John Oliver explained the Canadian elections for us.
I’ve been having the Canadian Election results running in the background. I don’t quite understand everything that is going on, but I’m hoping everything turns liberal soon.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
CBC and CTV project that Justin Trudeau will be the next Prime Minister of Canada – and his Liberal Party is about to achieve a Majority Government.
Whew.
Don’t get too excited. The Liberals were the ones who set up the policies that allowed the Conservatives to pull off all of their crap. They also supported a lot of the authoritarian bills the Cons created. Liberals are just shills for Ontario-based business interests instead of the Albertain-based ones the Cons legislate for. Bill C-51 will remain. The gutting of the social safety net will remain. The gutting of any science that does not support the goals of oil will remain.
Same shit, different colored neckties. In five years Canadians will start yelling about how corrupt and evil the Liberals are and how we need a change and re elect the Conservatives again despite actually having more that two choices unlike our friends in the USA. Little will change. We’ll remain dumbasses.
Here’s a live stream of CBC’s coverage in case anyone’s interested. Our public broadcaster that Harper attempted to defund.
The Conservatives have lost over 60 seats, and the Liberals have gone from 36 seats to over 180. A truly spectacular spanking and humiliation of the racist tactics from Stephen Harper.
Tomorrow we will have a Canadian Government again.
No more Harper Government.
I’m a bit disquieted by the majority government. That basically means that anything Justin trudeau wants to do will be followed by a hundred and eighty MPs chanting “so say we all” and our country will literally depend on the ethics and wisdom of one man.
…and we just had that, with Stephen Harper. I was hoping for a coalition to keep things balanced, and i’m sad that the NDP have lost seats to strategic voting.
but really, what I say doesn’t matter. I live in hard-line conservative country, where people regularly vote tory even though it’s not a wise decision.
Just got back from phonebanking for my local NDP candidate, a P.Eng who would have been Canada’s first woman P.Eng to take a seat in parliament. Sigh. Strategic voting did us in. :(
It really is unfortunate that the shotgun blast intended for Stephen Harper put so much buckshot into the NDP. The fear Harper hoped to inspire against muslims ended up wrecking Tom Mulcair due to fear of another Harper government. It’s almost an apocalypse for them, and they’re really the closest thing to a true progressive party in Canada.
Never thought a video about Canadian elections would prevent me from letting a contractor in my kitchen go unobserved. Anyway, glad to see that that Canada decided to pee in Harper’s cup, if you will.
Not sure it will be a left-of-center government though.
Italy has a “centre-left” government that’s bringing the War on the Poor to a level Berlusconi would not have dreamed of.
Caitie/Robert, very much so. And it does seem unjust. And some good candidates in that crossfire…
Still, I am sitting here, watching Harper concede. At l long last. And if someone had told me ten years ago he would somehow wiggle past split votes this long, I’m not sure I’d have believed them. And if I _had_ believed them, and had I any idea the kind of autocratic, divisive bullshit that was to come, I might have been tempted to request a decade long medically induced coma, cowardly as that might seem…
And the difference between the Liberals and the Cons winning is I no longer have to pretend to be Swiss or some damned thing when traveling, at least.
CaitieCat, Harridan of Social Justice@6: my guess (see the world politics thread) is that strategic voting wasn’t what did you in. Mulcair’s negative campaign did us in. Mulcair was an excellent opposition leader, but forgot to doff that hat and put on the PM hat for the campaign.
williamgeorge@2: I’m no fan of the Liberals, but to say they’re just like the tories is bullshit on the same level as equating the Democrats and the GOP. The Liberals never muzzled the scientists, and they funded science decently, including stuff annoying to business. When the science was clear, they would take the tiniest possible affirmative step to solve a problem that had been uncovered, trying to “balance” business interests with the survival of humanity on this Earth — but that’s worlds away from just shutting down the lab that did the science.
I don’t have a crystal ball to let me know where the Tories will be. Harper was a force of nature in that party, keeping the wingnuts from being too apparent. The party may find someone new to do that job, in which case perhaps it will come back (though in four years already, I’d be surprised). Or it may implode again, rather like the GOP is doing — but faster since all seats in Canada get competed for, there isn’t the phenomenon that there is in the US of seats that just have no competition at all.
Sorry to hear about the NDP, as I just read their positions on the OP linked page and they certainly sound more progressive than the Liberal party. I As a typically oblivious Murikan when it comes to political parties outside of the U.S., I had never really heard of the party before. But I’m curious; if some of the seats won by the Liberal party had been won by the NDP, would Harper be allowed to retain his seat, even if the Conservative party had not achieved a majority of seats? Could the Liberal and NDP parties combine to choose a leader if their combined districts outnumbered the Conservatives?
Harper was elected in his riding (political unit).
He’s in.
CBC reports that he will resign as Leader of the Party.
Which means that the ‘Conservative Party’ will stage their own leadership election.
The head of the national wing of the independence movement in Quebec also lost his seat (he, not Harper, convinced me to volunteer for the NDP: I’m in his riding).
At the NDP rally on Sunday, a man wearing Bloc Quebecois colours shouted at the collected NDP partisans waiting to enter the theater: “vive la femme voilée, vive la femme violée” — long live the veiled woman, long live the raped woman. The ugly side of nationalism got completely embraced by his party this election, much more openly than in prior elections. They won ten seats, up from four when the writ fell or six at the last election (two had bailed due to the xenophobic turn).
numerobis #14
Well.
That’s mightily ugly.
It’s always been there, lurking under the covers, but it seems to be getting worse. Parizeau (head of the provincial wing of the movement) blamed the anglos and the ethnic vote for the independence referendum loss in 1995. By the 2010, the party under Marois started pointing much more at muslims, and the veil in particular, when she became opposition leader and later premier. At the same time, the movement has been losing adherents; seems the hatred only sells to that 20% or so that in France vote for LePen. Indeed, a couple Bloc candidates got in hot water during the campaign for being pro LePen or pro PEGIDA (which IMO is somewhat worse than unfunny jokes about Auschwitz).
A friend of mine holds the view that we should have these big swings every election. He’s too cynical to think that any of the big parties are significantly better than any other. His reasoning is that you should change out the crooks at the top regularly. The longer they remain in power the better they get at graft, nepotism, and general malfeasance.
Just to be clear: the Liberal party isn’t particularly liberal. They’re centerist at best. When talking politics in Canada you have to denote if you’re a “capital L liberal”, or a “small l liberal” when using the term.
Okay, I did the research I should have done before I posted. For some reason I thought Oliver’s video said something different, but short-term recollection is not my strong suit, apparently. So the party with the most seats decides the leader, which does call for strategic voting. Seems all of our countries have issues with elective mechanics. I’ve always liked the idea of a multi-round election where if nobody wins a majority, you pare off the people under a certain threshold and let everybody vote between the remaining candidates, and repeat the process until one achieves a majority of the votes cast. This would completely eliminate the need for strategic voting because constituencies that are split would eventually pool together to overcome a smaller but less divided constituency, and it would allow sub-constituencies to be measured more accurately in the intermediate results. But of course it is completely impossible, although technology might let it be realized someday (in my dreams).
@18 So “the party with the most seats decides the leader” is only an approximation. The real situation is that in a parliamentary democracy, the government can be brought down by a vote of no confidence. Hence the governing party is the party that can can muster a majority of votes on a confidence vote (or a supply vote, which is considered a matter of confidence).
So the election of the Canadian House of Commons has the exact same basic setup as the House of Representatives elections in the USA, and the same motivations that make life hard on third parties. (i.e. tactical voting is at the level of individual seats, it’s not about the nationwide result). While a two-party parliamentary system is simple (party with the most seats has a majority and can therefore govern), multi-party systems have to deal with the possibility of no party having above 50% of the seats. In this case, there are a few options:
1) Two or more parties who have a majority combined govern together in a strong coalition, or else a weaker agreement. In Germany strong coalitions are the norm, where two parties share government roles. (Sometimes this is the two big parties going into coalition with each other to keep out the fringe parties). In my own New Zealand, weaker agreements have been the norm, where the minor parties agree to support the government but only take minor roles in it.
2) A proper minority government: a single large party, or a coalition of some sort which doesn’t have a majority (often the largest party but not always — in Denmark it’s actually the third largest party at the moment!) tries to form a government. They have no promises about getting support, so it’s going to be a rocky road for them, but they can find the numbers through negotation to pass a budget and avoid a vote of no confidence, it can work. This is standard in Canada when there is no clear majority — there’s no real history of coalitions.
Also, @18, there is a much better solution to the problem of tactical voting. It is called proportional representation — where a party with 20% of the vote gets about 20% of the seats. It seems almost unheard of in the USA but is common elsewhere in the world.
ceesays@5: Coalition governments only put a small limit on the prime minister’s powers. Essentially the junior party can always be extorted by the larger party with the threat of losing power (I know this cuts both ways, but history suggests the smaller party always get pushed around by the larger, possibly because the larger party at least has a chance at winning power in a future election while the smaller usually doesn’t).
Example 1: in Australia, the incumbent conservative party is a coalition of the Liberal Party and the National Party. It has been a stable coalition since 1925, with only occasional brief breakdowns at state level. For all intents and purposes, the Coalition is the Liberal Party with the Nationals providing extra numbers in Parliament in exchange for the occasional policy nod to primary producers.
Example 2: in the UK, the 2010-2015 coalition between the Conservative Party and the Liberal Democrats failed to moderate the Conservative agenda. The Lib-Dems kept being pushed to the right by the Tories and for some reason felt obliged to keep being pushed. Clegg made a terrible mistake in forming government with the Tories instead of Labour, which was ideologically *much* closer to the Lib-Dem platform. End result: the Tories might as well have won office on their own for all the difference the Lib-Dems made to their inhumanely regressive legislation, and at the next election the Lib-Dem vote collapsed from 23% to 8%, which is not all that surprising since they spent 5 years shafting their own voters.
#17 “capital L liberal”, or a “small l liberal” is a “small l” less capitalist or less liberal in the literal sense of the word?
A J Milne @10,
Yeah, I wouldn’t go with Swiss on that one. The biggest party here (SVP) makes Harper look progressive and inclusive. They’re flat-out racist, and proud of it.
Trudeau and the Liberals by a landslide. Harper has already conceded. NDC (unfortunately) in 3rd place again
Proportional representation has its share of problem: you vote for a list, but the party leaders decide who’s on which place on the list, so more often than not you end with lazy, inept or sociopathic politicians becoming lifelong elected officials because they’re always on top of their party list, thus fossilizing elected assemblies.
Plus you can end up with problems like the french Black Thursday: in 1998 the left won a plurality of the vote in many regions, so the right-wingers decided to enter coalition with fascists who then spent the next six years doing all they could to use the regions’ power to fuck up the lives of minorities.
gondwanarama:
Sympathies. And now I’m finding it a bit scary that picking {nation x} more or less randomly should go that way…
Still: USAians, please retain your senses sufficiently at least not to elect Trump, now. We’ve done _our_ bit to make North America slightly less embarrassing. So I’m pleading: don’t screw it up.
For anyone who cares:
1) The NDP used to be Socialists, but in the past decade have been shifting so far to the centre that they’re more Centrist at this point.
2) The Liberals are also Centrist, with left-wing economic policies but half assed support for a surveillance state.
3) A Liberal majority is not necessarily a good thing for progressive folk, because a Liberal minority would have had to cooperate with the NDP to get anything done. The budget wouldn’t have been as ambitious but the final product would have more closely resembled “progressive” than Liberal alone, who have shown a concerning amount of support for some of Harper’s damage. I liked Mulcair’s campaign platform as the contrarian leader. That’s who one ought to vote for if one is anti-Harper: the party promising to undo all of Harper’s shit.
Switching from Harper to Trudeau is like switching from arsenic to Bud Lite — “still technically poison.” One will kill you slower.
The NDP are arguably the most progressive of the big three, but even so they’re nowhere near as progressive as the NDP of 15, 20 years ago. Everyone’s shifting to the centre to make themselves out to be palatable, which leaves us card carrying Socialists pissing on our ballots. We can choose to squander our vote on a fringe party, which with First Past the Post, is as good as spoiling your ballot. Or we can compromise and vote in more god damn Centrists.
I, for one, am tired of apologizing to lower-c conservatives.
numerobis
Maybe it’s my European perspective talking, but to me it seems nationalistic movements always end up being racist. Yes, there probably are a few nationalists out there who are for an ‘inclusive’ form of nationalism, but they are few and far between, and in the end end up being ousted from their own movements by more vocal xenophobes. And it doesn’t surprise me at all that there is a huge overlap between racism and nationalism, both are steeped in an enormous ingroup/outgroup thinking pattern, with a clear hierarchy between both. And then there are of course the people who are not really nationalistic, but use the flag of ‘nationalism’ to cover their racism, because the former is more socially acceptable.
I am not entirely thrilled with the Liberal party majority either, mostly just relieved. But I agree with numerobis @11 that equating a Liberal government with a returned Conservative government is way off-base, even laughable. Under the Conservatives, we had a xenophobic, anti-science, anti-environmental regime that was only going to get worse; the Liberal leadership shows no signs of being any of these things.
I concede, however, that Liberal leader Trudeau showed weakness, in not taking any strong position against Harper’s anti-immigrant fear-mongering. I supported NDP leader Mulcair entirely in this election (although I would really prefer Elizabeth May as Prime Minister), largely on the basis of his principled stand on this.
My only other significant beef with the Liberals is their willingness to support a horrible “security” bill, C-51, which the Harper Conservatives pushed through. This was a sort of “watered-down” Patriot Act, which played on people’s fears, and amounted to all kinds of intrusion into people’s privacy. With any kind of luck, that will at least be weakened (in my opinion, could be done away with entirely) by the new parliament.
But numerobis, I don’t agree that strategic voting was entirely blameless in the NDP losses; in my riding (Kitchener Centre), the NDP candidate was doing just great up until the Liberal surge; my early worry was just that the strategic voting fans (of whom I am not a supporter) might just be right, and that the Conservative would take it through vote-splitting. Turned out, the Liberal took it quite easily; obviously, I can’t know what people would have done without the strategic vote movement (which was quite active here), I can only guess that he rode in on strategic votes.
“the”
Yeah, the strategic voting was what people were telling me over several days of phonebanking, not just a guess. My riding is one over from quoteunquote’s, and we had by far the strongest candidate, but a complete rookie blew us away as the Liberals nabbed the anti-Harper vote.
At the beginning of the election, strategic voting meant voting NDP. That’s why I blame the campaign.
zenlike@28: “nationalistic movements always end up being racist” — I don’t see how it can be any other way really. But the successful parties tamp it down so they get the 5-10% outright racist voters without scaring away the 10-15% I’m-not-a-racist-but voters who depend on plausible deniability; that’s the FN or UKIP. The very successful parties (which the nationalist Quebec parties were) can even appeal to the bulk of people who are deaf to the dog-whistles.
As a Murrican here, who considers Canadians “Kanucks” of the “Great White North”. excuse my disregard of the ramifications and significance of this election, but to me the significant lesson we Murricans should learn is the fact that this was Canada’s longest campaign season EVER, at 78 DAYS. While ours is approaching 78 Months!!
It seems the Representatives in Murrica think their job is to campaign, while writing/debating/passing legislation is trivial, incidental, busy-work. Oliver tried to highlight that difference at the beginning of his skit, yet got overwhelmed by his examination of the contenders in Canadia. So being the Murican I am (Oliver is a Brit) I’d like to rehighlight the campaign season length difference we gots here (instead of lawmaking, they only campaign)
The Conservatives played heavily on xenophobia both before and during the campaign. They went so far as to state they’d introduce a “barbaric cultural practices tip hotline” if they got reelected. The name was in part derived from the ridiculously named Zero Tolerance for Barbaric Cultural Practices Act, which was passed just before the election. The new law was aimed at practices that were already illegal, like polygamy, forced marriage, and so called honour killings. As far as the now never to be seen tip line goes they might just as well have called it the Harass Muslims line, as that’s what it probably would have ended up being.
What always rubbed me the wrong way with the discourse about “honor killings” is that it’s been used by far-rightists to cover under a pretense of principle their intent to ensure that the white men who kill their girlfriend/wife/mom/daughter are less heavily punished than the men of Muslim descent who do exactly the same.
RE: “Barbaric Cultural Practices”
Happily, this one is on the roof. But about a week ago, I quite enjoyed this letter to the editor of the Globe & Mail-
Re.: # 32 “Nationalist movements always end up being racist”
My understanding (I do not live in Quebec) is that the Bloq Quebecois stoked rather than tried to tamp down the racism. This included a horrid ad showing a drop of oil morphing into a niqab. I am disappointed that such strategies apparently increased their popularity. On the other hand, the increase from 6 to 10 seats for this party when comparing the 2011 to the 2015 results masks the fact that their popular vote actually declined by 3 %, from 23 to 20. The fact that they nevertheless won more seats is a consequence of our “first-past-the-post” electoral system, which I hope (but don’t really expect) Mr. Trudeau will change.
#18 @PDX_Greg
The Canadian election system is first-past-the-post voting, where the candidate with the most votes becomes the MP. This is a problem when you have more than two parties: FPTP gives you cases where the winner has 30ish% of the vote (meaning almost two thirds of the voters wanted someone else). How can anyone who understands the concept of privilege consider that a mandate?
E.g. in a previous election, the Greens got ~3% of the popular vote and sent one person to parliament. The Bloc Quebecois (the separatists) got 5% of the vote, and sent about 30. Why? Because the 5% who voted BQ all live in the same 30ish ridings in Quebec (actually, the Bloc doesn’t even bother running candidates outside Quebec). The lesson seems to be that a Canadian has no political power unless her neighbours vote the same way she does.
British Columbia tried to implement a version of the “instant run-off” electoral process for provincial elections called Single Transferrable Vote (STV) by referendum a few years ago. I was upset when it failed because I think it would have eventually positively impacted the democratic process across the entire country. STV does something like what you describe: instead of a single riding sending one MP to parliament, a bigger super-riding sends two. STV allows voters to rank the candidates in their district, and the top ranked two get elected. If you want to vote for a single candidate, you are still free to do so. Someone in BC did a quick analysis of the system using old voting numbers and found out that roughly 80% of the populace would have at least one of their top two choices sent to parliament. That sounds way better than a bunch of MPs with clear majorities, and several who had more votes against them than for them.
re 38:
That sounds reminiscent of arguments for using a “ranking” election procedure. Where, instead of the “pick one” process, voter would rank each candidate by preference. Each candidate gets a total of their rank scores, the one with the lowest rank (1 = “most preferred”) is then declared Winner.
However, also sounds “easier said than done”.
fnord
should Final Score be a simple summation total, or the average of the entire subset?
# 38 @ shikko
One reason for the hesitation to change the FPTP system is that it tends to yield majority governments, which are more stable. This does have advantages, since it is necessary for governments to pass unpopular legislation at times, and they are more likely to do this if they don’t face an immediate vote of non-confidence. This advantage, in my opinion, is far outweighed by the disadvantages. A hard-core ideologue may pursue an agenda which is neither necessary nor desired by the majority, as Mr. Harper just demonstrated.
@25
Proportional representation does not have to be closed-list. You can have open lists, where voters vote for a party and for a candidate (or candidates) in that party. You can have a Mixed Member system, where you have FPP seats offset by compensatory list seats (which can be selected through closed or open lists). And you can have STV, which gives roughly proportional results without any direct reference to political parties at all.
Re: 39
I have heard of another version of the ranked ballot. Electors would rank the candidates (or perhaps just the top three). In round 1 of the counting, candidates are ranked according to the number of first-place choices they received. If nobody has > 50 % of the votes, the # 2 votes for the candidate receiving the least first place votes are considered. If that is not sufficient to put someone over 50%, the # 2 choices of the second-to-last candidate are considered, and so on until a candidate has more than 50 % of the vote. Since the top three candidates usually get virtually all the votes (except for some Quebec ridings where there may be four contenders) it is not likely to go beyond the second count. And, since ballots are still counted manually in Canada, it does not seem terribly difficult to implement and it seems to me would yield results that more accurately reflect the will of the people. But perhaps it is not so simple? Did I overlook something?
joe321@37: indeed, see me @14 and @16. The Bloc has historically tried to tamp it down. Lid was off this time.
There’s a million tweaks on voting for ridings. The main problem is that marking one ballot with just one mark is already hard. No, really, it is, people screw it up *all the time* and then elections observers haggle over the correct interpretation. All the other systems are more complicated.
I’d still be in favor of IRV or STV or something like that, despite the complications: Americans seem to manage vastly more complicated systems, and Canada has a comparably educated populace. It would be nice to be able to register my preference for a marginal party but have my vote slide towards the center rather than risk handing the win to the opposite extreme.
Proportional I’m not so hot about: there’s something about having an actual person actually responsible for your actual geographical area that is quite appealing. Maybe a two-house system with a proportional house and a representational house could be nice.
laurentweppe @ 25
Many countries do use closed lists (with the rankings in the list decided by the the party bosses) in proportional representation , but it isn’t the only way to do it. You can have so-called open lists, where a voter will vote for an individual candidate and the ranking inside the list is determined by the number of votes the candidates will get (the parties get to decide who they will accept in their list long before the election, the voters will decide which candidate to vote).
A problem in the open list method is that parties have an incentive to put some celebrities in their lists to catch votes and sometimes they even get elected, but at least it’s the voters who will decide.
There are two super-huge problems with IRV.
#1: It still doesn’t do away with “strategic” voting (i.e. “vote for someone you don’t actually like, because you believe that your actual preference can’t win”). Suppose that, right now, we cut away all the primaries and moved up the U.S. presidential vote, and just listed all the declared candidates on an IRV-style ballot. Even though something like 99% of Democrats prefer Sanders’ policy proposals to Clinton, a majority of them would still put Clinton before Sanders because (for reasons which are not logically sound, if you investigate them at all, but that’s another comment for another time) they think she is somehow “more electable”. So IRV pretty much automatically shuts out the “little” candidates which its proponents claim are better-served by IRV.
#2: None of the claims made for IRV can be shown to hold unless every voter is required to rank all the candidates. The minute you permit anyone to say “I’m only ranking the candidates I like, and the ones I don’t really like I’m leaving blank”, then IRV can no longer make any provable claims to be better than standard FPTP voting. The math only works out if you can have the full rankings of every voter. No voting system currently in use (at least, of which I am aware) actually requires this (the best one I’ve heard about only permits — not requires — voters to rank their top 5, which sounds great until you hear that that system routinely has elections with 7+ declared candidates), which means that all the extra work of putting IRV into use is just useless theater to make people feel better about a process which has not been significantly improved.
There actually is a voting system which performs significantly better at choosing a single representative for a geographically-specific location, which does eliminate “strategic” voting: approval voting. (That’s where you check all the names on the ballot which you “approve” of — i.e. all the candidates you’d be willing to see put in office — and then the one who got the most checks wins.) It performs notably better than both IRV and FPTP in actual, real-world situations (although there are admittedly situations in which it fails — but there are fewer of them than for IRV or FPTP, and they tend to be heavily artificial).
I think IRV first got its undeserved start as “the voting system which would solve all our problems” when some mathematically-illiterate person either didn’t read all the details or didn’t understand them. It’s long past time to stop yelling about it; in the real world it doesn’t actually have a good track record.
Trudeau has stated that he wants this election to be the last one to use First-Past-the-Post . Granted, that statement doesn’t mean it will actually happen. For me, that was probably the biggest thing any party was promising this time around.
I’ll be writing my local MP and anyone else I can think of (including NDP & Green party) to try to push a change in voting system. I’m sick of having to vote strategically or having my vote only could towards pushing the popular vote %. The riding I’m in has generally been solidly conservative so it’s been very frustrating. They did lose here this time, however.
My prediction is that FPTP is going to survive just fine through this election. That might have been different if it had been a minority government.
Wrong. It allows one to vote for third parties and Sanders, while putting Clinton as your second and third choice. If there is a big split in the vote, it will go that deep. It allows small parties to get some first round votes, which is good for fundraising. It takes away the need to vote tactically for the most electable candidate in round one.
I believe The Vicar’s point is that we’re all idiots who don’t know the math and some people will still vote strategically anyway despite it not being their dominant strategy. Something like that anyway.
We’ll have to ask the people of Australia if that is the case. Their system is an immediate runoff one like described above.
The Australian system works brilliantly — it’s also the system used for the Hugos (and before anyone complains about the voting in the Hugos this year, let’s remember the the Hugo hijacking took place at the nomination level).
I can’t explain it any better than this fantastic cartoon of Dennis the Election Koala teaching Ken the Voting Dingo why he won’t waste his vote on a minor party:
http://koalaland.com.au/dennis-the-election-koala-explains-how-to-vote-in-the-australian-federal-election
Of course, having a great election algorithm does not mean you always get good guvment…
Not the result I was hoping for, but I am not exactly horrified by the result either. I did see a story indicating the cabinet will be gender balanced (http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-election-2015-justin-trudeau-news-conference-1.3280648) as they had promised during the election campaign. Of course, the actual composition of the cabinet is not known yet, but it is nice to know they have once again pledged to do this, rather than completely forgetting about it.
Lesbian Catnip @27:
“Centrist” is pushing it, this round. Here’s a quick sampling of their election platform:
The Liberals do have some stinkers in there, I’ll agree, but this is the furthest I’ve seen them lean Left. It’s a refreshing change, and I hope it encourages the NDP to rush back to the Left to keep themselves separate.
@#49, Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls
Ah, how kind of you to illustrate my point about people not understanding the math behind Instant Runoff Voting, because you obviously don’t. When the votes are actually counted in IRV, each vote only supports one candidate at any one time. The only difference between IRV and normal majority elections is that in IRV, if there’s no immediate winner and the choice your vote currently supports is eliminated, then your vote can be moved to another preference. If your second choice has fewer votes supporting it, then your vote might as well have just listed the first choice only because it will never be counted in support of your second choice.
Let’s break this down for a moment to illustrate why you are wrong about this not still hurting “little” candidates.
Suppose we had an election as stated. Let’s also suppose that, as recent elections have tended to be, the election is “close” — because, basically, the Democrats have been so disappointing and corrupt in the last 3 decades that more people believe there is no point in voting than vote for either major party. (This is true: there are more non-voting eligible voters than voted for either Obama or Romney in 2012.) 51% of the country votes for “A Democrat”, which we will simplify to “Clinton or Sanders”, while 49% vote for “A Republican”. For the moment, let’s ignore these people and presume they lose. (Which actually isn’t safe to assume!)
Now, suppose that people who vote their actual preferences are evenly split, and represent two thirds of Democrats — so one third of Democrats vote “Clinton, then Sanders”, and one third vote “Sanders, then Clinton”. That means that Clinton and Sanders will each receive one third of the Democratic vote on the first count, or 17% of the total vote. (One third of 51% is 17%.)
But suppose that the remaining third of Democratic voters actually prefer Sanders, but have been told by the media that Sanders can’t possibly win — which is pretty much what the media is doing, even though in actual polls of voters Sanders comes out ahead (which is why CNN took down its poll about the second debate; they were claiming Clinton “won” but the poll came in at over 75% for Sanders… but I digress). That means they will vote “Clinton, then Sanders”, thinking that they are supporting both. But those votes will be counted as votes for Clinton in the first round. Voila: even though two thirds of Democrats prefer Sanders, two thirds of Democratic votes go to Clinton. That’s the same “strategic voting” problem which keeps people voting for right-wing Democrats instead of going to the Greens who actually represent them.
It gets worse, though: it is possible to construct plausible scenarios where IRV leads to candidates winning that nobody likes very much. All it takes is for there to be a non-trivial group who have “unusual” preferences…
So, for example, suppose that those 17% of voters who voted “Sanders, then Clinton”? Suppose that instead of all 17% of voters voting that way, 14% voted “Sanders, then Clinton” but 3% voted “Sanders, then anyone but Clinton because I can’t stand her”. Since Democrats make up 51% of the vote, no Republican can get a majority in the first round of the count. The initial count will be 34% Clinton, 17% Sanders, and a bunch of Republicans with various counts no higher than 49%. Suppose that the Republican votes eventually consolidate (as the runoff is calculated, round after round) down to one candidate — Trump. We get 49% Trump, 34% Clinton, 17% Sanders. Since Sanders now has the lowest vote-count, he is eliminated and his votes are redistributed. 14% go to Clinton, 3% go to Trump (who would be listed in “anyone but Clinton” somewhere, and therefore are a higher preference than she is). That puts Trump over the top — he how has 52% of the vote, to Clinton’s 48%.
Note that this happens even though we explicitly started with 51% of the population preferring a Democratic candidate, and even though Trump would lose to Sanders in a 1-on-1 election. We could even have made the Democratic statistical advantage larger, and still had Clinton lose, as long as the people voting for Democrats other than Clinton have “weird” priorities.
(And if you permit people to not list all their preferences? That makes it even worse. Suppose those “Anyone but Clinton” voters had just voted “Sanders” and no second choice. It means that when Sanders was eliminated, those votes would simply be dropped, giving Trump a majority, albeit a slimmer one. 3% of the voters would simply be eliminated, and Trump would have 49% of the vote to 48%, which would mean he had 50.51% of the valid votes, which makes him the winner.)
That’s how the math works. If you didn’t realize it, then no, you didn’t understand it. Whether that makes you “an idiot” or not, well, I’m not going to say.
@#50, numerobis
Nerd of Redhead kindly demonstrated that at least some of you don’t understand the math. And that’s all it takes to make IRV fail — “some” of the voters doing the “wrong” thing, like “strategic” voting. QED.
The Vicar
I have asked this at previous US elections but no one has answered.
It is a totally fantasy scenario:
How would the US System respond if NO ONE voted Republican or Democrat?
Especially when electing president and VP, there isn’t a very straightforward answer. An “electoral college” votes, instead of each of the citizens directly. So, I can cast my “popular” vote for anybody at all, and they can legally ignore whatever that popular vote happens to be, as well as whatever their party happens to want (not likely to please anyone, but it can happen). Because we shouldn’t trust the filthy rabble with such important decisions.
The popular vote is supposed to in some way superficially guide the actual “electoral” votes, but it doesn’t really oblige them to do anything at all. So if by “NO ONE,” you mean none of the electors, then just no. It won’t happen. Electors are generally chosen by the state-level branches of the parties themselves, which of course are heavily influenced by the federal-level parties. However, each state legislature, also composed of Ds and Rs mind you, can independently determine their own process of picking electors, if they wanted to — so technically it’s pretty much “anything goes,” because the way it happens to be now isn’t determined very precisely by the Constitution or other federal laws.
Most states, except Maine and Nebraska, cast all their electoral votes the same way — so all 55 or so of California’s electors will vote the same way, no matter what the popular vote is, meaning that in an important sense there are not even 538 distinct, actual votes cast for the president (which is ostensibly the total number of electors in the college, but they don’t act independently). So, the fact is that the states+D.C. vote for the president, based on what the parties want — not the people, and not even those supposedly representing the people.
So, unless the parties are already stripped of their power somehow, at the federal and state level (a major political revolution of some sort), I cannot imagine how it would ever happen. Much more likely is that the parties retain most of their control but change the fucked up system we use, so you could get some kind of a coherent answer.
But basically, what would happen is this: human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria. That’s what. Then we would probably decide to bomb a few countries, to relieve some stress and punish you for looking at us funny.
I always get a nice giggle reading statements like this literally: the Liberals as a group are standing slightly too close to the NDP, and leaning towards them, which just freaks the NDP out. And yes, they’re standing in a room that’s oriented left-to-right.
Then I think you lack both imagination, and (as does zenlike) relevant knowledge of the real world. It’s certainly always there as a danger (and of course zenlike’s “always end up being racist” is unfalsifiable, for any movement still in existence) – but exactly the same is true of any political party or movement (the South African Communist Party at one stage employed the slogan “White workers of the world, unite”. In the UK, both the SNP (Scottish National Party) and Plaid Cymru (the Welsh nationalist party) are far more convincingly ant-racist than any of the three main unionist parties (Conservative, Labour, Liberal Democrat).
@57: If I understand the US system correctly (and I may not), when you vote for candidate X for president, you’re really voting for the delegates who promise to cast their votes for X. If they don’t do so, your only real recourse is to refuse to vote for them again. So, in principle, all 50 states could elect delegates who promise to vote for, say, Sanders, but when they actually cast their ballots, they do so for, say, Huckabee. I suspect that if that happened people would find it worth their while to riot, but in principle, I think it would be a legal vote.
Confusing the issue further, there are the “superdelegates”. If I understand their role correctly (and, again, I may not), ther purpose is essentially to make sure that the results aren’t TOO democratic. That is, they are there to prevent another McGovern from getting nominated. On the plus side, they’ll likely make things more difficult for Trump. On the negative…well, obviously, their basic purpose is to keep the will of the people from being heard too clearly. That can’t be good in the long run, no matter how convenient it is that they (might) keep Trump out.
@#56, chigau (違う)
Depends on what you mean by “NO ONE voted Republican or Democrat”. Let’s go through the list:
1. Nobody votes. At all. As in “Every candidate gets 0 votes, so no winners can be declared at all”: I’m not sure what the result would be, honestly. I suspect that either the existing government would refuse to step down and would just keep going for another electoral cycle*, or else a new election would be called. This is, however, a total fantasy scenario, because obviously people are going to vote.
*”Acting on what authority?” you ask. On its own, and that’s all that would be needed. Despite claims that the American government acts based on the Constitution, there are a lot of places where our procedures are just as undocumented as those of the British system. For example, even though in theory the federal budget has to be certified by the Comptroller General, this has not been done for decades — in order to make military spending seem less enormous than it is, Social Security and Medicare, which are not actually part of the budget, began to be listed as though they were, which makes the “budget” presented every year not an actual one, and therefore no Comptroller General has been willing to sign off on one since this practice began, which IIRC was back in the late 60s/early 70s. This has not stopped the government from functioning, it just means that a lot of citizen lawsuits over deceptive practices have been nipped in the bud by not providing grounds on which to sue.
2. The usual (approximately) number of votes are cast, but there are no votes for Democrats or Republicans: This would actually automatically indicate fraud, because candidates can vote for themselves, and essentially always do. If the vote count for either the Republican or Democratic candidate (or both) were 0 in any race, it would be prima facie evidence for fraud, and would certainly result in a court case brought by the candidate(s) who got no votes whatsoever, and probably a declaration that the election results were invalid.
2a. Same as #2, but there were no Democrats or Republicans running, somehow: realistically, this does not happen. If there were even a Congressional District with no candidates, the parties would jump at the opportunity and put in a candidate. The only time there is a contest with no candidate from one party, it means that either the other party has such a lock on the district that a loss is automatically guaranteed, or else that the position holds responsibility but no power, which is not the case for national positions. (In local contests, sometimes there are such positions, and nobody runs for office. In that case, the responsibilities of the position are usually forwarded to someone higher up, such as the mayor or some state official.)
3. The usual (approximately) number of votes are cast, but the number of votes for Democrats or Republicans is so small that it adds to less than 1% of the total: according to the rules, then the third-party candidate who received the most votes would be declared the winner. But:
a. The media would certainly refuse to accept this result quietly (unless the winner were a candidate even more in the pocket of the media ownership than the Republicans and Hillary Clinton [7th-largest donor: Time-Warner, who owns CNN — see my mention of the magic disappearing CNN poll above]) and the proposition that the election was stolen would not even be debated; it would be taken for granted like the proposition that after 9/11 we had to respond militarily was taken for granted (even though it was an obviously stupid idea). This lack of perceived legitimacy — even if it had been clear in advance that the Democrats and Republicans were both going to be kicked to the curb — would almost certainly be enough to give an excuse for judges (who are almost always explicitly nominated by one party or the other) to grant standing to the Republican and/or Democratic candidates to challenge the legitimacy of the election, and the legal system would find a way to keep the challenges coming until the election was declared invalid for some reason. (Any reason — even if it meant finally admitting that voting machines in poorer districts are inadequate for their populations, which is brought up and then gets swept under the carpet every federal election.) Basically, the two big parties would yell and scream until one or the other of them was put in place, unless of course the third-party winner was just as much a puppet as they are. And even then they would grumble.
b. In the 1970s and 1980s, and more strongly in the 1990s after Ross Perot acted as an independent spoiler for the presidential election, the Democrats and Republicans have cooperated all over the country to make it as difficult as possible to become a declared candidate without the backing of one of the two major parties. IIRC, in some areas, even write-in candidates have to have submitted various paperwork or else those votes are simply tossed out automatically (that is, “a write-in candidate” is in some areas really “a candidate who declared candidacy too late to get on the certified printed ballot”). The barrier to entry has been made ridiculously high — except, of course, that a party which ran a campaign in the previous election which met certain specific criteria, designed to describe the Democratic and Republican establishments while excluding third parties, are usually permitted to waive certain requirements, making their candidacy easy to declare. (In some towns, including one where I used to live, the local elections are run using throwaway parties which are created just for that election, which act as masks for the actual local political groups, because it permits them to skirt the tax/electoral requirements.) Even in cases where one of the two parties slips up and does not properly declare candidacy, the rules are not actually applied to them — there was a news story in the 2012 cycle in which Mitt Romney’s organization failed to declare his candidacy in some state. If the laws were evenly enforced, he would have been left off the ballot and would have been required to run a write-in campaign — but of course the laws governing elections are really only applied to third parties, not to the Democrats and Republicans, so naturally he was on the ballot in all 50 states.
c. For the Presidential election, as mentioned by consciousness razor above, the electoral college is something of a stumbling block. In most (all? I’m not sure how far the thing I’m about to mention went) states, although the members of the electoral college are theoretically supposed to vote in accordance with the preferences of the voters of the state, in practice there is no legal requirement that they do so, and the members of the electoral college are supplied in most states by party organizations so if a state went to a third party in the presidential election, it would not be surprising for the apparatchiks to vote for whichever of the two main parties had the larger number of votes and pretend that third-party votes were illegitimate. In the wake of the 2004/2008 elections, there was talk about amending state constitutions, which can enforce controls on the electoral college, to require that electoral college votes be cast automatically for whatever candidate wins the national popular vote. The stated goal was to amend enough state constitutions so that the popular election winner would automatically get enough electoral college votes to claim the election. I do not know how far that got, but it is actually a very difficult premise to argue against.
(Incidentally: you often see people claim that there was no real reason for the electoral college. This is not entirely true: in theory, the electoral college system means that calls for a recount are limited, at most, to a single state at a time — a losing candidate in a close presidential race doesn’t need to ask to recount all the votes in the whole country. Unfortunately, since the Constitution doesn’t actually specify that the electoral college votes must be cast in any particular way, the connection is dubious. I seem to recall that there have been cases where the electoral college members voted blatantly against state results.)
If your question really meant “how could someone win the election without being in one of the two major parties”, well, they would have to either be very rich or have a very rich backer — chances are that a candidate without a lot of funding would have no media presence; the “debates” televised by the networks routinely simply do not invite third-party candidates. (No Greens in the last three of ’em, even though they had effectively national presence on the ballot all three times, and no Libertarians when there were Libertarian candidates, either.) Since the debates are — let’s be honest — really just a series of short spoken campaign advertisements, usually with no challenges or follow-ups to statements which do not hold water, that’s a huge deficit of public presence to have to make up by advertising and touring. (And, in fact, even if Biden decided to run after all, at this point, he has already effectively lost by not being present so far for the free advertising which is the debates.)
They would also have the much more difficult task of overcoming the “strategic voting” barrier. As mentioned above, a huge number of voters do not vote for the candidate who best represents their interests (if they did, according to polls, the Greens would have held the presidency since at least 2000) but instead will vote for a candidate who “can win” (i.e. has media backing) and is not a candidate from the party they hate. So: lots of Democratic voters aren’t voting for a Democrat because they actually like the Democrat (polls tend to show that the American public is actually significantly to the left of national-level Democrats), but because they believe that third-party candidates can’t defeat the Republican candidate, which is of course a self-fulfilling prophecy (and one which would not be altered at all by IRV). This perception is encouraged by the media. The problem also exists for right-wing third parties, but to a much smaller extent — the only consistent right-wing third party is the big-L Libertarians, and most Republican voters don’t actually prefer Libertarian policy to Republican policy.
In other words, you don’t get to vote for the president. And if electors do whatever the fuck they want, you still don’t vote for president. You get to vote next time, for some other electors who can also do whatever the fuck they want? Okay, but the system as it is simply doesn’t let you vote for the president. We could change the system, in order to make it an actual, no-nonsense direct election of some kind (lots of options like that, proportional voting or numerous other things would be an improvement), but that’s not the system we have.
So….
“How would the US System respond if NO ONE voted Republican or Democrat?”
It is literally already the case that “no one” votes for a Republican or a Democrat to be president. That’s what happens every time, and the system responds in its absurd but traditional way, by electing a Republican or a Democrat. It’s hard to make any sense out of that, but it is true. People don’t vote for them. The states and D.C. do that, and no one is a state or a federal district. The number of votes such entities can cast is (roughly) based on their population, although it’s generally all-or-nothing for each state, instead of being proportional to what you might have thought were the actual “votes” we all made in a voting booth … whatever that’s supposed to be worth.
In any case, that result doesn’t in fact need to have any particular relation to what the actual population actually wants. As soon as the candidates are determined in the primaries, electors could just as well decide what will happen months ahead of time, by looking at what any (perhaps poorly-designed) poll says then, if they care at all about what the population ever thinks. That has as much relevance and as much of an “official” status in regard to the outcome (i.e., none at all) as the thing you and I do on election day. It does make me wonder sometimes, when I’m feeling especially cynical, what get-out-the-vote campaigns are supposed to be for.
In practice, of course, the parties want the system to continue to work in their favor, so they can’t allow things to become so wacky (not clear how bad it would need to be) that people wake up and decide to do something about it. But apparently people think it’s acceptable enough to do nothing, because I guess it fits in just fine in a “democratic” country where corporations are people and money is speech.
CR@62: IIRC, there was at least one case in the 19th century where one or more of the electors blatantly ignored the popular vote in favor of the person they thought should win (possibly because they provided the best bribe). I can’t remember the details, but it changed the national result. Florida was the state where it happened, of course. Probably more examples out there, but I don’t know the details.
And yes the intent of the electoral college was to avoid “mob rule”, i.e. too much democracy. The original intent was for only the wealthy (property owners) to have the vote.
The Vicar and cr
Thanks.
That all answers my fantasy question.
I don’t get the vicar @ 55. Your complaint seems to come down to saying that if voters vote against their rational self-interest, they’ll contribute to a globally suboptimal outcome. To me, that’s the *strength* of IRV: you have the incentive to truthfully reveal your preferences!
Thanks Vicar, you have convinced me that IRV is not as straightforward as it sounded. There is another concern for countries, such as Canada, that have three main parties: the method would tend to favour the centrist candidates. 90 % of Canadians voted either NDP (20 %), Liberal (40 %) or Conservative (30 %). A person voting Conservative is more likely to designate the Liberal as his/her second choice rather than the NDP because the latter is a bigger ideological leap. For the same reason, NDP voters will tend to designate the Liberal as their second choice. Liberals voters might go either way, though I suspect that in the most recent election, most would have designated the NDP candidate as their second choice. Since that aligns more closely with my political philosophy, I can live with it, but I expect huge resistance from the Conservatives and some from the NDP if Trudeau attempts to introduce IRV.
@#65, numerobis:
You have a certain amount of a point (but I can give you an example which shows that the problems are deeper than that, which I’ll give in a second). But here’s the thing: we already know that people vote against their best interests. This is not something which is rare, it happens constantly. And it happens with both the Democratic and Republican votes; the Republicans vote blatantly against their best interests by supporting people who explicitly say that they are going to screw over the voters, but the Democrats frequently choose “more electable” candidates in the primaries, which inevitably means “has more backing from the very rich, and will therefore behave like a Republican once elected” — look at the Chicago mayoral contest, where Rahm Emmanuel, who most locals disliked and who hadn’t spent much time in the city for years, basically bought the nomination. (To say nothing of the fact that the Democratic Party as a whole has deliberately moved rightward ever since the mid-1980s, meaning that it is now considerably to the right of most of its voters on most major policy headings.) If you’re going to work to reform the voting mechanism itself, then you need to address at least some of this problem, or else you’re wasting your time, just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic to borrow an overused metaphor.
Now, for that extra example. Instead of candidates, let’s suppose we have propositions on the ballot. Suppose there’s some issue which is pretty polarizing — the “pro” side is very pro, and the “anti” side is very anti. Both of those two sides want to take a drastic step — they want to amend the state constitution to impose a punishment for those who are on the other side of the issue. (There are a number of issues which this could be, under the right conditions.) But there’s also the option of changing nothing.
The three options on the ballot are:
A. Amend the state constitution to punish people who do X.
B. Don’t amend the state constitution at all.
C. Amend the state constitution to punish people who do not do X.
Now, people who are Pro-X have the preferences “A, then B, then C”. (Since it’s so polarizing, nobody who wants A as their first choice would choose C over B.) People who are Anti-X have the preferences “C, then B, then A”. (Again, nobody who wants C would choose A over B.) And people who want to leave things alone will either have “B, then C, then A”, or else “B, then A, then C”.
Let’s give those preferences some vote counts. Suppose that 35% of the voting population is “A, B, C”, 34% of the population is “C, B, A”, 20% is “B, A, C”, and 11% is “B, C, A”. (The last two groups only chose reluctantly — they don’t want either A or C, but they have to list preferences, which is why there’s a nearly 2-to-1 preponderance for the listing which is in the order the options appear on the ballot.)
The first round of the count will give 35% of the vote to option A, 31% to option B (votes with the same first preference get lumped together, so that’s 20% plus 11%), and 34% to option C.
Since there is no winner, the option with the lowest vote count is eliminated. That’s option B. The option B votes get shunted to the listed second choices, which means 20% is added to A, and 11% is added to C. The second-round count is, therefore, 55% A, 45% C.
Option A is declared the winner — and it’s a fairly strong win, too, none of this “only won by one percent or less” neck-and-neck stuff. A had a 10% lead over C. (And if the B voters had been permitted to merely vote “B” and have no further preferences, their votes would have been discarded after the first round, which would mean A had 35% of the vote to 34% to C, which means A would have had 50.72% of the valid votes, and would still have won.)
But notice something: if the election had simply been between option A and option B, option B would have won. All of the voters who had option B as their first choice would have voted for option B, as would all of the voters who had option C as their first choice. That adds up to 65% of the vote, a much stronger majority than the one by which A “won”. Nobody voted “strategically” against their best interests, there was no trickery. It’s just that IRV can fairly easily end up selecting a choice which would lose in a straight 1-on-1 contest against another option.
…aaaaand of course I left out a close tag after “do” in option A of the ballot options in that example, so that it’s all bold until nearly the end of option C. Sorry. (I didn’t preview, mea culpa. Arrrrgh…)
The Vicar: if you want to bring up “what’s the matter with Kansas” type arguments, then you are arguing against democracy itself. A good politician can make someone form a set of preferences that is counter to their stated preferences, sure. A voting system that fights that is not a democratic voting system.
As for your example: it’s even possible to construct a cyclic set of preference pairings — who should win then? There are bad cases in *any* voting system, as proved by Arrow. IRV is seen as an improvement to FPTP. Approval voting is also an improvement. All systems have pluses and minuses.
@#69, numerobis:
If you had read what I wrote in that first post about IRV, you would know that there is a voting system which actually does solve this problem. (It also doesn’t suffer from the problem IRV has of being hard to understand. If the U.S. were to try to switch to IRV, half the country would claim the system was rigged because they couldn’t follow the vote-counting, and the other half would still be infuriated that they were forced to rank the candidates they didn’t like, even though the objections are not actually valid.) If we’re going to spend the time and effort necessary to change the vote-counting mechanism in use, then we should choose a system which solves problems and is easy to understand. IRV does neither; the only cases in which IRV is better than the simple-majority-FPTP system we have are very basic.
Oh, and: no, it’s not possible to construct cyclic sets of preferences, unless all the candidates are exactly evenly tied. At every round of IRV, either there is a candidate who has a majority of the votes, or else at least one candidate is removed from consideration entirely. If the number of candidates is X, the number of counting rounds before there must be either a winner or an exact tie* is no more than (X – 1). The fact that you didn’t realize this means you don’t understand the math either. So now we have two people on a highly-intelligent, politically active board, who have demonstrated that they don’t understand how IRV actually works. That’s a strong suggestion that it’s way too complicated to be used in a popular election, where people are not highly-intelligent or politically active. (Can you imagine the average Fox News viewer being told “well, all the candidates you actually listed were eliminated, so your vote no longer counts”? They’d probably grab a gun and go shoot a few government employees just to cool off.)
*Most electoral systems have a pre-determined way of dealing with this situation, so even an exactly even tie doesn’t stop the selection of a winner. (And in IRV, there has to be some such provision — you can’t justify holding a runoff vote. Doing so would be to admit that the whole election was invalid; the whole point of IRV is that the runoff election has already been settled in advance by asking everyone to rank the candidates. That’s why it’s named “Instant Runoff Voting”, after all.)
Vicar, go ahead, show you understand the math. You haven’t shown any inclination of this so far, just casting aspersions against others based on their not understanding that if you make non-standard assumptions, you get bad results. Go fuck yourself.
For cyclic preferences, here’s a cycle: I like A better than B, B better than C, and C better than A. You don’t even need multiple people to have a cycle.
@#71, numerobis:
I have already given multiple examples of cases in which IRV is broken and gives bad results, which can be avoided by using other systems. One of the examples was a straightforward one with no issues, and one of them involved a thing we already know voters do to make elections not work. News flash: I constructed them from scratch because I actually have a grasp of the way IRV vote counting works; unless you can show a way I made a mistake, then yes, I consider that to be proof that I understand the math behind IRV.
So far, all you have done is say things I have already addressed and whine, and apparently have an emotional investment in IRV for some bizarre reason — you aren’t interested in improving voting in any way (because you wouldn’t stick with IRV, you’d go to one of the other alternatives — there are several), nor do you apparently like the standard system in use by the U.S., you just want to defend IRV. I don’t know what your problem actually is, but you aren’t arguing in good faith.
As for cyclic preferences: why are you giving that example in defense of IRV? By definition, IRV would not be able to accept that as a vote; it requires that every voter rank the choices from “best” to “worst”. Earlier you said that I thought you were idiots who didn’t understand the math of IRV. At the time, that allegation was not true.