Tuesday, 12 October 2004

IRV in SFO

Today’s WaPo has an interesting article on the use of instant-runoff voting in San Francisco (þ: PoliBlog). While IRV isn’t exactly perfect, I think it’s better by a mile than plurality voting in multicandidate elections, leaving aside the argument over whether we should have multicandidate elections—which is in essence a debate over whether or not the meaningful policy space is unidimensional.

# By Chris Lawrence @ 12:43 pm CDT [Permalink] « (0)
Manual TrackBack URL for this entry: https://blog.lordsutch.com/tb.cgi/2041
Tags: Political Science, Politics
 

3 comments:

Any views expressed in these comments are solely those of their authors; they do not reflect the views of the authors of Signifying Nothing, unless attributed to one of us.
[Permalink] 1. Robert Prather wrote @ Tue, 12 Oct 2004, 2:49 pm CDT:

Chris,

I take it you would prefer Condorcet voting? Based on my limited knowledge, it does seem like the better alternative (the winner has to win a head-to-head race against every candidate) but given the difficulty of the behind-the-scenes calculations, with a matrix and all, it seems unlikely to get adopted. I can see people’s eyes glazing over just at the prospect.

 
[Permalink] 2. Chris Lawrence wrote @ Tue, 12 Oct 2004, 3:30 pm CDT:

Condorcet seems to work fairly well for us in the Debian project (and we have software that does all the calculations fairly easily), but even IRV would be a massive improvement, even though it has some non-ideal corner cases.

 
[Permalink] 3. fling93 wrote @ Sat, 23 Oct 2004, 3:06 pm CDT:

I think there’s a much easier way to explain Condorcet than the usual Poli-Sci matrices. Just say: round-robin tournament. I think people will get that.

But I think IRV is a good way to introduce ranked ballots, and as Chris says, a huge improvement over plurality.

 
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Signifying Nothing formerly featured the stylings of Brock Sides, a left-leaning philosopher turned network administrator currently residing in Memphis, Tennessee who now blogs at Battlepanda, and Robert Prather, a libertarian-leaning conservative economist and occasional contributor at OTB.

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