The right way to read Ranked-choice ballots: not Instant Runoff, but Ranked Pairs-A
Summary: The first of four linked papers A – D which analyze how best to take ranked-choice ballots and choose a single winner. The analysis includes the different incentives each method offers to candidates, causes, and voters, seeking to win, particularly to the tactics of bracketing and strategic nomination; presents examples and proofs of how the different methods perform when voters opinions are described as ranging along more than one political axis; and how the different systems rate against all the various abstract criteria used to assess the worth of election systems. In sum, any tournament method is decisively better than Instant Runoff (also known as the Alternative vote, or the Hare method); and the best of the tournament methods is Ranked Pairs; it is argued that any tournament method better than Ranked Pairs is unlikely to exist, which given its ease of implemen- tation, makes it the best choice if ranked-choice ballots are to be used. Ranked Pairs works whether voters preferences on their ballots are strict, or whether voters are permitted to rank candidates in equal groups. If Ranked Pairs is considered too different from Instant Runoff to adopt, two other runoff methods, the Direct Hybrid and the Benham method, may be used instead.
