Range Voting vs IRV

Posted by Kat in May 31st, 2008

Published in Call to Action, Election Fraud, Party Related, Policy, Request for Info, ballot access

anyone have time to research if the statements of rangevoting.org on IRV are accurate?

and what do you think of this ballot initiative they have:

getting it in states like texas where we have no initiative or referendum would be difficult but might be easier than ballot access petitioning!

Possible Language for a Ballot Initiative for “Democracy Improvement”

[The hyperlinks lead to additional explanatory or justifying information. In item III we are not fixated on the range 0 to 99 and are fully amenable to other ranges such as 0 to 9 or -10 to +10 if those are felt superior; the range 0-99 is chosen merely for concreteness.]

We hereby outlaw gerrymandering: All election districts shall be chosen by the following completely unbiased automatic procedure:
1. Start with the boundary outline of the state. (Note: for states containing major separate islands or pieces such as Michigan or Hawaii, the pieces must be pre-joined by line-segments to create an artificial all-enclosing boundary. Each line used must have the property that the entire state lies on one side of it. Second note: The procedure described holds for congressional districts and statehouse seats. For county or city governments based in districts within that county, the same procedure must be used but starting from the county or city outline not the state outline.)
2. Let N=A+B where A and B are as nearly equal whole numbers as possible. (For example, 7=4+3.)
3. Among all possible dividing lines that split the state into two parts with population ratio A:B, choose the shortest. (Note: since the Earth is round, when we say “line” we more precisely mean “great circle.” If there is an exact length-tie for “shortest” then break that tie by using the line closest to North-South orientation, and if it’s still a tie, then use the Westernmost of the tied dividing lines.)
4. We now have two hemi-states, each to contain a specified number (namely A and B) of districts. Handle them recursively via the same splitting procedure.
5. (After this initiative is passed, redistricting to meet these standards must happen within 365 days. After that, exactly one redistricting must happen between US censuses, and it is to be conducted within 365 days after the census data is made public. Exception to the preceding 2 sentences: we allow redistricting caused by any successful court challenge arguing that our rules were not followed during those district drawings. The maximally-populous district must have population at most 6% higher than the minimally-populous one, otherwise our rules have not been followed well enough.) As an example, you may see this approximate sketch of how this method would redistrict Tennessee (png) (ps) (pdf) (tiff).
6. If anybody’s residence is split in two by one of the splitlines (which would happen, albeit very rarely) then they are automatically declared to lie in the most-western (or if line is EW, then northern) of the two districts.
We hereby enact Uniform ballot standards:
1. Uniform rejection-standard: each voter’s ballot must be immediately checked for validity, and the voter immediately notified of its non-validity so that he/she can try again to produce a valid ballot. Voting machines that silently reject invalid ballots are hereby illegal. (Exception: in locales that use hand-counted, not machine-counted, ballots, this statute is dropped since it would conflict with the desire for ballot secrecy and anonymity.)
2. Uniform format: In any statewide race, all ballots for that race must have the same format statewide wherever the same type of voting machine is used.
We hereby improve the voting system to allow voters to express more information in their votes and to reconcile the desire to express their opinions honestly in their vote, with the desire not to be strategically foolish:
1. Each vote in an N-candidate election with N>2 (Note: N includes all “write-in” candidates, if they are allowed) shall consist of one numerical score from 0 to 99 awarded to each candidate (for example 57, 0, 34, 99 could be one vote in a 4-candidate election);
2. Voters are allowed to fill entries with an “X” (”intentional blank”) if they desire not to express an opinion about that candidate (for example 57, 0, X, 99);
3. A candidate’s “total” is the average of all his non-blank scores;
4. The candidate with the highest total wins.
5. (Exception: to prevent candidates admired by a small group but unknown to everybody else from winning, the winner must have at least half the summed-score as the candidate with the greatest score-sum. This also removes any fear from voters about honestly putting “blank.”)
6. Any illegible or out-of-range score shall be treated as “blank” so that the rest of that ballot’s scores still get used.
Example.
We hereby democratize ballot access: Anybody can get on any ballot for any office provided they collect at least 2,500 signatures of citizens legally qualified to be voters, or at least the square root of the number of voters in the preceding election for that post (if there was a precedent, otherwise 100 signatures will suffice), whichever is fewer; and provided they submit this petition a month or more before election day.
We hereby free access to election information: All election results including precinct by precinct counts (where those precincts produce them) should be publicly posted on the internet within 5 days of the election as some measure of protection against fraud.

Mathematical facts about the “range voting” system in III: Please note that awarding a high or low score to candidate C in no way affects the battle purely between candidates A and B, so that voters may feel free to express their honest opinion of C without fear of hurting A by “denying him your vote.” Also please note that if candidate A has several “clones” A2, A3, then that will neither hurt nor help them, unlike in the old system where the clones might “split the vote” and lose. Also note that, surprisingly, it is known how to run this kind of election on any voting machine in the USA with no modification needed. Finally note that voters now can express information about all the candidates instead of just one, or, by voting like (0,99,0,0), can choose to act just like voters in the old system.

Historical facts about ballot access in IV: In all US history since the age of preprinted ballots began (about 1890) up to 2005, there have only been two cases where a ballot for some statewide office (or US presidential race) has ever had more than 10 candidates on it, provided at least 2500 signatures were required to get on ballot (and even in those cases, there were ≤12 candidates). (More facts)

Postscript: The following US states allow statutes to be passed by “initiative”:
AZ, AR, CA, CO, ID, MO, MT, NE, ND, OK, OR, SD, UT, WA.
The following US states allow constitutional amendments to be passed by “initiative”:
AZ, AR, CA, CO, FL, IL, MI, MO, MT, NE, NV, ND, OH, OK, OR, SD.
We recommend constitutional amendments since we wish to prevent legislatures from simply overturning the law and re-gerrymandering whenever they feel like it.The usual procedure is, you formulate the wording very carefully of your initiative, then you collect signatures to get it put on the ballot. Your state’s “secretary of state” office should probably have info on how to go about it and how many signatures are required. If anybody collects that information please let us know, and we will post answers.

8 users Responded In This Post

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64. Greg said,

May 31st, 2008 at 8:12 am

Kat, the Ballot Initiative is largely well-done, with the exception of the Range Voting item. For starters, Range Voting isn’t used to elect any public office anywhere in the world, so we have very little understanding of how it might work in practice. Do you really want to promote the national adoption of a system that is so untested in public elections?

Your discussion of clones misses one of the biggest problems with Range Voting. Consider the case where you have two similar candidates A1 and A2, and a very different candidate B. If I prefer A1 slightly better than A2 but a lot better than B, then I have a dilemma. I can maximize the chance B loses by giving both A1 and A2 the top score; or I could score A1 higher than A2 but thereby increase the chance B ultimately wins.

This problem was coined the “Burr dilemma” by Professor Jack Nagel, and was the key reason he abandoned Approval/Range voting in favor of preferential systems like IRV. IRV does not suffer from this strategic dilemma. Unlike the author of the Range Voting website, Nagel has published, peer-reviewed papers on social choice theory.

The claims of the Range Voting advocates are too many and varied to discuss individually here. But every “flaw” I’ve seen them point out has either something that is vanishingly rare in practice or a philosophical difference, not a flaw. No voting system is perfect, of course, but IRV’s weaknesses are fortunately very few and far between.

Instead of working out hypothetical scenarios on scratch paper, let’s look at how IRV was worked in practice in the US and across the world. These supposed problems with IRV are just non-issues in practice. It gives third parties a more meaningful way to participate in elections, without derided as “spoilers”, and it helps pave the way for proportional representation with Choice Voting (STV).

67. MajorityRule said,

May 31st, 2008 at 9:50 am

One problem with Range Voting is that the majority of voters may have Candidate A as their favorite candidate and still lose the election. Most voters would not like this feature if they knew about it.

68. Clay Shentrup said,

May 31st, 2008 at 11:39 am

You’d better support Range Voting, because IRV maintains two-party duopoly, just like plurality voting. Whether you buy the explanation for that phenomenon offered by RangeVoting.org, or not, it’s a fact. Just look at Australia, Ireland, Malta, and Fiji. Then compare to the approximately 27 countries that use a “genuine” (not “instant”) runoff, most of which have escaped duopoly.

And a larger point is that Range Voting will increase your average satisfaction with the political state of the world _vastly_ more than you could by maintaining the current system, but winning something like 10% of elections. That is, you could enact Range Voting, and then have all Greens become totally politically inactive, and still be happier with your government than if you used pluarality or IRV and got a respectable amount of spots in government. I say this based on these Bayesian regret figures:
http://rangevoting.org/UniqBest.html

69. Tbouricius said,

May 31st, 2008 at 12:04 pm

Range Voting can work with disinterested judges, but is doubtful for public elections. My credentials…I am a former five term Progressive Party state legislator from Vermont, and a political scientist who is an elections method expert. One of the most respected international experts, Nicolaus Tideman, writes in his latest book, “Collective Decisions and Voting” that Range voting is “not supportable,” being one of six voting methods that “have defects that are so serious as to disqualify them from consideration.” Another key point is that Range Voting is based on a widely rejected notion that it is possible to add individual “utility” scores to achieve a meanignful community score, and that this “Bayesian Regret” measure is the best test of a voting method. The notion is that if 10% of voters feel VERY strongly about their choice and the other 90% of voters are only lukewarm about their choice, then the 10% can trump the 90% of voters. Most experts reject this notion, favoring majority rule, and thus all of the elegant math of Warren Smith is essentially irrelevant.

That being said, I would love to see some organization experiment with Range Voting to give it some real-world testing. It has never been used in any government elections, and is unlikely to gain traction anywhere, as it violates both the majority criterion and the later-no-harm criterion (indicating a second choice can hurt your first choice).

70. Anthony Lorenzo said,

May 31st, 2008 at 1:25 pm

Kat:

Give me a call and i will explain this fully in detail to you. Email me your number or email me and i will give it to you.

Anthony Lorenzo
GP member from FL

71. Greg said,

May 31st, 2008 at 2:55 pm

278. Purple Ninja Grrl said,

June 4th, 2008 at 9:19 am

I’ve been a long-time supporter of Range voting and in my opinion its strengths over IRV are not the mathematical nit-picks over unusual-case scenarios, but rather

(a) This is the MOST important advantage — aside from ripping your ballot in half, there’s pretty much no way to cast an uncountable vote using range. With IRV (and with other ranked-preference methods), say, you absent-mindedly mark two second-choice candidates on the same race? Hey, guess what, your ballot isn’t worth squat anymore.

(b) It’s more expressive. Take the following two range ballots:

Person 1: Swift 100%, Obama 90%, McCain 0%
Person 2: Swift 100%, Obama 10%, McCain 0%

Despite having radically different opinions about the middle candidate, both of these would cast a ballot with Swift 1 / Obama 2 / McCain 3 under IRV.

I know I’m just kinda being an echo here, but in my mind these two points are what won me over for RV over IRV. In reality though I’d accept either one as a vast improvement over the nonsense we have to deal with now.

As for this specific ballot initiative, although I do like point #1, I’d rather see something closer to at-large elections that proportionally appoint winners based on highest-utility methods… that could do away with the need for districts entirely and thus prevent gerrymandering… however most of those methods I speak of are either insanely computationally intensive or potentially inaccurate approximations… perhaps for the time being their proposal is better?

326. Greg said,

June 5th, 2008 at 3:04 pm

Purple Ninja Grrl, your example shows how Range can keep the “spoiler” effect in place. Had Swift not been in the race, then “Person 1″ would have surely given Obama 100% and “Person 2″ would have probably as well, because Obama is the favorite candidate of both in the absence of Swift. So Swift’s entry into the race does in fact hurt Obama’s chances. Thus, you should expect Swift to still be derided as a “spoiler” and kept out of the debates. With IRV, Swift plays no “spoiler” role whatsoever, thus increasingly her chances to participate in debates and to have a meaningful impact on the election.