A Pox on IRV
Instant Runoff Voting (the soothing name for "Ranked Choice Voting") is not a big issue anywhere, but it's fun to write about on Election Day. Basically, everybody ranks the candidates in order of preference. The first-place votes are counted. If nobody has a majority, the lowest candidate is dropped, and his second-place votes are allocated to the remaining candidates....

"Hang on!"

What?

"You mean some people get to vote twice?"

Well...yeah.

"But only if they're stubborn or dumb enough to pick a candidate that comes in last?"

Um...yeah.

"Why doesn't everybody else get to vote twice?"

Um....it's not twice - it's Instant!

"Yeah, but some people get counted more often than other people? What's that about? Is that constitutional? What happened to one person, one vote?"

Well, see, the people who powerfully, deeply care about the minor-party candidates and fringe issues should also get to vote for a major-party candidate, because...um...because....

"Because they say so?"

...because otherwise, they are disenfranchised by their candidate's poor showing! See?

"That sounds pretty weak."

That's because you don't underst....

"Hey, here's an idea! Why don't we just count everybody's second vote? Isn't that more fair? And isn't it just about guarenteed to give us a majority by round 2?"

Guarenteed? How's that?

"Well, if you've got three candidates, you'll have a majority by round 2. No way to avoid it - do the math. If you've got four candidates, you'll at worst have one candidate with exactly half the votes. For N candidates, it takes N/2 rounds to reach 50% - that's faster than IRV, which looks like it can take N-1 rounds in the worst case. And it's easier to implement - you just count two marks on every ballot, rather than checking which ones to count the second, and which to count the first."

I guess so.

"So, seriously, isn't that more fair?"

Uh...maybe. But I don't understand IRV proponent's concept of "fairness" anyway, so don't ask me....



- posted by Scott @ 1:15 AM