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IRV isn't perfect, but it's a huge improvement over the current state of affairs. I disagree. In theory, yes it's an improvement, but it still doesn't eliminat
by NickM 7y ago
IRV isn't perfect, but it's a huge improvement over the current state of affairs.
I disagree. In theory, yes it's an improvement, but it still doesn't eliminate the spoiler effect, and in practice it's much harder to understand why it produces the election results that it generates.
I think most people who study this topic would agree that approval voting is better than IRV. Many people then go on to say "but at least IRV is better than FPTP". My concern is that IRV is effectively worse than FPTP, because it may poison people's enthusiasm for alternative voting systems when they see the strange outcomes it sometimes yields.
I don't think my fear is just theoretical either, as this has already happened before when the 2009 Burlington IRV election produced a strange outcome, and they subsequently switched back to FPTP.
- macawfish 7y agoI'm concerned as you are. I've come to believe that IRV in a world of Cambridge Analytica spinoffs could be even more dangerous than FPTP. Not only would strategic voting be possible (using algorithms to target swing-voters), it'd be almost impossible to detect, and nearly impossible to do general audience journalism about. Intuitively, I'd expect ordinal methods to be much harder to game, but I'm not even convinced this is the case. I've done some research trying to dig into this question, but a lot of the distributed-systems-game-theory-economic-math is hard for me to understand, and isn't focused on the messy problem of consensus between humans as much as it is on the problem of consensus between computer-like agents. In a world of Cambridge Analytica spinoffs, I believe this is an extremely important issue, and that FairVote's take is outdated.