Blue Mass Group

Reality-based commentary on politics.

IRV Senate Poll

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Various good-government types are circulating a petition to establish Instant-Runoff Voting (IRV) in Massachusetts elections.  In IRV, voters rank all candidates and their vote is cast for their highest-preferred candidate among those still eligible, with the last-place candidate eliminated each round.

With a four-candidate Democratic primary for MA-Sen, we can field-test this method on BMG.  Vote for your choice of the 24 possible orders of the four candidates:

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  1. Only in Cambridge would 2nd, 3rd and 4th choices matter…the rest of us have to settle one choice…the field is set, there is no reason to believe it will change. Coakley was first in and will stay. Capuano got the other Congressmen out, so he will have to stay to carry the beltway flag. Pagliuca’s consultants are making too much dough to let him slip away, so they will encourage him to stay the course. And Kkazei has no reason to leave as the race provides him a podium upon which to advance his admirable causes to certain audiences.

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    p>The race is won when the field is set…and the winner is….

    • I agree that none of the four candidates is likely to withdraw, for the reasons you give.  But there is a point to IRV that’s different from the Cambridge election system, and applicable here when there is only one winner.

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      p>I’m the (Cap, Kha, Coa, Pag) voter above.  In an IRV system, my vote will be cast against Pag if he is in the final two, no matter who his opponent is.  In the real world system, if I want to maximize the chance that Pag loses I may have to guess which of his opponents is doing best. For example, if the pre-election poll has Pag 35%, Coa 35%, Cap 20%, Kha 10%, for example, I’m going to cast a tactical vote for Coa instead of voting for my true preference Cap.

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      p>Currently among the BMG electorate Cap is winning outright with 7 of 8 first place votes…

      • it is an interesting exercise but in the real world tactical voting is rare. Most voters just go to the polls and vote their first choice with little thought to second choices or bank shots.

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        p>Considering your example, if Pag is at 35%, we can all pack it in because it will mean someone can actually buy a US Senate seat. He is predicted to spend $10 million dollars of his own. That’s a lot of ads to convince people that a Bain Co. anti-Ted kennedy conservative is really Ted Kennedy incarnate. The question is: just how stupid does Doug Rubin think the public is? and is he right?

      • this Nov, Lowell too. šŸ™‚ LOL

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        p>Still have a lot of work to do to get Choice Voting to pass…like get 33% of voters to SHOW UP so whatever outcome is valid.

    • Ha, due your homework. Currently, 9 separate jurisdictions in the United States use IRV, not including the Choice Voting implementation in Cambridge, with 6 more implementations scheduled by 2011. It’s also used by many, many organizations in the United States, including the American Political Science Association and now the Academy Awards. It’s also used by dozens of colleges, including MIT, Harvard, and Tufts, among others, in Massachusetts. Around the world, it’s used in Australia, Ireland, and other several other countries.

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      p>Also, hundreds of jurisdictions in the United States have two-round runoff systems, including many municipal elections in Massachusetts, including those in Boston. That’s the same exact concept: in the preliminary election you vote for your first choice and if that choice doesn’t make it to the second round, you vote for your second choice in the general election. That’s exactly what supporters of Sam Yoon and Kevin McCrea will do in the general Mayoral election in Boston. IRV is the same idea, only consolidated into a single election to save time and money.

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