Anyone with time and interest should read this column about the genesis of the single transferable vote and its history in America. It’s written by someone at Princeton U who knows her stuff.
There was controversy recently at Princeton over their STV student government elections. As with Georgetown undergrads earlier this year, calls for repeal were rooted in misunderstanding of the system.
Good article, Josephine.
Santa Fe, NM voters on March 4 overwhelmingly approved instant runoff voting for municipal elections. The margin was 65-35.
A charter amendment for public financing also won, but the margin there was only 61.4-38.6.
Most people adhere to the “never gonna happen” theory of electoral systems reform. In relative terms, the public financing movement (aka “clean elections”) receives boatloads of cash annually. Yet here’s an example of how the impossible - changing the voting system - can be more popular than the slightly less impossible - “getting the money out of politics.”
Here’s a list of who uses/will/wants to use IRV. In 2002, San Francisco was the only jurisdiction on that list.
I don’t know the comparable list for public financing. Anyone?
Who won the Georgetown Student Association presidency this week? We won’t know until Tuesday.
“The Election Commission has received several inquiries and complaints about this year’s election. In order to follow up and investigate each claim adequately, the Election Commission has decided, in accordance with the Student Association bylaws, to delay the announcement of results until early next week,” said Election Commissioner Maura Cassidy (COL ‘08) in an e-mail.
The Election Commission declined to comment further on specific complaints.
What were the complaints? Why the wait? Is it technical failure? Fraud? Did someone spend too much money and now needs to be disqualified? This is not a model for transparent election administration.
Santa Fe, NM voters will decide March 4 whether to use instant runoff voting in municipal elections. The campaign website is here.
The area’s major daily, the Santa Fe New Mexican, has come out against Amendment 5.
Amendment 5 is for “instant runoff,” or “ranked-choice” voting.: Make your first choice, second choice, third choice, etc. This would, at last, ensure majority-elected politicians, más o menos — but it depends on well-run elections using special computer programs. We say wait and see how it works in huge numbers of other cities — and, for now, vote against.
Fear of technology is a bad reason to sideline principles like majority rule that the editors otherwise support - especially since the number of US cities successfully using IRV grows each year.
The campaign needs help. If you’re in the region, you can get involved (or donate) through this site.
Jeffrey O’Neill just announced the release of OpenSTV 1.2. Time to update my copy.
The most significant changes in this release are the following:
- Changed output to be more descriptive and easier to read.
- Changed implementation of Supplemental Vote to use all rankings.
- Changed implementation of IRV to stop sooner (won’t change outcome).
- Print substages for ERS97 STV.
- Now possible to have unlimited precision (but max is set to 20 for gui).
- Meek/Warren implemented in fixed point.
For the uninitiated, the open-source program tabulates elections under different preferential (and non-preferential) systems including several single transferable vote algorithms.
The developers have launched a blog, too.
The Hoya reports that Georgetown University undergrads will use instant runoff voting to elect their president (and VP) for the second time. The GU Student Association implemented IRV last year.
“This year, the campaign field is one of the most crowded ever,†Election Commission member Maura Cassidy (COL ’08) said.
It’s hard to tell whether that’s because students are responding to the incentive to run. Nevertheless there are eight contending slates.
Candidates run as two-person tickets for president and vice president. Effectively, this is a single winner election.
The GUSA also uses IRV for student senate elections. There are 23 single-member “districts” corresponding to living arrangements. According to their site, last year’s reforms included:
geographical representation for the Senate - too few students know their Student Association Senator. by creating districts based on where you live, rather than what grade you’re in, we hope that students will have more day-to-day interaction with their representative to the Student Association
It would be interesting to know:
Duplicate rankings would be the most fatal error, followed by skipped rankings. High rates would indicate need for more vigorous voter education.
Prof. Eric Maskin came to Georgetown today to advocate for Condorcet systems, which he branded “true majority rule.” In the process, he gave nicely intuitive explanations of that system and the Borda count using the Florida 2000 and France 2002 examples.
Maskin’s main concern was how to solve the “spoiler problem” in plurality elections whereby a majority-opposed candidate wins because the majority splits its support. I’d take issue with two parts of the presentation: his treatments of instant runoff voting and the prospects for reforming the American electoral college.
He was not openly hostile to IRV, which I appreciate. He readily noted that system would, like Condorcet, be preferable to plurality because it lets voters register more than one preference using rankings. One might say Maskin’s preferences are: his favorite system > any reform > status quo. The same cannot be said of other Condorcet (and approval, and range) advocates whose preferences appear to be: favorite system > status quo > any reform.
But he was somewhat dismissive, lumping instant runoff with two-round runoff systems (TRS). In the 2002 French presidential election, Jean-Marie Le Pen entered the runoff because of first-round spoiler problems on the left, and Lionel Jospin, who may have been the majority-preferred candidate, ultimately lost to Chirac. This example supposedly highlights the deficiency of “runoff” systems, including instant runoff.
This is something of a straw man. Maskin’s main concern - he returned to the point when pressed by an audience member - is that runoff systems are eliminative, and the order of candidates’ elimination can produce ‘wrong winner’ outcomes. While that deficiency is possible under IRV, it is far less likely than under the French TRS. In the former, candidates are eliminated one at a time. In the latter, all but the top two are. In fact, IRV likely would have ‘worked’ in France 2002.
To adjudicate the relative merits of Borda and Condorcet (and, implicitly, IRV), Maskin applied five criteria from voting theory: consensus, anonymity, neutrality, independence of irrelevant alternatives (IIA) and decisiveness. Here we enter the realm of value judgements. Borda and IRV do not satisfy IIA, but Condorcet may not satisfy decisiveness. That is, it may fail to elect a winner when no one candidate is preferred by a majority over every other candidate in pairwise contests (called a “Condorcet cycle”). For Maskin, this deficiency is less offensive than the failure of IIA.
Moreover, if we assume with Maskin that most voters have ideologically driven preferences, a vote distribution resulting in the above is unlikely. (Say, Bush > Nader > Gore > Buchanan.) And when it occurs, we should not get too upset because such preferences are ideologically inconsistent. The voter has been illogical.
As a thought experiment, I’ll buy the claim that ideology, however understood, governs preferences. Too much criticism of reform efforts has been predicated on hypothetical preference orderings that seem schizophrenic.
Maskin also made some comments about the electoral college. When I asked him for thoughts on the National Popular Vote plan, he said it was a “cute idea” and that my question was “not on point.” But one of his arguments for using state-by-state Condorcet in presidential elections was that moving to direct election is variously “not possible” and “not likely to happen.” As such, the question is “on point” because he raised the issue.
Replacing the electoral college with a popular vote, as Maskin noted, would not address his core concern about plurality rules. His objective must have been rhetorical, therefore - to seize on reform energy to promote a reform unrelated to the desire for a direct election.
In all fairness, Maskin paid heed to the electoral college’s malapportionment and sidelining of voters in non-swing states, noting there may well be reasons to reform the institution.
But I vigorously dispute the claims that reform is “not possible” and “not likely.” One, states have constitutional authority to choose their electors in any way they want. Two, there was no single, sincere justification for the institution when the convention adjourned in 1787. (Hence states reserve the right to do what they want.) Three, National Popular Vote may have been a “cute idea” two years ago, but two states have since signed on, and it’s expected a third soon will. If that happens, we will be “46 electors closer to more democratic presidential elections.”
DemoChoice.org is a useful website where you can conduct STV (and IRV) elections among pre-defined electorates. They’ve just released an application you can add to a Facebook profile. To find it, log in, and search “demochoice.”
They offer two levels of security. For general use, feed DemoChoice a list of e-mail addresses for the voters you want to allow. For more “serious” elections, request that site keys be sent to your voters.
Or just run a public poll for fun.
Every year the LA Times faithfully does a story about the Oscar nomination process. Here is this year’s.
This is an interesting application of the single transferable vote. Next year I should pay more attention to movies so I can write something intelligent about the preference flows.
Does anybody know what surplus transfer method they use? One reader is asking that question in the comments.
Tom Round remarks at F&V:
By the way, the Proportional Representation Society of Australia’s “PR Manual†caters for very small electorates by providing for the votes to be counted (and the quota to be calculated) to four decimal places. Otherwise too many “vote points†get lost via surpluses. So, if 80 members of the “Utopia Tennis Club†are electing 5 executive committee members, the quota will be 13.334 votes rather than 14 votes, thus leaving the runner-up with 13.330 votes, rather than 10, and reducing the risk of a tie.
Ties can be a big problem in STV elections with small electorates. They can make people question the legitimacy of the system in general and an election in particular.
In one election I hand-counted, two candidates were tied for elimination, and none of the fairer, conventional tie-breaking rules helped: looking at first choices, looking at the prior round’s total, etc. We had to flip a coin. While the order of candidates’ elimination would not have changed who won in the end, the failure of all tie-breaking conventions and having to resort to a coin raised a lot of ire. There were somewhere around 12 voters and two winners to elect.
So calculating the quota (or victory threshold) out to four decimal places seems like a good idea. In general with the single transferable vote, the more numerical precision, the “fairer” the result. But how does one manage fractional thresholds when counting by hand?
It’s doable (as are fractional transfers) but laborious. Apparently OpenSTV will do it for you when you tell it to use GPCA rules.
