Details re why IRV would not have chnaged result in Lizard vs Wizard race

Instant Runoff Voting (IRV) presumably would have behaved in essentially the same bad way in this election because this race was dominated by the top 3 contenders.

Top-2-runoff and IRV are the same thing in a 3-candidate race, if the voters are the same and act self-consistent. But how solid was the top-3 domination in this race? If 99% of Holloway's votes transferred to Roemer while only 1% went to Duke that would have (just barely) put Roemer in the runoff. However, a split that drastic would have been extremely implausible. Trying for the most-plausible scenario: If all candidates from Holloway (4th) onward were lumped into a single "supercandidate" with

124127 = 82683+11847+9663+7385+4118+4000+2053+1372+1006

votes, then in order for them to put Roemer into runoff ahead of Duke, those 124127 would have had to transfer 80652+X to Roemer, X to Duke, Y to Edwards, and Z failing to transfer to anybody, for some X,Y,Z≥0 with 80652+2X+Y+Z=124127. In practice in the real world, even in simple IRV elections with highly experienced voters, at least about 10% fail to transfer, so I think it is safe to assume Z≥12000. I also think it is safe to assume Y≥15000. Hence 80652+2X≥97127, hence 2X≤16475. So in order to push Roemer into runoff we would have needed a transfer from Supercandidate to Roemer of at least 88890 and from Supercandidate to Duke of at most 8237; this is a 92-8 percentage split. It seems safe to regard a split this drastic as having had virtually zero chance of happening. This completes our argument that IRV would not have changed the result.


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