IRV failing to capture voter preferences is not a "corner case". It is absolutely unclear that IRV is better at all than FPTP. See a set of voting simulations with candidates and distributions here for different voting methods:
Alarmingly, IRV is the worst voting system of all just by eyeballing these simulations. The charts it produces are bizarre, and it tends to select for extremists and/or candidates that do not capture the voter's preferences!
The only good takeaway from IRV picking up steam is that maybe it puts us on the path towards something like approval voting, which is much harder to game, and is much easier for voters to understand (I doubt more than 1 out of 10 people could explain how IRV works).
As someone who voted in the 2009 election I disagree that IRV actually spoiled the election, people - when voting in an IRV system, need to comprehend that they don't need to rank all candidates and doing an exhaustive ranking is a tactical decision to vote against an ultimate candidate.
That "spoilage" ended up being less about IRV and more about the fact that Bob Kiss was someone a lot of people ranked without good knowledge of him was more at issue, along with his personal character. Don't forget that he wasn't some 5th place follower who managed to pick up protest votes, he was the 2nd place candidate in the primary round.
I just wanted to add, the fact that IRV was repealed over this removal from office was a travesty and the result of shady politics - please understand this is a terrible case study.
IRV picking up steam might also have negative effects towards people's general opinion of alternative voting systems once they see all the strange outcomes it can have.
But I think that the positives attention around it brings outweigh the negatives. The first (recent) overhaul to a voting system is more difficult than subsequent changes.
> VSE is expressed as a percentage. A voting method which could read voters minds and always pick the candidate that would lead to the highest average happiness would have a VSE of 100%. A method which picked a candidate completely at random would have a VSE of 0%. In theory, VSEs down to negative 100% would be possible if a voting method did worse than a random pick
If VSE is going to be a percentage, it should be a percentage of the maximum happiness -- that is, the total happiness if everyone got their first choice, not the total happiness that is the highest any candidate can actually achieve. I say this mostly because it's much easier to calculate.
But more fundamentally, there is no reason to expect the worst-case candidate to be equally as bad as the best-case candidate is good. It's a huge mistake to rank systems on a scale from +100% to -100% where the units on the positive and negative "halves" of the scale are different!
And it's also a mistake to define 0% as whatever sortition achieves. It's trivial to construct a pathological system in which 0% VSE is equal to 100% VSE. (Everyone is equally un/happy with all candidates.) This should be impossible.
You have 100 candidates. For 99 of those candidates, the entire electorate agrees that any one of these interchangeable guys would do a fine job. Nobody prefers any of them to any other.
The last candidate is Mao Zedong. Under his leadership, the country's industrial and agricultural bases will be systematically destroyed, anyone who owns a rental property will be executed, and tens of millions of people will starve to death for no reason.
The electorate agrees that Mao is an undesirable choice.
So: any method that can't pick Mao achieves a VSE of 100%.
Sortition, by definition, achieves a VSE of 0%. But it's still pretty good -- there's a 99% chance of selecting one of the good guys, and a 1% chance of epic, country-shattering disaster.
A method that is guaranteed to select Mao has a VSE of, I assume, -100%. But it is much, much worse than sortition (the notional midpoint, 0%), while the VSE of 100% is only moderately better than sortition.
That is very interesting and I hadn't seen it before. IRV still does better than plurality by quite a bit, although it doesn't do well compared to the rest. As the chart shows, one of the biggest outliers is 100% honest voting with plurality.
I hadn't heard of 3-2-1 voting before but that is interesting. Maybe it would be one of the best. I generally prefer ranking to scoring (I'm not sure how much better someone prefers a candidate should really be part of the process) but the simpler tallying and presentation of results is nice. I also like that in the "scenereo type" breakdown the easy case gets the best results, condorcet cycles get the worst results, and the rest are in the middle (all with little effect of strategy). It seems like the right distribution to me, but none of the other methods measured get that distribution. IMO a ranked preference is usually much easier to determine how to vote (although it can still be an issue when some candidates are much closer than others), although I guess the limited effect of strategic voting should hopefully mean that it usualy doesn't make much difference exactly how you vote. OTOH, at least the names of the options should be changed; it is the rare race where I could describe any of the candidates as anything other than "bad".
IMO, proportional representation would be a much better change of voting system rather than just changing the method. Voting for one person is almost always going to leave lots of people unrepresented.
Very often when there are more than two candidates, none of them have a majority of supporters. In fact, sometimes that's true even with two or even one candidate...
What election are you thinking of where majority of votes didn’t win?
Because if you say 2016 / electoral college, I’ll have to remind you that the winner had a fairly vast majority. If you are thinking Canada or some ranked system, iirc they still elect by majority.
“No majority no win” is a great recipe for tyranny of the majority and why we have representative democracies, isn’t it?
The winner of the 2016 election received the majority of the votes cast in the electoral college by Presidential electors
Those electors voting for the winner were themselves, however, elected by only a minority of those voting for Presidential electors in elections which misleading had the name of Presidential candidates but not electors on the ballots.
I wasn't arguing the facts of the system. I wasn't even stating a preference (though, yes, I'm upset at the outcome). I was responding to a thread where:
1. Person states preference that majority wins
2. Person states that majority did win
3. I demonstrate that majority did not win
4. Person #2 says majority won EC
5. I point out that it was plainly obvious that person #1 would prefer a majority of the popular vote win
Canada uses FPTP voting and it has highly skewed the last few elections, sadly there was an expectation that the last federal election would result in election reform but that never materialized.
http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/
Alarmingly, IRV is the worst voting system of all just by eyeballing these simulations. The charts it produces are bizarre, and it tends to select for extremists and/or candidates that do not capture the voter's preferences!
It's not just of theoretical interest either, IRV famously spoiled the 2009 Burlington mayoral election, resulting in its repeal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Burlington_mayoral_electi...
The only good takeaway from IRV picking up steam is that maybe it puts us on the path towards something like approval voting, which is much harder to game, and is much easier for voters to understand (I doubt more than 1 out of 10 people could explain how IRV works).