IRV Fails Again, Alaska 2022-08-16

Instant Runoff Voting, the form of Ranked Choice Voting most enacted in the US, known for decades to be flawed, has failed again.

The August 16, 2022 special election in Alaska elected Mary Peltola to US House, but more people wanted Nick Begich.

This isn't an obvious conclusion from the top line reported results, so let's dig and see how this happened.

The IRV rounds played out like this, with Begich in third and eliminated in the first round.

	Round 1	Round 2
Peltola, Mary S.	75803	91375
Palin, Sarah	58937	86195
Begich, Nick	54009
exhausted	3304	14626
overvote	236	93
active	188749	177570

But let's look at all the second choice votes, from Peltola and Palin also:

First		Second
73948	Peltola, Mary S.	41424	Begich, Nick
		8447	Write-in
		3635	Palin, Sarah
56669	Palin, Sarah	32551	Begich, Nick
		3197	Peltola, Mary S.
		1214	Write-in
51762	Begich, Nick	25699	Palin, Sarah
		14093	Peltola, Mary S.
		1391	Write-in
3051	Write-in	1075	Begich, Nick
		997	Peltola, Mary S.
		429	Palin, Sarah

Begich was the clear consensus second choice of Peltola voters and Palin voters, and he had a sizeable first-choice vote as well.

When you add it all up, the pairwise preferences look like this:

	1	2	3
(1) Begich, Nick		88212	101500
(2) Peltola, Mary S.	79515		91438
(3) Palin, Sarah	63693	86283

Peltola had good first choice support, but much weaker second choice support, so ultimately more people wanted Begich over Peltola than the other way around.

With no additional complexity and no additional cost, we could have better Ranked Choice Voting that recognizes the democratic principle that if more people want A than B, A should win.

The source code behind this analysis is in https://github.com/brianolson/voteutil/ with the code to parse the Alaska vote data and the program to look for IRV anomalies.

Wait, why do none of the numbers above quite line up? Because each has a different priority for what it means to have 'first' and 'second' choice votes. When counting IRV it's an 'overvote' to cast a first choice vote for two different candidates. When just showing people's preferences for informational purposes it's not a problem. When counting Condorcet preferences it's not a problem, neither is preferred to the other, but they're both preferred to 3rd choice and un-ranked candidates.