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IIRC, the Burlington election as evidence of a failure isn’t universally agreed. Some point to it as an example of it working.
by 6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago
IIRC, the Burlington election as evidence of a failure isn’t universally agreed. Some point to it as an example of it working.
- jacques_chester 6y agoIt's also maddening that a single mayoral election is apparently the slam dunk counterexample. Meanwhile, Australia has been voting this way for a century. And over that time period, I think there have been fewer ugly paradoxes than in the US.
- paulgb 6y agoI agree that Burlington is overweighted, but I also wonder: we know about Burlington because in the US, jurisdictions typically make data available down to the level of how many times each rank-order was voted. Does Australia do this? Or is it possible that Burlington-like paradoxes have happened that we just don't know about, because we've only seen the tabulation-level data?
- NickM 6y agoAustralia also uses proportional representation (STV) which is quite different from the winner-takes-all instant-runoff elections that are being referred to as "ranked choice" in the US.
- jacques_chester 6y agoOnly in the Senate. The House of Representatives is single-member electorates.
- NickM 6y agoAh thanks, my mistake - I didn't realize that.
- NickM 6y agoIt's a tricky example because the Republican was effectively the third party candidate in that election. But once you realize that, the spoiler effect is very easy to see; the Republicans would have mostly preferred the more centrist Democrat candidate over the progressive Independent candidate, and if they had strategically ranked the Democrat first on their ballots the Democrat would have won. By voting honestly and putting their favorite candidate first, they screwed themselves over and threw away their vote, and were understandably bitter about it given that ranked choice is frequently claimed to solve this exact problem.