Anthony Lorenzo from the Florida-based "Center for Instant Runoff Voting" supplied comments about Range Voting and Instant Runoff Voting to a Florida radio station. You can read our replies to Lorenzo's comments at this web page: http://www.rangevoting.org/Lorenzo.html Lorenzo, in response to THAT, has more than once accused us of using his comments "out of context." To defuse that claim, we here post his original comments, in full, verbatim. We had in fact already offered to Lorenzo to post them in June 2007 but since he never responded to our offer we did not. But since, in September 2008, Lorenzo _again_ made the "out of context" accusation, and in public, we now post his original comments (whether he wants them posted, or not) in full and verbatim. Lorenzo is quoting snippets from rangevoting.org web pages then replying to them. It hopefully will be obvious which are the snippets and which are Lorenzo's responses: ======== Instant Runoff (IRV) voting system (Executive summary) 1. Range voting is simpler than IRV. (simpler than 1, 2, 3? That is a matter of opinion, and you put this forward like it is data; please....) 2. Range voting is more expressive than IRV. (More expressive than weighing all the candidates you like against each other and determining what order you would prefer them elected? I don't agree. But again, this is one of those opinion things that can't be proven or disproven. However, we do have research on exit polling of San Francisco voters wh found it easy enough to use, the vast majority (over 70%)). 3. Range voting works on every voting machine in the USA, including noncomputerized ones, right now, without modification and without reprogramming. But IRV cannot be made to work on many kinds of voting machines. When San Francisco adopted IRV it screwed up and was unable to announce all nontrivial election results, supposedly for weeks. (IRV works without computer programming too. It was used in 1906 in Florida prior to electronic voting. Burlington, Vermont uses paper ballots and hand counts them. Your assertion that IRV requires software is not accurate. State governments require software and approval of machines, not IRV. Get your facts straight. Second, any machine could have software developed very easily to conduct IRV elections. The idea it can't be done is totally ridiculous.) 4. Adopting IRV will cause voter errors ("spoiled" ballots) to become 7 times more frequent (based on San Francisco numbers). But adopting range voting appears to decrease errors. (Wrong. San Francisco limits voter rankings to 3 choices. We are not following that model in Florida, as it is not as good and has a high number of "exhausted" ballots (ballots where all the choices have been eliminated, and thus a vote can not be recorded in that round from that specific ballot. What do you base your assertion that Range Voting will cause less errors on? Please show some OBJECTIVE RESEARCH DATA to support this claim.) 5. Range voting is /monotonic/, i.e. increasing your vote for somebody can help but cannot hurt them. IRV is not monotonic. (IRV has VERY LIMITTED EXAMPLES of where it fails the monotonicity criterion. What that means is that if you rank your most prefered choice highest, they are more likely to lose. This is IRV's main flaw, though the chances of it emerging and actually happening are so slim. It has NEVER happened in reality.) 6. In range voting, scoring your favorite candidate top cannot hurt either you or him. In IRV, it can hurt both. (Didn't we just discuss this?) 7. With IRV the "Nader spoiler" and "wasted vote" problems are not solved, contrary to pro-IRV-propaganda . Indeed, because of fear of these very effects, IRV voters tend to rank third-party candidates below top (even if favorite) and hence prevent their election, which presumably is why every IRV country is and always has been 2-party-dominated . For this reason IRV cannot attract support from intelligent third-party members. (Again, show some data that supports this assertion, as IRV is not used nationally or statewide anywhere currently. Please provide some data to support this claim. In fact, IRV is immune to tactical voting in theory and most researchers and experts in the field woud say you are wrong about this, so please provide some evidence of such statements.) 8. IRV makes ties and other nightmare-scenarios much more likely; Range voting makes them much less likely. (Wrong. We have a built in mechanism in our language to do a pairwise comparison (condorcet) between the two who tie to resolve ties. Ties are highly unlikely, but surely possible. I am not sure where you say IRV is more prone to ties. What are you basing that on?) 9. IRV is historically more likely than range voting merely to lead to a backslide to plurality voting. (Again, what are you basing this on?) 10. IRV will (in plausible scenarios) elect candidate X in preference to candidate Y, even though based on the IRV votes, Y is pairwise-preferred over X (and over everybody else too) by an arbitrarily-huge supermajority of the voters. This appears to have happened in both the Peru 2006 election (but less dramatically; merely a "55% majority" rather than a "huge supermajority" was thwarted) and the Chile 1970 election (this time with about a 2:1 ratio supermajority being thwarted). (This is possible, but highly improbably and extremely unlikely to occur. Arrow's theorem says no voting system is perfect, including Range Voting and IRV.) 11. Raising a candidate in your IRV vote from bottom to top-ranked can actually /cause him to lose/! (Yes, you covered this in monotonicity criterion. It is POSSIBLE, but improbable to ever occur.) 12. Contrary to pro-IRV-propaganda , pathological IRV elections seem unpleasantly common in practice. Two of the last five Debian elections would have exhibited pathologies had they been held using IRV. (There are 4 cities using IRV currently. I am not sure where you get that they are common practice, first and foremost, or where you see that IRV is a disease-causing system, as it has no ability to transmit diseases. I don't know what Debian means, or what this references.) =====end.