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I agree that a Condorcet counting process would give better outcomes than the IRV one that is usually proposed, you're right, but I think that both are unintuit

I agree that a Condorcet counting process would give better outcomes than the IRV one that is usually proposed, you're right, but I think that both are unintuitive, in the sense that if you handed someone a set of ranked ballots and asked them to calculate the winner, they would not be able to come up with a system on their own. In fact, even if you told them what the process should be, they probably wouldn't be able to remember it and implement it correctly. This lack of transparency/legibility between the voting process and the results it produces is just the sort of thing that undermines people's confidence in elections, and that makes it an easy target for those who oppose reform, or who just want to undermine faith in an outcome that didn't go their way. We only have to look at the 2011 UK referendum on introducing the "Alternative Vote" system (their name for IRV) where the Prime Minister said in the national press that "It’s a puzzling mess of preferences, probabilities and permutations."[0] I support any reform that is offered to replace FPTP, but advocates need to be really careful that they don't tie themselves to a proposal that is open to such attacks, and then poisons the well for years to come, preventing other more understandable or more representative reforms from being offered (as happened in the UK). [0] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1383675/AV-referendum-Dont-sleepwalk-damages-democracy.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1383675/AV-refere...

mindslight 4y ago
To your point, at least with Condorcet, you can say that the winner was preferred to every other candidate by a majority of people. That isn't a specification of the counting process, but it seems like a pretty straightforward definition of a winner that most everyone can understand. Runoff voting seems to completely fall to your criticism, in that the outcome can be non-intuitive and really does depend on the counting process. Heck I understand the algorithm and can still foresee examples where it would feel completely unfair. The real criticism of Condorcet is the possibility of ties. But really that seems like more of a feature, compared to a greedy algorithm that produces non-intuitive outputs. If there is a Condorcet tie, then that should be considered exceptional and a winner should be chosen some other way. Or heck, maybe the winners should be the whole group of 3+ tied candidates, who'd then need a quorum amongst themselves for every action in office.

mindslight 4y ago

To your point, at least with Condorcet, you can say that the winner was preferred to every other candidate by a majority of people. That isn't a specification of the counting process, but it seems like a pretty straightforward definition of a winner that most everyone can understand. Runoff voting seems to completely fall to your criticism, in that the outcome can be non-intuitive and really does depend on the counting process. Heck I understand the algorithm and can still foresee examples where it would feel completely unfair. The real criticism of Condorcet is the possibility of ties. But really that seems like more of a feature, compared to a greedy algorithm that produces non-intuitive outputs. If there is a Condorcet tie, then that should be considered exceptional and a winner should be chosen some other way. Or heck, maybe the winners should be the whole group of 3+ tied candidates, who'd then need a quorum amongst themselves for every action in office.