Talk:Rob Richie

message: This article was automatically assessed because at least one WikiProject had rated the article as stub, and the rating on other projects was brought up to Stub class. BetacommandBot 16:05, 9 November 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: WikiProject class rating

message: Besides being written like a resumé, this page's content gives credibility to the CEO of a voting reform advocacy organization.  What it doesn't cover is whether Richie has any experience with public choice theory, or if he has a non-expert fascination.  This is important.  From an expert view, instant runoff voting only satisfies mutual majority, and a lot of the claims made by FairVote and supported by Richie are trivially undermined, e.g. the claim that IRV finds a winner with a majority is true insomuch as every candidate has a majority against some other candidate, except possibly one Condorcet loser.  Qualifying this by citing the mutual majority criterion only raises questions about what majority rule *is*, which is a core question in public choice.  That Richie has testified and written legislation doesn't tell us if he has credible expert knowledge of public choice.  The article needs detail of what he has and hasn't studied and published, or else we're all speculating on his knowledge based on what he's said in public. --John Moser (talk) 03:59, 7 December 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Important to cover what Richie is not 

message: The statement, "election reforms that increase voter turnout, accountable governance, and fair representation, including reforms such as instant runoff voting and the National Popular Vote plan," implies that these reforms increase turnout, accountable governance, and fair representation.  This lacks research, and most current research shows these reforms do no such thing.  Many of FairVote's claims on reducing polarization and negative campaigning, for example, reference Australia as evidence, where the media often claims negative campaigning has gotten so bad it's destroying Australian democracy with toxic polarization. Ongoing research is studying IRV's well-known "center-squeeze effect," and spatial modeling shows it's prone to lean far from representative; but fair representation itself requires some normative ideal, which technically is reduced to spatial modeling concepts, coming down to Black's median voter theorem or Plott's majority rule equilibrium theorem and the concept that an alternative inside a policy core can't be disturbed by one outside the core—more simply, that you can't get consensus for one option (which IRV can elect) if some other options exist which have better consensus (but they may potentially have similar consensus, such that which is *the* consensus is unclear, while it is clear that all other alternatives are *not* the consensus).  Because public elections don't have a quorum, you can always force an outcome by agenda-setting; IRV runs down to two winners, essentially setting the agenda to selecting one or the other.
IRV also discards a group who collect around a non-mutual-majority candidate, entirely, such that if the election is close, they may be able to guarantee a better outcome by voting for a candidate who they don't like, but who they dislike less than the potential winner.  For example, if it's going to be between 49% and 51% Republican voters and a majority of Republicans vote for Trump above the runner-up Republican, then in a group of several Republicans and Democrats, if there's 51% Republican turn-out, Trump wins, and Democrats would be better off voting for the least-bad Republicans in order rather than Democrats; while if if it's 51% Democrat turn-out, bailing out on the risk by ranking the least-bad Republicans first will guarantee a Republican win despite a Democratic majority of voters.  Claims that voters are more free to cast their vote how they want are misleading at best:  IRV suffers the same problems as first past the post, but in a fancier mechanism. The same can be said of party primary elections, selecting candidates who are then pitted together in a national popular vote, requiring that each voter only vote in a single party's primary and so excluding information about voter's choice from the final result.  National popular vote can, theoretically, throw out a candidate who wins a majority of first-choice votes by prohibiting voters from voting for them (e.g. if they want to select their party's nominee yet feel the other party's most moderate candidate fits their own views better, back to the whole spatial modeling thing), thus eliminating them before the final round.  IRV does the same with the Condorcet candidate, who doesn't usually get a majority of first-choice votes.
That's not to say there's a better alternative to single transferable vote; STV is more responsive to a diverse voting body because it can redistribute them to different coalitions.  IRV is STV electing one, which creates exactly one quota-reaching coalition, and voters can only be redistributed to the losing coalition.  That implies STV has this damage as well, to a smaller degree; we just don't happen to have a better alternative at this time (list proportional, for example, makes the election about parties rather than voter choice between alternatives, and party is a synthetic construct that doesn't change the fact that a voter placed their preferences in a particular order).  This is a matter of ongoing research, with everything from STV-CPO and Schulze-STV to methods using an alternate elimination method such as Geller's STV-B, Nauru-STV, and some kind of reverse-Bucklin system; they all have flaws (RNB-STV, which I invented, has amusing flaws that bother me in what should be but in practice probably won't be corner cases, even though as a single-winner method it always elects from the uncovered set).  It converges to its natural consequences in IRV. --John Moser (talk) 04:32, 7 December 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Vague claims