My numbers aren't THAT contrived, just because they are specific. When you imagine there being three viable parties, roughly how much of the vote do you imagine each one having? There's actually quite a bit of room where the effect I showed happens.
IRV chokes when there are two parties with roughly equal sizes, and one of the parties (G) 'feeds' heavily into another party (D), but not so much the other way around. In this easily imagined setup a small point swing decides whether G or D is knocked out first, and that causes either a cascade of votes into D, or all the votes fleeing both G and D because G cannot get enough votes from (D) to stay alive. The G people think their votes will feed harmlessly into D, but this can't happen if G knocks out D first, and in fact the G people are in for a rude shock: they just screwed themselves out of their second choice.
You say: In both cases, the candidate that the majority does not like will not take office.
This isn't really true because no one had a majority among the first choices. If you're just saying that the majority of LAST choices didn't win in my examples (meaning G), that's not saying much, and not always true in IRV, and how do you know what the last choices are in standard voting?
Sure, it looks ugly when someone wins without a majority of the vote, but I think my example of the 2% shift from G D R to D R G producing a 36-point swing from R to D shows that the final tally in IRV is bullshit anyway.
In your supposed counter-example, your 2% swing produces a 2% swing. I don't think you understand. I'm not complaining that it's possible for 2% to swing the election; I'm pointing out that in a standard vote it's easy to know what you need to do (assuming the public knows generally who is more popular and there is time to campaign), whereas IRV is LESS representative of your preferences because it tricks you into thinking it will represent them accurately.
People who voted G D R got their least favorite candidate because they ranked their favorite first; the problem isn't that R wins in a close count, the problem is that a glitch in IRV is chosing R over D, when the relative ranking of D and R didn't change in those 2% anyway.
Also consider this: if that 2% had changed from G D R to R G D (having some epiphany that R was the one true leader) then the vote looks like this:
31%: G, D, R ("We lost 2%? Pshaw!") 32%: D, R, G ("We've been united for clarity!") 2% : R, G, D ("We're with you, R!") 35%: R, D, G ("No! Get away get away!")
Now instead of D being eliminated and R winning as in the first example, G is eliminated and D wins.
If that 2% REALLY wanted R to win, they shouldn't have placed him first like that. What fools! Don't they realize that sometimes in IRV that putting someone as your first choice can make them lose?
The straight up vote system has the virtue that most people can understand that you don't back the loser, and the benefit of voting strategically is apparent to everyone and so very many people DO vote strategically. Casting a 3rd party vote in the current system is effectively saying "yes I know my guy can't win, but I actually don't have a preference between the other two."
(You can even argue that it helps third parties by giving them more leverage and power against a more mainstream party because the votes really are being taken away; in an IRV where G is only 11% of the vote and D knows that it can get almost all of G's second votes -- it pays no attention to G whatsoever.)
Try this thought on for size: IRV makes primaries obsolete
I seriously doubt it. The party that concentrates their efforts on one candidate has a huge campaigning advantage and is likely to win. Anyway it could easily still boil down to a 3-way race at some point between two R-ish people and a D, say, and you're back in wacky land.
The current voting system is like a car without any doors. Yes, it's a piece of crap car and you
If you've ever played a shooter like VIewpoint, the slowdown happens when there are suddenly tons of bullets on the screen all of which you have to dodge. The slowdown here is actually exciting and necessary. In a good classic game, slowdown is part of the gameplay, not just a result of having too many eye-candy polygons around..
The Matrix movies and games that follow them demonstrate that sometimes slowdown is actually what you want, even if you don't need it!
Aunt Tillie awakes to find her world ruled by the philosophy of the CLI!
She is jolted awake in pitch blackness, with the chattering of repeated words in gibberish, and some beeping. She is cold and scared and feels like she cannot do anything, and is too frightened to do so even if she tried. The words being spoken somehow remind her of her charts at hospital: concerning her intimately, but not for her. What is going on?! Suddenly she is ejected somewhere dark. She can't move her hands and feet, and everything is still.
"What's going on?" she asks. She is scared, but Aunt Tillie has always been a tough lady and she knows she can solve this problem.
"'WHAT' DOES NOT COMPUTE" a voice booms.
"I can't see anything."
"'I' DOES NOT COMPUTE"
Aunt Tillie mutters to herself but realizes she is dealing with someone incredibly literal and stupid, with whom she can only communicate in a very limited way. From the booming voice though she can tell the person is powerful and she might say the wrong thing and who knows what might happen then. If only she can learn the magic words!
"Show me where I am?"
"SHOW WHAT? YOU MEAN SHOW beep something squawk somehow?"
[ A few minutes of trial and error pass. Aunt Tillie manages to hit on something: ]
"Show here," she says, muttering "you bloody fool" to herself quietly.
The lights click on briefly. Aunt Tillie gasps in shock. Her hands and wrists are trapped in some kind of upright scooter. Worst of all she seems to be in a horribly complex and sterile place that reminds her of the nightmares she used to have of the New York Subway system after that one time she visited Eric in America. Strange, powerful looking machines lie around in shadowy places, and many chutes and passageways are around. Cryptic signs decorate every wall and surface and most of the machines, but there are so many of them, and they are all generally unreadable that she can make no sense of them at all.
Soon the lights shut off.
"Keep showing it!" she cries.
"'KEEP' DOES NOT COMPUTE"
Aunt Tillie spends the next several hours with magic words. She never learns how to keep the lights on, but she discovers that she can keep saying "show here" and most importantly by saying the right words can move herself around, although the upright scooter thing lurches terribly, and she finds that she has to describe everything in terms of the cryptic signs on the walls. Instead of just "turn left, stop, go forward..." she has to say "trav'l beep 'crptcwrd'". She has to say travel with a slight accent, which would infuriate her if she were not so pessimistic and weary already from getting the beep sound right.
She makes a chilling discovery when she discovers that right where she woke up is a sign that says "Aunt_Tillie", and that the booming voice sometimes implies that her "home" is right under that sign. Where is her cozy bed? Where is her teapot? Where is her wicker mail basket? "Even if I could find a teapot I coudln't use it" she says forlornly, "until I learn to talk to it right."
"'EVEN' DOES NOT COMPUTE"
She's mad that she has taken about four hours to learn what someone could have described to her in ten minutes. "If only I had a cheat sheet on how to use magic words, provided to me by some kindly person trying to prove how easy it is to live like this!" she thinks, "and while I'm at it I could really use some tea."
[ Days pass. She becomes more and more proficient at moving around, shackled to her scooter. Tillie learns how to make tea. Sadly she learns that the nearby sign marked "TEA" is not at all helpful until much later when she learns how to see invisible things. However she finds that if she says "MAKETEA" a faraway machine jolts to life. One time she went to find the machine. It sat huddled among hundreds of others, very few of which she recognized. It was a scary place and she quickly left, finding nothing helpful
it seems like entertainment requiring "investment" is falling from our culture
This is a common complaint but you are forgetting The Sims and Everquest which are hardly fire-it-up-and-gee-whiz sorts of games. Nor are they particularly unpopular.
Slashdot Mirror
My numbers aren't THAT contrived, just because they are specific. When you imagine there being three viable parties, roughly how much of the vote do you imagine each one having? There's actually quite a bit of room where the effect I showed happens.
IRV chokes when there are two parties with roughly equal sizes, and one of the parties (G) 'feeds' heavily into another party (D), but not so much the other way around. In this easily imagined setup a small point swing decides whether G or D is knocked out first, and that causes either a cascade of votes into D, or all the votes fleeing both G and D because G cannot get enough votes from (D) to stay alive. The G people think their votes will feed harmlessly into D, but this can't happen if G knocks out D first, and in fact the G people are in for a rude shock: they just screwed themselves out of their second choice.
You say: In both cases, the candidate that the majority does not like will not take office.
This isn't really true because no one had a majority among the first choices. If you're just saying that the majority of LAST choices didn't win in my examples (meaning G), that's not saying much, and not always true in IRV, and how do you know what the last choices are in standard voting?
Sure, it looks ugly when someone wins without a majority of the vote, but I think my example of the 2% shift from G D R to D R G producing a 36-point swing from R to D shows that the final tally in IRV is bullshit anyway.
In your supposed counter-example, your 2% swing produces a 2% swing. I don't think you understand. I'm not complaining that it's possible for 2% to swing the election; I'm pointing out that in a standard vote it's easy to know what you need to do (assuming the public knows generally who is more popular and there is time to campaign), whereas IRV is LESS representative of your preferences because it tricks you into thinking it will represent them accurately.
People who voted G D R got their least favorite candidate because they ranked their favorite first; the problem isn't that R wins in a close count, the problem is that a glitch in IRV is chosing R over D, when the relative ranking of D and R didn't change in those 2% anyway.
Also consider this: if that 2% had changed from G D R to R G D (having some epiphany that R was the one true leader) then the vote looks like this:
31%: G, D, R ("We lost 2%? Pshaw!")
32%: D, R, G ("We've been united for clarity!")
2% : R, G, D ("We're with you, R!")
35%: R, D, G ("No! Get away get away!")
Now instead of D being eliminated and R winning as in the first example, G is eliminated and D wins.
If that 2% REALLY wanted R to win, they shouldn't have placed him first like that. What fools! Don't they realize that sometimes in IRV that putting someone as your first choice can make them lose?
The straight up vote system has the virtue that most people can understand that you don't back the loser, and the benefit of voting strategically is apparent to everyone and so very many people DO vote strategically. Casting a 3rd party vote in the current system is effectively saying "yes I know my guy can't win, but I actually don't have a preference between the other two."
(You can even argue that it helps third parties by giving them more leverage and power against a more mainstream party because the votes really are being taken away; in an IRV where G is only 11% of the vote and D knows that it can get almost all of G's second votes -- it pays no attention to G whatsoever.)
Try this thought on for size: IRV makes primaries obsolete
I seriously doubt it. The party that concentrates their efforts on one candidate has a huge campaigning advantage and is likely to win. Anyway it could easily still boil down to a 3-way race at some point between two R-ish people and a D, say, and you're back in wacky land.
The current voting system is like a car without any doors. Yes, it's a piece of crap car and you
If you've ever played a shooter like VIewpoint, the slowdown happens when there are suddenly tons of bullets on the screen all of which you have to dodge. The slowdown here is actually exciting and necessary. In a good classic game, slowdown is part of the gameplay, not just a result of having too many eye-candy polygons around.. The Matrix movies and games that follow them demonstrate that sometimes slowdown is actually what you want, even if you don't need it!
Aunt Tillie awakes to find her world ruled by the philosophy of the CLI!
She is jolted awake in pitch blackness, with the chattering of repeated words in gibberish, and some beeping. She is cold and scared and feels like she cannot do anything, and is too frightened to do so even if she tried. The words being spoken somehow remind her of her charts at hospital: concerning her intimately, but not for her. What is going on?! Suddenly she is ejected somewhere dark. She can't move her hands and feet, and everything is still.
"What's going on?" she asks. She is scared, but Aunt Tillie has always been a tough lady and she knows she can solve this problem.
"'WHAT' DOES NOT COMPUTE" a voice booms.
"I can't see anything."
"'I' DOES NOT COMPUTE"
Aunt Tillie mutters to herself but realizes she is dealing with someone incredibly literal and stupid, with whom she can only communicate in a very limited way. From the booming voice though she can tell the person is powerful and she might say the wrong thing and who knows what might happen then. If only she can learn the magic words!
"Show me where I am?"
"SHOW WHAT? YOU MEAN SHOW beep something squawk somehow?"
[ A few minutes of trial and error pass. Aunt Tillie manages to hit on something: ]
"Show here," she says, muttering "you bloody fool" to herself quietly.
The lights click on briefly. Aunt Tillie gasps in shock. Her hands and wrists are trapped in some kind of upright scooter. Worst of all she seems to be in a horribly complex and sterile place that reminds her of the nightmares she used to have of the New York Subway system after that one time she visited Eric in America. Strange, powerful looking machines lie around in shadowy places, and many chutes and passageways are around. Cryptic signs decorate every wall and surface and most of the machines, but there are so many of them, and they are all generally unreadable that she can make no sense of them at all.
Soon the lights shut off.
"Keep showing it!" she cries.
"'KEEP' DOES NOT COMPUTE"
Aunt Tillie spends the next several hours with magic words. She never learns how to keep the lights on, but she discovers that she can keep saying "show here" and most importantly by saying the right words can move herself around, although the upright scooter thing lurches terribly, and she finds that she has to describe everything in terms of the cryptic signs on the walls. Instead of just "turn left, stop, go forward..." she has to say "trav'l beep 'crptcwrd'". She has to say travel with a slight accent, which would infuriate her if she were not so pessimistic and weary already from getting the beep sound right.
She makes a chilling discovery when she discovers that right where she woke up is a sign that says "Aunt_Tillie", and that the booming voice sometimes implies that her "home" is right under that sign. Where is her cozy bed? Where is her teapot? Where is her wicker mail basket? "Even if I could find a teapot I coudln't use it" she says forlornly, "until I learn to talk to it right."
"'EVEN' DOES NOT COMPUTE"
She's mad that she has taken about four hours to learn what someone could have described to her in ten minutes. "If only I had a cheat sheet on how to use magic words, provided to me by some kindly person trying to prove how easy it is to live like this!" she thinks, "and while I'm at it I could really use some tea."
[ Days pass. She becomes more and more proficient at moving around, shackled to her scooter. Tillie learns how to make tea. Sadly she learns that the nearby sign marked "TEA" is not at all helpful until much later when she learns how to see invisible things. However she finds that if she says "MAKETEA" a faraway machine jolts to life. One time she went to find the machine. It sat huddled among hundreds of others, very few of which she recognized. It was a scary place and she quickly left, finding nothing helpful
it seems like entertainment requiring "investment" is falling from our culture This is a common complaint but you are forgetting The Sims and Everquest which are hardly fire-it-up-and-gee-whiz sorts of games. Nor are they particularly unpopular.