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Comment by ChadNauseam

Yep. Actually the behavior of IRV is extremely unintuitive (despite how nice it sounds). Even using very simple models that assume every voter has political opinions completely described by a 2d political compass, prefers candidates that are closer to them on the compass, and that voters are normally distributed around a central point, you get very strange behavior! Here are some diagrams that illustrate the effect: https://rangevoting.org/IEVS/Pictures.html

interestingly, IRV is not even monotonic! It's easy to construct a situation where converting people to have the same ranking as you causes you to get a candidate you like less. (The concave parts of the voronoi diagrams describe areas where this happens.) If you're curious about this, a few years back some friends and I tried to make a video describing this phenomenon: [0]. (Our editing and presentation skills are nothing to write home about but I think the video is interesting.)

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0m7vtt9jXpM

parent ChadNauseam 4 years ago

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