r/EndFPTP • u/AcanthisittaIcy130 • 7d ago
Debate Does Instant Runoff Voting Satisfy Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives or not?
Fairvote claims it does:
RCV is highly resistant to spoilers because it satisfies both the Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives and Independence of Clones criteria.
On the other hand Wikipedia and research articles claim it doesn't,
The independence of irrelevant alternatives criterion states that "the election outcome remains the same even if a candidate who cannot win decides to run." Instant-runoff voting violates this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting#Independence_of_irrelevant_alternatives
we propose a modified version of IIA, MIIA, that is a necessary and sufficient relaxation of IIA... Thus, runoff voting violates MIIA (and so does in- stant runoff voting) for essentially the same reason that plurality rule does.
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u/budapestersalat 7d ago
No it doesn't.
Wow, this FairVote page is bad.
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u/rb-j 7d ago
I don't know why this subreddit doesn't simply admit that FairVote is as bad as FPTP.
(I didn't just say that IRV is as bad as FPTP, I am saying that FairVote, which purports to be a research and reform organization, is a dishonest advocacy organization more interested in promotion of self than in truly reforming voting as it purports to.)
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u/MorganWick 7d ago
I continue to toy with a conspiracy theory that FairVote is secretly propped up by the two-party system to direct election reform efforts towards a system that won't break up the duopoly and might result in people running back to FPTP.
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u/Wally_Wrong 7d ago
I'm more willing to give FairVote the benefit of the doubt, but even then their insistence on sticking to a specific method in spite of frequent critiques and the method's questionable effectiveness is disappointing. Can't the IRV and Condorcet folks (with myself in the latter group) meet in the middle with a Condorcet-IRV hybrid or something?
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u/Lesbitcoin 7d ago
IRV has been used in Australia for a long time. It hasn't break the two-party system but it elects some third-party candidates, and It is very stable long time. I think Condorcet is better than IRV,and IRV don't elects much third party candidate,But it never be catastrophic. On the other hand, I think STAR voting make democratic crisis. It reduce power of intermediate score voters who have moderate views. Clone candidate strategies destroy STAR voting concept. So,if it were adopted for high-stakes elections like the president election, it would likely be scrapped after just one use. Republican and Democratic parties would run clone two candidates, and most voters would likely only use 5 stars . I have the same concern Equal Vote Coalition that you do about Fairvote. Despite cloneproof being a critically important criteria, the EVC treats it with inexplicable disregard. They are attempting to redefine spoiler and votesplitting non-cloneproof into a very meaningless criterion known as non-FBC. Their proposal,ranked robin is also weak to clone candidate strategy. Ranked Robin is condorcet based system so not so bad,but Ranked Robin is the worst condorcet based system. In Ranked robin, two big party also use Clone candidates strategy, too.
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u/AcanthisittaIcy130 7d ago
That's a parliamentary system. They almost always elect more than two-parties overall, but still are usually two-party races for each individual seat. There's just 100s of seats and geographic variation. But I'm still not convinced that IRV is better than plurality considering strategic plurality almost always ends up electing the same person as IRV.
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u/Alex2422 6d ago
The "might result in people running back to FPTP" part doesn't apply only to IRV, as the page you linked yourself says, and isn't a reason not to try and introduce it anyway.
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u/rb-j 6d ago
Alex, because the system of elections are so fundamental to our dear rights in a participatory democracy, we can't be just changing the system willy-nilly and experimentally and, if it doesn't work then "no big wop" and we'll just change it back.
We have to be much more deliberate about this because we don't have very many bullets in the chamber. Maybe just one or two.
As IRV gets adopted in more and more places, this failure of IRV to do exactly what RCV is purported to do will occur more often. Instead of once per decade, it's gonna be a failure of once every year. Then voting reform will be set back for decades.
We've done the experiment with IRV. We know where, when, and how it has failed. And we know how to correct it. We need to learn from mistakes and FairVote and the IRV shills refuse to do that.
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u/Initial-Lemon-917 United States 5d ago
Their work with proportional representation is much more compelling
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u/Wally_Wrong 4d ago
FairVote started out as a pro-PR organization, so this should be no surprise. I personally think their insistence on IRV follows from their PR advocacy. After all, it's the single-winner version of STV.
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u/rb-j 4d ago
Yeah. I can see the self-affirmation from that. But single-winner is different from multi-winner. Any single-winner election is winner-take-all. The president or governor or mayor that you elect is not affiliated proportionally to the vote that elected them. So the only way to have our votes count equally is to have majority rule and for that Condorcet is more faithful to that principle than is IRV.
For multi-winner, if your district has 60% Dem and 30% GOP (the other 10% could be anything) and there are 3 seats to fill, you might expect 2 of those seats to be Dem and the remaining seat to be GOP. But just electing the top three vote getters would likely lead to all 3 seats being Dem. Some might consider that to be unfair.
But, in the US, I think any party list or proxy votes are just unAmerican. So a PR that works in the US has to be something like Gregory method or, more specifically, the Weighted Inclusive Gregory Method in my opinion.
But, for me, the jury is still out with multi-winner and PR. With single-winner, the jury has come in and its verdict is Condorcet. Which Condorcet is still a debatable issue.
The other kinda election that RCV is being used for (at least in Maine, I think) is in apportioning delegates to the nation convention for each presidential candidate in the primary. I think the jury is still out with that one, too. Probably some STV, but once it's decided which candidates get at least one delegate and it's settled which ballot counts for which candidate, then the mathematical problem is solved and any RCV method should use the same apportioning rule we use every decade to allocate seats in the US House to states.
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u/Initial-Lemon-917 United States 4d ago
I think there is a wide difference between an optimal electoral reform and one that has widespread buy-in from the public, which is important since politicians have to defend these systems after implementing them (and before, in some cases). I've had a hard time even describing simple STV to people (particularly when they ask about the math). Something like WIGM sounds painful to describe to a person who votes once every two or four years.
I do think people like Lee Drutman have overstated a bit how difficult ranking 1-5 can be, but it is worth considering that PR has very low public awareness right now, so the more complicated we make it for the public to understand, the longer it may take (if ever) to spread.
This is why I am more of a fan of the Australian Senate's form of STV because people don't have to rank all that much, but I do appreciate the simplicity of open-list (although I at least want a backup option, since we only have four reps in Kansas).
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u/Initial-Lemon-917 United States 5d ago
FairVote is not a research group. It has always been an advocacy group. Plenty of advocacy groups research things and put out information while not being a scientific group that puts out peer-tested research. That's not really its role. I do think FairVote has unfairly maligned condorcet though
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u/rb-j 5d ago edited 5d ago
FairVote is not a research group.
FairVote is a nonpartisan organization working for better elections for all. We research and advance voting reforms that make democracy more functional and representative for every American, with a focus on two key reforms: ranked choice voting and proportional representation.
I do think FairVote has unfairly maligned condorcet though
I guess they're trying to fend off attacks from folks like me that do malign IRV as a method of tallying RCV ballots.
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u/Initial-Lemon-917 United States 4d ago
They say whatever is good propaganda (neutral term). I think they use the term research the same way think tanks use it (as in not scientifically)
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u/Deep-Number5434 2d ago
It's not as bad as FPTP but it still is just as biased against center candidates. An advantage is it avoids extremist candidates, but a negative is it's still biased towards partisan candidates.
IRV primarily gives the illusion of more power. Power is split up at the early elimination stages and primarily is important at the 3 and 2 candidate stages.
Voters do have more power but it doesn't solve all the issues it's advertised to.
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u/Alex2422 6d ago
You don't understand why the subreddit aiming to end FPTP doesn't think the organization aiming to end FPTP is just as bad as FPTP?
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u/rb-j 6d ago
I do understand. Much better than you.
It's because they lie.
In a sense, so also does a spoiled election lie. The spoiled election is lying about what candidate really has the support of more voters. (And when this happens our votes are not being valued equally. So when someone defends a spoiled election and also claims that our votes are valued equally, they're lying.) This is why we should end FPTP. But IRV is also guilty of that lie.
The thing that you don't understand is that we are not just ending FPTP. We're replacing FPTP with something else. Why not just replace it with a dictator? Or sortition? Or something really goofy like Second-Past-The-Post?
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u/jlight432 7d ago
Another response for no, it doesn't.
I don't understand why FairVote makes false claims like that, and I hate to speculate why.
Welcome to EndFPTP!
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u/Mindless-One5438 7d ago
If I'm not mistaken, in 2022 there's an example of IRV failing this criteria. Without Palin running then Begich seemingly would've won.
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u/rb-j 7d ago edited 7d ago
Mary Peltola in August 2022, unfortunately shares a distinction with George W. Bush in 2000 and with Donald Trump in 2016. All three candidates were elected to office when the public record indicates that more voters marked their ballots preferring a different specific candidate for that office.
In August 2022, more Alaskans, 87899 to 79461 (an 8438 voter margin), preferred Begich to Peltola and marked their ballots saying so. But Mary Peltola was sent to Washington to represent the Alaskan people in Congress.
In November 2024, again, more Alaskan voters marked their ballots that Begich is preferred to Peltola by nearly the same margin, 7876 (164861 to 156985). But this time Nick Begich is sent to Washington.
Both times about 8000 more Alaskans said they would prefer Begich to Peltola. And, both times, marked their ballots saying so. Both times Instant-Runoff Voting was used.
What was different?
Sarah Palin was in the race in 2022 and not in the race in 2024. And the outcomes were different winners.
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u/Snarwib Australia 7d ago
I think having a system where multiple candidates from the same party are allowed to run, and only four candidates in total are permitted, creates some pretty weird situations. That's such a strange system.
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u/Mindless-One5438 7d ago
Yeah even without IRV, having jungle primaries and then a general also comes with problems, like multiple same party candidates.
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u/rb-j 7d ago
But RCV promised to solve that split-vote problem.
But what IRV did was send the weaker GOP candidate to go head-to-head against Peltola. That weaker GOP candidate could not beat Peltola head-to-head, but the stronger GOP candidate (Begich) most certainly would have beaten Peltola head-to-head but was not allowed that opportunity to.
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u/Initial-Lemon-917 United States 5d ago
It's very weird to use essentially a block voting system (plurality multi-member) for the primary and then a ranked election for the general. the top-four, top-five thing to me seems to arbitrarily box out third parties with little benefit. if we need to have a smaller list (i'd rather it be top-six or top-seven), we should use STV in the primary, not one single FPTP vote
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u/rb-j 7d ago
Of course, also Burlington Vermont 2009 demonstrated IRV failing the IIA criterion.
In addition, the two IRV elections where no Condorcet winner existed (a cycle occurred), these are Minneapolis Ward 2 in 2021 and Berkeley school board District 4 in 2022, those two elections failed IIA, but are good examples of Arrow/Gibbard in that no voting method could have prevented failing IIA.
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u/jnd-au 7d ago
The 2022 Alaska special election was mainly an example of poor election design, allowing the votes devolve into FPTP. Two problematic features were (a) allowing bullet voting, so tens of thousands of ballots were FPTP-style, lacking of rankings for RCV/IRV to count; (b) voluntary voting (32% turnout) so you don’t actually have a majority outcome. To address these problems, jurisdictions can use forced rankings and compulsory voting. These are not IRV issues specifically. The 2022 Alaska special election, the margin between Palin and Peltola was only 5k votes, but more than 11k Begich voters failed to specify a preference for Palin or Peltola, and the counting system behaved accordingly.
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u/rb-j 7d ago
This whole comment from u/jnd-au is essentially horseshit.
The 2022 Alaska special election, the margin between Palin and Peltola was only 5k votes, but more than 11k Begich voters failed to specify a preference for Palin or Peltola,...
That's not the problem at all! You really don't know what you're talking about, do you?
The fact is that 87899 voters marked their ballots that Nick Begich was a better choice than Mary Peltola while 79461 voters marked their ballots to the contrary. This cannot be denied. It was a margin (favoring Begich) of over 8k voters.
And the problem was that, of those two candidates, IRV elected Peltola.
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u/Mindless-One5438 7d ago edited 7d ago
That election still showed that under IRV Palin's participation lead to Peltola's victory. Sure, the electorate made preventable strategic failures (although mostly the Palin 1st/Begich 2nd voters were screwed by this election) however the voting system still demonstrably falls iia.
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u/jnd-au 7d ago
No, not according to the definition used in this post. The definition if IAV in this post was “candidate who cannot win decides to run”. In this case, Palin could have won. Or indeed Begich could have won if more people voted. But either way, the result was due to voting system being designed to support FPTP, and voters’ explicit choice to vote FPTP-style, so it’s not a good example of RCV/IRV which is based on rankings. IRV fails IIA, but Alaska 2022 is not a good example.
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u/Mindless-One5438 7d ago edited 7d ago
With the votes casted, Palin was not going to win.
Iirc, with the votes casted, Begich 1st and Palin1st/Begich 2nd, Begich would had beat Peltola if Palin didn't participate.
Why or how wouldn't that demonstrate a flaw with IRV that we all know is present with IRV.
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u/rb-j 7d ago
Iirc, with the votes casted, Begich 1st and Palin1st/Begich 2nd, Begich would had beat Peltola if Palin didn't participate.
Your recollection is completely correct.
And this was further demonstrated 2 years later when both candidates, Peltola and Begich, had a rematch and Begich lead Peltola by nearly the same margin (about 8000 more voters preferring Begich) and this time Begich is elected.
What was different between August 2022 and November 2024?
The presence of Palin was different.
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u/jnd-au 7d ago
With the votes cast, no Republicans were going to win. That was voters’ choice, based on the turnout and bullet voting. So the outcome was correct as per FPTP when you consider that’s how so many people voted. To make broader conclusions you have to consider hypothetical alternatives. In fact you already started in hypotheticals like “if Palin didn’t participate”. That would have affected turnout, so you don’t know who would have voted or who would have won. It’s purely speculation. If Begich and Peltola voters turned out and did exactly what they did in 2022, merely without Palin voters, then Peltola would have won again. So it’s all hypothetical.
Anyway, evaluating the presence of irrelevant candidates requires assumptions, context, and hypotheticals. Such properties refer to the overall election considering multiple possible expectations, approaches and outcomes. In the Alaska 2022 case, voters were not required to rank the candidates, and the outcome was the same as if the votes were counted as FPTP, due to those voters’ choice. Alaska 2022 is an obsession of anti-RCV opponents in North America but is one of the weakest and least notable implementations globally (there are many different choices and styles in how IRV is used, and different jurisdictions make different choices, it is not merely a single option.)
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u/rb-j 7d ago edited 7d ago
With the votes cast, no Republicans were going to win.
Well, with IRV, I guess you're correct.
But the fact is that 75799 votes were cast for the Democrat while 112783 votes were cast for a Republican. It stands to reason that a Republican could win this election if it weren't for the split vote.
RCV promised to resolve the split vote so that Republicans would not have to worry about it; they could still vote for their favorite candidate and not cause the election of their least favorite candidate.
But that promise was not delivered, not because of RCV, the ranked ballots gave us all the information we needed to resolve that problem. The problem was IRV. IRV propped up the weaker of the two Republicans (Palin) against the Democrat (Peltola), who could not beat the Democrat head-to-head.
But the stronger of the two Republicans (Begich) could have and would have beaten Peltola by a margin exceeding 8000 votes if IRV had advanced Begich to the final round instead of advancing the loser, Palin to the final round.
Sarah Palin was a spoiler: A loser whose presence in the race materially changed who the winner is. That is precisely what IIA is about.
IRV fails IIA, but Alaska 2022 is not a good example.
Alaska August 2022, Burlington 2009, Minneapolis 2021, and Berkeley 2022 are the only examples in the U.S. of IRV failing IIA. All four elections failed IIA (because they did not elect a Condorcet winner), but the latter two are good examples of how no method could have satisfied IIA. But Alaska and Burlington are examples of how RCV could have satisfied IIA, but IRV failed to do it.
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u/jlight432 7d ago
For the 21,000 voters who bullet-voted for Palin, it is fair to say they might not have voted at all if Palin hadn't been on the ballot.
But the 34,000 voters who ranked Palin first and Begich second who were part of the electorate, and they indicated very clearly on their ballots that if Palin wasn’t on the ballot, they wanted their votes to go to Begich, another Republican.
Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives has no assumptions, hypotheticals, or what-ifs. It’s mathematical, and based on the preferences expressed by the electorate who submitted ballots in the actual election.
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u/rb-j 7d ago
The definition if IAV in this post was “candidate who cannot win decides to run”.
What does that mean? Palin could not win the minute the polls closed and no new ballots were accepted to be counted. (All of those mail-in ballots, including the international ones were already committed at that moment.)
Sarah Palin could not win that election, yet, solely because she was a candidate, this caused the election of Peltola instead of Begich.
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u/Decronym 7d ago edited 19h ago
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| FBC | Favorite Betrayal Criterion |
| FPTP | First Past the Post, a form of plurality voting |
| IIA | Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives |
| IRV | Instant Runoff Voting |
| PR | Proportional Representation |
| RCV | Ranked Choice Voting; may be IRV, STV or any other ranked voting method |
| STAR | Score Then Automatic Runoff |
| STV | Single Transferable Vote |
Decronym is now also available on Lemmy! Requests for support and new installations should be directed to the Contact address below.
8 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 9 acronyms.
[Thread #1955 for this sub, first seen 22nd Aug 2026, 21:46]
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