Thanks for this interesting post! I particularly like your point that instant-runoff voting “has a track record in competitive elections and is much more in line with conventional notions of “majority””. Paraphrasing, the point is of course not to debate whether or not IRV produces a theoretically valid notion of majority; rather, it is about the psychological perception of the voting process and of the perceived legitimacy of the winner. I think these psychological aspects are very important, and are essentially impossible to capture by any theory.
Relatedly, I found this paragraph in Wikipedia’s article on approval voting, which I find worrisome: “Approval voting was used for Dartmouth Alumni Association elections for seats on the College Board of Trustees, but after some controversy, it was replaced with traditional runoff elections by an alumni vote of 82% to 18% in 2009.” My understanding is that voters in approval voting most often choose to support only one candidate, despite being given a much broader range of options; this, in elections with more than 2-3 possible candidates, often leads to a winner who collected only a small fraction of the votes, and who is then perceived as lacking legitimacy.
I have not studied the question in detail, but as of know my guess would be that instant-runoff voting should be preferred over approval voting.
(From Dartmouth math professor Robert Z. Norman) In 2007 there was a per voter average of voting for 1.81 [of the four] candidates. Hence the proportion of bullet votes had to be fairly small (or else nearly everyone voted for one or all three candidates, but not two, which would seem crazy).
Specifically, if all ballots approved either 1 or 2 candidates, there must have been 19% approve-1 and 81% approve-2 ballots. Norman in later email later hypothesized that actually there may have been a strategy of “either voting for the petition candidate or voting for all [3 opposing] nominated candidates.” If that was the only thing going on then 60% of the votes would have been approve-1 and the remaining 40.5% approve-3s, but in this case approval voting was clearly showing its immense value by preventing an enormous “vote-split” among the 3. In any case the fraction of “approve≥2” ballots presumably had to be somewhere between 40.5% and 81%.
Thanks for this interesting post! I particularly like your point that instant-runoff voting “has a track record in competitive elections and is much more in line with conventional notions of “majority””. Paraphrasing, the point is of course not to debate whether or not IRV produces a theoretically valid notion of majority; rather, it is about the psychological perception of the voting process and of the perceived legitimacy of the winner. I think these psychological aspects are very important, and are essentially impossible to capture by any theory.
Relatedly, I found this paragraph in Wikipedia’s article on approval voting, which I find worrisome: “Approval voting was used for Dartmouth Alumni Association elections for seats on the College Board of Trustees, but after some controversy, it was replaced with traditional runoff elections by an alumni vote of 82% to 18% in 2009.” My understanding is that voters in approval voting most often choose to support only one candidate, despite being given a much broader range of options; this, in elections with more than 2-3 possible candidates, often leads to a winner who collected only a small fraction of the votes, and who is then perceived as lacking legitimacy.
I have not studied the question in detail, but as of know my guess would be that instant-runoff voting should be preferred over approval voting.
(From Dartmouth math professor Robert Z. Norman) In 2007 there was a per voter average of voting for 1.81 [of the four] candidates. Hence the proportion of bullet votes had to be fairly small (or else nearly everyone voted for one or all three candidates, but not two, which would seem crazy).
https://www.rangevoting.org/DartmouthBack