An Analysis of Various Election Methods

An anonymous reader writes "David Cobb talked about Instant Runoff Voting (IRV) as the best choice in electoral methods in his interview here, but is it really? The folks over at electionmethods.org seem to think it isn't. They favor Condorcet voting, which is another ranking style method using simulated one on one elections. Here is an evaluation of various methods, including IRV and Condorcet."

Comments

Election of 2000

[dolphin558]

The election of 2000 proved every system wrong.

Re:Must explain in one sentence or less

[Zeinfeld]

Here: "Rank the candidates by preference, where one is most preferred and X is least preferred." That's how all priority voting schemes work for the voter and all that needs to be explained to them, this is just a way of counting the votes.

Like chess the rules can be explained very quickly. The consequences of those rules cannot be predicted however. Even the folk on Crooked Timber could not work out the implications of Condorcet.

The advantage of STV is that voters know that they do not hurt their prefered candidates chances by voting for a lesser preference. Under STV with the current Republican leadership I would probably vote Democrat, Libertarian, Green. Under Condorcet I would only vote Democrat.

The reason third parties like Condorcet is that they have the idea that they will get the second place votes from the major parties. This only works when the third parties are at the center of the two major parties. With the Religious Reich and free market ultra-ideologues in control of the GOP this is currently the case. They have managed to leapfrog over the Libertarian party into the world of total la-la land.

But after Bush and cronies get sent packing back to Texas the GOP will try to get back to the center. At that point it is quite likely that I would much prefer the Republican to the loonies that the third parties tend to dredge up.