I think the strongest argument is this:

Nearly all IRV-advocates and voters using IRV wrongly believe that it somehow is tabulated optimally and has no spoilers. If everyone transparently understood the IRV spoiler scenarios, they would not react particularly strongly to the cases where it arises. However, IRV is almost always oversold with claims that are false. People believe that winners always have majority support or that spoilers can't happen. Thus, IRV sets up a situation to risk losing the public's trust.

A system that violates people's basic intuitions is a system people will be suspicious of.

Because IRV spoilers are both hard to explain, hard to look at the ballots and understand, and violate people's intuitions, it is a set-up for the destruction of trust in elections and in voting reform as a movement in general.

This is far worse than the effect of the spoiler itself.

The most important feature of a voting system is that it is easy for people to understand the results and trust that the system is working and thus feel trusting of the democratic process overall.

@cfrank yeah, after posting I went further into the electowiki link etc

But I think my key view isn't just the decency of the method but the marketing as "IRV tweak". I imagine so much more success talking to RCV advocates and saying, "hey, there's a tweak that really improves RCV, it's just doing a bottom-two runoff when eliminating candidates…" and it sounds so much more "yes and" than other ways of bringing up issues with methods in practice…

I heard a critique of STAR-PR that seems fair, and I want to see what the thoughts are on it.

Essentially, given:

• there are enough centrist, lesser-evil sorts of effective-clone candidates to fill all the seats
• the preferences for other candidates are all spread somewhat equally among voting groups who number as many as there are seats

Then with everyone giving middling scores or low scores to the centrist lesser-evil candidates, can win all the seats instead of getting anything proportional.

Example votes for two-seat election:

• 10 votes: A5 C3 C3 D1 (two interchangeable C candidates)
• 10 votes: B5 C3 C3 D1

So, this is okay centrists Cs (times two candidates), split electorate in liking A or B (and opposing the other), and D thrown in to show that this could be realistic if D were a lesser-evil worse than C for everyone.

Proportional would be electing A and B. STAR-PR would elect both Cs.

Another example proof, 6 seat election:

• 100: A5 Gs1
• 100: B5 Gs1
• 100: C5 Gs1
• 100: D5 Gs1
• 100: E5 Gs1
• 100: F5 Gs1

This is contrived and uses 6 seats because there are only 5 stars, so it takes splitting into 6 blocks in order to keep the 5's from adding up to less than the combined 1-star scores. Still, this stays even with some tweaks (doesn't need all tie-scores) as long as the blocks are split enough to still have G get highest scores. Given 6 effective clones for G-candidates, STAR-PR elects all Gs, and that is clearly not proportional.

What are the responses to this? Is this just a weird edge case? At the least, does this demand some qualification in how STAR-PR is described?

Yeah. Everyone, including Fairvote, emphasizes that electoral systems change campaign behavior and voting behavior. There is no realistic scenario in which you change voting systems and all other behavior in the system stays. Discussing that artificial situation is only useful as a conceptual exercise in comparing some particular point in the math or something, not as an assertion about counterfactual situations.

There's no possibility that single-choice plurality voting in Burlington 2009 would have this 3-way race as it was. All the media and voters and everyone (candidates included) would have come to some pre-election idea of Montroll or Kiss as the primary non-Republican and the other as dangerous spoiler. They would have had that argument. And the result would be likely Montroll winning but maybe Kiss or even the Republican and then all the spoiler-blame fall-out. There's NO chance it would have avoided all those well-known dynamics.

@toby-pereira

At what value of x are AB and CC equally good?

Yes, but another question is: at what value of x can we be comfortable calling CC "proportional"? Anything less than x=1?

I think any method that elects CC for any x over 0.5 is doing PR wrong

Do you mean under 0.5?

Anyway, I do think again there's two issues: what is fair to call "proportional" and what method is good for representation, and those do not need to have the same answer.

I wish this investigation had included BTR-RCV

(side-note: don't call it BTR-IRV, that includes "runoff" twice and is less-clear as a name)

Over years, I've continually said that misrepresenting IRV is worse than IRV itself. I don't support IRV, but I can tolerate it if advocates somehow promote it without false statements. However, a system that is almost impossible to clearly discuss with lay people without false statements is a problem of the system itself.

On that same page where Fairvote talks about Condorcet and such:

It may be disputed whether it would have been better for Montroll to win the election despite attracting so little core support. However, it is certain that Montroll would have also lost under a two-round runoff election or a single-choice plurality election.

This is plainly wrong. Under a plurality election, we know with certainty that voters will be strategic, and that is why Montroll would have won. Their wording is missing the key point, and can be true only with this change:

it is certain that Montroll would have also lost under a two-round runoff election or a single-choice plurality election — if the voters were all completely honest, which we know plurality voting not to be.

Fairvote in this argument is trying to assert that IRV cannot be worse than single-choice plurality. They assert that by selectively ignoring the entire issue of strategic voting, even though they focus elsewhere on strategic voting. Fairvote is a model for motivated reasoning over fair reasoning.

@toby-pereira Indeed, the source of the issue is going by total score. I emphasize Allocated Score (STAR-PR) because I'm concerned about proposals that people are really promoting rather than just any sort of potential system with this issue.

@jack-waugh if you are describing RR from FV, I once had an argument about the bullet-vote claim and score voting, and it devolved to be obvious that some people have no interest in even softening their confidence about something in light of being questioned. I don't use Twitter/X at all anymore. I think best to bring up BTR in whatever random conversations when RCV comes up. More people will bring it up when more people know it is a thing etc.

I'm a maybe but I don't have a direct conflict that evening, there's no clearly better time for me.

@kodos IRV my write-up on the website? I don't know what write-up or website you mean, I don't think I did a write-up. I shared a link to someone else's write-up though.

I would think that like with IRV in general, when a candidate is eliminated, the ballots that had that candidate first move to the next choice among the remaining candidates if the ballots marked any of them.

The simpler or not-simpler thing you mentioned makes no sense to me. No round is different from any other. Anything that uses different first round or something is less simple.

Think of it like paper ballots. You just put a ballot in the pile of whatever candidate is highest on that ballot among the remaining candidates. When you check for bottom-two, it just means the two smallest piles.

@brian-lackey I think the main point is to use this to prompt IRV advocates to look at this issue, yes. I do not have plans to spend lots of time making this happen myself though

@cfrank concerted efforts for language change absolutely works. There are lots of examples. Even in this space, "instant runoff" got rebranded "ranked-choice" in practice.

"Support Voting" is too broad, almost every voting system fits that description.

"Choose One" and "Choose Any" are so dramatically superior and clear as names, they will catch on faster than other rebranding if we just do it. "Approval Voting" is not something the general public even knows as a term really, only people in voting-reform circles still.

"Approval" is a misnomer and confusing. It does NOT ask voters whether they approve or disapprove. Voters can approve all or none and still mark some as preferred over others.

What's clearly going on is "choose any" instead of "choose one" (also, please encourage everyone to stop saying FPTP and Plurality voting, those are horrible, confusing, inaccurate names). Choose-One Voting versus Choose-Any Voting is obviously the better clearer way to describe these things.

Choose-Any Voting has ZERO information about approval, and implying wrongly that it does has all sorts of ramifications including confusing people about how to think about it.

As a transition, we could say "Choose-Any (aka Approval)" until people eventually catch on and get used to the better name.

I wish this investigation had included BTR-RCV

(side-note: don't call it BTR-IRV, that includes "runoff" twice and is less-clear as a name)

@jack-waugh if you are describing RR from FV, I once had an argument about the bullet-vote claim and score voting, and it devolved to be obvious that some people have no interest in even softening their confidence about something in light of being questioned. I don't use Twitter/X at all anymore. I think best to bring up BTR in whatever random conversations when RCV comes up. More people will bring it up when more people know it is a thing etc.

@gregw for some reason, I can't click the link to see that other post you are referencing, but I was able to look into BTR-score mentioned in various places. I agree it is fine, but it is much bigger step (less of just a tweak) to go from people assuming RCV/IRV is all there is. Given a world of naive people just thinking IRV is the only alternative, the smallest tweak from there is easier to promote. With BTR-IRV, the ballot style can stay the same.

I'm not saying BTR-IRV is ideal, I'm saying it's more practical in the context of political reality.

@cfrank yeah, after posting I went further into the electowiki link etc

But I think my key view isn't just the decency of the method but the marketing as "IRV tweak". I imagine so much more success talking to RCV advocates and saying, "hey, there's a tweak that really improves RCV, it's just doing a bottom-two runoff when eliminating candidates…" and it sounds so much more "yes and" than other ways of bringing up issues with methods in practice…

A tweak to IRV to make it a Condorcet method

I actually think this feels better than any other ranked voting method I've seen.

All the other Condorcet methods seem to me to be further from IRV, which means practically that it's harder to convince RCV advocates to be open to them.

This is such a simple, clever tweak, it's easy to bring it up to RCV advocates, and it really is just a little tweak, and expressing why it matters clears up all the confusion about what's wrong with IRV to start with…

Any issues? Is there any reason to prefer Ranked Pairs or Ranked Robin or other Condorcet methods over this IRV-tweak?

Does this IRV-tweak meet the equality criterion (being able to cancel someone else's vote)? I think maybe, I just haven't confidently figured that out.

This looks to me like it might be the most practical option of any in terms of actually getting implemented in public elections because it does better than anything else at being just improved-RCV and potentially satisfying the vast majority of RCV advocates and less argument and contention than any other option…

@toby-pereira that doesn't change my point. Blocking someone's election just because they are nobody's favorite is not a goal I support at all. Being the top favorite of anyone is not the point in itself. A candidate that is nobody's favorite and that everyone really still highly approves of is likely a good candidate to elect as long as any quota-sized blocks of voters get their favorites.