at least keep them from fighting us as payback

(4) we should actively seek out the other small parties in the state to build bridges and get mutual support for the above positions.

I rather liked the guy from FairVote, he was very well educated on the topic, and genuinely wants what's best for people (as I think we all here do), and was happy to get a copy of my analysis/response. With any luck, that might be my in to convincing the state chapter to perhaps push Range in some of their future initiatives. Not terribly hopeful on that, realistically, but more than I was before.

On Dec 16, 2017 17:52, "NoIRV" wrote:

So what happened?