[python-committers] Vote on governance will happen between Nov 16 - Nov 30

[Chris Jerdonek]

On Tue, Oct 23, 2018 at 10:46 AM Antoine Pitrou <antoine at python.org> wrote:
> Le 23/10/2018 à 18:05, Tim Peters a écrit :
> > The rangevoting site has a great deal of info about all sorts of voting
> > systems.  Over a decade ago, Ka-Ping Yee (who used to be very active in
> > Python development) ran some _visual_ voting simulations on 5 popular
> > systems, which scared him (& me) away from IRV forever:
> >
> >     http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/
>
> Thanks!  This is a great resource.  I agree that IRV looks scary, while
> Approval or Condorcet look reasonable IMHO.

A major problem with approval voting IMO (and range and score) is that
it constrains how voters can express themselves:

If you really like one candidate but your second choice is so-so but
better than the third, do you "approve" of your second choice? If you
do, you'll be helping to defeat the candidate you really like. So as a
voter your hands are artificially tied.

Regarding Tim's point about IRV and third parties, what third parties
in the US *really* want is proportional representation. PR is much
harder to make progress towards here, but still possible.

One reason third parties support IRV is that it can be a huge
challenge even to be "qualified" (i.e. recognized) as an official
party in many states. Some states require parties to get a certain
threshold of voter support at a statewide election (e.g. have a
candidate win at least 5%). Plurality makes this much harder because
of the spoiler effect / wasted vote dynamics. With IRV, the idea is
that parties will be able to see their true support.

Another reason some advocates favor IRV is that it's a special case
(the n=1 case) of single transferable voting (STV). This is a form of
PR that many advocates feel would be a lot easier to take hold in the
US than, say, the party list systems more common in Europe and
elsewhere. Indeed, over twenty cities in the US once used STV in the
earlier parts of the 20th century. (But it was eventually repealed in
all but one city, in part because of its success in electing minority
candidates.)

--Chris