Instant Run Off Primary

[trout007]

Here is an interesting system that is similar to a caucus but more automated. Basicly everyone ranks their candidates in preferential order and then the lowest is dropped and their votes are given to the next highest. This would be especially good for a lesser known candidate becuase it gets rid of the "he can't win" scenario.

http://www.instantrunoff.com/

[nate895]

I Love It

[nate895]

bump

[nate895]

Hey, Utah Republicans use it.

[bcreps85]

I've been advocating a run-off voting system for years. My understanding is that it was actually on the table for debate once.

Our leaders decided that the American public wasn't "smart enough" to comprehend such a voting system. The funny thing...in mock-elections during grade school we used this...and no one had any problems with it.

[mexicanpizza]

I love it.

I would also like to hear about any possibility of coordinated ranking among sets of supporters having an effect on the outcome. I don't think it's possible with reasonable numbers of votes, but I'd have to think about it.

Something like we would all vote RP as #1, then groups of us would pick different sub categories of rankings.

[humanic]

Getting Instant Runoff Voting implemented is unbelievable important. It's already being done at the local level in some places, but more people need to throw their weight behind it immediately.

[LibertyIn08]

Run-off voting is about as statistically valid as plurality.

Approval voting is considered the most statistically viable. I know a man who gave a presentation a few months back about the various systems; he was a Nobel laureate. If I could get him to come here and post, maybe he could better educate us all.

Wikipedia has some good articles about the various voting systems as well.

[jp5065]

I fail to see how this would have helped Ron Paul..

[Bold As Love]

I'm not sure, but I think they use this in San Francisco (I heard that on Randi Rhodes via Air America Radio a few years ago).

Think its very interesting and might be a way to break the two-party stranglehold at least in Congressional, State and local elections.

[nate895]

I fail to see how this would have helped Ron Paul..

It would get rid of the "he can't win" attitude because if he doesn't win, your second choice would be counted as well, possibly even third choice.

[jp5065]

It would get rid of the "he can't win" attitude because if he doesn't win, your second choice would be counted as well, possibly even third choice.

I don't buy it... people would still say he can't win.

I don't want my vote to get transferred to Romney Huck or McCain.

Seems like all this would do, in most states, is cancel out any Paul votes and give them to the others.

This is billed as the "anti-spoiler" system, don't we want Ron Paul to be the "spoiler," the come from behind underdog?

[humanic]

I fail to see how this would have helped Ron Paul..

If there are more than two people in the race, IRV allows you to vote your conscience without "throwing your vote away". If your guy comes in last, you still get to choose from the remaining candidates.

As we all know, there are many people who like Ron Paul better than any of the other candidates, but because they are convinced that he "can't win" and that voting him would be "throwing their vote away", they cast their vote for the lesser of the remaining evils. With IRV, there would be no incentive to do this.

Say someone's ranking of candidates went as follows:

1. Ron Paul
2. Mike Huckabee
3. John McCain

In the current system, many people like this end up voting for Huckabee if they really hate McCain and don't think Ron Paul has a chance of winning. With IRV, they could cast their vote for Paul by listing him as their first choice. If McCain receives over 50% of the vote (that is, over 50% of the people list him as their first choice), he wins, and that's that. But, he would have won regardless, even if this person and everyone like them had voted for Huckabee. However, if McCain does NOT receive 50% and Paul has the least votes of the three of them, Ron Paul is eliminated and this person's vote is then cast for their next choice, Mike Huckabee.

[Exponent]

I don't buy it... people would still say he can't win.

I don't want my vote to get transferred to Romney Huck or McCain.

Seems like all this would do, in most states, is cancel out any Paul votes and give them to the others.

This is billed as the "anti-spoiler" system, don't we want Ron Paul to be the "spoiler," the come from behind underdog?
It would only fail to fix the problem if people failed to understand how it works. Unfortunately, this is likely.

Your vote would never transfer to anyone else if you did not want it to. You can list only one person.

The benefit is when you really like person A, but think he has little chance to win. You really dislike person B, and he has a really good chance of winning, so you want to vote for person C, who is not as bad, and also has a good chance. With IRV, you can put person A first, person B second, and not even list person C. If person A does actually have a chance to win, then you just helped him do so. If it turns out that person A didn't have enough support, then your vote ends up going to person B. At no point will your vote go to person C, and your vote for person B is not reduced in power simply because he was second on the list. And neither was your vote for person A reduced because you had more than one person on your list.

If people understand how it works, it completely eliminates the affect of "he can't win" on the vote itself.

[fgd]

Instant runoff voting is possibly one of the most awful and problem-ridden election systems ever devised.

Read this paper. Approval voting beats it by a mile.

http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/

[FarSide]

There is also the argument to be made for getting a candidate that more people are happy with.

For example, with a ranking system (very simplified):

candidate A: #1 choice for Repubs, #3 choice for Dems
candidate B: #1 choice for Dems, #3 choice for Repubs
candidate C:#2 choice for both Repubs and Dems (100% of people) --> Winner


So then the question is, is it better to have someone most of the people are OK with, or someone who is HATED by 49% of the people?

[Exponent]

Instant runoff voting is possibly one of the most awful and problem-ridden election systems ever devised.

Read this paper. Approval voting beats it by a mile.

http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/
I'll certainly have to consider that stuff more; I've heard about and didn't doubt the existence of problems with IRV, though I hadn't looked into it before. Nonetheless, such simulated statistical analyses clearly miss psychological effects, such as the "can't win" mentality that we've been talking about here. Overcoming that problem might be worth dealing with monotonicity problems associated with IRV.

With approval voting, I'd have a hard time psychologically trying to determine the cut-off of who is acceptable and who is not. I'd like to see how those images on the page you linked to would change for approval voting as the distance of acceptability changed. I might in fact work up my own simulation sometime based on their description...

Despite that difficulty though, I certainly would not be opposed to approval voting. Right now, I'm sort of in a mindset of "anything but plurality".

[humanic]

There is also the argument to be made for getting a candidate that more people are happy with.

For example, with a ranking system (very simplified):

candidate A: #1 choice for Repubs, #3 choice for Dems
candidate B: #1 choice for Dems, #3 choice for Repubs
candidate C:#2 choice for both Repubs and Dems (100% of people) --> Winner

So then the question is, is it better to have someone most of the people are OK with, or someone who is HATED by 49% of the people?

Are you saying this is what would happen under IRV, or are you proposing a different system all together? If it is the former:

Candidate C actually wouldn't win in this scenario under IRV, but it is a bit too simplistic of a scenario to serve as a good example.

Remember that people's first choice IS their vote. It is only if no candidate receives a majority that anyone's second choice even matters. Therefore, in this scenario, 100% of the vote is split between A and B since no one chose candidate C as their first choice. Unless A and B received exactly the same number of votes, one of them would win outright.

Even if there were a tie, candidate C would be eliminated as the low man, so he would not win. However, in this scenario, there would still be a tie, because candidate C had no votes to be dispersed to the other candidates when he/she was eliminated. Realistically, this would probably never happen except in a very, very small election, like a 5-10 person precinct. I'm not sure how they tie would be broken if this were to somehow happen to be honest.

What could happen in real life would be that candidate C, aside from being the second choice of all of the Republicans and Democrats, could also get a lot of independent votes. If he got more votes than, say candidate A, then candidate A would be eliminated and all of his votes would go to candidate C, since that is the second choice of all of the people that voted for A. This could put him over the top for the win.