A rant about IRV and it's recent history in Alaska.
There's a lot to respond to here, but this part is simply false:
It's also possible that RCV spoiled in the 2021 New York City Democratic
mayoral primary election, which was won by Eric Adams. It eliminated Maya
Wiley after the penultimate round of counting, and then counted Wiley's
votes for either Adams or Garcia. It's possible that Garcia was a spoiler
and that majorities ranked Wiley over Adams and Garcia. (I don't know NYC
political dynamics, but assuming a subset of voters pay attention mainly to
candidates' gender & race, Garcia voters in that subset would tend to
prefer Wiley over Adams, and Adams voters in that subset would tend to
prefer Wiley over Garcia.) But NYC didn't publish the voters' rankings, so
the possibility that Garcia was a spoiler can't be checked, except perhaps
by a "freedom of information" request to compel publication.
The CVR data has been published for years, and is still available here:
https://www.vote.nyc/sites/default/files/pdf/election_results/2021/20210622Primary%20Election/cvr/PE2021_CVR_Final.zip
And we know Adams was the Condorcet winner
https://fairvote.org/rcv_in_new_york_city/. There have been a number of
published papers using this data, easily discoverable online.
On Sat, Mar 29, 2025 at 2:27 PM Steve Eppley seppley@alumni.caltech.edu
wrote:
RCV (a.k.a. Instant Runoff) clearly failed in Alaska in 2024 too. The
Republican Party learned an important lesson from the fiasco in August
2022: RCV can easily spoil. So in 2024, one of the two Republican
candidates who qualified for the general election dropped out to avoid the
possibility of being a spoiler. And the one who didn't drop out -- Nick
Begich -- had similarly pledged to drop out if another Republican finished
ahead of him in the primary election.
A lesson they haven't yet learned is that the kind of pledge that Begich
made -- to drop out if another Republican finished ahead of him in the
primary election -- can lead to spoiling too, because the candidate who
drops out might be the one who could win in the general election. Suppose
Begich had made that pledge ahead of the August 2022 election. Then he
would have dropped out to avoid the possibility of spoiling Sarah Palin's
victory. But it was Begich, not Palin, who a majority ranked over Democrat
Mary Peltola in the August 2022 election.
(Peltola's majority over Palin was very narrow. That means RCV came close
to electing the extremist.)
In France in 2024 they didn't use RCV, but a similar dynamic led to
similar pledges to drop out. To avoid spoiling that would help the
right-wing party win in the final round of elections, candidates of
centrist & left-wing parties agreed to drop out if they finished no higher
than third place in the penultimate round of voting, to avoid spoiling the
other's chance of defeating the right-wing candidate. That's the same
mistake as in Begich's pledge to drop out if another Republican finished
ahead of him in the primary election. The candidate who finished third
might be the one who can win, and in this case the candidate who ought to
drop out is the one who finished second (or possibly even first).
It's also possible that RCV spoiled in the 2021 New York City Democratic
mayoral primary election, which was won by Eric Adams. It eliminated Maya
Wiley after the penultimate round of counting, and then counted Wiley's
votes for either Adams or Garcia. It's possible that Garcia was a spoiler
and that majorities ranked Wiley over Adams and Garcia. (I don't know NYC
political dynamics, but assuming a subset of voters pay attention mainly to
candidates' gender & race, Garcia voters in that subset would tend to
prefer Wiley over Adams, and Adams voters in that subset would tend to
prefer Wiley over Garcia.) But NYC didn't publish the voters' rankings, so
the possibility that Garcia was a spoiler can't be checked, except perhaps
by a "freedom of information" request to compel publication. (I wonder
whether hiding the voters' rankings is a lesson learned by proponents of
RCV after the Instant Runoff fiasco in Burlington Vermont in 2009. After
that fiasco, they changed its name from Instant Runoff to Ranked Choice
Voting, so I also wonder whether the reason for the change of name was to
try to hide its track record of spoiling. And I wonder whether they say an
RCV election didn't spoil whenever the evidence to check it is unavailable.)
We can expect the Democrats too will eventually learn the lesson that RCV
is prone to spoiling. After that, I expect only one Democrat and one
Republican will run in RCV general elections, plus third party or
independent candidates who can't win and might be spoilers. That seems
like the existing two-party system... which might explain why so many
Democratic & Republican politicians support (or don't oppose) RCV. It
would still have the same terrible flaw that any voting method that counts
only one majority (or one plurality) has: the majority (or plurality) that
gets counted can often be a coalition of minorities on different issues.
That undermines majority rule, undermines politicians' incentive to support
majority-preferred policies, prevents government policies from being
stable, incites political polarization, and empowers extremists by making
their supporters' votes needed by the rest of their coalition.
Another possibility we could hope for, but which seems unlikely because it
would require the Democratic party or the Republican party to place country
over party, is that one of the two "big tent" parties would learn to
completely "stand down" (not nominate a candidate) in elections they might
not win, so that a "moderate" independent candidate could run and defeat
the "greater evil" without a spoiler on the ballot to split the coalition
against the greater evil. We saw examples of this "stand down" strategy in
Utah in 2022 and in Nebraska in 2024, when the Democrats chose not to
nominate candidates for U.S. Senate... that allowed the independent
candidates who ran (Evan McMullin in Utah and Dan Osborn in Nebraska) to
assemble larger anti-Republican coalitions than any Democratic candidates
had assembled in those states. If those states had been swing states
instead of solid red states, it's a good bet that the independent
candidates would have won. But good luck persuading the Democrats to stand
down in a swing state or swing district, which would be the opposite of the
"50 state strategy" that some of them advocate. The "Democrats stand down"
strategy makes sense not only in solid red states & districts where a
Democrat would be a sure loser; it also makes sense in states & districts
where the Democrat isn't a sure winner if election of the Republican would
be catastrophic. (Two examples of catastrophes are Trump 2025 and
single-party domination of all branches of a state government -- such as in
Texas or Florida -- or all branches of the federal government.) By a
symmetric argument, the "Republicans stand down" strategy can make sense
for Republicans in states & districts where an independent candidate has a
better chance to defeat the Democrat than a Republican would have.
If the Democrats hadn't nominated a candidate for President in 2024, I
think it's likely that No Labels would have been able to persuade Larry
Hogan to run. Hogan was the popular two-term "moderate" Never-Trump
Republican former governor of solid blue Maryland, and it seems likely that
he would have been a Condorcet winner in 2024. He declined No Labels'
invitation because he knew the Democrats would nominate a candidate
(expected to be Biden), which would have given Hogan no chance to win and
only a chance to be a spoiler. But in a Hogan versus Trump election with
no Democrat on the ballot to split the anti-Trump coalition, Hogan could
have been able to assemble a winning coalition: in addition to "lesser of
evil" votes from Democratic-leaning voters, Hogan would have been favored
by swing voters, moderate Republican voters, and some of the voters who
vote R only because they've been led to believe the D party is socialist or
whatever. (I think the only real questions about whether Hogan would have
defeated Trump are whether too many Democratic-leaning voters would fail to
vote for the "lesser of evils" and either abstain or "waste" their vote on
a sure-loser third party spoiler, and whether donors would have adequately
funded Hogan's independent campaign.)
Years ago, an advocate of Instant Runoff presented empirical statistics
(from Australia, I think) that seemed to show Instant Runoff doesn't spoil
much in practice and rarely defeats a Condorcet winner. But those
statistics are misleading, because they neglect potential candidates who
are deterred from running either to avoid being a spoiler or because
Instant Runoff would create the false impression that they're very
unpopular. It also ignores the effect of voter preference information that
the parties gain when STV Proportional Representation elections are run
alongside Instant Runoff... information that can be useful for predicting
Instant Runoff spoiling and avoiding the spoiling by standing down or by a
party nominating only one candidate. Particularly noteworthy is Instant
Runoff's deterrent effect against potential Condorcet winners who would
lose and appear to be very unpopular given Instant Runoff because they
would be sandwiched between two other candidates, one of whom would be
classified as a spoiler if the Condorcet winner chose to run & lose.
An Instant Runoff winner who's said to be a Condorcet winner based solely
on the candidates who chose to run and the actual votes cast, but who would
have lost pairwise to a potential candidate who didn't run, should not be
deemed the sincere Condorcet winner.
Greg Dennis asks "why leave out the November 2022 election where RCV
elected the Condorcet winner Peltola?" Because we're not claiming RCV
always defeats the Condorcet winner. However, was Peltola really the
sincere Condorcet winner in November 2022? It's impossible to know for
certain, because RCV may have deterred potential candidates from competing,
or the primary election may have prevented potential candidates from
competing in the general election.
By the way, my definition of "spoiler" is narrower than RBJ's definition.
He calls X a spoiler if X, by running, causes the winner to change from
some Y to some Z. I call X a spoiler if both of the following conditions
hold: (1) X, by running, causes the winner to change from some Y to some
Z. (2) The number of voters whose order of preference has X > Y > Z
exceeds the number of voters whose order of preference has X > Z > Y. In
other words, X is a spoiler if X, by running, causes the election of a
"greater evil" of most of X's supporters. We can also define a
counterfactual spoiler: someone who would be a spoiler if s/he runs, but
chooses not to run. Similarly, we can define a counterfactual Condorcet
winner: someone who would be the sincere Condorcet winner if s/he runs, but
chooses not to run.
Spoiling (which violates the IIA criterion) isn't necessarily bad. For
instance, if Scissors by running changes the winner from Paper to Rock, the
additional preference information gained when Scissors runs may suggest
Rock is better than Paper. In this case, we should hope Scissors isn't
deterred from running.
The possibility of rock-paper-scissors preferences shows that some
spoiling and violation of IIA is unavoidable for ANY plausibly democratic
voting method. (That means any voting method that tends to reduce to
majority rule when there are only two candidates. Cardinal voting systems
offer no escape from this tendency, because voters in the majority who
prefer Paper over Rock have an obvious strategic incentive to vote the
maximum for Paper and the minimum for Rock when only Paper & Rock are
running, which is equivalent to majority rule.)
--Steve
On 12/5/2024 12:34 AM, Greg Dennis wrote:
Why leave out the November 2022 election where Peltola was the Condorcet
winner against Begich?
On Wed, Dec 4, 2024 at 4:46 PM robert bristow-johnson <
rbj@audioimagination.com> wrote:
This is what we've learned from the 2-year history of Ranked-Choice
Voting in Alaska.
The Instant-Runoff Voting method of RCV failed in Alaska August 2022 at
everything that RCV is supposed to do for us (as it also did in Burlington
Vermont 2009).
Essentially, it was a spoiled election with all the bad things that come
with a spoiled election. In August 2022, Sarah Palin was a loser whose
presence in the race materially changed who the winner was. Had Palin not
run, Begich would meet Peltola in the final round and defeat Peltola. (We
know this from the tallies
from the Cast Vote Record.)
The definition of a Spoiler is a loser whose presence in the race
materially changes who the winner is.
So then these voters for the spoiler, Palin, they find out that their
second-choice vote was never counted. Their favorite candidate was
defeated and their second-choice vote was never counted. If just 1 out of
13 of the Palin voters that marked Begich as their lesser evil (there were
34089 of them); if about 2600 of these voters voted tactically (the tactic
is called "compromising") and marked their lesser-evil (Begich) as their
first-choice vote, then Begich would have met Peltola in the final round
and beaten Peltola.
They were promised that it was safe to vote for their favorite, Sarah
Palin, but by doing so they caused the election of Mary Peltola. But they
prevented Begich from having a head-to-head with Peltola because Palin did
instead and lost.
There were about 112000 voting GOP and 75000 Dem. The GOP vote was split
and RCV promised that it would resolve the split vote correctly, but it
didn't. IRV propped up the weaker of the two GOP candidates against
Peltola and that candidate lost. If, instead, RCV had put Begich up
against Peltola, Begich would have won.
They were promised that RCV would let them vote their hopes, not their
fears. But they would have been better off voting their fears. They were
promised their second-choice vote would count if their favorite candidate
couldn't get elected but that second-choice vote was never counted for
these Palin voters.
More Alaskans, 87899 to 79461 (an 8438 voter margin), preferred Begich to
Peltola and marked their ballots saying so. But Mary Peltola was elected
instead.
This November, again, more Alaskan voters marked their ballots that
Begich is preferred to Peltola by nearly the same margin, 8354 (164117 to
155763).
Both times about 8000 more Alaskans said they would prefer Begich over
Peltola to go to Washington and represent the state. And, both times,
Alaskan voters marked their ballots saying so. Both times, Instant-Runoff
Voting was used.
What was different?
Sarah Palin was in the race in 2022 and not in the race in 2024. And
different winners resulted.
--
r b-j . _ . _ . _ . _ rbj@audioimagination.com
"Imagination is more important than knowledge."
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I agree with Greg Dennis that there is a lot to respond here.
On 03/29/2025 2:26 PM EDT Steve Eppley seppley@alumni.caltech.edu wrote:
RCV (a.k.a. Instant Runoff) clearly failed in Alaska in 2024 too. The Republican Party learned an important lesson from the fiasco in August 2022: RCV can easily spoil. So in 2024, one of the two Republican candidates who qualified for the general election dropped out to avoid the possibility of being a spoiler.
I don't know what their motivation is. In Alaska November 2024, the Condorcet winner was elected with RCV. That meant that the Spoiler Effect was avoided and that every voters vote were counted equally.
And the one who didn't drop out -- Nick Begich -- had similarly pledged to drop out if another Republican finished ahead of him in the primary election.
Yeah, but here's the dumb thing. August 2022 Palin did finish ahead of Begich. Among the GOP Palin was preferred over Begich by more Republicans than the contrary. But among Alaskans as a whole (which is what the general election is about), Begich is far preferred over Palin. 37000 voter margin.
But the mistake in August 2022 is that, among Alaskans as a whole Begich was preferred to Peltola by over 8000 vote margin. Yet Peltola was elected with IRV.
A lesson they haven't yet learned is that the kind of pledge that Begich made -- to drop out if another Republican finished ahead of him in the primary election -- can lead to spoiling too, because the candidate who drops out might be the one who could win in the general election.
And that's the problem. That's the wrong lesson to be learned and IRV obfuscates the correct lesson. Begich was the stronger GOP candidate, yet IRV propped up Palin against Peltola head-to-head and Palin was too weak. Yet Begich would have beaten Peltola. The GOP split their vote and RCV promises to resolve that split vote correctly and IRV didn't. But Condorcet RCV would have resolved that split vote correctly. Palin voters would have been able to safely vote for their favorite candidate had the election been decided with Condorcet-compliant rules.
Suppose Begich had made that pledge ahead of the August 2022 election. Then he would have dropped out to avoid the possibility of spoiling Sarah Palin's victory. But it was Begich, not Palin, who a majority ranked over Democrat Mary Peltola in the August 2022 election.
Yes. And RCV promises to solve that problem for us, but failed to in August 2022.
(Peltola's majority over Palin was very narrow. That means RCV came close to electing the extremist.)
Peltola was preferred to Palin by about 5000 voters out of 188000. Begich was preferred to Peltola by 8000 voters and preferred to Palin by a margin of 37000.
We can expect the Democrats too will eventually learn the lesson that RCV is prone to spoiling.
I would say that IRV is more prone to spoiling than is Condorcet RCV. I think that's obvious. For the case of a Rock-Paper-Scissors cycle, any method will demonstrate the spoiler effect. If the method elects Candidate Rock, then Candidate Scissors must be a spoiler.
But Condorcet RCV would have saved Burlington 2009 and Alaska 2022 (August) from spoilage where Hare RCV (or IRV) failed to do so.
Greg Dennis asks "why leave out the November 2022 election where RCV elected the Condorcet winner Peltola?" Because we're not claiming RCV always defeats the Condorcet winner.
That's right. November 2022 didn't exhibit the Spoiler Effect as did August 2022. But that might be that Begich voters mistakenly thought that Begich was weak and jumped ship onto either Palin's or Peltola's bandwagons.
By the way, my definition of "spoiler" is narrower than RBJ's definition. He calls X a spoiler if X, by running, causes the winner to change from some Y to some Z. I call X a spoiler if both of the following conditions hold: (1) X, by running, causes the winner to change from some Y to some Z. (2) The number of voters whose order of preference has X > Y > Z exceeds the number of voters whose order of preference has X > Z > Y.
In other words, X is a spoiler if X, by running, causes the election of a "greater evil" of most of X's supporters.
But that is always the case when IRV fails to elect the Condorcet winner. Then the loser in the IRV final round is the spoiler. At least in the case of 3 significant candidates.
It's because many more of Palin voters preferred Begich over Peltola. Or in Burlington 2009, many more of Wright voters preferred Montroll over Kiss. In both cases, many more of the voters for Candidate Right preferred Candidate Center over Candidate Left. That is the Center Squeeze.
So your additional requirement adds no additional restriction. When IRV fails and spoils an election, it is always the Center candidate who is robbed, which means the candidate on the Right or Left is the spoiler and the opposite candidate on the Left or Right is the beneficiary of the spoiled election.
We can also define a counterfactual spoiler: someone who would be a spoiler if s/he runs, but chooses not to run. Similarly, we can define a counterfactual Condorcet winner: someone who would be the sincere Condorcet winner if s/he runs, but chooses not to run.
That's just so speculative that I don't feel safe speculating.
Spoiling (which violates the IIA criterion) isn't necessarily bad.
It's always bad for a larger number of voters than the spoiling favored. More voters suffered from the spoilage than voters who benefited.
For instance, if Scissors by running changes the winner from Paper to Rock, the additional preference information gained when Scissors runs may suggest Rock is better than Paper. In this case, we should hope Scissors isn't deterred from running.
Scissors has every right to run. We must not deter Scissors from running. But if Scissors is the spoiler (which is the case in a cycle and Rock is elected), it is simply in the numbers that Scissors running drew more 1st-choice support away from Paper than they did from Rock (and they would be Scissors' voters 2nd-choice votes). That's how Paper got eliminated in the semi-final IRV round.
I still think that Greg needs to justify these two claims right on his front page, https://voterchoicema.org/ :
-
[Instant-Runoff] Voting Ensures Majority Support by eliminating the “spoiler effect” and guaranteeing the winner earns a majority of the votes in any election.
-
[Instant-Runoff] Voting Expands Voter Choice by freeing you to vote for who you really want, without settling for the “lesser of two evils,” and without fear of “wasting” your vote.
Both claims are shown to be false. Proven false. Why do you continue to state these claims without qualification, Greg, when we all know they're just false? You're lying to your customers.
robert
--
r b-j . _ . _ . _ . _ rbj@audioimagination.com
"Imagination is more important than knowledge."
.
.
.
On 2025-03-30 03:17, robert bristow-johnson wrote:
We can expect the Democrats too will eventually learn the lesson that RCV is prone to spoiling.
I would say that IRV is more prone to spoiling than is Condorcet
RCV. I think that's obvious. For the case of a Rock-Paper-Scissors cycle,
any method will demonstrate the spoiler effect. If the method elects
Candidate Rock, then Candidate Scissors must be a spoiler.
But Condorcet RCV would have saved Burlington 2009 and Alaska 2022
(August) from spoilage where Hare RCV (or IRV) failed to do so.
Yes: every[1] method fails IIA when there's a Condorcet cycle. Methods
that fail Condorcet by definition also fail IIA in other cases.
By the way, my definition of "spoiler" is narrower than RBJ's
definition. He calls X a spoiler if X, by running, causes the winner to
change from some Y to some Z. I call X a spoiler if both of the
following conditions hold: (1) X, by running, causes the winner to
change from some Y to some Z. (2) The number of voters whose order of
preference has X > Y > Z exceeds the number of voters whose order of
preference has X > Z > Y.
In other words, X is a spoiler if X, by running, causes the
election of a "greater evil" of most of X's supporters.
But that is always the case when IRV fails to elect the Condorcet
winner. Then the loser in the IRV final round is the spoiler. At least
in the case of 3 significant candidates.
It's because many more of Palin voters preferred Begich over Peltola.
Or in Burlington 2009, many more of Wright voters preferred Montroll
over Kiss. In both cases, many more of the voters for Candidate
Right preferred Candidate Center over Candidate Left. That is the
Center Squeeze.
So your additional requirement adds no additional restriction. When
IRV fails and spoils an election, it is always the Center
candidate who is robbed, which means the candidate on the Right or
Left is the spoiler and the opposite candidate on the Left or Right
is the beneficiary of the spoiled election.
I just did a check using linear programming, and that seems to be true.
My reasoning is as follows:
By Steve's definition, a spoiler is a candidate A who,
(1) if he runs, changes the winner from B to C,
and (2) has more A>B>C voters than A>C>B voters.
For IRV, if we want to find a counterexample where (1) holds but not (2):
- B must beat C pairwise, so the winner without A is B.
- After A is added, the finalists must be A and C, hence
B must be the plurality loser.
(A must be included to change the outcome, and C must be
included to win)
- C must beat A pairwise to win the second round, and
- there must be at least as many ACB voters as ABC voters.
The polytope produced by these constraints is, unless I've made a
mistake, empty.
We can also define a counterfactual spoiler: someone who would be
a spoiler if s/he runs, but chooses not to run. Similarly, we can define
a counterfactual Condorcet winner: someone who would be the sincere
Condorcet winner if s/he runs, but chooses not to run.
That's just so speculative that I don't feel safe speculating.
This is similar to Marcus Ogren's "primordial election":
https://voting-in-the-abstract.medium.com/the-primordial-election-that-is-never-held-e019356faf90
By its nature, it's very hard to speculate about concrete examples,
because we can't see what could possibly have happened. But it makes
sense that there would be at least some primordial election effects.
If it's too costly to run and you're not going to win, you're not going
to run.
Marcus says that if candidates could run relatively unimpeded, we would
expect to see a lot more center squeeze elections than Condorcet cycles,
because in a spatial model, the former is more likely to occur than the
latter. When the US ballot data shows a more even distribution between
center squeezes and cycles, there are two possibilities:
-
We only need two parties to accurately represent political opinion, so
fringe parties will always be fringe; or -
Something deters candidates who would be closer to the median voter
from running.
Spoiling (which violates the IIA criterion) isn't necessarily bad.
It's always bad for a larger number of voters than the spoiling
favored. More voters suffered from the spoilage than voters who benefited.
For instance, if Scissors by running changes the winner from Paper
to Rock, the additional preference information gained when Scissors runs
may suggest Rock is better than Paper. In this case, we should hope
Scissors isn't deterred from running.
Scissors has every right to run. We must not deter Scissors from
running. But if Scissors is the spoiler (which is the case in a cycle
and Rock is elected), it is simply in the numbers that Scissors running
drew more 1st-choice support away from Paper than they did from Rock
(and they would be Scissors' voters 2nd-choice votes). That's how Paper
got eliminated in the semi-final IRV round.
With a Condorcet cycle, every method would have an IIA failure, though.
Suppose the jurisdiction used ranked pairs instead, then Scissors
running could still change the election from Paper to Rock.
Since every method has to bite the IIA bullet in a cycle, it's not clear
which way of resolving the cycle is best (in the senses of having
legitimacy and not deterring candidates from running). Some approaches
are better than others (ISDA would be better than something that fails
Condorcet loser), but there's no obvious "best of the best".
-km
[1] With the usual caveats: determinism, neutrality and symmetry, etc.