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User:RobLa/Burlington2009: Difference between revisions
→Question #4: The 2010 Repeal: pasting in Robert's answer to Question #4, with one minor formatting change (using bullet points instead of paragraphs)
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'''Q: ([[User:RobLa]]) - With your math background and having read about Condorcet, you had a bit of head start on your fellow Burlington citizens when it comes to understanding the difference between a Condorcet winner and an IRV winner. When voters repealed IRV in 2010, do you feel like they were doing it because they understood that distinction, or was the 2010 repeal of IRV more of a referendum on Bob Kiss's performance in office?'''
A: (Robert) It is true that there was a lot of confusion and disillusionment regarding the 2009 IRV result. Like the three parties, there were at least three different positions regarding IRV.
* Progressives (the party of the reelected mayor) and "IRV Happy Talkers" denied that anything went wrong with the election parroting FairVote's position. A parody of their position: ''"Of course it was a huge success! No voting machines exploded or burst into flames. A majority of voters did not suffer from paper cuts."'' Their actual claims: ''"The Burlington election was a model of clean, open debate without 'spoiler' concerns..."'' and ''"Burlington's instant runoff voting (IRV) election went off without a hitch in 2009. If anything, it was even more successful (than in 2006). IRV clearly worked as intended to avoid the "spoiler" dynamic..."'' '''are technically and decidedly false'''. I knew that, I tried to be clear about it, but I was also opposed to the repeal question. I had hoped to reform ranked-choice voting rather than get rid of it.
* Republicans (and conservative Democrats) considered the GOP candidate, who had the plurality of first-choice votes, as the candidate who was robbed. But that is just rejecting the whole notion premising ranked-choice voting that the plurality winner is not always the candidate truly preferred by the majority of the electorate when there are more than two candidates. Republicans in Vermont found out in 2014 in the gubernatorial election when the Libertarian candidate for governor was most likely a spoiler and caused the GOP candidate to lose. https://vtdigger.org/2014/11/11/robert-bristow-johnson-ways/ Sometimes people get hoisted by their own petard.
* Democrats were divided on IRV. Many of us really expected the Democrat candidate to win because he has broad (although not as deep) support. He was overwelmingly the second choice of voters who voted for someone else as their first choice. His loss on March 3, 2009, was a bitter surprise.
Some IRV opponents gathered on the internet some false beliefs regarding what happened. They made a category error at first claiming that people were "disenfranchised" with IRV drawing from some complaints of the San Francisco and Oakland RCV elections. In those elections, there were more than a dozen candidates and only three levels of ranking. So you could mark your 1st, 2nd, and 3rd and none of your votes counted in the final round and you were not able to weigh in on the actual selection of the mayor. But Burlington 2009 had 5 candidates and 5 ranking levels. No one were denied an opportunity to weigh in on any of the candidates. Ballot access requirements are important. We don't want just any old schlub to get on the ballot but only those who demonstrate some prior base of support.
So, ironically, the choice we had in 2010, was between Dumb and Dumber, which is the same problem as with the two-party system. Dumb was IRV and Dumber was FPTP, and in 2010, Dumber won and Burlington Vermont lost its ranked-choice voting by about a 4% margin. I was a voice in the wilderness calling for a third way of looking at it, but the two sides were so polarized and so unwilling to separate themselves from their own talking points, that fewer voters understood, despite some newspaper analysis that did make clear that the Democrat candidate would have beaten either the GOP or the Prog in the IRV final round, had he been '''in''' the final round. Some responses to that point was simply "so what?". They didn't understand that this clearly spells out the spoiler scenario.
== References and footnotes ==
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