# Instant runoff voting worked out fine in San Francisco **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [November 3, 2004, 4:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/instant-runoff-voting-worked-out-fine-in-san-francisco/272781 "2004-11-03T16:13:58Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![erislover](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/71e660/32.png) [@erislover](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/erislover)\ **Post date:** [November 4, 2004, 4:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/instant-runoff-voting-worked-out-fine-in-san-francisco/272781/21 "2004-11-04T04:09:38Z")
Well, I recall the thread, I posted with it to agree with you that multi-party systems, and I quote myself, “focus on the marketplace of ideas as the expression of freedom” and are what democracies should go for. I also say, “Ideas as such need a mechanism for competition, and that competition needs to be a forum for transparency.” I still think this is true, and I don’t want my post there to be taken otherwise… but transparency means a lot of things. You want votes to _mean_ something, so that you can get a good idea of where people stand by checking the vote tally, but at the same time you want people to _know what they’re getting_ out of someone winning, and that requires a sort of party-contraction so no one has unrealistic goals that they’re changing the world by helping to elect the one socialist member of the House or something. It is not just politicians that should compromise, IMO. Voters should be able to express honest preferenes while also being realistic. You get better preferences out of multi-party systems, but you get distorted expectations when all these disparate politicans compromise two months later on a budget. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [November 4, 2004, 4:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/instant-runoff-voting-worked-out-fine-in-san-francisco/272781/22 "2004-11-04T04:13:40Z")
> [@erislover](#): > > You want votes to _mean_ something, so that you can get a good idea of where people stand by checking the vote tally, but at the same time you want people to _know what they’re getting_ out of someone winning, and that requires a sort of party-contraction so no one has unrealistic goals that they’re changing the world by helping to elect the one socialist member of the House or something. But one socialist member **would** make a real difference. For one thing, he or she would get at least some committee assignments and be in a position to inject a socialist perspective into the debates that shape legislation before it comes out for a floor vote. For another, in a multi-party system, there almost certainly would be no majority party, ever, in any legislature. (There is a majority party in South Africa but that’s rather a special case.) That means no party could ever be in a position to get its own way on everything. No legislation could pass unless it were a compromise cobbled together by several very different political camps, enough to form a voting majority. ---
**Author:** ![erislover](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/71e660/32.png) [@erislover](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/erislover)\ **Post date:** [November 4, 2004, 4:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/instant-runoff-voting-worked-out-fine-in-san-francisco/272781/23 "2004-11-04T04:31:12Z")
I didn’t say it wouldn’t make a difference, I said it might bias unrealistic expectations. 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![ultrafilter](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/3d9bf3/32.png) [@ultrafilter](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ultrafilter)\ **Post date:** [November 4, 2004, 4:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/instant-runoff-voting-worked-out-fine-in-san-francisco/272781/24 "2004-11-04T04:54:37Z")
> [@Mr2001](#): > > From a voter’s perspective, Condorcet works the same way as IRV. You rank the candidates in the order you prefer them, possibly leaving out certain candidates if you don’t have a preference about them. > > Each ordered ballot is converted (behind the scenes) into a matrix representing pairwise matchups between each combination of two candidates, and all these matrices are added together to produce the final vote count. After applying some math, you can determine the winner, unless there’s a genuine contradiction in voters’ preferences. [ElectionMethods.org](http://www.electionmethods.org/CondorcetEx.htm) has a more detailed explanation. This is not a correct description of Condorcet voting because it assumes that the voter’s preferences are transitive. If a majority of the populace prefers A to B, B to C, and C to A, the final result should reflect that. That’s why you need the voter to fill in the actual matrix with the pairwise races. ---
**Author:** ![Ms2001](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ms2001/32/18463_2.png) [@Ms2001](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ms2001)\ **Post date:** [November 4, 2004, 5:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/instant-runoff-voting-worked-out-fine-in-san-francisco/272781/25 "2004-11-04T05:00:48Z")
> [@ultrafilter](#): > > This is not a correct description of Condorcet voting because it assumes that the voter’s preferences are transitive. If a majority of the populace prefers A to B, B to C, and C to A, the final result should reflect that. > > That’s why you need the voter to fill in the actual matrix with the pairwise races. [EM.org](http://EM.org) seems to describe Condorcet voting as I have. Does it really make sense to let voters cast circular ballots? I mean, some contradictions in the final sum may be normal, but what can you possibly learn from a single ballot that’s marked A\>B, B\>C, C\>A? ---
**Author:** ![ultrafilter](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/3d9bf3/32.png) [@ultrafilter](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ultrafilter)\ **Post date:** [November 4, 2004, 5:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/instant-runoff-voting-worked-out-fine-in-san-francisco/272781/26 "2004-11-04T05:05:34Z")
> [@Mr2001](#): > > [EM.org](http://EM.org) seems to describe Condorcet voting as I have. Does it really make sense to let voters cast circular ballots? I mean, some contradictions in the final sum may be normal, but what can you possibly learn from a single ballot that’s marked A\>B, B\>C, C\>A? That some voters can’t pick a single winner. Anyway, I think I was mistaken. ---
**Author:** ![Ms2001](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ms2001/32/18463_2.png) [@Ms2001](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ms2001)\ **Post date:** [November 4, 2004, 5:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/instant-runoff-voting-worked-out-fine-in-san-francisco/272781/27 "2004-11-04T05:17:26Z")
> [@ultrafilter](#): > > That some voters can’t pick a single winner. I can see some uses for letting voters cast their matrix directly, but I think those could be taken care of by letting them rank candidates equally instead. If a voter likes A, B, and C equally, but doesn’t like D or E, he can rank A/B/C each #1 and leave the others blank (which will translate into A\>D, A\>E, B\>D, B\>E, C\>D, C\>E). If there are only 3 candidates and he likes them all equally, he doesn’t need to vote in that race at all - he should have a blank matrix, not a self-contradictory one. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [November 6, 2004, 8:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/instant-runoff-voting-worked-out-fine-in-san-francisco/272781/28 "2004-11-06T20:53:29Z")
Looks like I posted too soon. The first IRV election in SF didn’t go so smoothly after all – the elections office still hasn’t been able to certify the result: [http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/11/05/EDGPN9LHK51.DTL](http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/11/05/EDGPN9LHK51.DTL) Apparently this is because of a bug in the software. “Conspiracy theories abound, as does security precautions for the computer and boxes of paper ballots that were wisely mandated as backup – and may yet have to be counted the old-fashioned way.” ---
**Author:** ![Ms2001](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ms2001/32/18463_2.png) [@Ms2001](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ms2001)\ **Post date:** [November 7, 2004, 2:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/instant-runoff-voting-worked-out-fine-in-san-francisco/272781/29 "2004-11-07T02:22:48Z")
Thanks to the design of IRV, that recount will probably take a lot longer than it has to. You can’t just count the ballots locally and report the number of votes for each of N candidates (as you could with approval voting), or each of N^2 - N pairs (as you could with Condorcet voting); you have to report the number of ballots cast for each of N factorial possible ranks. For example, the race for County of San Francisco Supervisor District 5 had [22 candidates](http://www.smartvoter.org/2004/11/02/ca/sf/city_and_county.html). I’m not sure if IRV was used for that race, but assuming it was, it’s impossible to break down the counting at all. 22 factorial is insanely huge, so they’d do better to read each ballot one at a time over the phone. ---
**Author:** ![Giles](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/giles/32/60_2.png) [@Giles](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Giles)\ **Post date:** [November 7, 2004, 6:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/instant-runoff-voting-worked-out-fine-in-san-francisco/272781/30 "2004-11-07T18:05:38Z")
> [@Mr2001](#): > > Thanks to the design of IRV, that recount will probably take a lot longer than it has to. You can’t just count the ballots locally and report the number of votes for each of N candidates (as you could with approval voting), or each of N^2 - N pairs (as you could with Condorcet voting); you have to report the number of ballots cast for each of N factorial possible ranks. > > For example, the race for County of San Francisco Supervisor District 5 had [22 candidates](http://www.smartvoter.org/2004/11/02/ca/sf/city_and_county.html). I’m not sure if IRV was used for that race, but assuming it was, it’s impossible to break down the counting at all. 22 factorial is insanely huge, so they’d do better to read each ballot one at a time over the phone. No, that’s not necessary. If you have several precincts each tallying ballot papers for a single electrate, then the person tallying the totals needs to tell each precinct who the lowest candidate is, whose votes get redistributed, and ask eachj precinct to lok at those, and say who the next choice is on those ballot papers. Repeat this each time you eliminate a candidate and get new totals. The other way to do it would be to bring the ballots in to one central place to be counted. It’s possible that would save time, but it’s not necessary. ---
**Author:** ![drhess](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/94ad74/32.png) [@drhess](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/drhess)\ **Post date:** [November 13, 2004, 4:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/instant-runoff-voting-worked-out-fine-in-san-francisco/272781/31 "2004-11-13T16:55:01Z")
> [@ultrafilter](#): > > But they’re not the same from the voter’s perspective except for when they’re filling out the ballot. Condorcet voting is strategy-free, and the standard form of IRV is not. > > I agree that approval voting’s not all that great. Consider a scenario with four candidates (A, B, C, and D) and 12 voters, where A, B, and C are equally favored as first choices, and half the population favors D as a second choice, while the other half doesn’t like anybody other than their first choice. Here’s what you get: > > A: 2 > A, D: 2 > B: 2 > B, D: 2 > C: 2 > C, D: 2 > > Each of A, B, and C got 4 votes, and D got 6 votes, so D is the winner, even though s/he was nobody’s first choice. > > But like I said before, approval voting is better than the plurality method, and it’s much simpler to explain than Condorcet or instant runoff voting. That makes it attractive as an immediate goal for vote reform. Questions: 1. So how would this same scenario play out in Condorcet vote counting? 2. Also, I guess assuming half like D as 2nd choice is hard to know in approval voting since we don’t ask what they prefer, just what they can live with. In that case, isn’t D a good compromise since A, B and C were “not voted” by 8 people each and D only by 6? ---
**Author:** ![ultrafilter](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/3d9bf3/32.png) [@ultrafilter](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ultrafilter)\ **Post date:** [November 13, 2004, 5:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/instant-runoff-voting-worked-out-fine-in-san-francisco/272781/32 "2004-11-13T17:00:10Z")
> [@drhess](#): > > 1. Also, I guess assuming half like D as 2nd choice is hard to know in approval voting since we don’t ask what they prefer, just what they can live with. In that case, isn’t D a good compromise since A, B and C were “not voted” by 8 people each and D only by 6? I’ll have to do some research for 1., but D is outside the Smith set, so no, D is not a good candidate. The Smith set is the smallest set of candidates such that every candidate in the Smith set could beat every candidate outside the Smith set in a pairwise election. Condorcet voting guarantees that the winner will come from the Smith set, and no other system does. ---
**Author:** ![Rillian](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/bcef8e/32.png) [@Rillian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Rillian)\ **Post date:** [November 13, 2004, 7:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/instant-runoff-voting-worked-out-fine-in-san-francisco/272781/33 "2004-11-13T19:11:11Z")
Still confused about the voter experience for IRV versus Condorcet. For a race with five candidates, what does the ballot look like? For IRV, it shows all five and I can pick one and stop or pick my first choice, a second choice, and then stop, etc. all the way to ranking all five. (I could also pick none, of course.) What is it for Condorcet? ---
**Author:** ![Rillian](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/bcef8e/32.png) [@Rillian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Rillian)\ **Post date:** [November 13, 2004, 7:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/instant-runoff-voting-worked-out-fine-in-san-francisco/272781/34 "2004-11-13T19:13:32Z")
> [@BrainGlutton](#): > > Looks like I posted too soon. The first IRV election in SF didn’t go so smoothly after all – the elections office still hasn’t been able to certify the result: [http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/11/05/EDGPN9LHK51.DTL](http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/11/05/EDGPN9LHK51.DTL) Apparently this is because of a bug in the software. “Conspiracy theories abound, as does security precautions for the computer and boxes of paper ballots that were wisely mandated as backup – and may yet have to be counted the old-fashioned way.” Any SF-based dopers who can describe how the ballot worked for these races? Any updates to the counting since 11/6? It would be disappointing to see IRV get a black-eye just out of the gate. (Althought it sounds like an IRV ballot with Condorcet counting is the better option.) ---
**Author:** ![ultrafilter](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/3d9bf3/32.png) [@ultrafilter](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ultrafilter)\ **Post date:** [November 13, 2004, 7:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/instant-runoff-voting-worked-out-fine-in-san-francisco/272781/35 "2004-11-13T19:28:20Z")
> [@ultrafilter](#): > > I’ll have to do some research for 1., but D is outside the Smith set, so no, D is not a good candidate. I may have spoken too soon. I think D is in the Smith set for this election. Note that in that scenario under IRV, there is no winner. ---
**Author:** ![ultrafilter](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/3d9bf3/32.png) [@ultrafilter](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ultrafilter)\ **Post date:** [November 13, 2004, 7:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/instant-runoff-voting-worked-out-fine-in-san-francisco/272781/36 "2004-11-13T19:29:34Z")
> [@Rillian](#): > > What is it for Condorcet? The same. There ought to be a method for you to rank candidates equally, so if you have no preference for several first choices, you can rank them equally. ---
**Author:** ![Rillian](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/bcef8e/32.png) [@Rillian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Rillian)\ **Post date:** [November 13, 2004, 7:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/instant-runoff-voting-worked-out-fine-in-san-francisco/272781/37 "2004-11-13T19:37:58Z")
> [@ultrafilter](#): > > The same. There ought to be a method for you to rank candidates equally, so if you have no preference for several first choices, you can rank them equally. Okay. But from a UI design, it is simpler to have the vote select their first choice, then gray out that choice and ask "Select a Second Choice or Cast Ballot. and so on. Does not allowing you to choose multiple first choices or second choices, etc. invalidate Condorcet, i.e is it a requirement or an option? ---
**Author:** ![Rillian](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/bcef8e/32.png) [@Rillian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Rillian)\ **Post date:** [November 13, 2004, 7:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/instant-runoff-voting-worked-out-fine-in-san-francisco/272781/38 "2004-11-13T19:50:30Z")
Here’s one [analysis](http://www.fairvote.org/irv/various1.htm) of two problems with Condorcet: > [@](#): > > The Condorcet rules suffers from the Condorcet Paradox: there may not be any candidate who defeats all the others: A might beat B, B might beat C, and yet C could beat A. In this case, some other system must be used to resolve the paradox. > > In addition, the Condorcet candidate might be one with so little core support that he or she would never have been able to win under any of the single-winner voting systems currently used for all governmental elections in the United States and other nations. ---
**Author:** ![ultrafilter](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/3d9bf3/32.png) [@ultrafilter](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ultrafilter)\ **Post date:** [November 13, 2004, 8:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/instant-runoff-voting-worked-out-fine-in-san-francisco/272781/39 "2004-11-13T20:00:45Z")
These were addressed in the articles I posted earlier, but I’ll quickly recap. > [@Rillian](#): > > The Condorcet rules suffers from the Condorcet Paradox: there may not be any candidate who defeats all the others: A might beat B, B might beat C, and yet C could beat A. In this case, some other system must be used to resolve the paradox. That’s not a flaw of the system. If you get a non-transitive preference in the election results, it’s because that’s how the electorate actually feels. Trying to shoehorn non-transitive preferences into a transitive model is just a bad idea. > [@](#): > > In addition, the Condorcet candidate might be one with so little core support that he or she would never have been able to win under any of the single-winner voting systems currently used for all governmental elections in the United States and other nations. That can only happen if no candidate has strong support. Is there a meaningful way to pick a single winner in that case? No one is saying that Condorcet is perfect. It’s not–it doesn’t satisfy the favorite betrayal criterion, which is a nice-to-have–but it’s a hell of a lot better than IRV, which doesn’t even have all the nice properties that our current system has (i.e., monotonicity). ---
**Author:** ![ultrafilter](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/3d9bf3/32.png) [@ultrafilter](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ultrafilter)\ **Post date:** [November 13, 2004, 8:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/instant-runoff-voting-worked-out-fine-in-san-francisco/272781/40 "2004-11-13T20:16:17Z")
> [@drhess](#): > > Questions: > > 1. So how would this same scenario play out in Condorcet vote counting? > > 2. Also, I guess assuming half like D as 2nd choice is hard to know in approval voting since we don’t ask what they prefer, just what they can live with. In that case, isn’t D a good compromise since A, B and C were “not voted” by 8 people each and D only by 6? As far as I can tell, the Condorcet algorithm returns A, B, and C as the set of winners. There’s just not enough information to pick any one of them. By plurality and IRV, there’s no winner, as no one will vote D first. You end up with a three-way tie. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/instant-runoff-voting-worked-out-fine-in-san-francisco/272781.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/instant-runoff-voting-worked-out-fine-in-san-francisco/272781.md?page=3)