IRV is an extremely funky voting system, but almost anything is better than Plurality. I very much enjoyed Ka-Ping Yee’s voting simulation visualizations, and would recommend the short read for anyone interested.
I have actually made my own simulation visualization, though I’ve spent no effort annotating it and the graphic isn’t remotely intuitive. It models a single political axis (eg. ‘extreme left’ to ‘extreme right’) with N candidates and 2 voting populations. The north-east axis of the graph determines the centre of one voting population, and the south-east axis determines the centre of the other (thus the west-to-east axis is when the voting populations agree). The populations have variances and sizes determined by the sliders. The interesting thing this has taught me is that IRV/Hare voting is like an otherwise sane voting system but with additional practically-unpredictable chaos mixed in, which is infinitely better than the systemic biases inherent to plurality or Borda votes. In fact, if you see advantages in sortition, this might be a bonus.
I like Ping’s simulations a lot! The two main problems with it are that by representing voter preferences as a plane there will always be a condorcet winner (when a lot of the weirdness and voting systems comes down to how they handle the cases when there isn’t one) and that assumes voters always vote their true preferences (when a lot of the weirdness in voting systems comes from strategic voting).
IRV is an extremely funky voting system, but almost anything is better than Plurality. I very much enjoyed Ka-Ping Yee’s voting simulation visualizations, and would recommend the short read for anyone interested.
I have actually made my own simulation visualization, though I’ve spent no effort annotating it and the graphic isn’t remotely intuitive. It models a single political axis (eg. ‘extreme left’ to ‘extreme right’) with N candidates and 2 voting populations. The north-east axis of the graph determines the centre of one voting population, and the south-east axis determines the centre of the other (thus the west-to-east axis is when the voting populations agree). The populations have variances and sizes determined by the sliders. The interesting thing this has taught me is that IRV/Hare voting is like an otherwise sane voting system but with additional practically-unpredictable chaos mixed in, which is infinitely better than the systemic biases inherent to plurality or Borda votes. In fact, if you see advantages in sortition, this might be a bonus.
I like Ping’s simulations a lot! The two main problems with it are that by representing voter preferences as a plane there will always be a condorcet winner (when a lot of the weirdness and voting systems comes down to how they handle the cases when there isn’t one) and that assumes voters always vote their true preferences (when a lot of the weirdness in voting systems comes from strategic voting).