Indablog

I recently sent a letter to Dave Farber whose Interesting People (IP) list was running a thread about IRV, with submissions from Steve Unger and FairVote’s Rob Richie.

He didn’t post it (not yet, at least) which is unfortunate, since I could really use the PR.

But it was honest and serious, so here it is, with a little touch up.

Hello Dave,

For IP if you wish,

Regarding Instant Runoff Voting…

I’m very familiar with the challenges of managing an IRV interface, having created an online straw poll system that uses one.

Consequently, I stay very alert to debates about the virtues of IRV. My opinion is that other proposals for US election reform deserve far higher priority. They include:

1) mandating the use of paper or “hard” ballots;
2) correcting the travesty of gerrymandered legislative districts;
3) adoption of weekend voting;
4) meaningful campaign finance reform;
5) improved voter education.

Arguing the merits of alternative voting systems is a nice exercise, but it’s important not to forget that the integrity of our system remains damaged at its very foundation… Far too many people have good reason to doubt whether their votes will be counted as intended. And even when votes are recorded properly, pervasive gerrymandering ensures that most of the votes cast serve only to ratify existing power structures.

Beyond restoring trust in the democratic process by fixing the technology used to record votes, my view is that the most pressing challenge for election reform is cultural. As long as American ideology proclaims freedom and democracy as universal goods, the endurance of US political legitimacy in the world depends on cultivating an active, well-informed electorate. We need to practice what we preach. Voter turnout needs to increase dramatically. Voters need to demand better tools: tools that can help them develop a sober understanding of their own interests, and tools that can help them achieve a detailed accounting of how candidates for office intend to advance those interests. (The only thing more striking than the lofty idealism embodied in that statement is how close American society could be to achieving those goals through better application of the tools some of us already have at hand.)

That said, I’m willing to grant that range voting may be “better” than IRV, at least to the extent that monotonicity is a serious concern. Moreover, as a perennial senior judge for a well-established class of artistic performances, I happen to have a great deal of first-hand experience with range voting. I’ve seen it work well in highly controlled circumstances.

But I’m certain any attempt to implement range voting at a public level would prove to be a logistical nightmare, even in relatively small elections. As FairVote’s Rob Richie pointed out, range voting has “no track record of success… for any governmental elections anywhere in the world.” There’s a reason. The learning curve for election officials and for voters is much steeper than its proponents imagine. Note the lack of granularity at popular web-based range voting interfaces like Netflix and YouTube. And I can vouch for the fact that range voting systems are no less subject to “gaming” than any other.

Implementing an IRV election is no piece of cake either. But people are often viscerally ordinal in their apprehension of the world. IRV can capture that information at a social level. So the rise of interest in IRV across pockets of the US provides an opportunity for healthy experimentation. However, the bottom line, again, is that promoting IRV (or range voting, or condorcet) as the best choice now for US election reform reflects a fundamental misdiagnosis of our biggest problems.

You and your readers are welcome to try my site at Indaba.org. It’s possible to rank priorities for election reform here:

http://www.indaba.org/election.php?eid=6

Indaba.org’s ballot mechanism is derived in part from the open-source project funded by FairVote, back when it was called the Center for Voting and Democracy. I’ve added several features, including a consolidated display and interactive enhancements to the ballot.

Here’s a “fun” poll, showcasing the interactive ballot interface:

http://www.indaba.org/election.php?eid=66

Indaba, by the way, is Zulu for “important meeting.” The motivation behind the site is to provide a venue for ranking not only candidates in political horse races, but also values and policy priorities. I make no claim that online straw polls like this one can serve as reliable predictors of public opinion. The number of participants is too small, cheating is too easy, and the self-selected nature of the surveyed population means the sample is inevitably skewed.

The site’s real utility lies in its potential to help serious participants see opportunities for coalition. On what can people agree? Even if their first choices are wildly diverse, what second, third or fourth choices might serve as grounds for consensus? An IRV interface can reveal this far more effectively than range voting. So I call Indaba.org an experiment in collaborative expression of converging and diverging opinion.

The data I’ve accumulated so far would probably be more interesting to Howard Rheingold than Joseph Zogby. Like most online presidential polls, Indaba.org has been swarmed by members of partisan camps, mostly Ron Paul supporters on the Republican side, and Bill Richardson supporters on the Democratic side. But within those swarms it’s possible to distinguish islands of like-minded sub-groups that reflect the choices of discernable individuals. The trick is making those islands and the relative distances between them easier to spot. New kinds of archipelagoes could emerge.

With more work (and big dose of strategic support) I believe this technology could serve as a venue for a new form of debate. For example, why not invite people to submit questions they want to see answered by candidates in the upcoming presidential election? Participants would then vote to select the top twenty five (or more) issue areas from the list of submissions, using IRV to pick the winning question for each category. The candidates would then be able to answer from an equal footing, with the same opportunity to post text and video responses of pre-established length. Voting participants would then rank the candidates’ responses within each category, using the same IRV interface to reveal the most generally favored answer.

Indaba.org is not likely to get as many voters as American Idol, of course. The rather meaty substance at the site is an acquired taste. But I think it can open up perspectives on how the power of the Internet can serve the needs of a democracy.

Can you help? Suggestions are always welcome.

Thanks,

Craig Simon

Filed under: Development Chronicles