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22 Election L.J. 1 (2023)

handle is hein.journals/enlwjr22 and id is 1 raw text is: Original Articles ELECTION LAW JOURNAL Volume 22, Number 1, 2023 © Mary Ann Liebert, Inc. DOI: 10.1089/elj.2022.0016 Open camera or OR reader and 'r 4 : scan code to access this article p . and other resources online. Is Hare (aka IRV and RCV) Better But Not Best? Richard F Potthoff ABSTRACT The Hare voting system for single-winner elections-better known currently as ranked-choice voting (RCV) and earlier as instant-runoff voting (IRV)-has recently experienced sharply increased adoptions and impact in the U.S. Therefore, a detailed examination of its favorable and unfavorable features is necessary. Further, we compare Hare against a different type of ranked-choice voting-Condorcet systems. Advocates of Hare rightly point out that it avoids some serious defects of plurality voting (though so do Condorcet sys- tems). Not afflicting Condorcet systems are many flaws of Hare, including possible failure to elect Condorcet winners; lack of summability; inability to rank candidates at the bottom, below unused ranks; obscuring the strength of a dropped candidate; and dubious recount provisions. We note some unnatural restrictions im- posed by actual or proposed rules governing Hare: maximums on how many candidates may be ranked, pre- vention of recount requests from potential winners, and disregard of skipped intermediate rankings- limitations that may arise from efforts to overcome inherent Hare complexity. Keywords: approval voting, Condorcet system, Hare single-winner system, instant-runoff voting, ranked- choice voting, recount INTRODUCTION T HE HARE SYSTEM FOR voting and elections, in its single-winner version (which is our focus here), also goes by several other names: the alter- native vote; instant-runoff voting (IRV); or, most recently in the United States, ranked-choice voting (RCV). In this article, which examines both benefits and faults of the method, we refer to it as the Hare system rather than RCV, the name most commonly used currently in the U.S. The reason we use the name Hare is that various voting systems besides Hare-including Borda, Condorcet systems, Coombs,2 and others (Felsenthal 2012; Pacuit Richard F. Potthoff is a Visiting Scholar in the Department of Political Science and the Social Science Research Institute at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, USA. 2019; Poundstone 2008)-are also based on a ballot that asks voters to rank the candidates (or other types of choices being weighed). Thus, the Hare system hardly deserves a monopoly on the term ranked-choice voting. In the U.S.,3 the Hare system has enjoyed a recent surge in its adoption and use in numerous jurisdic- tions around the country (FairVote 2021). A recent 'The Borda method is explained later, in the next section. 2Briefly, the Coombs method works effectively as follows, using rounds. Each voter ranks all candidates. On each round, a candidate who has a majority of the first-place votes is elec- ted, if one exists. If not, the candidate with the most last- place votes (among surviving candidates) is eliminated, and the next round proceeds with that candidate removed from the ballots. 3Although the emphasis in this article is on the U.S., the single- winner Hare system is also used elsewhere, as in Australia (where it is called preferential voting) and in Ireland. Our basic results apply wherever the system is used, though. 1