Alternative Voting, also known as instant runoff voting, produces results very similar to first past the post, while introducing massive headaches. You want range voting or approval voting instead.
There are three IRV countries: Ireland (mandated in their 1937 constitution), Australia (adopted STV in the early 1900s, but in 1949 added “reweighting” to STV in their multi-winner elections, a change which does not matter for us since we are only considering single-winner elections—Australia and Ireland have both kinds of elections), and Malta. (Later note: a recent addition is Fiji, but it unfortunately then got subtracted due to a 2006 coup.)
All three became 2-party dominated in their IRV seats. And this is despite the fact that in addition to IRV single-winner elections, they all also have multi-winner STV “proportional representation” (PR) elections, and they are parliamentary rather than presidential. Both of these two factors mitigate toward having more than 2 parties (the parliamentary countries with PR essentially all have many more than 2 vibrant political parties). But despite those multiparty-genic factors, the effect of IRV in these countries has been enough to drag them back down to 2-party domination status! So given that, you can bet your bottom dollar that the USA, were it to adopt IRV but still to remain presidential and without multiwinner PR elections (i.e. wholy with single-winner elections), will definitely stay 2-party dominated.
I strongly urge anyone who cares about voting systems to poke around this site for a while, it’s very well-written.
Also, it is extraordinarily impolite to post a comment containing a link, then, after a reply has been posted, edit the link to point somewhere different. I don’t currently have enough karma to downvote, but if I did I would definitely downvote such a flagrant breach of basic etiquette.
Yes, so in a highly-artificial scenario, AV can produce a result no worse than the same result under FPTP. Both range voting and approval voting can lead to the single least-popular candidate getting in. See http://archive.fairvote.org/?page=1920
And more to the point, neither of those are on the ballot paper. AV is.
In the link you sent, the person who has evaluated Range voting has evaluated a system based on totaling and not averaging based range voting with a reasonable quorum as it is described in rangevoting.org.
There are a number of reasons that averaging is preferable to totaling especially in sceanrios with incomplete information.
Alternative Voting, also known as instant runoff voting, produces results very similar to first past the post, while introducing massive headaches. You want range voting or approval voting instead.
IRV leads to 2-party domination
I strongly urge anyone who cares about voting systems to poke around this site for a while, it’s very well-written.
Also, it is extraordinarily impolite to post a comment containing a link, then, after a reply has been posted, edit the link to point somewhere different. I don’t currently have enough karma to downvote, but if I did I would definitely downvote such a flagrant breach of basic etiquette.
For the record, PlaidX’s original link was to http://www.rangevoting.org/IRVcs.html . The link now points to http://www.rangevoting.org/TarrIrv.html . And the argument there is a specious one, in that the situation described only works if the “best” voters know how everyone else is going to vote. Which they don’t.
Sorry, I couldn’t see your reply when I did my edit. I should’ve reloaded.
Yes, so in a highly-artificial scenario, AV can produce a result no worse than the same result under FPTP. Both range voting and approval voting can lead to the single least-popular candidate getting in. See http://archive.fairvote.org/?page=1920
And more to the point, neither of those are on the ballot paper. AV is.
Hi Andrew,
In the link you sent, the person who has evaluated Range voting has evaluated a system based on totaling and not averaging based range voting with a reasonable quorum as it is described in rangevoting.org.
There are a number of reasons that averaging is preferable to totaling especially in sceanrios with incomplete information.