Conaill said:
Yes, but "bottom of the barrel" votes are not as bad as you make them out to be. In an IRV system, this is not even considered until all your previous preferences have been eliminated. If none of the candidates you know and like are going to win, you probably don't have much more interest in the contest anyway.
And, as I noted, you don't have to make them bottom of the barrel if you don't want to. IRV gives the voter more options as to how they wish to express their desires.
If I recall correctly, trying to compare last year's mean with an IRV sum is apples and oranges. In a system that uses the value of the ranking, taking a mean makes sense. IRV ranking are only for what order to count your "yes" votes - each ballot at any time has a value of 1, and taking a mean would make no sense.
Not at all. Your AV does use a ranking system, but there are only two ranks instead of five or ten. And in your AV, each and every item must be ranked. In essence, each item must br ranked as "good" or "bad".
Unless you've gotten into a tie instance, this is mostly true. But only mostly. As you yourself have noted, exactly which you put first or second can make a differece - or else the issue you have with "compromise" candidates would not exist.
I'm not sure why you keep bringing up the compromise candidates. As fusangite has noted, if it isn't your first choice, you've no reason to vote at all for a compromise candidate in your AV system.
That kind of strategy requires extensive knowledge of how the the voting is going to go, and an assumption that the other voters are not also trying to finesse the system. In IRV, attempting to finesse is, as a practical matter, rather likely to get your preferred candidate eliminated.
As for bias against poorly-known products: AV has a bias against poorly known products - they don't get voted for often, just like in IRV. Are you saying that we should use a voting process in which the number of votes you get doesn't count much?
In the Ennies, they've already gotten a huge leg up merely by getting past the judges. How much more help do you think they ought to have? Do we want it so a candidate that only one person knows is as likely to win as a top-selling product? That doesn't sound right at all.
I've been thinking about this "harder to implement" thing. It is true with a physical voting system that IRV is more difficult to implement, as the ballots have to be physically handled multiple times. But this is all-electronic voting, and while it takes time to explain the system, the algorithm for counting ballots is actually pretty darned simple.
The only extra diffiiculty that IRV really poses is this - you must keep an electronic copy of each ballot until voting is complete. AV allows you to toss out the ballots and keep a running tally. But the number of ballots in the Ennies is not high, and the amount of information per ballot is small, so I don't think there'd be major storage issues.
[Edit: I say "your AV" frequently here. That's simply to make it clear which AV system I'm talking about - the one Conaill specifically described - as opposed to any other schemes that might fall under the same general category.]
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