User:Lucasvb/Is Instant-Runoff Voting the right voting system for you?: Difference between revisions
User:Lucasvb/Is Instant-Runoff Voting the right voting system for you? (view source)
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=== I want to... Allow voters to always support other candidates safely ===
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In Instant-Runoff Voting, you will never help other candidates unless your first choice gets eliminated. This means you can be sure that your current top choice will always get your full support on every elimination round, and therefore, you are free to rank the candidates in order of preference as they are eliminated.
However, this property also means you cannot ''always'' safely support your favorite first. There is a fundamental trade-off between "you can always support your favorite" and "you can always support candidates other than your favorite". The only voting systems that have both properties are exceptionally complicated, and not very good to begin with.
So you must choose whether always supporting your favorite is more important than always supporting other candidates.
=== I want to... Break free of polarization and partisanship by electing more consensus candidates ===
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Since the votes third parties receive must be transferred and this transfer is important to the results, this means third parties get more attention and participation in the media.
However, in places that have used IRV for a long time like in Australia, you still have political analysis and election results being presented as [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-party-preferred_vote two-party preferred vote], which effectively ignores much of the information in the ballots and gives third-parties much less exposure. So in practice, it seems that IRV promotes a political bipolarization narrative in the media.
=== I want to... Allow third parties to be taken more seriously by the mainstream parties ===
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IRV favors polarization, as vote splitting still occurs. Whenever voters must take sides and the largest groups wins, the sides will have to maximally compete with one another even if they significantly agree. Overall, the result of this is that petty differences are highlighted much more than important issues and policy.
If a voting system is not designed to work within this "taking sides" paradigm, there is no such problem.
=== I want to... Have a more cooperative non-partisan political culture ===
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IRV doubles down and amplifies the factionalism that we all hate
=== I want to... Have pre-election polls which reflect the honest opinion of voters ===
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Under IRV, candidates beyond your current top choice receive '''no support''' from you. Most ballot information doesn't even get considered in statistics due to this.
IRV is designed so that voters are ''always'' giving 100% of support to one candidate, and 0% to everyone else. Having multiple elimination steps doesn't change this.
=== I want to... Have election results which reflect the honest opinions of the population ===
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Since only first preferences are important at any given elimination step, upcoming and rising parties may never be seen as such in the results. For example, let's suppose a small third party gets people excited and manages to secure 20% of the first-preference votes on the first step of elimination, compared to 30-40% of other mainstream candidates.
That upcoming candidate will be eliminated, and that will be the end of it. All the results will report the "20%" and nothing more.
But what if that candidate was the ''second'' preference of 80%-90% of the voters, reaching across the isle and gathering genuine bipartisan support? That information would never have been even '''talked''' about or seen by anyone, because preferences past the top choice are never looked upon without elimination of the top choice. Everyone who supported mainstream candidates only showed support for them and nobody else.
Wouldn't you agree that this would severely misrepresent the genuine opinion of the population about that upcoming party?
=== I want to... Have election results which represents everyone, not just a group of voters ===
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