andrewducker (
andrewducker) wrote2025-05-02 09:03 am
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My general feeling on the by election result
Reminder that any voting system where you can win a single seat without 50% of people thinking you're better than the alternatives is not fit for purpose.
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Which is why I said that you do end up with 50% of the voters preferring the winner to somebody – namely, to whoever survived until the last notional round and then lost it.
It's true that if the elimination process doesn't need to go the full distance then this might look more sensible. And of course I'm not arguing that bloody FPTP is better – when we had the choice to switch to this kind of system I voted in favour. But I don't like to see overstated arguments even for my own position (perhaps especially not for my own position), and I think it's disingenuous to describe it as "50% preferred A to all the alternatives" when what you really mean is "all the alternatives except the ones that my own algorithm decided didn't count".
no subject
And I don't think it's fair to say "the ones that my own algorithm didn't win". We're talking about a single seat here. If we were talking about multi-member constituencies then which algorithm you use, how you divide up the seats between multiple parties, etc. makes a big difference. But when it comes to a single winner situation I don't think I've seen many alternatives seriously discussed which would leave the party that 7% of the voters had as their first choice in active competition. Are you thinking of an algorithm which wouldn't do that?
(I'm ignoring things like Approval Voting, because it doesn't have very wide support, and seems to leave itself open to strategic voting in a way that looks complex and unpleasant if it becomes common.)
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Also, I think there are several plausible ways to define the set of not-hopeless candidates. The one that sprang to my mind was the Smith set. But apparently IRV can elect a candidate outside that set, by sometimes eliminating the Condorcet winner if there is one!
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(Also, did you see people being nice about you over here: https://andrewducker.dreamwidth.org/4560569.html?thread=32304313#cmt32304313 ?)