[2429.AB] IRV Amendment, Redux

[anjo]

Still a hard no from me on switching to IRV.

@Of_the_Ages

Rather than shifting the delegate election to IRV, we should simply lay out rules for invalid ballots to be interpreted. The primary (and possibly only) situation where we would likely interpret invalid ballots would be ranked IRV type ballots in an approval election. The exceptionally straightforward way of interpreting those would be to assume the voter intends to approve their first choice and no others. It solves the main problem we’re having with invalid votes.

I agree with the idea of just codifying a rule for mistakenly ranked ballots. It’s a way easier fix than completely switching voting systems (especially when there’s good reasons for why we use AV for Delegate, but I won’t bore everyone here with that again ). However, as Welly already wrote, I think it would make more sense to consider all candidates ranked above RON to be approved, instead of only the first choice:

On their AV ballot, the voter tells us all candidates they would support over RON. In case they mistakenly rank the candidates, the resulting list also declares which candidates they support over RON. So in both cases, the voter themselves, without any subjective re-interpretation necessary, provides us the exact same information. Plus, this would always produce the same list of approvals, whether a voter properly used an AV ballot or mistakenly ranked the candidates (assuming honest voting), so I also don’t believe that voter agency would be subverted with this.