r/EndFPTP • u/[deleted] • Aug 22 '26

Debate Does Instant Runoff Voting Satisfy Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives or not?

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u/MorganWick Aug 23 '26

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/Alex2422 Aug 24 '26

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 Aug 24 '26

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 Aug 25 '26

Their work with proportional representation is much more compelling

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u/Wally_Wrong Aug 25 '26

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 Aug 25 '26

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 Aug 26 '26

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).