u/rb-j

Are the major claims made by this organization actually true?

Claim 1:

• "In a majority winner system, candidates have to gain the support of more than half of the voters to win." ... "Using ranked choice voting in general elections requires candidates to win with majority support (more than 50%)."

Special election for Congress August 2022:

1. 188,582 voters voted in this election for a candidate (not a blank ballot).
2. The candidate who won received (counting votes the IRV way) 91,266 votes.
3. 91266/188582 = 0.483959 or 48.4%. 48.4% is not "more than 50%".
4. 91266 voters supported the winner (although 15467 were really supporting Begich). 188582-91266 = 97316 voters did not in any manner support the winner. More voters came to the polls and voted and voted for a loser than the number of voters who voted for the winner. 6050 more voters voted for a loser than voted for the winner. Would we allow a winner in an FPTP election to get away claiming they got "majority support" when more voters voted against that candidate than voted for them?
5. Compare apples to apples.

Claim 2:

• "Ranked choice voting ... eliminates the spoiler effect"

1. Sarah Palin was the spoiler in that election. Had Sarah Palin not run and Alaskan voters come to the polls and voted exactly the same way with the remaining two candidate, then Nick Begich would have defeated Mary Peltola by a margin of 8408 votes.
2. The complete quote is "Ranked choice voting allows voters to rank candidates in the general election in order of preference. This gives Alaskans more choices, eliminates the spoiler effect..." Giving Alaskans the choice to choose Nick Begich over either Mary Peltola or Sarah Palin is irrelevant if that expressed choice is ignored.

>>> Mary Peltola in August 2022, unfortunately shares a distinction with George W. Bush in 2000 and with Donald Trump in 2016. All three candidates were elected to office when the public record indicates that more voters marked their ballots preferring a different specific candidate for that office. >>> >>> In August 2022, more Alaskans, 87859 to 79451 (an 8408 voter margin), preferred Nick Begich to Mary Peltola and marked their ballots saying so. But Mary Peltola was sent to Washington to represent the Alaskan people in Congress. >>> >>> In November 2024, again, more Alaskan voters marked their ballots that Begich is preferred to Peltola by nearly the same margin, 7876 (164861 to 156985). But this time Nick Begich is sent to Washington. >>> >>> Both times about 8000 more Alaskans said they would prefer Begich to Peltola. And, both times, marked their ballots saying so. Both times Instant-Runoff Voting was used. >>> >>> What was different? >>> >>> Sarah Palin was in the race in 2022 and not in the race in 2024. And the outcomes were different winners.

Here are the reasons we want Ranked-Choice Voting. The purpose of RCV is, in single-winner elections having 3 or more candidates:

1. ... that the candidate with majority support is elected. Plurality isn't good enough. We don't want a 40% candidate elected when the other 60% of voters would have preferred a different specific candidate over the 40% plurality candidate. But we cannot find out who that different specific candidate is without using the ranked ballot. We RCV advocates all agree on that.
2. Then whenever a plurality candidate is elected and voters believe that a different specific candidate would have beaten the plurality candidate in a head-to-head race, then the 3^rd candidate (neither the plurality candidate nor the one people think would have won head-to-head) is viewed as the spoiler, a loser whose presence in the race materially changes who the winner is. We want to prevent that from happening. All RCV advocates agree on that.
3. Then voters voting for the spoiler suffer voter regret and in future elections are more likely to vote tactically (compromise) and vote for the major party candidate that they dislike the least, but they think is best situated to beat the other major party candidate that they dislike the most and fear will get elected. RCV is meant to free up those voters so that they can vote for the candidate they really like without fear of helping elect the candidate they loathe. All RCV advocates agree with that.
4. The way RCV is supposed to help those voters is that if their favorite candidate is defeated, then their second-choice vote is counted. So voters feel free to vote their hopes rather than voting their fears. Then 3^(rd)-party and independent candidates get a more level playing field with the major-party candidates and diversity of choice in candidates is promoted. It's to help unlock us from a 2-party system where 3^(rd)-party and independent candidates are disadvantaged.

RCV failed, in Alaska in August 2022, to do precisely what it was adopted to do (essentially to prevent a spoiled election due to vote splitting, as a result punishing Palin voters for marking their favorite as #1 which caused the election of Peltola). The fault is not in the ranked ballots (in fact, it's only because of the ranked ballots that we know that Begich was more preferred by more voters than either Palin or Peltola). The fault is in the manner (IRV) that the vote is tallied.

This same failure occurred in 2009 in Burlington Vermont. Got published here.

This op-ed in Washington Post from November 2022 also spells this out. Written by two internationally-recognized election law and voting systems profs. One has a Nobel for his work.

Whoever tells us that RCV (using Instant-Runoff Voting tabulation) will solve the split-vote problem ("Can't split the vote in Alaska because we have RCV.") is lying. And Alaska in August 2022 is the proof.

Nice TEDx presentation by Sara Wolk.

I won't nit-pick details right now. Maybe later in a comment.

There was another live youtube that wasn't as good. This is really fucking good and it's only three. No fiddle or synth. And no overdubbed double lead guitar.

Let's begin with the first sentence:

> Condorcet voting methods (also known as “head-to-head” or “round robin” voting) use a ranked choice ballot that enables voters to rank candidates in order of preference just like with ranked choice voting (RCV), ...

Let's call it "Instant-Runoff Voting" like they did in 2014 when they changed their marketing term to the umbrella term "Ranked-Choice Voting". Condorcet RCV is RCV. This latest thing from Better Choices (Top-3 head-to-head) is not RCV but it is Condorcet.

But if a ranked ballot is used instead of a FPTP ballot or an Approval ballot or a Score ballot (which STAR uses), then it's Ranked-Choice Voting. Whatever the tallying rules are (i.e. IRV vs. any variant of Condorcet vs. Borda vs. Bucklin).

> ... but have a different tabulation rule that downgrades the importance of a voter’s first choice.

In either case, the voter intent by ranking A>B is that if this voter has to choose between A and B, this voter is voting for A. IRV doesn't always elect the candidate with the most first-choice votes. IRV doesn't necessarily count a voter's first choice vote. What IRV does is apply majority rule to only the two candidates in the final round (not to any other pairing of candidates).

What IRV does is downgrade the importance of Majority Rule and, in an unpredictable manner, sometimes ignores Majority Rule:

>>> When more voters mark their ballots that Candidate A is preferred to Candidate B than the number of voters marking their ballots to the contrary, then Candidate B is not elected.

This majority rule is directly coupled to the equality of our votes. If Candidate B is elected (as has occurred with IRV) then the voters preferring Candidate A over B had the value of their votes diminished w.r.t. the voters preferring B over A, because there were more of those A voters than the B voters, yet the fewer B voters get to have their candidate elected.

> It’s possible for there to be no Condorcet winner due to a “Condorcet cycle.”

It's possible for a Condorcet cycle in any RCV election even when IRV is used to tally the vote. Whether there is a cycle or not depends only on how voters voted and is independent of the tallying method. Two RCV elections that we know about (Minneapolis Ward 2, 2021 and Berkeley school board District 4, 2022) had cycles. It's just that Condorcet tallying will realize that fact while IRV is oblivious to it.

Arrow's theorem ultimately rules, no matter what method is used. Whether it's IRV or Condorcet or STAR or Approval or FPTP, it is possible that voters can vote in such a manner that it is impossible to satisfy majority rule (w.r.t. voters actual preference) and impossible to avoid a spoiled election. It's just that Condorcet will satisfy majority rule and prevent a spoiled election whenever it's possible. IRV fails that sometimes and spoils the election even when it's possible to avoid a spoiled election.

> Condorcet voting could elect a candidate that is no voter’s first choice. > > Condorcet voting could produce an unexpected outcome: the election of a candidate that no voter (or very few voters) ranked as their first preference.

That is a falsehood when considering 3 candidates (anything could be possible when there are 4 or more). Even with the extreme case of 3 candidates, 2N+1 voters: N voters for Leftie, N voters for Rightie, and 1 voter for Candidate Milquetoast (at least Milquetoast votes for themself), that requires a dead tie between Leftie and Rightie, and complete polarization (where no Leftie voter likes Rightie at all and ranks Milquetoast above Rightie and vise-versa), and only then can you say that Condorcet will elect a candidate that gets almost no first-choice votes (but the Milquetoast candidate gotta lotta second-choice votes from both the Left and Right).

> For voters who are used to a status quo in which your first choice is the only thing that matters, the election of a candidate who lacks substantial first-choice support could be unsettling.

But that's also what happens with IRV. And FairVote is proud of that. They like to call it a "come-from-behind victory" when the candidate that IRV elected lacked the most first-choice support. Because when IRV does that, it is ignoring the first-choice support in favor of majority rule. But when IRV also fails majority rule (besides ignoring the most first-choice support), that's when IRV fails in the minds of the voters. It fails because it didn't value the voters' votes equally and failed to prevent a spoiled election, which is precisely what RCV is promising to do.

> Moreover, an elected leader who fails to have the strong backing of any voting group could very well face challenges in governing.

Which is precisely what has happened with IRV failed to elect the Consistent Majority Candidate (the Condorcet winner) when such candidate did exist. That is 100% the case (with, admittedly, just two cases).

> For a real-world example, consider the 2022 special election for U.S. House of Representatives in Alaska. The last place candidate in round 1, Nick Begich, was in fact the Condorcet winner.

Nick Begich was in third place (regarding only first-choice votes). Not "last place", who was Al Gross (who got 12.6% of the primary vote and bowed out). Begich and Palin (both GOP) together had 59.8% of the first-choice vote and Begich was only 2.8% behind Palin, in only first-choice votes (among GOP), but had far more support than Palin overall.

But the failure of IRV was that Palin was the weaker of the two GOP candidates and could not beat Peltola head-to-head in the IRV final round. But Begich could have and would have beaten Peltola with a 4.6% margin. But IRV didn't give Begich that chance to, which was its failure.

Again, the moral of the Alaska 2022 story is:

>> Mary Peltola in August 2022, unfortunately shares a distinction with George W. Bush in 2000 and with Donald Trump in 2016. All three candidates were elected to office when the public record indicates that more voters marked their ballots preferring a different specific candidate for that office. >> >> In August 2022, more Alaskans, 87899 to 79461 (an 8438 voter margin), preferred Begich to Peltola and marked their ballots saying so. But Mary Peltola was sent to Washington to represent the Alaskan people in Congress. >> >> In November 2024, again, more Alaskan voters marked their ballots that Begich is preferred to Peltola by nearly the same margin, 7876 (164861 to 156985). But this time Begich is sent to Washington. >> >> Both times about 8000 more Alaskans said they would prefer Begich to Peltola. And, both times, marked their ballots saying so. Both times Instant-Runoff Voting was used. >> >> >> What was different? >> >> Sarah Palin was in the race in 2022 and not in the race in 2024. And the outcomes were different winners.

That is the lesson to learn from Alaska 2022. And FairVote is lying to themselves (and to you) about it.

> A Condorcet voting method would have elected the last-place candidate, an unpalatable and counter-intuitive outcome for many voters.

No, the Condorcet voting method would have elected the candidate that was clearly preferred by voters over every other individual candidate. And by enough of a margin (4.6%) to be significant. FairVote is lying to you.

> RCV [IRV] has been proven to elect the Condorcet winner in almost every instance.

That's true. And that's the only reason why IRV has been "successful". IRV is only successful (elects the consistent majority candidate and prevents the spoiler effect) when it elects the Condorcet winner. IRV never succeeds when it fails to elect the Condorcet winner. Remember, all the CW need do in an IRV race is to get into the IRV final round and then the CW will always win that final round.

> Of the nearly 500 single-winner [IRV] elections in the United States since 2004 in which we have sufficient ballot data to identify the Condorcet winner (as of September 2022), the Condorcet winner won all but twice, for a Condorcet efficiency rate of 99.6%.

No. It was four times that IRV failed to elect the Condorcet winner and FairVote knows that. The "Condorcet efficiency rate" is 99.2%. Two of those four elections had no Condorcet winner (the Minneapolis and Berkeley cases mentioned above).

> In other words, [IRV] already reliably elects the Condorcet winner in the vast majority of cases, ...

Good!! So let's elect the Condorcet winner in every case where it is possible to.

> ... using a simpler and more intuitive system.

That's bullshit. IRV cannot make this simple claim:

• When more voters mark their ballots that Candidate A is preferred to Candidate B than the number of voters marking their ballots to the contrary then, whenever possible, Candidate B is not elected.

That's far simpler than IRV.

> And, in the rare situations where [IRV] does not elect the Condorcet candidate, that candidate – as noted above – will by definition be a candidate who lacks substantial first-choice support from any voting group.

And that is also a lie. Begich did not "by definition ... lack[] substantial first-choice support from" GOP voters. Begich had substantial first-choice support, almost as much as Palin, whom IRV did send to the final round. But IRV sent the weaker of those two GOP candidates to the final round to lock horns with Peltola. And that weaker GOP candidate lost to Peltola, where the stronger GOP candidate, Begich, would have beaten Peltola as he did two years later (when Palin wasn't there spoiling the race).

FairVote is extremely self-serving and dishonest in their service to self. FairVote's interest is in their own self-preservation, not in election reform. They are just unwilling to face the facts and admit to failure when they are staring at such in the face.

Sometimes to understand how a voter would be motivated to vote on a cardinal ballot, including STAR and Approval, and to get a grip on the variables without being a formidable multi-dimensional (or too-many-dimensional) conceptual math problem, I limit the modeling of a problem to 3 significant candidates. Even the normal cases or the edge cases in RCV are about the interaction of, at most, 3 "significant" candidates.

When there are fewer than 3 candidates, then FPTP is fine. There are no tactical issues in voting. One of those candidates you like better. Then you vote for them over the other candidate that you like least.

So we basically can understand that RCV elections have a very limited number of qualitatively different cases;

1. 2 or fewer candidates. No issues about anything with RCV.
2. 3 or more candidates, but one of them still got over 50% of the vote. No IRV 2nd round needed. No issues. Just like FPTP.
3. 3 or more candidates, no one got over 50% of the vote. So an additional round is required and the plurality candidate was still elected. IRV still does nothing different from FPTP. 3a) Condorcet winner exists and is elected. 3b) Condorcet winner exists and is not elected. 3c) Condorcet winner does not exist: a preference cycle.
4. 3 or more candidates, no one got over 50%, and in the additional round the plurality candidate was not elected. The so-called "come-from-behind victory". This is the only case where IRV is different, in outcome, from FPTP. 4a) Condorcet winner exists and is elected. 4b) Condorcet winner exists and is not elected. 4c) Condorcet winner does not exist: a preference cycle.

There are really only 8 ways an IRV election can turn out. Pretty much every RCV election can be classified in 1 of those 8 categories. I wish that someone (like FairVote) would be maintaining and updating a record of all single-winner RCV elections and identifying which of those categories each RCV election is.

Now suppose there are 3 candidates and consider Condorcet methods. Now even if a Condorcet method is a "Single-method system" (like Ranked-Pairs, Schulze, MinMax, BTR-IRV) they can be expressed as a "Two-method system" (a 3-way Round-Robin followed by a "completion method" if there is no Condorcet winner) with the specific single-method system as the completion method.

So I want to compare these systems in the case of 3 candidates to each other and to a couple "traditional" two-method systems:

• Condorcet-Plurality
• Condorcet-Borda
• Condorcet-Bucklin
• Condorcet-TopTwoRunoff (which, for 3 candidates is equivalent to Condorcet-Hare or Condorcet-IRV)

Now, they call elect the CW when such exists, so let's understand what they do when there is a cycle: Candidate Rock, Candidate Paper, and Candidate Scissors. The cycle is:

Rock > Scissors > Paper > Rock

There is circular symmetry so we can arbitrarily name "Rock" as the candidate with the most 1st-choice votes. Then, sorting in terms of 1st-choice votes is either one of two cases:

1. Rock
2. Paper
3. Scissors

or it's

1. Rock
2. Scissors
3. Paper

Now, BTR-IRV will elect the same candidate as Condorcet-Plurality. That is Candidate Rock. This is because Paper and Scissors will first have a runoff, Scissors defeats Paper and advances to the IRV final round and is defeated by Rock. So this completion method ignores the two candidates having the fewest 1st rankings.

Now let's consider Ranked-Pairs, Schulze, MinMax. MinMax is normally about defeat-strength as margins (not winning-votes) so let's also consider only margins for RP and Schulze. (I never liked defining defeat strength as winning votes anyway.) Now, it's clear that Ranked-Pairs, Schulze, MinMax margins will elect the same candidate when there are only 3 candidates. If there's a cycle, they all elect the loser of the pairing with the smallest margin of defeat. So they are all ignoring the pairing having smallest defeat margin.

Now consider Condorcet-TTR, which is the same as Condorcet-Hare. These methods will always elect the winner of the pairing of the top two candidates, which always includes Rock. That is they elect Paper when it's the first case above (1.Rock>2.Paper>3.Scissors) and they elect Rock when it's the second case (1.Rock>2.Scissors>3.Paper). Correct? So this completion method ignores the candidate having the fewest 1st rankings.

Is there any other outcome? Does this cover all of the possible outcomes of a 3-candidate ranked ballot election?

So guys, there is this Tuesday night group that's a live phone call (using Google Meet) that you might wanna participate in. It's hosted by Hayden "Sass" Sasswood. It happens Tuesday night beginning at 8:00 pm East Coast (or 5:00 pm Left Coast) on Tuesday night.

The Google Meet URL or go to https://democracydiscussion.com .

It's still going right now. But we've been going for 2 hours already. You don't need to stay for the whole call.

Come join us and argue about voting methods! We even, once-in-a-while get some fereigners from Down Under calling in.

Just curious who/what might be going on about it.

Something a little like Sum of all Fears or similar.

I have been reading that North Korea has actually tested a 160 kiloton possibly thermonuclear bomb on September 4, 2017. That's 8 times bigger than Fat Man. North Korea keeps testing delivery vehicles and is getting transpacific.

So the Democratic People's Republic of Korea of course cannot compete with the U.S. on par because of the disparity of size, wealth, and technological advancement of the two countries. The U.S. is far more powerful and the DPRK must respect that.

But if I was the fat, crazy, evil North Korean megalomaniac dictator and I wanted to nuke DC for some reason, I know that if the U.S. sees the missile coming from the DPRK, then I can kiss Pyongyang goodbye. So, to maintain plausible deniability, our strategic military and spy agency would cook up a plan to very covertly smuggle an entire functioning midrange thermonuclear missile to some virtually uninhabited place in South America or maybe in Norway or something.

Part of the plan must be engineering the stealth to get the missile to the total wild-assed location so that NORAD would have no idea of what to make of it after it launches. They see it launch and track it and it becomes alarming, but they have no evidence that it's connected to any particular enemy.

So after DC gets nuked, the crippled U.S. has to figure out how to respond but, to do that, they gotta figure out what happened. Who is responsible.

I wonder if a Tom-Clancy-like movie could be made outa that?