I guess I feel I want to defend Instant Runoff Voting (IRV) if only because it is preferential voting and STV does as well. So when people say that Alaska's special election in 2022 shows that vote splitting occurs under Instant Runoff Voting, I feel I should say something.
My perception is that the Alaska vote had five types of votes - there were other types as well but they were not measured.
In Round 1:
Democrat Mary Peltola 40% of the votes
Republican Sarah Palin 31% of the votes
Republican Nick Bergich 28% of the votes
three parts: 14 percent marked Bergich 1, Palin 2
approx. 7 percent marked Bergich 1, Peltola 2
approx. 7 percent marked Bergich 1 [no back-up preferences].
If more than half the votes had been marked Palin or Bergich 1, Palin 2, then Palin would have been elected after Bergich's elimination. But only 45 percent were.
more than half the votes were marked Peltola or Bergich 1, Peltola 2, so Peltola got more than half the votes and was elected.
Due to the flexibility of preferential voting, voters had the liberty to mix and match their first and later preferences, and about a quarter of Bergich's votes did so, selecting Peltola as their second choice.
Peltola's victory did not mean that vote splitting occurred but only that there was no solid voting block among Republicans to be split.
Lumping the two Republican vote tallies together is what you would do under party-list PR, but preferential voting (IRV or STV) allows votes to cross party line. This is seen as a strength by some and a weakness by others.
You might also say that all women's votes should be used to elect a women and if not that is vote splitting,
or men likewise
or that all inland Alaskan votes should be used to elect someone, and if not, that is vote splitting,
but under preferential voting, the voter sets his or her priorities and ranks the candidates based on his/her own criterion, along or across party lines.
only Bergish's back-up preferences were considered -- Peltola's and Palin's were not.
Preferential voting allows voters - if they want to - to form up a single voting block.
This is only if they want to.
And only some votes are transferred and only under certain circumstances.
if a candidate had taken majority of votes in the First count, there would have been no vote transfers at all, for example.
(note that if a candidate had taken a majority in the June 11 primary, there would have been no election in August.)
when they form up a single voting block, if it has more than half the votes, then that "generally supported" candidate is elected,
if it does not have more than half, that "generally supported" candidate is not successful and a more-widely-supported "generally acceptable" candidate wins.
To say it a different way, there is vote splitting under IRV - vote transfers never establish a candidate who has all the votes. but the most popular candidate wins and that person, to win, must have more than half the votes in play when it happens.
likewise, there is vote splitting under STV. The votes are split (put into different groups) coherently based on the voters' ranking, with the majority of seats going to voting blocks that have majority of votes (as fairly as possible within the possibility of the District Magnitude). The voting blocks are not set by sheer party identification but set by voters when and if the first counts and back-up preferences come into play.
Some might be right when they say that charges against IRV lend support to PR but likely Republicans in Alaska who don't like IRV would see the state go back to FPTP, and then each party just runs one candidate so no possibility of a party block being split. and then they would be in same straitjacket as we suffer ourselves in Canada.
definitely two-seat district gives more possibility of more voters being happy with result, as long as singe voting is used.
MMD means more parties could be represented.
three-seat district means three parties might be represented, and so on.
the more parties represented, the more voters see their party represented,
However PR is about having parties represented proportionally, not just the most parties represented.
unfortunately, Alaska only has one Representative
and mayoral elections must be single winner
and provincial by-elections are single winner.
so unfortunately, there is basic minimum of cases where a single winner is elected.
However in general elections, if we brought in MMDs, we could see some nice PR results in the districts in the general elections.
as long as fair voting was used, such as any system where each voter casts just one vote.
interesting that Alaska selects its candidates through SNTV:
wiki "2022 U.S. House of Representatives election in Alaska":
All candidates run in a nonpartisan blanket top-four primary on the same day as the special election, with each voter casting a single vote for their preferred candidate. The four candidates who receive the most votes [go on to the election]"
Now here we might see vote splitting, for sure.
48 candidates were in the blanket primary in 2022!
The top four altogether took only 68 percent of the vote, the remaining 32 percent sent no one to the special election.
The vote-splitting was such that the Republican party came close to blocking out any Democrat from going on to the general election.
The Republican vote was spread across 16 candidates. Altogether it amounted to 57.73 percent of the votes cast. If that party had run just one candidate, it may have taken a majority of the vote, thus obviating the need for the holding of the general election in August. But as about half the votes of the Begich supporters would not have supported Palin, and likely most Palin supporters would not have supported Begich, and these two were the two front runners, this "main thrust" strategy likely would not have yielded a Republican majority.
But if the Republican party had run just four candidates, if its vote had stayed solid and it had been pretty evenly balanced, it might have blocked any Democrat candidate at all from going on to the August vote.
The Republican party vote if it was only spread across four candidates, might have given each Republican candidate 14.4 percent of the vote.
The Democrat vote was spread across 6 candidates, no one of which took more from than 10.08 of the vote. So it was possible for them to be blocked right out of the election.
So hopefully either Alaska changes the system - perhaps dropping the primary - or Democrats learn to reduce their number of candidates to only four at the most -- cause they would be disappointed if they are blocked out of the general election.
(The city of Portland is voting on adopting STV in city elections - if it is adopted, it is expected that the city will drop primaries and allow voters themselves to vote through STV in a combined primary/election contest, perfectly do-able under STV.
see
[Back to Alaska:]
Altogether, the Democrat party took 17.23 percent of the votes cast in the primary. You would think that was not enough to win the seat but actually the August vote was quite different from the June vote.
For one, 27,000 more voted in the August vote than in the June vote. Not only were the field of candidates reduced to four but more voters voted - perhaps even different voters voted in August compared to June.
In the August vote, Peltola took 75,000 votes, up from the 16,000 she received in the June vote and up from 28,000 received by all Democrats in the primary.
This advance was very likely due to the voters who had voted for Independent candidates in the June vote. These candidates were all dropped (or withdrew) prior to the August vote. These voters amounted to 51,000 votes.
Meanwhile the Republican vote, which was 93,000 in June, only grew to 111,000 in August. while Peltola's (Democrat) vote increased by about 60,000.
So you cannot judge the final result by the June vote.
Alaska vote was reported in:
Al Gross, an independent, was in the top four so was nominated through the primary process but withdrew before the election and that is why only three candidates were in the special election.
Here in Canada, we likely would have no limit on how many candidates run in the election - no primaries for us -
and we would let IRV sort out the most-popular generally-acceptable candidate.
I hope I have convinced you all of the effectiveness of IRV in finding that candidate - as much as any single-winner election can do, that is.
Note:
When Begich was eliminated and when the the 3000 write-in ballots were eliminated, 12,000 of the votes had no marked back-up preference.
These were all moved to the "exhausted" pile.
When the other votes were transferred to Peltola (11,000) or to Palin (28,000), the new candidates' vote tallies showed Peltola having more than half the votes then in play.
Due to the exhausted ballots, the total votes still in play at this point were only 177,000, of which a majority is only 88,500.
Peltola's final tally was 91,000, 51.44 percent of the votes still in play at that point.
Her tally was not a majority of the valid votes cast though.
Note that Palin's final vote tally was 86,000, 48.49 percent of votes still in play at that point.
Her tally was also not a majority of the valid votes cast.
So IRV does not produce a winner who had majority of votes cast but a majority of votes at the point in time, as the number of votes that are still in play thins due to "exhausted" votes.
=========================
Comments