Show HN: RankedVote – SurveyMonkey but focused on ranked-choice voting
rankedvote.coRankedVote is a web app that allows you to run online contests and make decisions using ranked-choice voting (RCV). RCV is an electoral system used in Maine, Alaska, New York City and dozens of cities across the United States.
RankedVote’s goal is to build support for RCV by giving people an easy way to run contests and make decisions online.
Ranking the voting systems: STAR Voting > Approval Voting > Ranked Choice Voting > Plurality ("pick only one") voting.
Ranked Choice Voting is marginally better than plurality voting, but it has problems. The chief defect with Ranked Choice Voting is its non-monotonicity, whereby increasing your support for your genuine favorite can actually hurt their odds of winning. This may be what happened in Alaska [1].
STAR Voting is a slight modification to Score Voting, where you simply score each candidate and are not forced to rank them. You are given the discretion to give multiple candidates the same score if you so choose. STAR is highly expressive and simple to count: just sum the scores.
Approval Voting is appealing because of its simplicity. Both ballots and how they are counted would require only superficial changes versus plurality, such as changing the prompt from "Vote for only one" to "Vote for as many as you like." Approval has a good balance of utility and simplicity.
If we are going to invest time and effort into achieving voting reform, it would be a shame to spend that effort on RCV rather than superior alternatives.
[1] https://electionscience.org/commentary-analysis/rcv-fools-pa...
I just want to make clear for others: this "ranking" is just bhauer's opinion.
Since some people here might interpret it as being presented as objective fact or some consensus opinion.
There are a lot of pros/cons to all of the richer voting systems, usually categorized as approval voting, ranked voting, and score voting, in terms of increasing information.
But there is absolutely no consensus that approval or score are better than ranked. (In my opinion, ranked comes out ahead, and I talk about why in another comment here.)
But most of all, ranked choice is what has the growing momentum, as a lot of reform organizations have concluded it's the best practical solution. But what's most important is that we adopt one of them, and it would be a shame to spend our effort squabbling over which alternative, than giving support to the one that has the most momentum and chance of succeeding now. We're really only even having this conversation now because of the success reform groups have had in promoting ranked voting.
it would be a shame to spend our effort squabbling over which alternative, than giving support to the one that has the most momentum and chance of succeeding now
I think the bigger shame would be to spend so much effort promoting RCV, only to have people become jaded and disillusioned with voting method reform in general when they realize RCVs many glaring problems.
The biggest problem with RCV IMO is that it looks like it eliminates the spoiler effect, but it really only eliminates it in simple cases where the third-party candidates are not competitive. This suddenly becomes very obvious and painful in cases like Burlington, 2009 or Alaska, 2022 where voters were told "RCV is great because you can vote honestly", only to realize post-election that this was entirely false, and that they threw away their votes and let the election go to a candidate they despise.
Trust is extremely important in political movements, and very easy to lose. I fear RCV is going to poison the well for any FPTP alternatives for a long time to come.
> RCVs many glaring problems
But all the voting methods have glaring problems, and every method is going to result in people complaining after their preferred candidate loses but would have won using another method.
RCV isn't going to poison the well any more than other systems. STAR voting and approval voting, for example, open themselves up to the criticism that voting itself becomes a subjective process, which could "poison the well" even more. When people have to worry about what it means to give a 3 vs a 4 to a candidate, or whether to approve 1 or 2 or 3 people?
Ranking candidates is an objectively accurate statement of preference (in contrast to STAR/approval which are subjective), and while instant runoff isn't perfect, it's easy to understand and doesn't result in absurd outcomes or people not understanding how to vote.
You can criticize RCV for sure, but if you want to defend another method, you have to show how its drawbacks aren't even worse.
it's easy to understand and doesn't result in absurd outcomes
I mean, I realize this is somewhat subjective, but "more people ranking a candidate first can cause them to lose" seems like a pretty absurd outcome to me.
I'm not saying approval voting is perfect either, sure it has flaws, but at least it doesn't violate the monotonicity criterion (or a variety of other important criteria that RCV fails to satisfy).
I think this is the important point: some criteria are more important than others in that the societal reactions when one or another criterion is violated are not equal and could engender different outcomes.
If approval voting reduces to bullet voting in heated contests, I don't see that as very bad: to put it crudely, it's just the cost of doing business with that particular voting method, but there's nothing to say the results are compromised as a result. What would be way, way more troubling for the general public is being able to say "but that candidate was the clear favorite, why did the runner-up get the seat?" after the votes are counted. RCV has real, provable problems that will (and have!) create social unrest and a skepticism of the election's results when something like the monotonicity criterion is violated, not to mention the spoiler effect is not completely eliminated under RCV.
Further I believe bounded rationality can be applied here and very many people would still take the approach of filling in more than one bubble even in "strategic" settings, because people aren't perfect rational utility-maximizing agents, and anyway I don't see an acute disadvantage of using approval voting if that's the biggest gripe people seem to have about it.
In short: think of elections in a more 21st-century-Nobel-winner sense, not in a rote 20th-century-econ-professor sense.
"Bullet voting" (voting for only one candidate) isn't usually even a smart strategy to maximize your influence in an approval voting election, despite fairvote.org's claims that it is.
Fairvote lack expertise and lie a lot.
Of course approval voting doesn't reduce to bullet voting, for the same reason tactical plurality voting (the status quo) isn't honest. Green supporters voting Democrat for instance.
https://www.rangevoting.org/BulletVoting
Do you have examples of 'RCV has real, provable problems that will (and have!) create social unrest"'?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Burlington_mayoral_electi...
Approval also doesn't violate favorite betrayer, which RCV does.
From a voter perspective, monotonicity and favorite betrayer seem to be two of the most important factors when determining "absurd outcomes." At least in my opinion.
> but "more people ranking a candidate first can cause them to lose" seems like a pretty absurd outcome to me.
It sure does seem absurd, and so thankfully there's no case where RCV does that! :)
There seems to be a lot of misinformation thrown around about this, where people seem to be conflating different issues.
I'm not sure what your source is, but you might be misunderstanding the Favorite Betrayal Criterion... which seems counterintuitive at first but isn't really. There's a lot of noise made about the fact that moving a non-preferred candidate higher than your preferred candidate can help your preferred candidate to win... but it's actually because you're ranking your preferred candidate's main opponent even lower in the process. And also it's basically impossible to do strategically because you'd need to know how everybody else voted first.
End of story, there's nothing absurd about cadidate A winning, but if some people downranked candidate A from 2nd to 3rd rank, then that candidate would lose.
"more people ranking a candidate first can cause them to lose"
https://electionscience.org/library/monotonicity/ has examples of exactly that.
The normalization error, what you are calling subjectivity, is already accounted for in VSE calculations.
Score voting methods like star voting and approval voting are objectively superior.
https://electionscience.github.io/vse-sim/VSEbasic/
> The normalization error, what you are calling subjectivity, is already accounted for in VSE calculations.
I’d love to see an actual paper of the methodology of VSE (the FAQ is less complete than I would like, but helpful in that it shows lots of problems – for instance, while the brief description claims VSE tests elections with “voters who cluster on issues in a realistic way”, none of the descriptions of the different voter models mentions any tie to any empirical research on how voters actually cluster, instead it simply models three different, apparently chosen because of intuitive/aesthetic appeal, empirically ungrounded, abstract ideals); there are several dimensions of it which seems quite subjective/arbitrary rather than objective, making its conclusions also arbitrary, and, worse, it seems to simply ignore known effects like cultural differences in applying rating systems without concrete grounding (which effects both score-based and limited-ranks systems, but not particularly forced-preference or vote-for-one systems.)
> I’d love to see an actual paper of the methodology of VSE
See the references on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_utility_efficiency
I don't see a problem in the Alaska election. Perhaps I'm missing something? I posted this in a previous discussion but I'll repost because I'm keen to hear other perspectives.
From https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-democrats-win-in-a...
> 40 percent of voters had chosen Peltola as their first choice, 31 percent had chosen Palin and 29 percent had chosen Republican businessman Nick Begich III. Under the rules of ranked choice voting, Begich — as the candidate with the fewest first-choice votes — was then eliminated, and his votes were redistributed to whomever his voters ranked second.
> Unsurprisingly, most of Begich’s votes (50 percent) went to his fellow Republican, Palin. But an impressive 29 percent went to Peltola, and 21 percent were “exhausted,” meaning there was no second-choice pick, and the votes were essentially thrown out. That combination was enough for Peltola to win. While Palin gained more votes from the redistribution than Peltola did, Peltola was starting from a higher total, and receiving 29 percent of Begich’s votes was enough to keep her ahead of Palin. In the end, Peltola received 51 percent of the votes counted in the final round, while Palin received 49 percent.
Sounds fair to me. Some of Begich’s voters expressed a “Begich or nobody” preference. Many Begich voters expressed a “Peltola over Palin” preference. It’s not clear to me why pairwise preferences are meaningful, they don’t encode nuances like the above.
The objection about the spoiler effect is confusing to me. I see that there are certain situations where ex post, you get some weird outcomes where _hypothetically_ ranking your preferred candidate lower would have helped your candidate. But I don't think it's possible to identify these cases ex ante, and I don't see how they can in practice affect anyone's voting strategy. (Though maybe it's enough to get bad press like https://electionscience.org/commentary-analysis/rcv-fools-pa...?)
I think you can spin these technical narratives like "you threw your votes away because, if there had been a head-to-head it would have gone differently". But taking a simple explanation of what happened like the above, it's hard for me to see why the result is actively unfair.
It's not nearly as complex as you're making it out to be. Palin was the spoiler candidate in Alaska. If Palin hadn't run, Begich would have won. Additionally, if Palin > Begich > Peltola voters had "dishonestly" voted Begich > Palin > Peltola, Begich would have won and those voters would have gotten a better outcome for themselves. By honestly ranking their preferences, they threw away their say in the outcome.
Now don't get me wrong, as a Democrat there is a part of me that is happy Peltola won, but this was clearly a pretty messed up outcome given that Begich was the condorcet winner and that Alaska is a very red state. Republicans are right to be upset about the way this election played out.
Now obviously FPTP also has the possibility of spoiler candidates, but at least in that case it's pretty easy to understand the situations in which you might be throwing away your vote. Do you think most of those Palin voters had any idea that they could have elected Begich by voting strategically? Complex, opaque voting systems like this are super bad for democracy IMO.
> By honestly ranking their preferences, they threw away their say in the outcome.
When Begich came out as the loser, every one of the votes he got went to the voter's #2 choice which was either Palin or Peltola (and a surprising 29% of Begich voters had Peltola as their #2 choice!)
The only people who "threw away their say in the outcome" are the ones who didn't rank their preferences. They basically opted out of having a vote if their one chosen candidate didn't win by not making a #2 choice.
It's very clear with ranked choice voting when you might be throwing away your vote, it happens only when you don't specify who your vote should go to if your first pick doesn't have enough supporters. Every single person who selected a #1 and #2 choice had a say in the outcome of that election.
> it happens only when you don't specify who your vote should go to if your first pick doesn't have enough supporters
And your second pick, and your third pick... right?
A big reason for electoral reform is to encourage a wider range of candidates to run, which means voters may be faced with having to come up with a total ordering across a dozen different options.
You seem to be saying that voters who aren't informed enough about their relative preferences for all available candidates, deserve to have their votes thrown away, or at least that voters who can remember an ordering for a list of a dozen names should be given more electoral power than their fellow citizens who cannot manage that feat.
That's maybe not the biggest distortion and potential unfairness in the US right now (with the electoral college and partisan gerrymandering being two aspects that courts openly accept, not to mention other more insidious methods of disenfranchisement) but I think that reform advocates need to be careful not to support the equivalent of "literacy" tests, which have a disturbing past.
> You seem to be saying that voters who aren't informed enough about their relative preferences for all available candidates, deserve to have their votes thrown away
Not at all, if we get to the point where people are having to choose between and rank 50+ different candidates I might agree there's a problem, but a handful of choices simply isn't. In the Alaska election they had just three to rank, since the primary weeded out the most unpopular others right away. There's also nothing to stop someone from bringing in a list of names and ranks compiled ahead of time. No need to keep your preferred ranking in your head. These days you could pull out your phone while in the voting booth, or have a small slip of paper in your wallet, purse, or pocket.
This might surprise you, but many many people aren't terribly informed about the candidates and still manage to cast a vote under our current system. This is especially true for local offices. That subset of the population can continue making poorly informed choices about a few more candidates than usual without much trouble.
I do appreciate that you're looking out for the rights of the illiterate voting population, but there's never been an easier time for illiterate people to get informed. Nearly half of the research into a particular candidate I do these days is in the form of youtube videos and radio interviews. It's admittedly slower than reading, but I do feel like I get a lot of information about a person by seeing and hearing them speak. Come voting day there are already poll workers prepared to assist illiterate voters with casting their vote as well and none of that will change under ranked choice voting.
> These days you could pull out your phone while in the voting booth, or have a small slip of paper in your wallet, purse, or pocket.
You're completely right about the possibility of bringing a slip of paper, and I was probably over-estimating the scale of the burden there. I would like to point out, though, that we really don't want to normalize the idea of people bringing out their phones while in the voting booth, as that seems like a way to encourage vote buying or coercion (even though the victim/voter may have ways to circumvent this problem, and even though phones aren't the only way someone could take a camera into a voting booth).
> This might surprise you, but many many people aren't terribly informed about the candidates and still manage to cast a vote under our current system.
In fact that doesn't surprise me, as I was already aware of this fact, but I see it as an existing limitation of democracy that shouldn't be made any worse. The simpler and less ambiguous the question on the ballot paper, the more of an even playing field there is for all voters. I used to think that to maximize the chances of finding the optimal winner, an election should try to demand that voters enter as much information as possible on their ballot paper, but my view has completely changed on this. Even under FPTP, the election algorithm is being fed with thousands of bits of information, and the output only needs to be roughly 1 or 2 bits of information, so there is no harm in making the ballot papers as uninformative as voters are uninformed (as long as the algorithm encourages honest votes, and combines them fairly).
> there's never been an easier time for illiterate people to get informed.
I agree, but my reference to "literacy" tests was meant to convey the fact that supposed literacy tests have in practice been used as pretences to exclude voters who were likely to vote for a party other than the one administering the test. As such, my objection wasn't that illiteracy itself was a major problem, but that any unnecessarily complicated process could be seen as having a disenfranchising effect, which would undermine confidence in elections even if the effect were not significant, or be used as an argument to prevent the adoption of the reform before it was even used, either by people who genuinely care or by concern trolls. Anyway, for completeness, here is an example of a literacy test issued by the state of Louisiana:
https://www.ferris.edu/HTMLS/news/jimcrow/question/2012/pdfs...
I have a feeling the average voter doesn’t actually have a preference for more than one candidate, much less ranking all of them. The whole appeal of RCV is supposedly to help Third Parties, but that hasn’t really come to fruition. Many voters are partisan, and don’t feel like ranking a RINO/DINO as their second choice. RCV ballots state that you can choose to vote for only one candidate.
People are used to casting ballots for their main choice, and if pressed I doubt most of the electorate would be able to describe the instant runoff process RCV enabled and you would be hard pressed to find a layman able to flesh out all the different scenarios of how their ballot would be counted in any particular close race.
> I have a feeling the average voter doesn’t actually have a preference for more than one candidate
Many voters don't have a preference for the people they vote for now. Many really do tend to fall back on voting for a party, and that option doesn't go away with RCV. I do suspect it'd be better (and easier) for each party to put forward only one candidate in each election, but as long as the list is narrowed down well enough by voting day it's not really a problem. In the Alaska election voters only had to rank three candidates which is perfectly reasonable.
> RCV ballots state that you can choose to vote for only one candidate.
And we should retain the option. Choosing one and refusing to rank the others is pretty much the same as voting against everyone else, or in the case where your one chosen candidate is removed, more like not voting at all. I don't have a problem with letting people make that choice although I have heard it argued that voting should be compulsory. I'm not sure if that'd require a rank for everyone under RCV or not.
> People are used to casting ballots for their main choice, and if pressed I doubt most of the electorate would be able to describe the instant runoff process RCV enabled and you would be hard pressed to find a layman able to flesh out all the different scenarios of how their ballot would be counted in any particular close race.
This is perhaps the biggest problem and it applies to literally any change we make to our voting system. We need to educate the public on how the new system works, or at the very least provide information so that the public is able to inform themselves. I can't speak to how well Alaska made an effort to inform their population about the new voting system, but I will say that there are some very good youtube videos that explain the idea behind RCV pretty well.
Following any change there is bound to be a little confusion, but with time and little effort on the part of the people I'm convinced we'll be just as comfortable with an improved voting system (RCV or not) as we are with the one we're stuck with presently.
The people who picked Begich as their first choice had their second choice counted, but the people who picked Palin as their first choice threw away their second choice. Had the latter's second choices not been thrown away, then Begich would have won.
> The people who picked Palin as their first choice threw away their second choice.
You don't get to rank a bunch of choices and then claim your vote didn't get counted because every one of your choices didn't win the election. People who picked Palin as their #1 choice won against Begich. Their vote went to Palin exactly as they wanted. Palin lost, but the voter who put Palin first voted for the person they wanted and that vote was counted.
Voting for a losing candidate does not mean throwing your vote away or not having your vote counted.
Yes, it does mean throwing your vote away under Hare RCV. People who ranked Begich second had their vote thrown away when he was eliminated.
People who ranked Begich second still had the vote for their #1 pick counted. It doesn't matter who your #2 pick was if your number #1 pick is still in the race. That's the entire point of picking a #1 candidate.
A vote that is counted in the final contest of an election is not a vote "thrown away" even though the person they voted for lost. Voters have to be allowed to pick a candidate who ultimately doesn't have enough supporters to win an election. That's how elections work.
This is simply wrong.
Palin voters didn't get their second choice preferences counted. If they had instead tactically/ insincerely ranked Begich first, he would have won by a 5% majority against Peltola. They were punished by voting sincerely for Palin.
Palin was a spoiler. People who voted for her threw away their vote, period.
Voting for a losing candidate does not mean throwing your vote away or not having your vote counted. People who picked Palin as their #1 choice won against Begich. Their vote was counted and it went to Palin exactly as they wanted.
If you want to argue that there should have only been one republican on the ballot to prevent a 'spoiler' you'd have to take that up with the republican party
There it is, there's the thing they're really railing against. They wanted every Republican voter to vote for all of the Republicans, then all (or none) of the Democrats. Basically turning the ballot into RvD.
But they forgot one crucial thing: people. Even within the party, there are members and candidates others can't stand. And if you're going to give people choices, you have to be prepared for them to make choices you don't agree with.
Do we know for a fact the breakdown of 2nd choices on ballots where Palin was the first choice? If not, you are only speculating.
It seems possible that Palin lost due to voters incorrectly expressing their preferences by not putting a 2nd choice. If that is a routine thing, then it is indeed a problem with ranked choice voting in the real world, but it is NOT a structural flaw as you are claiming.
Yes, the cast vote record has been released, and Begich wins the head to head vs both Palin and Peltota. [1] is a nice writeup on the election (highly recommend the What's Interesting header if you don't have time for the whole thing) and [2] is a link to the released ballot data.
[1] https://electionscience.org/commentary-analysis/rcv-fools-pa...
[2] https://www.elections.alaska.gov/election-results/e/?id=22pr...
Especially since Begich only wins the Condorcet because he's preferable to Palin to Democrats.
In a primary system, Begich doesn't even get to the general. So it becomes Palin against Peltola.
Begich can only win in a head to head matchup in a general election against any single candidate. He cannot beat the field, because he is consistently someone's second choice in the overall field.
Beating everyone head to head is beating the field. The reason Begich wasn't picked by RCV is because he didn't have enough first choice votes. The problem with your analysis is that you are placing more value on a person's first choice than is warranted. You are assuming people care so much about their first choice winning that their lower choices are essentially irrelevant as long as their first choice is in the race. However, this is not necessarily the case. For example, what if someone liked their first two choices equally (or perhaps close to equal), but was forced by the ballot to rank one ahead of the other? That is a very different situation than if the voters did in fact have a very strong preference for their favorite over their second favorite, which is the situation you are assuming. Neither of these situations can be assumed from the data presented on a ranked/ordinal ballot.
With a cardinal ballot such as score or STAR, your argument could potentially hold water because we can glean the nuanced preferences from people's ballots. eg if someone ranked Palin 5, Begich 4, and Peltota 0, that's a very different story from Palin 5, Begich 1, Peltota 0, even though both of those ballots would look identical if they were squished into a ranked ballot format. The second case would support your argument pretty solidly since the voter didn't like Begich much at all, just a smidgen better than Peltota.
For the opposite scenario, consider if this race had been done with a 5 point score/STAR ballot where 40% voters give Palin 5, Begich 4, and Peltota 0, 40% voters give Peltota 5, Begich 4, and Palin 0, and 20% voters give Begich 5. It would be inexcusable not to elect Begich. Even though Begich was not the first choice for 80% of the population, an election like that would indicate such extremely strong support for him that you'll probably be inclined to point out that such an election would never happen in reality and I'm giving a contrived example. Which you're right, I'm not saying this is a likely scenario, I'm simply trying to illustrate how a compromise candidate could in fact be very strong, but RCV will still eliminate them if they don't have enough first choice votes. Placing a premium on people's first choice votes as RCV does is both unwarranted given the data represented on the ballots as well as harmful due to the issues it causes with monotonicity, not electing the Condorcet winner, etc.
If we want to insist on ranked ballots, we should be using a Condorcet method to count them.
Beating everyone head to head is not beating the field. He came in third against the field. He only wins when you eliminate all other choices except one opponent. Peltola beat the field. In a FPTP system, she would have just won.
Democratic second choice votes for Begich only exist because Democrats would prefer him to Palin. They don't want him so much as don't want her. And if they can't get Peltola, they much rather have Begich.
The only reason there's noise about Peltola's win and RCV is because she's a Democrat. Look at all the hubbub being thrown about trying to say Begich should have won. You'd rather the person who came in third in the general win. And don't think people wouldn't complain about that.
STAR is RCV/IRV with extra steps that doesn't scale.
There was a time, not too long ago, that both parties could accept losing an election. I'd like to see that come back.
You're just repeating the same points without engaging with anything I wrote. You're still making the assumption that the first choice votes are the most important, and ignoring the fact that people have other preferences that they marked as well.
> Peltola beat the field. In a FPTP system, she would have just won.
FPTP sucks and does not elect representative winners, that's exactly why we need to get rid of it. RCV is just iterated FPTP and as such, carries a lot of the same baggage and problems (while adding a lot of complexity and other new problems).
> He only wins when you eliminate all other choices except one opponent
No, this is exactly backwards. Begich is the only one in this race that can win without artificially eliminating someone (which is what RCV does by ignoring lots of information on the ballots). Peltota can only win by eliminating Begich as Begich wins in the head to head, in order to get this win lots of votes that voters expressed have to be discarded.
> Democratic second choice votes for Begich only exist because Democrats would prefer him to Palin. They don't want him so much as don't want her. And if they can't get Peltola, they much rather have Begich.
That's exactly the point, the voters farthest to the right prefer Begich to Peltota, the voters farthest to the left prefer Begich to Palin, and there's a few people in the middle who prefer Begich to both. Begich was the best candidate considering the whole field of preferences - admittedly a weak compromise candidate for some, but a strong compromise candidate for others and the first choice for many (and as I mentioned before, we can't know how many consider Begich a weak compromise vs a strong compromise candidate, anything you say about the sizes of those groups is just your personal speculation).
> The only reason there's noise about Peltola's win and RCV is because she's a Democrat. Look at all the hubbub being thrown about trying to say Begich should have won.
For some people, sure, but for those of us actually trying to push for positive change this has nothing to do with democrats or republicans. This has to do with RCV not electing the condorcet winner and having a non-monotonic election.
> You'd rather the person who came in third in the general win. And don't think people wouldn't complain about that.
Yes I would, if they win the head to head vs everyone else. You're still treating FPTP like some kind of gold standard. Sorry but that's not a good metric.
> STAR is RCV/IRV with extra steps that doesn't scale.
STAR has exactly 2 steps, a summation step and then a step to compare the top two winners. RCV is a whole iteration process and thus a lot more complex and a lot less scalable. STAR is also precinct summable, whereas RCV requires tallying in a central location which is another thing which makes RCV much less scalable.
What you don't get the field is everyone. It's not a series of one-on-one competitions, it's a race with everyone in it.
You are trying to redefine "the field" to make it mean something not quite the same.
I'm not disagreeing that FPTP is bad. It forces us into these consolidated party situations. But the field is EVERYONE. At the same time. And you ask the voters, "Which one you like the most?" And that answer, in this case was Peltola. So Peltola beats the field. With a plurality, yes, but no one has a better plurality.
I'm not defending FPTP or treating it like a gold standard. But at the very least, the person who came in last in the general should not win the election. He's people's most second choice because for both groups where he is the second the second choice, it's only because they absolutely do not want the last person.
It's less, "He's a moderate I can live with" and more "At least he's not X". Where X is either a Democrat or Palin.
Republicans wanted a have your cake and eat it too moment. They were the ones who went with this process every step of the way until the second it gave them a result they didn't like. They kinda know that crazy wins primaries. But crazy also loses the general. So they tried to bank on getting Democrats to do the work for them. But the plan failed, because there were enough people that just like Peltola on her own.
RCV/IRV is fine. It's not perfect, but it's far better than FPTP and the results are rarely counter-intuitive.
STAR requires you to give a 0 to 5 to every candidate. The end result of the scores look a lot like RCV but with ties. Not to mention, every 0-n scale system devolves into essentially Y/N as people quickly glom onto the notion that they're the values that matter the most.
You can call STAR "two step" if you ignore the actual voting portion. That's the part that makes people work harder just to essentially rank their preferences.
You make it sound like being the consistent second choice means he doesn't deserve to win, when the opposite is true. Consider a hypothetical country in which 33% of the population is religion X, 33% is religion Y, and 34% is religion Z. Candidate 1 wants the country to be a religion X theocracy, candidate 2 wants the country to be a religion Y theocracy, candidate 3 wants the country to be a religion Z theocracy, and candidate 4 wants the country to have freedom of religion. (Assume all voters would love a theocracy of their own religion, be okay with freedom of religion, and hate a theocracy of a different religion.) Do you want an election system where candidate 3 wins instead of candidate 4?
Assuming absurd scenarios can get you any result you want.
Because in your scenario, all of those people have to prefer gaining their religious theocracy to such the degree that they're willing to lose practicing their religion at all to get it.
It's reductio ad absurdum.
> I see that there are certain situations where ex post, you get some weird outcomes where _hypothetically_ ranking your preferred candidate lower would have helped your candidate.
It's not even that strong -- it's outcomes where ranking your second-most preferred candidate above your preferred one will help get that second-most preferred candidate elected, as opposed to a third one you detest -- if you know your most preferred candidate won't be elected.
Which makes sense, of course. But it's also "cheating" to manipulate the system if those aren't your actual preferences, and it wouldn't even work in practice because you'd have to know how everyone voted in the first place to know if it was worth it.
You're right, it seems fair to me too in this instance.
Of course it works in practice. You just vote for the stronger lesser evil candidate, for the same reason my aunt voted for Biden even though she preferred Warren. This is called compromise strategy.
The opposite strategy would be like if Trump supporters voted for Warren to advance the weaker candidate against their guy.
The same strategy works in any kind of runoff method including instant runoff voting.
What you mentioned is something closed primaries are designed to counteract.
Closed primaries are the reason we have a polarized two-party system.
States with open primaries suffer from the same polarization. I think the root cause of a polarized two party system goes much deeper than that.
What is most interesting to me is the number of exhausted votes. Did those folks not pick a second candidate because they did not want to support either choice as a second, or did they not know how the voting system worked?
It sounds like the real problem here is education, which will be a challenge with any different voting system, and some a lot more so.
It will probably be better the next time around.
‘Sarah Palin Instructed Supporters Not to Rank Candidates’
https://news.yahoo.com/sarah-palin-instructed-supporters-not...
Apparently some were instructed not to make a second choice.
the big problem is that begich was by far the most preferred candidate, but didn't win. and palin voters would have been better off to rank begich in 1st place. the whole thing is a mess.
> I fear RCV is going to poison the well for any FPTP alternatives for a long time to come.
Which, cynically, might be the reason it has achieved the level of adoption that it has so far. We at least have to consider the possibility that the current major parties will only (disingenuously) support reforms that will, in the long run, further entrench their duopoly.
American republicans are consistently against RCV simply because it consistently makes them lose more because there's more broad support for more middle of the road contenders. Before republicans realized they should fight it, and started running a narrative against it, you could have asked any american and they would not have had a notable opinion on voting methods.
Any fight against RCV is purely a republican fight against more equitable and realistic representation for americans. It's not hard to understand, as plenty of schoolkids use RCV every year for school and mock elections. It is strictly better than plurality voting in terms of getting more people elected that more people are at least a little happy with. It by and large results in a more represented public.
If, by some magic, we end up in a world where politics is a utopia and the extremely contrived "issues" with RCV finally are worth caring about, THEN we can move to replace it, which will be easier in an environment that allows more nuance to politics, like RCV does.
For now, RCV is an easy way to get a broadly better political system. It is currently only disliked by like 1000 turbonerds who spend their time making absurdly complicated voting systems to solve ever more contrived voting situations, situations that broadly aren't the problems currently facing the world, and every other opponent is a republican who either believes incorrect partisan rhetoric ("it's more than one vote!") or cynically understands how it will cause them to lose elections and for some reason think that's a bad thing.
You mean when the candidate they wanted to win doesn't?
Oh, republicans are already attacking it because of Alaska
https://washingtonmonthly.com/2022/09/06/sarah-palin-and-the...
As a resident of Alaska I will support any effort to repeal RCV. The state legislature can repeal a ballot measure 2 years after its effective date, so that may happen before the 2024 election.
Just to be clear for others: those who reject Ranked Choice Voting do so because it does not support 3rd party candidates - it encourages strategic voting (due to its non-monotonicity) that locks in to 2-parties again. It thus completely fails to achieve the most important part of reform, and falls below ALL other systems previously mentioned here (including also Condorcet or Proportional Representation systems, where applicable). This is not simply "oh some people like Approval voting a little more" - we are dumbfounded by those who prefer Ranked Choice Voting. STRONG negative preference.
It's also worth considering that the same parties who benefit from First Past The Post would be threatened by a change to literally any other system aside from FPTP or Ranked Choice Voting. Surely that comes into play when voting reform movements are funded. And surely that kind of "conspiracy talk" shouldn't be dismissed in an intellectual forum when there is a very clear path to how these reforms could directly affect very powerful parties.
> we are dumbfounded by those who prefer Ranked Choice Voting.
Hello, I prefer RCV. Reasons:
- it is a stepping stone to proportional representation (achieved by adopting both RCV and multi-member districts), which is much more important than which single-winner voting system is chosen
- you need to be a fellow voting systems nerd to understand when you may want to vote tactically in RCV, so approximately zero people will vote insincerely
- it is really obvious that voting tactically is an option in approval voting, and so lots of people will vote insincerely and this will undermine the confidence in the voting system
- while single-winner RCV may not result in many more third-party winners (we need multi-winner RCV, i.e. proportional representation for that), it will change the kinds of winners for the two dominant parties, which is just as important. This point is always under appreciated.
- RCV has much more momentum behind it
> - you need to be a fellow voting systems nerd to understand when you may want to vote tactically in RCV, so approximately zero people will vote insincerely
I don't think this is true. Consider a hypothetical voter whose sincere party preference order is "Constitution > Libertarian > Republican > Green > Democrat > Socialist > Communist". It doesn't take very big of a logical leap to say "it basically always seems to be a Republican or Democrat who wins, so for my vote to count the most, I should vote Republican > Constitution > Libertarian > Green > Socialist > Communist > Democrat."
> it is a stepping stone to proportional representation (achieved by adopting both RCV and multi-member districts), which is much more important than which single-winner voting system is chosen
There are proportional methods for STAR and approval as well, there's no reason they couldn't be the stepping stones from this perspective
> you need to be a fellow voting systems nerd to understand when you may want to vote tactically in RCV, so approximately zero people will vote insincerely
Yet that doesn't try and stop people from duping voters into eg only ranking Palin, even though RCV is basically the only system where there is practically 0 reason to not rank additional candidates. Your point mostly makes sense but in practice I wouldn't expect high amounts of tactical voting in STAR either for similar reasons. And from another perspective - if someone were to eg bullet vote in STAR to help their first choice win, is that really tactical voting, or just an honest vote/admission that they care so much about their first choice that all other opponents are equally bad? In my opinion, being forced to grapple with compromise would be good for society.
> it is really obvious that voting tactically is an option in approval voting, and so lots of people will vote insincerely and this will undermine the confidence in the voting system
Possibly, although I think bullet voting is much less common than people think it would be. That said, people want to be able to express preferences so I think the best use of approval is in primaries where the top two candidates proceed to the general. Outside of that I'm kind of meh on approval, and if people have to choose between approval vs RCV or approval vs STAR, I expect RCV/STAR to win almost every time.
> while single-winner RCV may not result in many more third-party winners (we need multi-winner RCV, i.e. proportional representation for that), it will change the kinds of winners for the two dominant parties, which is just as important. This point is always under appreciated.
Will it? With RCV the two dominant parties no longer have to worry about the spoiler effect, so there is even less incentive to reach across the aisle and receive influence from a third party than before. Whereas before you might want to take some token talking points from a third party and siphon some votes from them, with RCV you might be able to assume you'll get those voter's 2nd choices for free.
> There are proportional methods for STAR and approval as well, there's no reason they couldn't be the stepping stones from this perspective
Proportional approval voting is extremely confusing (and expensive) to compute the winner, people won’t accept a system that they don’t understand how it works.
> Yet that doesn't try and stop people from duping voters into eg only ranking Palin, even though RCV is basically the only system where there is practically 0 reason to not rank additional candidates.
It’s the first election where people used it so they will learn about that. Also some people might just want to vote for Palin and are indifferent after that. While I would fill out the entire ballot, most people won’t bother, and that’s fine.
> if someone were to eg bullet vote in STAR to help their first choice win, is that really tactical voting, or just an honest vote/admission that they care so much about their first choice that all other opponents are equally bad?
No it does not necessarily mean that, it could plausibly mean that they do have a second preference, but are afraid of giving them points so that they don’t overtake their first preference. Think of a Bernie, Hillary, Trump election where some Bernie voters don’t want to give high points to Hilary, even though they much prefer her to Trump, for fear of her beating Bernie. RCV allows them to confidently vote Bernie > Hillary > Trump and not worry about this problem.
> I think the best use of approval is in primaries where the top two candidates proceed to the general.
I think it would be best to ditch primaries completely and have everyone run in a multi-winner general election with RCV. So few people vote in primaries, so the highly engaged extremists influence the outcome for everyone in the general. Also why do I need to vote twice for the same position, it’s annoying. It would be nice to only need to vote in one election, the general.
> With RCV the two dominant parties no longer have to worry about the spoiler effect, so there is even less incentive to reach across the aisle and receive influence from a third party than before. Whereas before you might want to take some token talking points from a third party and siphon some votes from them, with RCV you might be able to assume you'll get those voter's 2nd choices for free.
It seems like you are talking about two things at once:
1. a major party moderating their position to get votes from the other major party
2. a major party taking a (more extreme?) position to get votes from a third party
When you say “reach across the aisle”, to me that means #1 above, i.e. Democrats and Republicans moderating their positions to appeal to the median voter. I agree that would be good and RCV does encourage that!
RCV doesn’t encourage #2, and I think that’s also a good thing.
I would love a robust multi-party system, but for that we really need proportional representation. Trying to get it with single-winner elections, no matter the system, isn’t a good approach.
> No it does not necessarily mean that, it could plausibly mean that they do have a second preference, but are afraid of giving them points so that they don’t overtake their first preference. Think of a Bernie, Hillary, Trump election where some Bernie voters don’t want to give high points to Hilary, even though they much prefer her to Trump, for fear of her beating Bernie. RCV allows them to confidently vote Bernie > Hillary > Trump and not worry about this problem.
Well that's the whole point I was making. In STAR if they really don't like Hillary but prefer her to Trump, they can vote Bernie 5, Hillary 1, Trump 0. Yes, they've very marginally increased the likelihood that Hillary reaches the runoff instead of Bernie, but in doing so they have ensured that in the runoff their vote will contribute to Bernie over Hillary or Hillary over Trump (depending who reaches the runoff). If they aren't willing to give up even one point on a 5 point scale in order to express that preference in the runoff, I'd argue that they have essentially admitted that their preference for Bernie to win is so strong that it overrides any of their other preferences. It's just an honest vote. It could perhaps be a miscalculated vote if they don't understand the implications of that kind of vote, but if they understand and still vote as such then it's honest.
If anything I consider this an advantage of STAR over RCV. Political polarization has gotten to a ridiculous point and we should be encouraging finding common ground. STAR helps facilitate this kind of dialog on a societal level while RCV implicitly tells people they can have their first choice without needing to find any common ground with other camps. In RCV there is not even the option to have your lower choices counted alongside your first choice in any given elimination round. STAR gives voters the ability to choose whether to compromise or not.
> ranked choice is what has the growing momentum
Using that as justification for why ranked choice should be adopted is circular reasoning.
To the extent that the real victory would be replacing plurality voting, but the current progress is specific to a particular alternative, I don't think it is circular. Of course, it would be a circular argument for which system would be best.
There's no way that it would be a good idea to choose a system (ranked choice) that has more complex rules while having known defects over an alternative, simpler system (approval voting) that apparently (based on Wikipedia's short discussion) lacks those defects and has an overall favorable performance when it comes to resistance against tactical voting. FWIW reading the decision rules for ranked choice puts me off.
Purely in theory, one would probably prefer a system where all voters have to rank all the candidates; in practice, however, all of voting, validating, counting, applying the rules, and understanding the rules is significantly more difficult than approval voting where a candidate's points is simply the number of times a voter has marked their name on the ballot. You can (generally or for more important decisions) amend approval voting with a quorum, minimum percentage of approval, or minimal distance between first and second places without damaging the system with too much complexity, something I cannot even fathom how to achieve with ranked choice.
There are many forms of "ranked" and there absolutely is consensus that the form that constantly gets pushed in the US is no good. It is marketed with lies and doesn't live up to any of its promises, as we just saw in Alaska. It didn't prevent the spoiler effect, it didn't make it safe for voters to rank candidates honestly, and it didn't choose the candidate preferred by the majority. Pretty much any other proposal is better.
I genuinely don't understand why people are so hardheadedly loyal to this one centuries-old poorly-designed voting system. Just because it's the first one they heard of? I don't get it.
If you're claiming there's consensus RCV with IRV is no good, you're going to have to show sources. Because everything I know tells me that's patently false. There's no such consensus in academia, there's no such consensus in the political world, there's no such consensus anywhere.
You say pretty much any other proposal is better, plenty of other people say the other proposals mostly look even worse.
I don't understand why you ascribe this to "hardheaded loyalty" instead of people just genuinely disagreeing with you, and that they have good reasons for it. Honestly, from the tone of your comment it seems like you're the one who's unwilling to seriously consider the alternatives.
> I just want to make clear for others: this "ranking" is just bhauer's opinion.
It's also a non-sensical claim, any voting system "ranking" depends on specifics of the electoral system. For example, larger multi-winner districts using some sort of proportional or Condorcet system are always better that any ranked or approval result in a single winner districts.
No it's not just his opinion, there are objective metrics like voter satisfaction efficiency that back it up.
https://www.electionscience.org/library/approval-voting-vers...
No, because "voter satisfaction efficiency" is just as subjective of a criterion as the voting methods themselves are.
There's nothing "objective" about it. Just because it's a number you can calculate doesn't make it the right number. Some people think it's a good metric for evaluating voting systems, but many others don't, and there isn't even remotely any kind of consensus that it's a good or even useful measure.
Every voting system has some flaws (see: Arrow's impossibility theorem), and Instant Runoff Voting definitely saw its worst-case scenario rear its ugly head in Alaska: A Condorcet winner existed (Nick Begich), he lost, and voters whose first choice was Plain and second choice was Begich could theoretically, retrospectivally, all changed their first votes from Palin to Begich to have him win rather than Mary Peltola.
It's important that I say retrospectively. This was a house race with national coverage, tons of high-quality polling from pollsters with nothing better to do, and it was still absolutely not clear from that polling that Begich would do better than Palin in round 2, or that Palin was likely to beat Begich in round 1. If I had the opinions of those hypothetically strategic voters, and I were completely strategic, and completely tuned into that polling, I still would have voted honestly. The strategy was only apparent after the fact.
Thinking about "defense in depth" against this scenario, we'd be remiss not to mention Condorcet ranked choice voting methods, which always elect a Condorcet winner, and only resort to (game-able) elimination procedures if there isn't one. Not only would that have resulted in a better outcome in Alaska, it would have made the possibility of strategic voting much, much more remote, both because a strategic scenario would be much less likely, and because that strategic scenario would be much less visible before the election.
With score voting, strategies are always available and almost always obvious: just exaggerate your score differences between the most likely candidates. The fact that strategic dishonesty would have helped in Alaska is a fair criticism of IRV, but the real commonness of strategic scenarios in STAR and score are a more primary feature.
>see: Arrow's impossibility theorem
Arrow's theorem only applies to ranked systems. That said, cardinal systems are still susceptible to strategic voting (Gibbard's theorem)
Gibbard's theorem implies "strategy" in a sense (your optimal strategy depends on distribution of other people's votes) which is much less nefarious than many people's intuition on what "strategic voting" implies.
When people think about strategic voting coming from a FPTP context, the strategy they're thinking of is putting in a dishonest vote for a non-preferred candidate because that provides a better chance at matching their preferences than an honest vote. This is not what Gibbard's theorem is about. Strategic voting in cardinal systems, for example, tends to look basically like dynamic range compression and at an individual level generally only "tiebreaks" between candidates that were otherwise fairly evenly matched, while the FPTP strategy of bullet voting a non-preferred candidate is just straight up bad for your preferences.
>putting in a dishonest vote for a non-preferred candidate because that provides a better chance at matching their preferences
This still somewhat exists. For example, with score voting: preferences A>B>C but you really hate C, and he's leading in polls. It might be reasonable to "dishonestly" score B higher. This minimizes chances that C wins, and while it doesn't harm A it does decrease strength of your preference for A>B. "Dynamic range compression" is good way to put it, or maybe "ballot influence conservation": one ballot has fixed influence, and you can either spend it entirely on A/B>C or A>B/C, or any ratio in between.
Yeah, "dynamic range compression" on a score vote does feel a bit dishonest—kind of independently of whether it's actually "strategic", actually.
Personally, this is a major factor in preferring approval over score vote, which requires someone who intuitively "feels", say, a 0.3/0.6/0.7 about candidates to either vote 0/0.75/1 to maximize their vote spread, or give more influence to people who do. Notice that this is not strategic in Gibbon's sense—it is always better to vote 0/0.75/1 than it is to vote 0.3/0.6/0.7—but it's probably more counterintuitive!
Thank you for pointing out how overused "Arrow's impossibility theorem" is as an argument against all voting systems (and therefore often as an argument against all reforms to the current near-worst possible voting system).
I would go further and be somewhat dismissive even of "Gibbard's theorem", since it only shows that an insincere vote can strategically produce a better outcome for a voter if they can identify what that that vote should be, and if they are one of the voters for whom such a strategy is available.
So it doesn't guarantee (as far as I'm aware) that even a single voter (under every possible cardinal voting system) will necessarily have enough information before or during the election to confidently pick some specific insincere vote that will increase their chances of getting the outcome they want.
> I would go further and be somewhat dismissive even of "Gibbard's theorem", since it only shows that an insincere vote can strategically produce a better outcome for a voter if they can identify what that that vote should be, and if they are one of the voters for whom such a strategy is available.
Gibbard's theorem is even weaker than that. It only assures the constructibility of vote sets for which the right "final" votes to achieve a particular outcome are distinct. It does not guarantee that there are any insincere votes which perform better than a sincere vote!
Optimal strategic approval voting with a strict ordering is always a choice between sincere votes, in fact (since adding a vote for a strictly more preferred candidate never hurts your preferences, you can always find a sincere vote which performs better than an insincere strategic vote by additionally voting for all candidates more preferred than the least preferred candidate on the strategic vote).
STAR and Approval have different pros and cons, they are not objectively superior. I think RCV is better, in my opinion.
STAR and Approval both have their own tactical voting problems. If you really like A, are meh about B, and dislike C, it’s clear you should rate A high / give A your approval and rate C low / do not give C your approval. But what about B? It has nothing to do with what you actually think about them, it has to do with what you think their odds of beating C and A are. You want B to do well enough to beat C, but not well enough to beat A. This adds too much distortion to people wanting to express their sincere preferences, which they can easily do in RCV: A > B > C
And, more importantly, RCV is a stepping stone to multi-member district STV proportional voting (plug for https://www.fixourhouse.org/), which is the golden goose; way more important to implement proportional representation than squabble about STAR vs RCV, and RCV gets us closer to proportional representation.
This adds too much distortion to people wanting to express their sincere preferences, which they can easily do in RCV: A > B > C
RCV actually literally has the exact same problem you're describing with voting strategically, it's just subtler and harder to understand. The problem is, if you rank A > B > C, then your subsequent preferences after A only matter if A gets eliminated. If A comes in second place, then your "B > C" preference has no impact, and C may be elected whereas if you "dishonestly" voted for B first you might have allowed B to win.
This is a feature, not a bug.
The point of ranking is not to have your vote redistributed many times, but rather for your #1 preference to go to your preferred candidate.
If your preferred candidate does not win, your vote gets a second chance (or more!) to get counted.
In the case your describing here, the only way that C wins, is that he gets more votes than A or B.
If your preferred candidate does not win, your vote gets a second chance (or more!) to get counted.
But that's not always the case; this is exactly the point I'm trying to make. The whole problem is that your vote only gets a second chance to be counted if your preferred candidate gets eliminated. If your preferred candidate loses because somebody else wins before your preferred candidate gets eliminated, then none of your later rankings affect the outcome whatsoever. This is why you can't actually vote honestly in IRV if you want your vote to count.
Let me try to illustrate this with an example:
Let’s imagine the US switched to RCV before the 2020 election, and Mitt Romney decides to run as an independent. Now let’s look at, say, West Virgina, which is a pretty red state, and went about 70% Trump 30% Biden in the 2020 election in real life
WV Democrats are still going to vote for Biden, and they’d probably prefer Romney over Trump, so let’s say they all vote in that order, but imagine roughly a third of Republican voters in West Virgina like Romney better than Trump, so we end up with this:
45% vote Trump, Romney, Biden; 25% vote Romney, Trump, Biden; 30% vote Biden, Romney, Trump
Romney gets eliminated first, his voters fall back to Trump, and Trump wins. The Democrats all wanted Romney over Trump, but Biden was never eliminated, so their second choice of Romney had no bearing on the outcome. But, what if they’d strategically voted for the “lesser of two evils”?
now we have: 45% vote Trump, Romney, Biden; 25% vote Romney, Trump, Biden; 30% vote Romney, Biden, Trump
Now Romney is a clear winner, he has the majority of first choice votes, so nobody’s second or third choice even matters. So basically in this example, Biden was a spoiler candidate for Romney, and all those Democrats are going to be super disillusioned when they realize that the “it fixes the spoiler effect" and "you can vote honestly” lines are both wrong, and they could’ve had a better outcome if they’d voted strategically, just like in the old system.
That's not quite right. In ranked systems you're saying that your preference of A over B is the same as your preference of B over C. This is often not the case. In fact, this is why ranked systems almost always fail the favorite betrayer and monotonicity criteria. I explain more with examples in a longer post below.
Whether later-no-harm is a feature or a bug is the biggest difference, I think, between people who like STV/IRV and people who dislike it.
You have to consider factors beyond just the decision algorithm — elections must be inclusive, fair, and accurate as well. RCV makes auditing a lot harder due to centralization, the complexity means there is more room for software problems and process problems, and the spoiled ballot rate increases, especially among people who are less privileged. When you look at the whole picture, RCV is probably a net negative.
Approval doesn't have these problems; it's a clear win.
> RCV makes auditing a lot harder due to centralization,
I'd argue that the algorithm is far more complex. It is `while no winner: pop(min(candidates)); reallocate(min(candidates))`. This while loop is quite a problem. Cardinal systems (except STAR) are `argmax(sum(candidates))`, which is actually identical to Plurality. The difference is that Plurality requires a one-hot vector. This algorithm is trivially parallelizable too. STAR doesn't require a while loop but is more complex because it does have 2 phases (which RCV is almost always going to be more than 2 phases given that while loop).
The trivializes of cardinal systems tallying algorithm makes statistical audits also trivial. I just can't imagine the mess we'd be in if what happened in Arizona happened with an ordinal method like RCV. It would be much easier to create a narrative of fraud.
Yea what we need is to get rid of districts. Proportional representation is the only great solution.
Districts are good to make sure there are some local ties between citizens and representatives and not only represantitives from one region remain.
Take the German system: there are district level elections, so that there is one person elected in each electoral district. These get half the nominal seats. Then the other half of parliament is filled up with candidates to match the proportional vote. The fill up is a bit complicated, especially if a party has a lot more directly elected folks than proportionally mandated, which leads to growth of parliament and discussions how that growth can be avoided. (Larger districts and only 1/3 directly elected or not every directly elected candidate really making it or not holding up the exact proportionality or whatever) But it combines the factors mostly fine and avoids many of the problems of the pure systems.
That is one solution, another is multi-member districts
Depends on your tradeoffs.
If you elect, oh, 5 people in each district then your proportionality is still granular to about 17% of the vote in the district (for single member districts it's granular to about 50%, of course). And your districts are 5x as large as single member districts are for the same number of representatives. What it does give you though is better electability for local independents.
With mixed-member proportional you can easily get down to couple-percent granularity while maintaining medium-size districts (typically twice as large as single-member).
This right here is the problem, these things get way too damn complicated for normal people really fast.
You don't think normal people can understand: "Rate this candidate from 0 to 5 stars?" If so, we really need to rethink a lot of how we ask for people's opinions, because this is probably the most common way.
The problem with RCV is there's a big difference between giving an honest opinion and voting tactically.
In RCV it's safe to put your first choice first if either they're an overwhelming favorite to win, or they're so weak they're sure to get eliminated right away. If it's a close three-way election, you might cause your favorite candidate to lose by ranking them first. It's hard to develop any kind of intuition around how your vote will impact the race in these situations -- I think in the long run voters tend to learn that voting for third parties isn't safe, so two parties continue to dominate.
> If it's a close three-way election, you might cause your favorite candidate to lose by ranking them first.
Could you explain that? I can't think of a situation where putting the candidate I want to win as #1 would cause them to lose. Ranking other close candidates as #2/#3 could cause my #1 to lose, but I don't think voting for someone as #1 alone would possibly harm them.
So what I think the parent is referring to is called the Favorite Betrayer Criteria[0]. The short is that there are two forms of the spoiler effect: strong and weak. RCV handles the weak case but does not handle the strong case. I explain part of why cardinal methods handle the strong case in this comment[1]. The truth is that we're far more concerned with the strong case than weak case because from our current position this is the more frequent type of spoiler (and arguably is more frequent in general).
[0] https://electowiki.org/wiki/Favorite_betrayal_criterion
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33111242
I wonder if fixing the "strong case" spoiler actually is NOT what some "spoiler voters" would want, simply BECAUSE they want to spoil for the other party to try to move that party toward where they want it to be.
Probably. But I don't think the public really wants their voting systems to be highly vulnerable to strategic voting. That does just give elites an edge and ends up with less equitable representation.
(strategies exist for ALL voting systems. But not all strategies are equally as bad)
Also, not all "strategies" fit people's intuitive notion of "strategy", which is colored by FPTP having a really glaringly awful strategic incentive for dishonest voting.
Most cardinal systems make it difficult to vote strategically. That's actually what the difference with star and score is about. But this is also why so many in the thread are talking about monotonicity and favorite betrayer. Failing these criteria means your voting system is highly susceptible to manipulation. Essentially allowing candidates to win that shouldn't have won.
> not all strategies are equally as bad
That's an important point. Also, just because a strategy exists in theory, doesn't mean that in practice any voter can confidently find that strategy (since they lack perfect information about how all the other voters intend to vote).
Let's say you have three candidates A, B, C.
A is left, B is center, C is right leaning.
Polling shows that voters are leaning:
- 15% BAC
- 15% BCA
- 25% ABC
- 45% CBA
If everyone voted as they desired, then the instant runoff would be between B and C, with B winning with 55% of votes.
If a subset of C voters instead strategically vote ACB (6%), this would change the runoff to be between A & C, with C winning 60%.
First, a run off between A and C wouldn't have C with 60%. C would have 54%, the 6% of C voters would have to come from CBA. And if A is in the runoff, that 6% stays with A.
These are post facto strategies though. You can only implement that strategy if you can guarantee all of that information. Which you can only do after the election.
The first problem is that polling is an estimate. If you are wrong by a couple of percentage points, the strategy fails. If the results come back 16 (BAC), 16 (BCA), 23 (ABC), 39 (CBA), 6 (ACB), B now has 32 first votes and A only has 29.
Next is getting the right number of people to comply. You could easily just mess it up and have either not enough or too many people cast the strategic ballot. If only 4% or less vote ACB, the plan doesn't work. If 11% or more vote ACB, A wins.
In the end, strategic voting is a bit like voter fraud, talked about way more than is actually done. And implied to be a much bigger problem than it ever could be.
Oh I don't disagree, and am in the strong support of anything that moves away from FPP. The only addition I will make is that these (potentially unfounded) fears is what leads people to continue to vote strategically, such as voting BAC instead of ABC to avoid the potential of C using the strategy.
And just to be clear, this makes sense.
Because the relevant fact here isn't that some CBA voters put A at the front (ACB). It's that they moved B from 2nd to 3rd. So of course, that lessens support for B, so B no longer wins.
People seem to present this as a flaw, when it's reflecting actual changes in voting. And this is basically impossible to do so strategically, because nobody has this level of accurate detail prior to the election.
The only issue is that the (potentially unfounded) fear of strategic voting on the other side leads people to vote strategically in the same FPP manner by voting ABC instead of BAC to avoid C. But I greatly long for anything that moves us from the anti-democratic FPP.
> you might cause your favorite candidate to lose by ranking them first
That's a flawed characterization that keeps getting repeated.
As I explain in another comment below, in theory you could get your favorite candidate to win by further downranking the candidate who would otherwise win. One way of accomplishing that is to move other candidates up higher above your actual preferred candidate.
But in reality, there's no way to know what the exact precise vote breakdowns will be, so voting strategically (lying about your preferences) is impossible in a practical sense. There's no intuition to develop -- just vote your preferences.
It isn't a flawed characterization. It is called the Favorite Betrayer[0] (also known as Strong Spoiler Effect) and has been seen in practice. We should also talk about rank's failure of the Monotonicity Criterion[1][2] because that's relevant here too.
To claim it is impossible in practice is to deny history.
[0] https://electowiki.org/wiki/Favorite_betrayal_criterion
[1] https://electionscience.org/library/monotonicity/
[2] https://electowiki.org/wiki/Monotonicity
> I think in the long run voters tend to learn that voting for third parties isn't safe, so two parties continue to dominate.
The empiricval evidence in countries with long term ranked voting (Australia, say) is that bicameral party systems (only Democrats or Republicans have any realistic chance) wither and die, and smaller blocs have a better chance of survival and impact | influence in the House and Senate ..
Two parties "dominate" in Australia (or rather three parties, which are effectively two - the Nat-Liberals being an Rural-Urban conservative coalition of long standing) but nowhere near the degree to which two parties dominate in the USofA; more importantly minority opinions have gravitas and can sway the major vote - none of this bipolar US Dem-Rep deadlock.
Also it’s not just about the nominal parties that win, it’s the composition of politicians in those parties, and RCV selects for more broadly agreeable candidates.
I think comparing the US to others is often a bad comparison. Most others have coalitions and you'll find that two coalitions dominate. In the US parties act as coalitions. We can see the wide range in opinions from people like Warren/Sanders/AOC compared to those like Pelosi/Biden/Harris. Even in the Republican side you have this massive division, though they've been more effective lately at achieving a party over principle strategy. So two coalitions isn't really any better than what's here in the US because it is in essence the same thing.
They can do that - but the game theory around "don't rate the candidate you don't want ..." stuff is way too complicated.
And if it is not as simple as "Bob got the most votes, Bob won" it's going to get harder and harder to explain exactly what is going on, which is going to get people annoyed and angry.
As long as the result is the same as would have come from first past the post, nobody will care.
> They can do that - but the game theory around "don't rate the candidate you don't want ..." stuff is way too complicated.
I'm not understanding your point. In cardinal systems a non rating is equivalent to a rating of zero. Just like in ordinal systems a non ranking is equivalent to ranking last place.
> And if it is not as simple as "Bob got the most votes, Bob won" it's going to get harder and harder to explain exactly what is going on
This makes it seem like you're in favor of cardinal methods actually. Tallying their votes is pretty trivial. You sum the scores of all candidates and then argmax the totals. I don't think people have a hard time understanding this. It is essentially the same as what happens with FPTP! I mean this is objectively a simpler algorithm than those used by even the simplest ordinal methods.
The problem is not understanding how to rate a candidate but understanding what the ratings will accomplish and what voting strategy should be used to get your intended outcome.
If you're looking to game the system, the the point is to make this hard. The entire point is that we're trying to understand your preference in candidates. That's all that needs to be understood. Moving your preferences around slightly has little effect on purpose. If it had large effects, like RCV has, it would violate the monotonicity criteria and make it likely for the favorite betrayer criteria to fail. Both criteria that RCV fails btw and I think most people care about these criteria a lot, even if they don't fully understand them.
> "And, more importantly, RCV is a stepping stone to multi-member district STV proportional voting"
I agree that proportional representation is a huge deal, but I suspect we can do better than STV by changing what the election results mean. Currently in every system I know of we treat it as a binary choice; a candidate is either a member of the set of candidates who won, or they aren't.
A different way to do it is to allow every candidate who receives some minimum threshold level of support to be elected, but when voting on issues each elected person's influence is weighted by the level of support they received in the election.
This sort of system is compatible with FTPT, RCV, or approval-voting style ballots, but the differences matter less as long as you can say of the vast majority of voters (assuming an omniscient view -- privacy of votes would obscure the actual data) that that voter clearly has a representative in congress, and that voter delegated the same amount of influence to that representative as any other voter. (People who only voted for fringe candidates that don't meet the minimum threshold lose out, but that would probably be rare among people who actually pay attention to politics and aren't casting a protest vote.)
If this were enacted for the U.S. House of Representatives for example, the likely outcome would be that each state would have at least one Republican and at least one Democrat who would wield different amounts of power depending on how popular Republicans and Democrats are in that state. You'd also have Libertarians and Greens and Independents and whatever else. A state might have two representatives after one election and ten after another, and it wouldn't be a problem because influence is the same.
It would be an even greater shame to be stuck with first-past-the-post while we squabble over its replacement.
I vastly prefer score or approval voting over ranked-choice, but I also vastly prefer even ranked-choice over FPTP and will be voting accordingly here in Nevada. We can always adopt score or approval voting later.
Same. "Perfect is the enemy of good" as they say.
I used to be vehemently opposed to RCV; I'm still against it. It's leagues better than FPTP and my hope is that it opens the door for improvements like STAR or anything that can satisfy the Condorcet criterion.
It's not clearly better than FPTP. There are arguments that it might be a little better in terms of choosing an outcome, but it definitely makes auditing a lot harder, has implementation risks due to complexity, and significantly increases ballot spoilage.
When you take all those factors together, I think it's overall worse.
I'm not convinced that instant runoff is actually better than FPTP.
Without tactical voting (and good information to support it) the first thing IRV does (along with most variations that in practice get the label "RCV", though of course this doesn't apply to all ranked methods) is to throw out the compromise candidate that everyone likes.
In the current situation, I am concerned that most people will prefer their particular flavor of theocracy to finding ways to get along (which they probably prefer to anyone else's flavor of theocracy). We already struggle with similar dynamics a bit, but it's the devil we know and I really don't want it magnified.
Even if your technical argument would be correct (it's not), you would be trying to fix the problems of democracy by purposefully skewing the vote away from the desires of the electorate. That's a bad idea because it prevents democracy from working and exposing the leaders to the unfiltered democratic will of the people; so you get unaccountable leaders that can maintain power by gaming the system instead of catering for the interest of the public.
Essentially, any power-mad dictator and authoritarian regime has some variant of this argument. Yes, we love democracy and voting, but we definitely cannot let those kinds of people vote or get elected. You are just espousing the softer version still accepted in some countries of "yes, the voting system is not ideal but it gives our side an advantage for now, realpolitik always trumps democratic principles".
Uh, no. Insofar as "the desires of the electorate" is a thing that exists, I am insisting that IRV sometimes does a piss poor job of picking it. In an election where 90% of the electorate prefers A to B, we shouldn't necessarily be picking A but we clearly shouldn't be picking B (especially with no indication of strength of preference); IRV can, and I think does in some cases that are both dangerous and realistic.
Getting a little more concrete:
Imagine a society split roughly evenly between 3 religions. Let's say 35% follow religion A, 30% follow religion B, 30% follow C, the remaining 5% belong to other religions or no religion. Approximately everyone with a religion (in our model; reality is more complicated but not sufficiently to make things inapplicable) prefers that society be organized as a theocracy according to their religion, would sufficiently accept secular tolerance, and violently opposes living under another religion's theocracy.
In this imaginary society, what is "the desire of the electorate"?
If everyone votes their honest maximal preference then the plurality says Theocracy A, which is violently opposed by 65% of the population! Picking secular tolerance over Theocracy A is not just something I (probably) prefer from the outside, but is actually preferred by the vast majority of the population over what IRV would pick!
I don't follow your example. If the religious vote according to their genuine preferences, they would pick their brand of theocracy as the first option and the secular option as the second. IRV would then eliminate two theocracies in the first round and then secularism would win by a landslide in the instant run-off.
Yes, there are games which can be played that increase the chances of some minority group in the second round, for example not listing secularism in the hope that it won't make it to the runoff. But it's a dangerous game of chicken for which the optimal strategy becomes apparent only after the results are tabulated. Alaska is a good example where even with excelent information and pooling data the Palin voters were stil unable to coordinate to skew the results. The existence of that risk is heaven and earth compared to an FPTP election which pretty much guarantees theocracy in your example.
> IRV would then eliminate two theocracies in the first round
Either I failed to communicate the situation I intended or one of us is very wrong about how IRV works.
Reducing the society to 20 people to simplify the proper language a little: We have 7 ballots that start "A;S;...", 6 ballots that start "B;S;...", 6 ballots that start "C;S;...", and one ballot that starts with "S". IRV considers the options in first place, sees that S is the least (only one person ranked it first), and eliminates that option. Which theocracy is picked will depend on things further down the list, but it will never be secularism. In the best case it will pick A, which would lose to S 13:7 in a head to head vote.
If we believe that "the appropriate compromise" between people with genuine disagreement will typically not be anyone's first choice, IRV specifically systematically excludes that appropriate compromise.
> FPTP election [...] pretty much guarantees theocracy in your example
Yes, FPTP doesn't fare better here mechanically. The advantage of FPTP (which, to be clear, I still think is terrible) is that most voters understand that they need to vote strategically and understand how to do that. IRV is often sold on removing the need to vote strategically, and it does not do that, while making the correct strategic choice more complicated than "the better of the front runners".
Sorry, I got confused about the example, you are of course correct, it's a basic center squeeze.
The IRV case here is simply a cheaper way to organize a delayed runoff; voters are usually adept at understanding the implications of strategic voting, as long as it's framed correctly: in case your preferred option does not make it to the second round, would you still go to vote, and which would be your other choice? In Europe there is a long tradition for the two round delayed runoff, but it's certainly not presented to the voters as "you can chose anybody in the order of preference and it will be magically solved by the system".
Two round is in almost any case superior to FPTP, so if you can get it by simply tweaking the ballot paper and allowing second and third choices (IRV), it's an easy upgrade.
Approval voting might be closer to a Condorcet winner in some cases, but it's not a panacea to center squeeze because it's vulnerable to honest voting. What we see in practice is a tendency to function as FPTP, as all sides have an incentive to demonize the center and train their voters to mark a single option. So, in your example, the Sunni or Shia Muslims which can't stand themselves enough to approve each other but would still prefer islam in the second round (if secularism is not available), would lose the approval vote to a well disciplined contigent of Buddhists.
IRV solves that by not providing any help to competitors in the first round, and moving the "lesser evil" decision into the second round, encouraging more honest voting. Short of some Condorcet method (which will never be practical or intelligible by the average voter), IRV is an "acceptable compromise".
> If everyone votes their honest maximal preference then the plurality says Theocracy A, which is violently opposed by 65% of the population!
I'm failing to see how that's worse than FPTP, which in practice would also result in picking Theocracy A (because the 5% representing the Secular Tolerance Party would be one of those "third parties" which get blamed for spoilers under FPTP).
I don't claim it's worse; I'm not convinced it's better. Here they behave the same, and I think it's a pretty significant failure on both their parts. If I had to argue that IRV is worse than FPTP, I'd point out that voters already know what sort of strategic voting FPTP expects of them, while IRV is often sold on the premise that voters don't need to vote strategically and so is more likely to hit those failure modes in more damaging ways as we learn... but there's a degree of devil's advocate there. I do worry that it might be worse, but I do not claim that it is.
> Here they behave the same
Well yeah, in this particular instance they do. That doesn't mean they always do. For example, with the commonly-used Tennessee capital election scenario (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting#Tennesse...), IRV would select Knoxville while FPTP would select Memphis - still not quite optimal for everyone (Nashville would probably be the ideal winner in a "perfect" electoral system), but good enough for the majority and a strict improvement over FPTP.
Of course they don't always; certainly IRV is sometimes mechanically better. I believe we can construct examples where FPTP would happen to work out better given the same honest votes, although I do think they're more contrived - see below for details. I am more worried about what happens in practice, though; as I said, people understand with FPTP that they need to vote strategically and understand how to do that.
Contrived scenario for FPTP picking the Condorcet winner while IRV fails to:
Back to the "which theocracy, or do we just tolerance?" question, but now each religion has at least two candidates and secular tolerance has a bigger constituency.
FPTP picks S, sort of by chance, which is also the Condorcet winner. IRV consolidates the C votes behind C1, then the B votes behind B1, then the A votes behind A1, then discards S.I think that works out, FPTP makes the right choice for sort of the wrong reason while IRV makes the wrong choice. But I do think the much bigger concern is FPTP-with-strategic-voting behaving better (or at least no worse) than IRV-with-whatever-happens-in-practice.
As far as I can tell RCV is equivalent to what we've been using in Australia since federation to elect lower house candidates (we call it prefential voting and use it at all levels of government). I'm curious in what case "increasing your support for your genuine favorite can actually hurt their odds of winning"? I skimmed the link to the article you referenced and it appears that there were two republican candidates which is the main reason neither won - I don't believe I've ever seen a case here where one party had two candidates on the same ballot paper and I suspect it's probably illegal. I've also never seen a ballot paper with more than about 15 choices (and it's very rarely more than 10), so vote splitting is rarely a problem (it can be for minor parties with similar policies/leanings etc.). On that basis I'm pretty sure there's never been a case in this country where anyone has lost an election due to gaining higher primary levels of support - indeed it's pretty rare that the winning candidate doesn't have at least 35% of the primary vote (though exactly that happened in our recent federal election, as a total across all seats), and exceedingly rare for it to be less than 30%. There are certainly plenty of cases where the winner isn't the one with the highest primary vote, but it's typically only a few percentage points lower, and mostly affects the more progressive candidate because for many seats there are two such candidates with solid levels of support but only one mainstream conservative candidate.
I don't believe that there is anything stopping two candidates from one party. I believe I have even seen it before, but I can't find a reference.
Doesn't seem compatible with the idea of "two-party preferred" voting which is what's actually used in practice here, though I'm not 100% clear as to whether that's explicitly different to preferential voting/RCV.
Two party preferred is more a statistical count done on the assumption that {Labor, Coalition} = {Government, Opposition}. Of course it'll be decreasingly relevant now if the teals can stick.
> "increasing your support for your genuine favorite can actually hurt their odds of winning"
This is referring to the monotonicity criterion[0]. The page has both toy examples and real world ones. It includes some hints about possible violations in Australia, but your voting system isn't very transparent so it is difficult to audit these situations.
As for vote splitting, I think it would be better to look at Favorite Betrayer[1][2]. Sometimes also called the strong spoiler effect. This is actually a big problem. It is why candidates like Bernie Sanders pledge to not run as independent after losing the primary. If you don't violate this condition such pledges are entirely unnecessary.
[0] https://electowiki.org/wiki/Monotonicity
[1] https://electowiki.org/wiki/Favorite_betrayal_criterion
[2] https://electionscience.org/library/the-spoiler-effect/
[0] https://electowiki.org/wiki/Monotonicity
Sure, thanks, I can see how it can happen now, and actually it revealed my understanding of preferential voting wasn't entirely correct. As for "favorite betrayal criterion" - I actually think it's a feature of preferential voting that I actually take advantage of, whereby I vote [1] for a minor candidate who has policies I agree with but I accept is not in a realistic position to govern effectively (due to lack of experience/resources etc.), but [2] for the party that I'm happy to actually win, providing they're aware they're relying on 2nd preference votes from another party that they can't just ignore.
So it sounds like you're trying to strategically vote to push a party you want in another direction. I totally understand this, but under score or star (where we have more resolution that approval) it is very easy to just extract this information out of an honest ballot. You can measure the distance between the voters and other candidates as well as the distance between your mean voter and other candidates. You have full information about which direction you should alter your course to better serve your population. Approval gives you this information too, it is just not as fine grained. My main (long) post in the thread argues that the advantage of cardinal systems is its ability to effectively embed voter preference better. What I'm talking about here is just extracting that information and that candidates can utilize that information without ever relying on voters to vote strategically.
One thing that I think gets lost in political debate around voting is that RCV also changes the behavior/selection of the candidates. Its not just that the candidates are identical and you vote with a different mechanism - but candidates have an incentive to moderate. This may mean the outcome is the same (in terms of which candidate wins) but their positions represent the median voter more.
I would imagine approval voting and other voting systems have this too (I'm not going to pretend to know how this would turn out for all of them) and I think that gets lost a bit when analyzing the systems.
That's kinda the entire point. One of the (many) metrics for voting systems is called Voter Satisfaction Efficiency (VSE). This is basically a global L2 distance from each voter to each candidate. To maximize VSE we want to minimize that distance. In other words, we want winning candidates to be most representative of a population's opinions and values. You can see a comparison of different systems here[0]. Note that there are other criteria that matter, but there are plenty of methods that have high VSE and the other criteria we want. Also note that the spread in different types of strategies represents the method's vulnerability to manipulation. If a strategy still yields a high VSE then it is not an effective strategy.
[0] https://electionscience.github.io/vse-sim/
If I'm not mistaken this link is exactly what I am describing. It simulates how close the winning candidate is to voters based on how people would vote. But it explicitly doesnt simulate how candidates would shift due to changing incentives.
In other words - it treats elections as a one side game where voters pick strategy (voting methods/preferences) and the candidates are stable. But it is a two-sided game where politicians change opinions/policies based on system as well.
That is a hard thing to capture, but strategy is a decent way to approximate it. I do think this is fair criticism for what it is worth, but I don't think anyone has been able to create an accurate model for this (for any voting system) and I'm not sure you can accurately model this tbh.
This is also where it would be great to skip primaries, since primaries favor more extreme candidates.
RCV-IRV doesn't encourage moderate candidates because, in a polarized environment, moderate candidates are much more likely to be no one's first choice and get eliminated as a result.
This isn't hypothetical -- you can look at the results in Seattle's City Attorney race, which strangely ended up electing a Republican to a citywide office for the first time in 20 years, and where the outcome under RCV would have been the same because the moderate candidate (the reasonably well-liked incumbent) didn't secure enough first-place votes, either in FPTP or in RCV-IRV.
> moderate candidates are much more likely to be no one's first choice and get eliminated as a result.
If i look at my country's upper chamber, which is elected with two-round system, then it is quite the reverse. Extremist candidates rarely pass to second round and if they do, they are eliminated there.
That is interesting but I don't know if that's always true. In Alaska, its pretty clear that Senator Murkowski, who was always somewhat moderate, has really leaned into being even more moderate since RCV was introduced there.
Presumably, she knows that she will face little penalty for rebuffing Trump or McConnell on the issues they have for which the right position is unpopular - since there isn't much of a chance of her being dethroned by a right person.
I do take your point that the dynamics can be weird and aren't always "go to the median". And perhaps having a weird dynamic where the introduction of a different voting strategy or other party changes things dramatically - is not a good thing for trust.
Murkowski would have been eliminated in the GOP primary this year under the traditional system. Most republicans here in AK despise her. Whether she could pull off another highly questionable win in the general via write-in ballots is doubtful. McConnell has thrown his support behind her, rather than the candidate with far more republican support within the state, because of course he has.
Murkowski probably wins with RCV. The one D on the ballot, Chesbro, is a placeholder nobody expects to win, but her voters will surely rank Murkowski #2.
This is actually not the case - RCV suffers from the "center squeeze" effect [1], in which moderates are squeezed out in the early rounds. That said, things like Approval have the opposite problem, in which moderates are given an advantage (some approval people will say this is a feature, not a bug).
For an edge case, consider an election with 3 factions: socialists, libertarians, and fascists. There is also a 4th candidate, a boring status quo moderate, running. Imagine the populace is split 1/3 between the first 3 factions as their 1st choice, but everyone selects boring status quo moderates as their 2nd choice, because everyone in the first 3 factions hates the other ideologies.
The boring status quo moderates get eliminated in round 1, and eventually 1 of the 3 extremes will win, resulting in 2/3 of the country being very angry. Not ideal.
Obviously this is just an unrealistic edge case, but it demonstrates the effect.
[1] https://electowiki.org/wiki/Center_squeeze
> That said, things like Approval have the opposite problem, in which moderates are given an advantage (some approval people will say this is a feature, not a bug).
This is a weird way to say that representing the population is a bug.
Your example election would be a compelling argument if population preference was more of a multimodal distribution rather than closer to a unimodal distribution. Despite the US's current division, it is nowhere near as divided as your scenario.
To be clear, I personally prefer approval to IRV. But raw approval gives undue advantage to moderates. Approval-to-runoff being clearly superior than raw approval, for this reason. And STAR being a little bit better than that.
The RCV people's main criticism of Approval is that it doesn't allow you to express different levels of support, and they aren't totally wrong (even though their preferred mechanism of IRV doesn't get them there, either).
I think (without data, happy to be proven wrong) that the US population is fairly strongly bimodal on most issues. Many issues that people care a lot about (for better or worse...) have two clear centers of gravity,
e.g. for gun control and abortion most people are in the orbit of a "mostly ban" or "mostly allow" group, with very few people falling into some nuanced middle ground.
> But raw approval gives undue advantage to moderates.
If by "moderates" you mean "most liked" then I'm not sure what the problem is here. The point of voting is to find the most universally agreed upon ruler. You may call this unfair, but I would say that it is MORE unfair to give advantage to fringe groups rather than giving advantage to the masses. I thought the point of democracies was about having rule by the masses. If you think fringe groups should have the advantage I'd like to hear your argument.
> If you think fringe groups should have the advantage I'd like to hear your argument.
I'm not sure what gave you the impression I think that. My comments clearly suggest that my view is that STAR > Approval-to-runoff > Approval > RCV-IRV > Plurality. My reasoning is that I place a very high value on the condorcet and favorite betrayal criteria.
My apologies then. It was the italicized "undue" that made me think that this was your position. I read it as "undeserving".
As for the condorcet winner, that is quite hard actually. But if we consider a weak condorcet winner (where it is true 90+% of the time), that isn't as hard. I do think simplicity, transparency, and reduced vulnerability to strategy is a worthwhile trade-off for a strong condorcet winner. But of course, this is just my personal opinion and what's the preferred optima depends a lot on personal preferences.
> I think (without data, happy to be proven wrong) that the US population is fairly strongly bimodal on most issues. Many issues that people care a lot about (for better or worse...) have two clear centers of gravity,
We'll you'll be happy then! :)
Because this is commonly believed but actually totally untrue. There's an entire book about it, "Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America" by Morris P. Fiorina.
The upshot is basically that if you ask people binary yes/no questions (or binary left/right votes), the population appears divided, bimodal. But whenever you give a sliding scale in surveys, it becomes abundantly clear that the population is centrist -- unimodal. Even for gun control and abortion, the most hot-button issues.
> The upshot is basically that if you ask people binary yes/no questions (or binary left/right votes), the population appears divided, bimodal.
SHOCKING! (I laughed a little too much at this comment)
But this is also why surveyists tend to ask the "strongly disagree, disagree, neutral, agree, strongly agree" questions. Because it can measure the temperature better. This is effectively a type of cardinal voting too. After all, voting theory is also known as "social choice theory."
But I definitely agree that in practice we find more normal like distributions in preference. Which is why I find it odd when commenters argue that other voting systems "give advantage" to "moderates" or "centrists" as if this is not in reality "gives 'advantage' to candidates that have low variance to the mean opinion." (aka, the most representative). Isn't that the goal of voting systems? To be the most representative?
It's actually really interesting, when you look at political science literature and essayists.
You have those insisting that the population is divided and there just aren't that many centrists, and then you have those insisting that the population is centrist and there aren't that many extremists.
And they're always looking at the same exact bell curve, and then the first group decides the center is only an arbitrary 10% wide so most people are divided (45% on either side), and the second group decides that the center is an arbitrary 80% wide, so only a small number of people are extremist (10% on either side).
It's the same damn bell curve.
I don't think I see as much of a problem out of academic literature (there are clear problem groups though, not denying that), but more that the problem is how the information is conveyed to the population. Both the media perception as well as how radicals present information. I'm always reminded of John Cleese's skit on extremism[0]. When he lists the enemies of liberals and conservatives "moderates" are included in both. I think we see this a lot as we often paint people that are moderates as "on the fence." We see this with the popularity of subreddits like r/ENLIGHTENEDCENTRISM[1]. With one of the top posts suggesting that centrists see "compromise" and "a little genocide" as okay.[2] But is this not the playbook of authoritarians (right or left)? To remove all nuance from the conversation. Centrists aren't people who go to the middle of divisive opinions, they just don't cleanly fit into either camp but pull elements from both. I think nuance is the most important thing we can do to fight extremism in either direction.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXCkxlqFd90
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/ENLIGHTENEDCENTRISM/top/?t=all
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/ENLIGHTENEDCENTRISM/comments/cw2bbh...
Voters will realize that approval gives benefits to centrists, and they will change their voting strategies and stop approving centrists. None of the math analyses shared here take that into account.
For example, say three fictitious candidates are running for dogcatcher, Bernie, Hillary, and Trump. Does your hardcore Bernie supporter friend believe that approving Hillary doesn't hurt Bernie? Will they choose not to approve centrist candidates, leading to extreme results in elections?
If centrist is defined by the minimization of distance between a population's preference and a candidate's position then I don't see the problem. Why would you want an extremist? Or why would you want someone that is less representative of the population as a whole? Isn't the point of democracy to minimize this distance?
I'd actually argue that if approval was used Bernie would have won. One can vote Bernie honestly but also approve of Hillary as a safety. And this would have had a larger edge with Score or STAR. Bernie was quite popular and frankly a lot of people that also voted Trump also liked Bernie because he was an outsider.
> One can vote Bernie honestly but also approve of Hillary as a safety.
No, that's the thing. Many people want to express their preference, and really really didn't want to "approve" of these two people at the same level. It's exactly the same with...
> Bernie was quite popular and frankly a lot of people that also voted Trump also liked Bernie because he was an outsider.
...where these people may have felt positively about Bernie, but they really really preferred Trump, and they would not have "approved" of Bernie if that meant putting him at the same level as Trump.
So now you have two groups of people who would have preferred Bernie as their 2nd place choice, but decide not to "approve" him in order to help their 1st place choices win. Supporters of approval voting just keep ignoring this dynamic of how real people vote in the real world.
So I think your points are valid. I also just want to state that pretty much every cardinal voter I know prefers STAR then Score then Approval. I'm STAR 5, Score 5, approval 4 (only slight preference of STAR over Score). But I think that resolves your concerns. It is just that in practice we find that Approval is easier to argue for and is good enough. From a personal stand point I'll argue with technical people about voting systems if we got approval but I wouldn't be an evangelist anymore.
It's an iterated event, voters would learn that voting a single candidate generally gives them less influence.
Millions of Jill Stein voters would disagree with that.
RCV has made real ground, and halting its progress for STAR voting seems misguided. There's no consensus here, but you're stating the ranking like it's some objective fact. Imo, RCV's growing popularity only increases the popularity of other new voting systems (note that we're having a conversation about them, because someone used RCV).
Yea, it's been interesting to watch how RCV has filtered into the public consciousness over the past 5-10 years and slowly increased in terms of how many people parrot it as the answer to all our voting ills.
There was a site posted to HN years back that mathematically analyzed a ton of these voting schemes, I cannot seem to find it on Google but it was some sort of hybrid scheme that apparently has the best overall outcomes.
Edit: Given some of the comments below, some good material on these voting systems...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13161396
https://ncase.me/ballot/
https://rangevoting.org/rangeVirv.html
http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/
IRV is a Schelling Point, and I think it's important to consider it as such. The biggest critique of alternatives to FPTP is "they are too complicated". When you look at an individual system like IRV it seems hard to sustain that objection, but then a bunch of voting system nerds enter the room, and now we're comparing Condorcet to Borda, and critiquing a bunch of mathematical properties of each system, and drawing graphs of preference-space; at which point the average voter's eyes gloss over and they say "yup, too complicated".
I think this is a perfect case for the maxim "Let not the perfect be the enemy of the good". It seems IRV is sticking, and nobody has made Condorcet or Borda stick; let's go with IRV for now. Once we've abolished FPTP, and everyone is familiar with ranked systems, we can come back and argue for a better option.
As far as I'm concerned, IRV captures 99% of the utility of changing voting systems.
(All that said, I do like the work that https://electionscience.org is doing with Approval Voting, and if we can run experiments in local elections across the country with two new systems, I think that's also positive.)
Condorcet is actually quite simple, and the voting community does it a huge disservice by insisting on talking about it in very complicated ways.
Condorcet is just "if a candidate would beat all others head to head, then that candidate is the winner".
But the voting community insists on immediately jumping to all the crazy tie-breaking algorithms you need to implement if there is a "loop" (Smith Set).
My opinion has always been that those two concepts should be severed. All the "flaws" of Condorcet actually only apply to when tiebreakers are used. The flaws do not apply when there is a Condorcet Winner.
(The Smith Set isn't hard to understand either. It's just "these candidates beat all others head to head.")
And when there isn't a Condorcet Winner, that is actually valuable information. It means that the population was not ready to decide. It may warrant a later runoff, giving the population more opportunity to research the remaining Smith-Set candidates, and decide through additional debates or whatever else. As an alternative, people can always choose to apply any old method for the tiebreaker - even IRV! Condorcet-IRV (where IRV would only be applied to the Smith Set) strictly dominates IRV-only, in every way.
A group in Seattle actually got an Approval voting ballot initiative enough signatures to get on the ballot this year (where RCV has been trying and failing for decades), but the City Council, sensing their re-election chances under such a system in danger, intervened and modified the initiative to add RCV as a 3rd option, because they know they have a better election odds with RCV, and RCV will probably beat Approval on name recognition alone.
A cynical take would be that IRV has gotten traction in the US precisely because it does not seriously threaten the existing power structure. It might nibble away on a few edges, but if you look at all the countries and cities with IRV, they are not obviously better than those still stuck on FPTP.
IRV is hard to evaluate though. How long would it take to teach a member of the general public to evaluate IRV results?
You also cannot have meaningful estimates until all results from every district are in. How long it took in New York to get any results might leave people disillusioned and opposed to anything but FPTP.
Using Borda and Condorcet is also clearly a straw man, as AFAIK nobody is actually pushing for those in practice. The real runners seem to be IRV, Approval and STAR. Of those IRV is clearly the most compared to evaluate.
IMI they are all pretty simple and in an ideal world it wouldn't matter that much. However, we need to be highly aware that as soon as a major election gets won with anything but FPTP, we'll see the losing party "flood the zone with shit" to undermine the election results and the method. We've already seen the beginning of this after the election in Alaska. We need to keep it as simple as possible, otherwise the shit will drown everything else out.
> IRV is hard to evaluate though. How long would it take to teach a member of the general public to evaluate IRV results?
This is always an interesting point to me. I often hear arguments that STAR and Approval are too difficult for the voters and far more complex (there's plenty of comments here suggesting that). While I disagree, that's a matter of opinion (I think both are trivial fwiw). But on the other hand, how votes are tallied is much harder to argue. Ordinal systems use a while loop where you pop an element each iteration and reallocate votes. Cardinal methods are sum then argmax. It is a joke to think that voters would understand Ordinal methods better than Cardinal methods with respect to how votes are tallied.
> How long would it take to teach a member of the general public to evaluate IRV results?
I'm puzzled by this. You can do it with pencil and paper in a few minutes? It's simple addition. You can easily build a website that visualizes each step if you think addition is difficult for people. It's trivial to compute in a spreadsheet.
> might leave people disillusioned
This is speculative; if it is true, you can find evidence by talking to, e.g. Alaskan voters. (IOW, Citation Needed.)
> clearly a straw man
I'm simply painting a picture by recounting my experience of what happened in the last thread on HN where voting systems came up, not making a strong claim about these specific systems being the runners up. My point still stands if you substitute any other systems, in this thread for example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33111242. The point I was making had nothing to do about the merits of those specific systems; the point was that a big technical can of worms gets opened, and the average voter has no interest in digging in to compare N solutions on M technical axes, Arrow's theorem, etc. This is what people mean when they say "alternate voting systems are complicated".
> It's simple addition.
Not quite. The tallying algorithm is `while (no candidate > 50% of votes): pop min(candidates), reallocate_votes(min(candidates))`. On the other hand cardinal methods are `argmax(sum(candidates))`. For comparison, FPTP is `argmax(sum(candidates))` too. The only difference is that FPTP is a one-hot vector. I'd argue that the average person intuitively understands cardinal methods without any training.
You're right, my bad. Computing `reallocate_votes()` is not as trivial as I suggested.
I do wonder if many people actually care to work through that step; in all of the public discourse around the Alaska vote, it's simply presented as a table with the reallocations already summed. For example, https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-democrats-win-in-a....
The general algorithm of "reallocate the votes from the candidate that is being eliminated" is conceptually simple, even if it's annoying to tabulate. I do stand by my claim that it would be very easy to build a website that can visualize this process without getting bogged down in the tabulation. See every site that's giving analysis on the Alaska results for examples.
I want to see actual UX studies on this; for example has anyone polled in Alaska to see whether people understand the result?
> Computing `reallocate_votes()` is not as trivial as I suggested.
I agree that it isn't hard, but I'm glad we both agree it isn't trivial.
> I do wonder if many people actually care to work through that step
I don't think most people care to be honest. But I think what does matter is recount events. I often point to what happened in Arizona as a perfect example. It would be substantially easier to create a narrative that an election is rigged if the tallying is more complicated. Malicious people like to hide in complexity and will often oversimplify a complex topic. Because of this, I think one of the most important factors in creating a secure election is ensuring that the tallying system is simple. While malicious actors will always act maliciously, we can reduce their effectiveness through this simplicity.
To add to the simplicity case: STAR and Approval voting are on essence how many online rating systems like IMDB, Yelp or Rotten Tomatoes work. Those seem very intuitive to users. (Edit: ignoring cases where those platforms hide votes etc)
> There was a site posted to HN years back that mathematically analyzed a ton of these voting schemes, I cannot seem to find it on Google but it was some sort of hybrid scheme that apparently has the best overall outcomes.
It might have been "To Build a Better Ballot":
https://ncase.me/ballot/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13161396
Good looking out, RangeVoting.org was the site I was thinking of but that HN post drove the discussion.
> There was a site posted to HN years back that mathematically analyzed a ton of these voting schemes, I cannot seem to find it on Google but it was some sort of hybrid scheme that apparently has the best overall outcomes.
Do you remember what was on it? I'll just drop a few links
https://electionscience.github.io/vse-sim/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4FXLQoLDBA
http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/
Regarding the Score/Approval/STAR trio, I always felt that there was a clear fourth possibility missing from the list, so I invented it:
https://pastebin.com/PCgSaBS8
Still, I'm not much of a political campaigner, so it hasn't gone very far.
That's a clever system, thanks for sharing it. What I appreciate most about it, though, is the explicit goal of "being easier to count by hand", which I think many advocates of voting-reform overlook.
You even say "by sorting ballots into each of thirteen piles corresponding to the thirteen possible rankings of three candidates", which shows you've actually thought through what the process would look like for the people doing the counting.
When people are proposing voting systems, they really need to consider that their process is being carried out in an adversarial environment, where different groups have incentives to cheat, or accuse the voting system of producing the "wrong" result (e.g. due to the unintuitive outcome, or the complex tactical thinking needed to optimally fill in the ballot), or claim that voting machines were running backdoored firmware (which is a destabilizing claim whether it is in fact true or false).
That last point is perhaps the most important. I think that as time goes on, the pressure to automate the counting process and give instant election results (or worse, do the elections online) is only going to grow, and any voting reform which (if done manually) slows down the counting process, or for any other reason in practice requires people to trust machines that are selected and maintained by officials from one political party, is going to do even more harm to democracy than FPTP does.
https://star.vote/ is pretty good. I've used it for some votes for a small community with usually more than fifteen different options, and it's worked pretty well!
A problem with all of these systems is that they are harder to understand, resulting in reduced voter confidence, or they demand more from the voter.
Any kind of ranking is going to mean you need to know enough about each candidate to put them in some kind of order. Maybe OK if there are two candidates but much harder after that. Most people will rank their favorite on top and then just randomly rank the remainder.
Simple plurality or majority vote is easiest to understand and easiest for the voter. You vote for the one candidate you like the best. If the isn't a majority for one and that is required, you have a runoff between the top two.
I agree, but I'd argue that instant-runoff/RCV is the second-easiest to understand, by far, while also being much better than simple plurality voting. Which is why I strongly favor instant-runoff.
Actually there's another option which hasn't been mentioned so far, which is just as easy to implement as plurality (for both voting and counting by hand), and has pretty much all the benefits of IRV/RCV.
That method is "Asset Voting", which works exactly like a plurality vote, except that once the totals for each candidate are known, the candidates are eliminated one by one (from least to most votes) and get to assign their vote counts to any remaining candidate.
If you agree with me and the parent post that voter confidence (including avoiding electronic counting machines) is the most important factor when evaluating possible alternatives to plurality (assuming the alternatives are no worse than plurality) then hopefully you will agree that Asset Voting is preferable to IRV/RCV.
There’s always going to be a trade-off when dealing with humans: voting result optimization vs ease of voting.
That’s always been the issue, not that we don’t know of better result counting theories.
Even in the 2020s, the ballots are explained over and over, “Connect the horizontal line”, or “fill in the box completely” — it’s a binary input to capture the best information from the lowest denominator.
STAR would change the input from binary to an order N, and the number of mistakes or “that’s not what I intended” will happen.
The average HN reader probably can fill in boxes pretty good, but the outside world not so much. RCV is a decent compromise.
I read the linked article and I found it kinda scatterbrained. It seemed to dispute claims or tweets about how a vote works, along with what head to head voting outcomes would be.
I do find how the math works out interesting. But I don’t find either disputes all that compelling.
The head to head polling is interesting… but that’s not how the election works. The fact that two systems would be different seems normal to me.
Folks who go to a ranked choice vote and pick just one, that’s their choice too. Same with people who don’t vote and so on.
Not to say the article is worthless, it is interesting, but I’m not sure I agree with the conclusions.
I don't think the voting system matters as much as we think. The main attack vector that interest groups use against democracy is shaping the public opinion in the direction that benefits them. Certainly, some systems may be easier to game, but ultimately interest groups will do neither more nor less than the minimum required to win. If they only need to make 30% of the population rabid in order to win, that's what they will do, but let's not fool ourselves into thinking they couldn't make 51% of the population rabid if they needed to.
Basically, if people's stated preferences are ill-thought-out and/or manipulated, then even the perfect voting system that perfectly reflects the people's preferences will yield bad results. Voting reform in this case would be fixing the symptoms, not the disease. The disease, in my view, is that given the sheer complexity of the issues, the poor attention budget of people, the outsized influence of media, the impossibility of directly interacting with decision-makers, there's basically no way people can make an informed decision.
Personally I think we should ditch elections and just pick representatives purely at random, and then pay them to think about their preferences full time, discuss them with each other, directly interview candidates for executive positions, and so on. The basic idea is that I think collective decision making probably reaches an optimum around Dunbar's number and falls off precipitously beyond that.
That's a very misleading article that plays loose with the math. e.g. It makes assumptions on things that are flat out not true (for example, assuming people would vote for thing they clearly didn't vote for).
If an article is going to sit there and make up votes that didn't occur, I can't really trust it.
I'm not convinced that additional complexity of STAR is worth it compared to extremely simple score voting.
Score voting (also known as range voting) is not a very good system to use in a real election because there's a huge risk that, on a scale of 1 to 10, the extremists will all give their candidate a score of 10 and everyone else 1, whereas the moderates will score their candidates, say, 7 or 8 and score the ones they don't like 3 or 4. The extremists could thus prevail despite being significantly outnumbered by moderates.
Or in other words, it's not safe to vote honestly in a score voting system because you're throwing your voting influence away. The rational thing is to maximize all your votes to be 1 or 10 and nothing in between.
Approval voting is just that. Basically it avoids the problem by forcing everyone to vote tactically.
STAR voting approaches it differently, by using score voting to select the top two, and then doing a runoff with the votes maximized. (Under STAR there's a risk that you might have two extremist ideological clones that make it to the runoff.)
I think plain score voting could work reasonably well in a primary.
>whereas the moderates will score their candidates, say, 7 or 8 and score the ones they don't like 3 or 4
Indeed, you should use whole available range. But there's still incentive to differentiate more than max/min, because otherwise you don't get any influence to choose between other candidates. For example with candidates: A-best, B-lesser evil, C-evil; instead of scoring max/0/0 it would be more reasonable to vote max/something/0. Voting system cannot give you result reflecting your preferences if you don't provide them!
Maybe another way to look at this: there's only so much influence single ballot has, and you can spend it to either push A above B/C, or A/B above C. It's a tradeoff, but score voting allows you to dial in the ratio you want. Falling back to approval is strictly less expressive.
> The rational thing is to maximize all your votes to be 1 or 10 and nothing in between.
Can't you just scale everyone's votes to the same range?
You could. That would be a reasonable thing to do.
I suppose you could even do an iterative process: rescale, remove the lowest-scoring candidate, rescale, remove the lowest-scoring candidate, and so on until there's a winner. That'd be like STAR but with multiple runoffs instead of one.
What's the added complexity of STAR?
STAR is phase 1: sort(sum(candidates))[:2] (almost identical to score/approval/FPTP. We'd just take argmax instead of top two) and phase 2: eliminate other candidates, argmax(sum(candidates)) (identical to score/approval/FPTP).
On the other hand RCV is a multi-round system with a while loop. In practice it almost never has fewer than 2 rounds (requires overwhelming majority, which almost never happens with more than 3 candidates).
From an algorithms perspective RCV is more complex.
I mean the added complexity of STAR compared to score. It irks me that it basically adds second election using different system, that happens to sneakily reuse the same ballot.
It's not a different system, it's the exact same algorithm. In both rounds it is argmax(sum(candidates)) (identical to FPTP btw) but the first round you take two elements instead of 1 and second round you use one hot vectors restricted to the top 2. That's it.
> From an algorithms perspective RCV is more complex.
Perhaps, but people aren't computers.
It's admittedly difficult to score this objectively, but I find RCV much easier to understand.
Much easier to understand from the voter perspective of the tallier perspective? From the voter perspective I find them fairly equivalent and both are frequently used in the everyday world (scoring might be even more considering 5 star reviews). But from a tallying perspective I think it is very hard to argue that RCV is substantially easier. Again, the score/approval algorithm is identical to the FPTP algorithm (which is trivial). It is simply argmax(sum(candidates)). Just sum the totals in an excel file and pick the largest number. I don't know a single person that has a hard time understanding this and I suspect if they did they would have an even harder time understanding how to tally RCV.
With STAR, it's harder to understand the affect of your vote.
RCV means: "I'd like this candidate, but if he can't win, I'll take this candidate instead." (And so on down the list of candidates.) Most people understand the concept of runoff elections. And, it's very very obvious that adding second and third choice candidates will never make your first choice less likely to win (on your individual ballot).
Under STAR, the effect of your ratings are less clear.
I think you're over complicating it in your head and that's making it difficult for you to see. You need a different perspective. Instead the perspective you need is that you rate each of the candidates and then put that into the system. The system will look at all the ratings and determine which has the highest agreeability as a whole. If you're too focused on your own individual "should" then maybe this is hard. You'll over think how you should play the strategy and game the system to make your preference dominate. But the entire point of cardinal systems is to take this out because we don't want people gaming the system. We just want to find people's preferences and elect candidates that are most representative of the people.
You're having a hard time figuring out "the effect of your vote" because the entire point is for you to not be able to game the system. Obviously no system is immune to strategies and there very much are some here. But they don't have huge effects on the whole election. I mean we don't want to violate the monotonicity criteria.
As a practical consideration, the runoff in STAR does offer a legal advantage in some districts where a runoff is legally mandated.
Ranked voting is supposed to prevent winner take all strategic voting. Voting by score encourages you to score everybody at zero except your favourite(s). This arguably means there will be less information in the vote tallies, although it gives voters more control over how their opinion will be responded to, and that is valuable
this is obviously false. simply consider that green party supporters usually vote democrat. with score or approval voting, they'd ALSO want to vote for the green.
whereas with ranked voting methods, they'd still strategically rank the democrat in 1st place, crushing any hope for the greens.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtKAScORevQ
Isn’t giving each candidate a score even more gameable than ranking candidates. If I like candidate A and think candidate B is their best opposition I can give candidate A 5.0 and candidate B 0.0 even if my real opinion of candidate B is 3.0. Lowering candidate B’s score artificially definitely helps candidate A.
Absolutely. Naive exaggeration is a fantastic way to make your vote count more than others in score voting. It also encourages more negative campaign tactics, since convincing a voter to rank your opponent 0 rather than 4 is literally 4 times as powerful as convincing them to rank you a 5 rather than a 4.
you have this exactly backwards, as explained by 3 different math phd experts here.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtKAScORevQ
https://www.rangevoting.org/NESD
https://electionscience.github.io/vse-sim/VSEbasic/
I think you misread the comment you're replying to. Calculating a total score is simply summing the scores assigned to a candidate from each voter, so there's no way to "lower candidate B's score artificially". There's no averaging going on here.
no. scoring is more resistant to strategy.
consider a green party supporter who normally votes democrat. with score voting or approval voting, he also votes green (of course).
with ranked voting, he still ranks the democrat strategically in 1st place to avoid getting the republican, and that makes it impossible for third parties to grow. ranking is too vulnerable to strategy.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtKAScORevQ
This is a case for approval over score voting. It's not a good case for RCV over approval!
no, it's not a case for approval voting over score voting, because score voting is better than approval voting if even one voter votes sincerely.
if enough people use honest scores, then score voting is better than approval voting even for the "honest suckers".
https://www.rangevoting.org/ShExpRes
> Ranking the voting systems: STAR Voting > Approval Voting > Ranked Choice Voting > Plurality ("pick only one") voting.
Funny is that you ranked them and not scored them nor just say whether you approve them or not.
If you have to vote for these voting systems using approval voting, which ones would you approve?
scores would be more like:
STAR or score or approval = 5 IRV/RCV = 2 plurality = 0
how i'd approve them in a real election would be based on electability, which would be true with any voting method used in an actual contentious election.
> Ranking the voting systems: STAR Voting > Approval Voting > Ranked Choice Voting > Plurality (“pick only one”) voting.
I’m going to disagree. For essentially single-winner, public, candidate, secret ballot elections:
Any Condorcet method* > Bucklin Voting* (without limited # of ranks) > Instant Runoff Voting* > Majority-Runoff** > Plurality Voting** > Approval***, Score***, or STAR*** Voting (or any other *** system)
For public, secret ballot, legislative elections:
Mixed Member Proportional (MMP) using PR-STV* + Party List for leveling) > MMP using any single-member district system + Party List for leveling > Single Transferrable Vote (PR-STV)* > Party List PR (optionally, using STV to minimize wasted votes, but vote-for-one is close behind) > single-member districts with single winner systems in the order above (but, compared to the preceding proportional systems, all are close enough as to make no real difference) > any system using some or all multimember constituencies (including staggered elections in the same district for multiple seats in the same body) not described earlier in this list.
For public, secret ballot, chief executive + designated successor elections:
The single winner methods, in the order above, modified to use ranked ballots if they don’t already, in two rounds where the first elects the chief executive, then that winner is eliminated from all ballots, then a second counting of the ballots is done to chose the designated successor > The single winner methods, in the order above, separately for each office > The single winner methods, i the order above, for slates of pairs of one candidate for each office > Plurality voting** in a two round system (with normal, vote-for-one ballots), where after a chief is chosen on the first round, the successor is chosen by eliminating all ballots for the prior winner and taking the highest remaining vote count.
(methods with * are ranked ballots methods, methods with ** are vote-for-one methods commonly in use in the US, methods with *** are either artificially limited-ranks or more-detail-than-ranks methods, which for candidate elections have no clear, unique honest mapping from actual preferences to ballot markings; they are very good when their particular system of ballot markings maps to something concrete – e.g., for approval for selecting group activities in non-secret-ballot elections where approving is a commitment to participate if that option is selected or disapproval forfeits the right to participate, or, for score voting, where chosen score maps to a commitment of resources in the event the scored item is chosen.)
Approval voting fails in a situation that is pretty common in Europe (e.g. French presidential elections) - you have center left, center right, far left and far right candidate. If you vote for center left/right, you have to decide whether to also approve center right/left candidate, which may be contrary to your values, corrupt and incompetent, but at least not communist or fascist. That is why later-no-harm property of IRV is important.
STAR voting can be easily gamed- tell your supporters "vote MAX for me and 0 for everyone else". Anyone who gives more than a 0 to their second choice candidate will hurt their first choice.
this is absurd. you're talking about what the CANDIDATE wants, not what voters (who actually do the voting) want.
STAR voting is shown to outperform virtually all other methods with any mixture of honest or strategic voters.
https://electionscience.github.io/vse-sim/VSEbasic/
The only voting system that isn't "vulnerable" to bullet voting is FPTP, since it obligates you to bullet vote.
Actually that's not the only invulnerable system; there's also "Asset Voting", which I've mentioned in a comment above[0]. It also obligates you to bullet vote, since the voter's honest first preference is the only information needed, but it avoids the spoiler problems of FPTP, and is thus superior to it.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33117670
Huh? Ranked voting isn't vulnerable to bullet voting.
If you only rank a single candidate, there's zero benefit, you're just throwing away the rest of your vote. It's not giving that candidate any extra influence, the way it would in approval voting.
> Ranked voting isn't vulnerable to bullet voting.
"Vulnerable to bullet voting" is the same thing as "violating the later-no-harm principle," which means that some forms of ranked voting are vulnerable, while others aren't.
- Borda Count is vulnerable to bullet voting, for the same reason as Score (giving points to anyone other than your first choice makes it less likely that your first choice wins, because it increases the score of your second and third choice).
- Condorcet systems are vulnerable to bullet voting, because the ordering of your second and third choices can potentially change who the Condorcet winner is.
- Instant Runoff is "immune" to bullet voting because the ranking of choices beyond the highest non-eliminated choice are ignored. This is also directly responsible for it being vulnerable to the spoiler effect, which makes non-bullet-voting pointless (your top choice must also be the choice most likely to win the 1-1 fight at the end, which means the remainder of your choices are highly unlikely to win, so why bother?).
later-no-harm is a bug not a feature. it's the whole reason IRV is so vulnerable to tactical voting.
https://clayshentrup.medium.com/later-no-harm-72c44e145510
for instance, alaska just elected peltola even though begich was preferred to peltola by a large 5% margin. palin voters preferred begich to peltola 10-to-1. but IRV ignored their 2nd choices. therefore they would have been better off strategically ranking begich as their favorite.
whereas with approval voting, once they cast a strategic vote for begich, it's safe to approve palin (and anyone else they prefer to their lesser evil). this is, in a nutshell, why score voting and approval voting (rated, not ranked, methods) are so superior. this is social choice theory 101.
https://electionscience.org/commentary-analysis/rcv-fools-pa...
Doing so would be ill-advised because it increases chances of winning for candidates that you actually dislike.
I want to say why the cardinal systems (STAR/Score/Approval) are usually better than the ordinal (Ranked/RP/Schulze). It is all about ,,embedding''. More efficient embedding systems mean you can get a higher information gain. Let's look at two different elections but with the same premise.
Suppose you REALLY like both candidates A and B. Then suppose that you really dislike candidate C.
Ranked:
A > B > C (A/B position determined by flipping a coin)
Ordinal:
A:5 B:5 C:0
What's interesting here is that the first (ranked) system tells us (embeds) that our preference for A over B is the same as our preference of B over C. But in the second case we are able to tell the system that we actually like both A and B equally and that the distance to C is much larger. Ranked does not capture how we don't like C and doesn't capture that we do like B. Because of this the ranked systems frequently fail the favorite betrayer criteria (RCV fails btw). In a realistic scenario this means that in a ranked system Bernie would spoil the election for Biden (or vise verse). Although Gary Johnson wouldn't be a spoiler in either Ordinal nor Cardinal I'd argue that a weak spoiler is less of a worry than a strong spoiler.
I will also argue that Ordinal methods are far simpler to calculate and do statistical verification on. Ranked systems require a while loop where we pop an element from our array each iteration and reallocate that element's votes until there is a singular winner. Cardinal systems on the other hand are simply an sum argmax. This sum argmax can be done in parallel and also makes it far easier to verify elections with random subsets of votes (a fairly common practice btw). The simplicity of the algorithm used to tally votes is extremely important and increases the transparency of the election.
At the end of the day, the two systems are
Ranked: "Put the candidates in order of preference"
Cardinal: "Rate each candidate from 0 to 5 stars"
People are very used to both types of questions. I see several arguments saying the latter is more complicated but this clearly isn't true or we'd have to change the vast majority of surveys.
I also want to state that there are no globally optimal voting systems. Yes, there are plenty of flaws in cardinal systems. But because no global optima exists we have to instead argue that the tradeoffs are worth it. There are some objectively better systems than others though. To play fair like this I will say that I believe that the above advantages are worth the slight reduction of VSE in a 100% honest election that you'd obtain from using either RP or Schultz style elections.
Hi! I actually made a similar site for my own purposes - https://poller.io - and I've been using it with friends for a while.
One interesting finding. I was expecting that Instant Runoff would be the method we all preferred. I also included plurality winner, Borda Count and the Condorcet winner (if there was one) in the list of results. After using this with friends for decisions, I realized that a lot of choices that did very well in borda count were getting eliminated in the IRV. If you have a lot of options in the poll, there's a good chance that an option that will make the majority happy gets eliminated because it has very few first place votes. Academically, I knew this was a possibility, but in practice it happened a ton. This made us change to borda counts as our method of choice for things (and then we promised to not game the system). But... if there's a Condorcet Winner, we always go with that.
I also thought that having a borda count as the method of eliminating the "last place" choice in each IRV round would be kinda nifty. This still lets people game the system though, and is kind of a gross hack.
Just letting you know our experience in case it is helpful for future options on polls! Good luck!
The resulting voting rule (Borda except if there is a Condorcet winner) is commonly known as Black's rule (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black%27s_method).
KUDOS to you for respecting the Condorcet Winner.
After spending a notable portion of my life diving deeply into voting systems, their side effects, and the various poorly-thought-out arguments that people make, I basically only feel wincing pain when a lot of these projects come out. So I'm glad that the concept of the Condorcet Winner hasn't been forgotten.
The IRV zealots have basically won the messaging war, using what I believe to be unethical tactics. IRV is not the only way to count RCV, but they act like it is. But power is power, so until society suffers enough with lousy results, it's just going to be the FPTP pain all over again, dressed up in different clothing.
cordorcet methods are overly complicated and don't optimize the right thing. the goal is maximal social utility in the face of strategic behavior. cardinal methods are simpler and generally better at this.
https://electionscience.github.io/vse-sim/VSEbasic/
> cordorcet methods are overly complicated
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33111997
> and don't optimize the right thing
Apparently "candidate that would beat all others head to head should win" isn't the right thing? You'll need to explain that.
> maximal social utility
Some folks define social utility as erring toward more passionate voters, which is a potential problem with all cardinal methods. If they don't elect the Condorcet Winner, they are fatally flawed for any election that purports to be democratic.
Isn't Borda Count just Score voting where you enforce that voters can't give two options the same amount of support?
I would be curious why people would prefer Borda over Score if so.
Not at all. Score Voting as usually defined is continuous on [0,1]. Rescaling to e.g. [1,5] doesn't change this. Restricting to integers on that does; but if there are fewer than 5 candidates, equivalent rankings can still differ for total scores. It's only equivalent if you pick an integer scale [K, K+N] with N candidates, K arbitrary.
That said, I prefer score, or even approval, as that's what strategic score devolves to, but without huge amounts of information loss.
> if there are fewer than 5 candidates, equivalent rankings can still differ for total scores
I’m having a hard time following, can you give an example?
I’m saying that Borda allows voters to give one candidate 5 points, one other 4 points, etc. and score would allow voters to give as many candidates 5 points, as many candidates 4 points, etc.
I'm objecting to the statement that they're equivalent if you forbid ties.
This is only true when you have as many candidates as score slots.
> It's only equivalent if you pick an integer scale [K, K+N] with N candidates, K arbitrary.
or [0, K], K arbitrary.
because you can give multiple candidates the same amount of support in Borda if it is 0.
I'm not super familiar with score, but the advantage in this scenario is that voters call all input the same way and get borda + IRV + a potential condorcet winner.
If you allowed same scores then you can't do both simultaneously and/or the UX gets really funky.
you can do both simultaneously if you count ranked ballots like an election office would: you throw away all tied rankings, and rankings that come after :)
> and then we promised to not game the system
That's the key point. Unfortunately, all known voting systems can be gamed.
Here's an interesting video that explains how they can be manipulated: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhO6jfHPFQU
Thanks! And I hadn't come across Poller before. Pretty cool. FYI - RankedVote actually uses a type of Borda Count as its tiebreaking mechanism. Not quite what you're saying, but is better than picking a name out of a hat!
You bring up a lot of interesting points on what people feel happy with after voting. None of these systems is perfect. Each can be picked apart in various ways. That's why I tend to frame things in terms of "does this move things forward from the status quo?"
Oh interesting. If you don't mind me asking, what is the tie breaking mechanism?
And totally agreed on the framing. Also, prepare yourself for the feedback of "we should have a runoff election with the top two" and then people completely rejecting the concept that you've already done the runoff. :)
Hehe...a bunch of Nate Cohn's in your friend group? :-)
In the event multiple choices have the same number of votes and those choices are the lowest vote getters in the round, RankedVote calculates a Borda Score for each of those candidates across all ballots that were cast. Basically just saying "Ok, these three candidates were tied, which one was ranked lowest on average across the entire group of voters?" And then eliminate that one.
I'll be using yours over the OP's.
Theirs has a sign in/ sign up wall; yours I get to use right away.
> "I also thought that having a borda count as the method of eliminating the "last place" choice in each IRV round would be kinda nifty."
That is a real thing. I don't remember the name for it though.
Did you ever try star voting?
No, but only because I have been too lazy to update the code.
If I had more free time, I would probably add Star and Approval and then try to use Star with my group of friends. Maybe OP can save me the trouble by adding to his site ! :)
Honestly, for things like "where should we eat" Approval is the method I do with my friends. It's quick and easy. No need to write anything down. Just thumbs up if you like the suggestion and then we take the place with the most thumbs up.
Shouldn't there be some Coq or Agda or gasp Rust code that implements all these voting algos that we can agree on and share?
Hi HN! I’ve been running RankedVote as a solo founder for over a year and have had great success (and luck) with it being used to educate voters in New York City and Alaska. Bill de Blasio even ate a piece of pepperoni pizza as the result of one contest held on RankedVote.
BUT…what I’m looking for at this stage are use cases outside of direct voter education where RankedVote can be applied. By crossing over into everyday uses, RankedVote can better promote ranked-choice voting to people who are unaware of it.
Recently, I’ve seen it used for anything from mascot naming contests, to monthly book club selections, to scrum prioritization, to deciding what character should be included in a new version of a video game.
Question to the HN Community: Where would you use ranked-choice voting in your life (or at work) to make decisions?
Distributed chess games. One team uses ranked choice, the other uses approval.
Seattle will be voting to adopt one of the two for city primaries next month, and it would be sweet way to pit the two systems against each other.
"What feature should we build next?" Could be a good one. I don't know that it's actually a good thing to ask of your users, but I could definitely see people thinking it's a good thing to ask.
Really well done and congrats!
I think the market specifically for “Ranked-Choice Voting” is probably way smaller than the need for “easy/better/awesome polling and survey tools”.
Just keep that in mind as you grow and good luck with everything
Thanks for the kind words!
And, you're exactly right. The online world of people specifically interested in tools for ranked-choice voting is quite small. The question I'm trying to answer is what use cases does ranked-choice voting work better than other existing survey/polling options? That way, someone could be looking for a solution to that specific problem. Right now, most of RankedVote's users are already aware of RCV and then try to apply that in some scenario at work where a simple voting tool would have been the alternative.
ranked choice is a primitive form of conjoint analysis, so that might be an avenue for exploration. marketers aren't always statistically rigorous in how they poll and analyze markets (which is one of the reasons product management rose in prominence, because of the promise of more analytic rigor). even simple versions of conjoint can be an informative tool in the toolbox, but the studies and the existing tools are expensive.
i don't know for sure that there is a big enough market there for VC, but i'm sure a good marketer could make a nice business out of it.
I've used misc voting systems in product development.
Approval voting for bug triage.
Ranked Choice Voting for prioritization (eg features, reqs).
Roman Eval (thumbs up or down) for acceptance testing and hiring candidates.
Using democracy at work is super light weight and fully transparent. Helped a lot with accountability.
Initially I had to be the heavy, coercing the team to honor their own votes. Over time, as people grokked it, teams would self-enforce. aka Empowerment.
Just to reiterate about administrative burden, quickly voting on stuff greatly reduced time spent nursing the misc bug tracking and project management tools. A huge win.
Please support Condorcet voting.
How about on HN, you only have 10 article upvotes a day, use them wisely.
What should we get for our team lunch today?
Early on, I saw these relatively big spikes of traffic every week day in the early afternoon. Turns out it was a school that was voting on what game to play at recess. Similar idea.
I used to be a hardcore pro-RCV supporter (I liked Yang, and Yang made RCV one of his main issues, outside UBI), but I've become a little more jaded in the last few years.
Empirically, it seems like RCV-IRV (RCV from here on) not much better than Plurality. For example, look at all the countries and cities with RCV and without. It's not at all clear to me that those with RCV are much better than those without.
Both NZ and Australia are dominated by a large center-left and center-right party coalition. Sounds familiar.
NZ has a housing crisis that is even worse than San Francisco. Australia is under the thumb of the mineral extraction industry. All sounds familiar.
(Obviously NZ and Australia beat the US on some metrics, e.g. single payer healthcare if that's your thing, but there are plenty of European countries that have equivalent or better systems without RCV)
There are hundreds of US cities with RCV. None of them are obviously better than those without. They still have all the same fights about zoning and bike lanes and public parking that other cities have.
I'd still prefer RCV over Plurality, but I don't really think it's the panacea some of its supporters thing it is.
Well I think you'd need to draw more of a causal link between those outcomes and the voting system. Maybe their elections really all are democratic outcomes, and there's something completely independent of the ballot-counting process that is causing bad outcomes.
If you zoom out and think about the entire voting process, it's rife with inefficiencies and bad assumptions:
A ballot proposal implies that the proposal is well-described and doesn't have perverse effects.
A voting day implies the voting population is ready to decide, and fully understands the proposal, and that everyone with an interest is aware of that interest and has an opportunity to vote.
A counting method implies that the outcome will actually reflect the democratic will of the population.
I recently asked Fairvote volunteers which cities/countries they point to as RCV done “right”. All of the places I’m familiar with have poor reputations for their politics (SF, Australia) or have had problems with it (NY’s democratic primary, Alaska).
All they could come up with is statistics that more women and people of color are elected with RCV, and there is not enough evidence yet that Approval voting will do the same.
Those studies also don't demonstrate any causality, only correlation. It seems not unlikely that districts willing to try an experimental voting method also are more interested in running diverse candidates.
NZ and a great many European countries use neither plurality voting nor RCV-IRV for their nationwide legislative elections. (France and some US states use a two-round system, which is essentially a bastardised form of RCV-IRV.)
Some European countries (at least France and Ireland) use RCV-IRV or a two-round system for their presidential elections, but Australia, NZ and several European countries are constitutional monarchies, and therefore don't have presidential elections.
You might want to look into cardinal methods (I have a longer post above). They are not vulnerable to the strong spoiler effect (when you like two candidates a lot they can end up splitting the vote in RCV). The most popular ones are STAR and Approval. They're both trivial to implement, infinitely scalable, and trivial to understand the tallying process (all while providing high VSE).
"How Ranked-Choice Voting elects extremists"
https://psephomancy.medium.com/how-ranked-choice-voting-elec...
This article recommends instead a STAR voting system which is still simple to implement and understand while not electing extremists in some cases. I would be sad to see NYC and others turn to ranked choice without considering all the alternatives.
In the real world, moderate candidates (green in the example) get more support/votes than extremists so it’s unlikely they would get the fewest first place votes. Also, if green is only able to get a tiny sliver of first-choice preferences, I don’t think they should be elected, even if they are in the middle of the 1-dimensional spectrum.
This is quite reductive and ridiculous, people don't measure their difference from a candidate on a single axis and vote for the person with the smallest distance.
> people don't measure their difference from a candidate on a single axis and vote for the person with the smallest distance.
Good news, that's not how it works. You are minimizing the distance in a hyperspace, not a single axis. People draw a singular axis (or two) to simplify and explain the concept. But still, the distance is measured in a hyperspace.
I am generally an RCV fan, but I think you're writing off this critique a bit too quickly.
Even with multiple axes the critique is still correct right? And I think (far from an expert) that there's decent evidence to support hotelling's law and median voter theorem.
I dont put critiques of voters in the same category as critiques of election systems.
Don't they? Isn't that axis just "how much they like the candidate"?
No, it is how much they like a candidate on a certain topic and then they consider all topics, which are weighted. But also the distance measurement of voting systems aren't in reality a single axis. So this doesn't really matter anyways because it is already accounted for.
The point being made about extremism hinges on the axis being "ideological left/right" rather than "how much I like the candidate"
This is Neural Vector Space Voting, NVSV.
A question and a comment:
1. Would it be straightforward to add other voting systems? The easiest one to add would be approval voting ("Check off any option you'd support"). This has very similar benefits to ranked voting, and is more appropriate in many situations.
2. Your description of "How Ranked-Choice Voting Works" describes the "first round" and then the "next round" and "repeat until a winner is found." While those of us who understand RCV understand that these rounds are automatically built into the system, I think it's never made clear to a newbie that the voters don't have to go back and vote again.
On #1 -- It could be, but trying to stay narrowly focused. There are some great services out there like OpaVote that do a wide array of voting options and calculation methods.
On #2 -- That's a great point. And one that hopefully people start to better understand by using RankedVote and seeing all the "Rounds" happen at once. But, yeah, for many it's a new term. How would you make it more clear?
#2: At the very least I'd throw the word "automatically" into either step 2 or 3.
Thanks for the nudge! Great to have fresh eyes on these things and love your thinking. I added an "automatically" to step 3. More importantly, I changed "Voters rank." to "Voters rank once" in the headline of that section.
P.S. Gotta love Webflow for making changes like this super quick.
I'm glad there's plenty of people here mentioning the Condorcet Winner. Because that's the one and only voting property that I can't compromise on. If there is a Condorcet Winner, a voting system that doesn't choose it is useless. But it's not like IRV has to be entirely thrown out. As some have suggested, it would be just fine to use a hybrid system like "pick Condorcet Winner if it exists, use [IRV/STAR/etc] otherwise".
I'd like more people to talk about Ranked Pairs / Tideman. It satisfies a ridiculous number of voting criteria, even more than Schulze, but with the huge advantage that it's explainable to a layperson. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranked_pairs
Feature suggestion: the system automatically tells you when you have a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet_paradox situation and offers to decide the outcome based on a coin flip instead.
Only half joking there, the amount of negative results about ranked-choice voting in social choice theory is quite amazing. I'm not sure whether I'd place it on the efficiency frontier of the 'complex but has desirable properties' versus 'easy to understand but far from perfect' trade-off.
In case there is no Condorcet winner, there is actually a more principled way to randomize over alternatives than just choosing each with the same probability, known as maximal lotteries (e.g., https://pub.dss.in.tum.de/brandt-research/fishburn_slides.pd...).
I love this idea: it feels very parsimonious, and it's optimal (in a very narrow sense) by definition. I can't find much criticism of it, though, aside from:
https://groups.google.com/g/electionscience/c/wT1_hN38b8s
very cool, thank you
While we're offering troll feature suggestions, I have another:
Add a calculation for how many person-hours such a ballot would have taken if carried out by hand (based on scientifically validated assumptions about how long one person takes to sort through a stack of N votes).
This would also let you give a figure for how much money had been saved by people entrusting their democratic process to an inscrutable and unaccountable online system, and therefore the size of the financial incentive to do so.
Would you consider a variation where the Condorcet Winner is awarded the win if the Condorcet Winner exists, and where in the cases there isn't a Condorcet Winner, IRV is applied to the Smith Set?
Any MaxVoting method which is any voting method where all voters can freely rate all candidates and all of that information is used to determine a winner (Approval, STAR, Majority Judgement, Division Free, Vote 321, etc.) pushes candidates toward the majority opinion platform, the single political platform that best represents that group of voters at that time.
Min voting methods which is any voting method that forces voters to pick only one candidate (plurality, ranked choice voting) favors either the left or right political power position, traditionally held by Republicans and Democrats.
Alaska's special election resulted in a race between a Democrat and a Republican where the winner received about 50% of the vote. How did that change anything?
RCV is just plurality with a 50% threshold. San Francisco had that until it switched to RCV so it could stop paying for the live run offs.
For ending division, MaxVoting methods--any MaxVoting method--will work. It should be up to the people of that area which one they want instead of being imposed from the outside by experts. CommonSenseforUnitingAmerica.org
though I think the app looks great. I’ve never seen the point of ranked choice. Approval voting seems faster to vote, easier to implement and explain
Because of 5 candidates, there are 3 I approve, and 2 I hate. But of the 3 I approve, I love one and only reluctantly accept the other two.
People often have strong feelings about their top preference, and approval rating destroys that.
And then in my example, the voter is tempted to approve just 1 in order to give them a better chance of winning. (Known as bullet voting.)
It's much more intuitive and less cognitive load to rank options by preference than to decide on an arbitrary threshold of approval. You already know your ranking; you have to strategically decide on an approval cutoff.
(Also, between the candidates you disapprove of, you still often think some would be better/worse than others, and want that to count too.)
> And then in my example, the voter is tempted to approve just 1 in order to give them a better chance of winning. (Known as bullet voting.)
This is fine. The probability with which a voter bullet votes vs votes three conveys the degree of preference for that candidates. This is not as informative as score voting on a wider range (because okay, degree of preference doesn't map perfectly linearly with probability of vote), but it's an perfectly adequate proxy.
By comparison, ranked choice, despite feeling like it gives you the ability to choose relative ranks, doesn't actually convey more information because it says nothing about your degree of preference! "Candidate A is perfect in every way > Candidate B agrees with me on all policy decisions but is my ex > Candidate C literally wants to murder me" looks exactly the same on a ranked choice ballot as "Candidate A is perfect in every way > Candidate B literally wants to murder me > Candidate C literally wants to murder me and also kicked my dog".
> It's much more intuitive and less cognitive load to rank options by preference than to decide on an arbitrary threshold of approval. You already know your ranking; you have to strategically decide on an approval cutoff.
Spoken like someone who doesn't have intransitive preferences!
Ranked choice absolutely conveys more information than approval. It's not as much as score voting, but it's mathematically false to say it's the same amount as approval. Among five candidates, approval would be 2^5-2=30 possibilities (almost 5 bits of information, assuming you can't approve/disapprove all because that's the same as not voting), while ranked choice would be 5!=120 possibilities (almost 7 bits of information, assuming ties aren't permitted). It's only with 3 candidates that they have equal information in terms of possibilities (2^3-2=6=3!).
And individuals don't have intransitive preferences, only populations can. (Assuming mental competence.)
Yes score voting would be ideal if it were easy to convert preferences strength into numbers, but one person's 7 can be another person's 3. There's no objective way to do it. The same as approval voting isn't objective, because there's no objective threshold. Whereas ranked voting is purely objective, a person can always express an ordered preference in a consistent, repeatable way.
> Ranked choice absolutely conveys more information than approval. It's not as much as score voting, but it's mathematically false to say it's the same amount as approval. Among five candidates, approval would be 2^5-2=30 possibilities (almost 5 bits of information, assuming you can't approve/disapprove all because that's the same as not voting), while ranked choice would be 5!=120 possibilities (almost 7 bits of information, assuming ties aren't permitted). It's only with 3 candidates that they have equal information in terms of possibilities (2^3-2=6=3!).
This is a common intuition trap, but it's wrong. Consider the difference between score voting on a 16-point scale vs a million-point scale vs arbitrary-precision score voting. A ballot for the first conveys 4 bits per candidate; the second, about 20 bits per candidate; the last conveys infinite bits of information. You ... probably don't expect a substantial difference between election results with each option.
The trick is that the aggregation rule destroys information, which is kind of the point of aggregation. Different aggregation rules destroy different information. The difference between aggregated approval voting and aggregated arbitrary-precision score voting eats LSBs, sure, but the obvious probabilistic constructions for extracting approval votes from arbitrary precision score votes actually approximate the arbitrary-precision votes quite well, which is not what your intuition predicts, because it turns out LSBs are, well, less significant.
Also, the flat fact is that most single-victor elections in practice don't have more than three "top" candidates that you're practically interested in extracting information about.
> And individuals don't have intransitive preferences, only populations can. (Assuming mental competence.)
That's one hell of a bad assumption.
> This is a common intuition trap, but it's wrong.
I respectfully disagree. Yes it's true that jumping to lots of information with score voting doesn't produce an equivalent increase of meaningful information and that information is eaten by the aggregation technique, but I would argue that's not the case with ranked voting.
In the larger practical sense, yes there is a good argument to be made for approval voting if everybody voted honestly and gradations in preference strength were truly "dithered" relatively accurately among the population in a way that approval voting could "recover" the actual score-like preferences in aggregate. But the reality is that approval voting is easily subject to bullet voting manipulation, which destroys all of the information that it would otherwise contain in theory.
So in the real world, I submit that ranked voting ends up conveying more information that actually gets used, because there's more incentive to vote honestly.
> > And individuals don't have intransitive preferences, only populations can. (Assuming mental competence.)
> That's one hell of a bad assumption.
I assume you're just joking. Because yes while we can joke "hur hur people are dumb", if you're not taking people's votes seriously then what are we even doing? Every mathematical model must assume that individual's preferences are transitive, or we'd go mad.
> I respectfully disagree. Yes it's true that jumping to lots of information with score voting doesn't produce an equivalent increase of meaningful information and that information is eaten by the aggregation technique, but I would argue that's not the case with ranked voting.
You would be largely wrong for single-victor elections, and even trivially so for those without more than three major candidates in the race (to wit: most of them). So you're going to have to make that argument.
> But the reality is that approval voting is easily subject to bullet voting manipulation, which destroys all of the information that it would otherwise contain in theory.
No, this is not the reality. At an individual level, bullet voting is part of your strategic frontier of (all sincere!) votes, but the only strategic bullet vote is for your sincere favorite who is also a likely candidate to win. It is possible to get your most preferred candidate elected over a more widely approved candidate, but this still requires a plurality of second-candidate approvers to prefer your most preferred candidate (and enough to bullet vote them!), which is, like, not the worst outcome in the world, realistically speaking.
Meanwhile, at a campaign level, it only makes sense to push bullet voting to (a) people who most prefer your candidate, whose only viable competition is a more widely preferred candidate who shares largely the same voter base, which in context is basically betting on your targeting specificity, and (b) people who are going to vote for multiple candidates, none of which are yours, who you're convincing to vote against their own interests.
Also, you don't have a 100% success rate on convincing people to bullet vote, so your ability to convince people to bullet vote your candidate is still a proxy for strength of preference. You're making it a lossier proxy, but since you're destroying information from people who you were able to convince to follow your suggested voting strategy, this is not really a winning strategy unless you're already winning.
All in all, bullet voting simply is not remotely as much of a bogeyman to approval voting as it is to some ranked voting systems. There is some degree of strategic influence available, but it certainly happens less easily than in a ranked vote and is weaker in approval voting than in pretty much any other voting system under discussion—I challenge you to find a bullet voting "manipulation" that manages to make approval voting contain less information after aggregation than your favorite ranked choice model.
> Every mathematical model must assume that individual's preferences are transitive, or we'd go mad.
It's okay to accept some error. People genuinely have non-transitive preferences. This only has to drive you mad if you insist on generating a total ordering.
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
> The probability with which a voter bullet votes vs votes three conveys the degree of preference for that candidates.
I can see why that would be a useful assumption, but is there really empirical evidence to confirm that?
A much bigger factor in determining what the voter does, I would guess, is whether they hear activists for their party telling them (perhaps disingenuously) that their candidate won't win if you "betray" them by approving your second or third preference.
So there will be probability distributions of parties that try spreading such a message, and people who hear such a message, and voters who are loyal enough or risk averse enough to follow the advice, but I don't think the combined distribution matches closely enough to the genuine "degree of preference".
As a result, some candidates will get a tactical boost at the expense of their rivals, and eventually all voters will start to question whether they should have voted differently.
It's not a fantastic proxy, I agree, since the aggregation rule implicitly assumes linearity and it's almost certainly not. I think it's somewhat mitigated in practice by the kind of small intersection between situations where it's strategically safe for a party to push bullet voting and where it's useful to do so being pretty constrained to elections where the top candidates are mostly acceptable to the same voters, though? I find it pretty unintuitive to construct an approval vote election scenario with a rational spoiler effect, and that's probably less big a deal than the vote weighting issues that crop up with multi-point score votes, but that's definitely something you can quibble over.
The wider point imo is that compared to all forms of ranked choice voting, arbitrary-precision score voting is pretty obviously night-and-day superior (information-content-wise, at least), to which approval voting is a "close enough", at worst moderately inferior but at least theoretically equivalent, trade-off in favor of implementability.
Even in your situation it doesn’t make sense to me to use ranked choice. Might as well use score voting so you can say how much more you prefer one candidate to another.
All voting systems have drawbacks, but I think approval is best relative to effort and impact.
Thanks! And both approval and RCV are steps in the right direction. For whatever reason, RCV has been implemented more broadly (but still just a tiny fraction of the US).
I've been very encouraged by the results in Alaska after the special election that just happened there in August. 85% found it simple. 73% ranked multiple candidates. And the election workers implementing it had a flawless go of it.
Some data from one of the groups that helped educate voters: https://alaskansforbetterelections.com/polling-shows-alaskan...
> 85% found it simple. 73% ranked multiple candidates.
But what's conspicuously absent from these statistics is how happy the voters are with the outcome (compared to a counterfactual world where the election had been carried out under FPTP and a potentially different candidate won).
Sadly it was an outcome which allowed Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) to make the argument[0] that:
> 60% of Alaska voters voted for a Republican, but thanks to a convoluted process and ballot exhaustion — which disenfranchises voters — a Democrat ‘won.’
This is exactly the sort of well-poisoning that supporters of other voting reforms are afraid of.
[0] https://www.independentsentinel.com/60-of-voters-cast-ballot...
If the problem was ballot exhaustion, couldn't that have been solved by doing what Australia does, i.e. asking voters to rank all the candidates? That doesn't seem like a problem with instant runoff voting itself.
> I’ve never seen the point of ranked choice.
I'm waiting to see RCV pushed by someone's who ideology doesn't exactly benefit from it in their area. It's not a second place always wins, but I have seen a lot of examples of "My party will not win in my area, but it's kinda close, and RCV gives me a higher statistical probability of "my side" getting in".
Maybe approval voting is better, I'm not sure how likely it is for unpopular candidates to win in close areas. If it suffers from the same issues as ranked choice or not.
I'm tired of it all being game.
I'm for any form of multi-vote system (RCV, Approval, etc) because (1) they tend to more accurately reflect the will of the electorate, and (2) they may help to break the strangle-hold of a two party system in the US.
The two-party system is so dominant in the US because of the first-past-the-post voting system. With such an election (even disregarding the financial power of the parties, or the role of the electoral college) third-party candidates never have a shot, because any intelligent voter knows that a vote for them is a spoiler for their second-favorite candidate.
Multi-choice voting systems generally reduce or eliminate spoiler effects, which both allows a third party to build support, and reduces the chance that an election will go to a candidate with lower support simply because the other side had their vote split.
Even when we're not talking about the two-party system, multi-vote systems better reflect the will of the people. My city has a ranked choice, multi-seat election for city council. All councilors are at-large, meaning you're voting a group of about ten of them in, and selecting from a pool of about 20 candidates. There's almost no other system that could accurately capture the majority of the people's positions.
Isn't approval voting just a signified form of Ranked Choice Voting -- one without prioritization?
So the strength of RCV would then be more built in tie-breaking.
No. Approval voting is actually a minimized score voting system, and although intuitively a two-point feels like this should convey less information, the way the aggregation rule works (straight addition—or specifically in the approval voting case, tallying), you're actually extracting significantly more information out of a set of approval votes than you would from a ranked choice vote.
To put it another way: given a (sufficiently large) set of [0,1] score votes, you can generate a set of approval votes that give a very good estimate for the score voting results by mapping each score vote to an approval vote by randomly picking a number in [0,1) for each vote and marking options scored above that threshold. Handwaving a bit, this implies that at scale approval voting and arbitrary-precision score voting give the same results with pretty good probability.
Now, score voting with arbitrary precision pretty clearly conveys more information than ranked choice! You can extract an RCV from a score vote directly, but this loses substantial information about how far apart the options were rated. Conversely, if you extract a score vote from an RCV, you ... well, you can get something like Borda count. For other RCV aggregation algorithms a score vote extraction is not quite as clean, but it's substantially less clear whether the information "lost" is real or an accidental artifact of the RCV itself. Certainly you can argue all day over the merits of Borda count and variants vs other IRV aggregation algorithms, but then score voting with arbitrary precision not only strictly dominates Borda count, but also is clearly conveying additional information about degree of preference on top of that which is obviously useful and not encoded in ranked choice votes at all!
Bonus: a surprisingly large number of decisions are dominated by no more than three viable choices that are clearly preferred over all others. When selecting for among three options, there are seven unique approval votes (the all marked/unmarked votes, expressing no preference, are equivalent), and only six ranked unique choice votes. It should be pretty clear that RCV and approval don't convey equivalent information in this case!
CES has a whole page on this.
In a nutshell, the reason this works is because the people who approve only X or Y have a pretty similar X versus Y opinion as the whole electorate, just based on random chance. It's just statistical sampling principles.
https://www.electionscience.org/library/expressiveness-in-ap...
> When selecting for among three options, there are seven unique approval votes (the all marked/unmarked votes, expressing no preference, are equivalent), and only six ranked unique choice votes.
No, they're both six. There are 8 unique approval votes (2^3) but two are thrown out -- the all-marked and all-unmarked, so you're left with 6, same as ranked. RCV and approval absolutely do convey equivalent information in the case of three candidates.
I don't know where you're getting seven from.
No they do not convey equivalent information, because the information content isn't just the number of states, it's the encoding mechanism too.
For instance suppose you encode the position of missile strikes on some land area in a 16x16 grid, meaning 8 bits of information.
Another person uses only six bits of information, encoding the missile strike position as degrees and distance from the center point of the grid.
Then it turns out the latter method is more accurate because the missiles tend to always strike pretty close to the center of the grid.
The specific patterns of voter preference that emerge in a realistic scenario are counterintuitive and can end up being more accurately measured by the kind of expression approval voting allows. You can get people who have radically different intensity of preference but the same order of preference so that they look identical to a ranked voting method but appear different to approval voting based on their thresholds.
In addition, you have tactical behavior, as well as the efficiency of how the voting method uses the information on the ballots. When you combine all of these factors together, approval voting tends to perform better than ranked voting methods.
https://www.electionscience.org/library/expressiveness-in-ap...
Wow, thank you!!
It's a pretty interesting topic on which a common intuition (n bits is less information content than log(n!), right?) fails it turns out most of the work is being done in the aggregation algorithm, not in the data entry.
Which is emblematic of the biggest problem with RCV, which is that the aggregation algorithms are too opaque to realize at a glance that the results they give are ... not as good as doing a straightforward thing.
Approval voting allows bullet voting, which is not ideal:
https://fairvote.org/the_troubling_record_of_approval_voting...
(a) bullet voting isn't actually a problem
https://www.rangevoting.org/BulletBugaboo.html
(b) Approval voting only incentivizes bullet voting when that is very close to actually capturing the voter's intent. The strategic thing to do is vote approve on all those you like better than whoever you think the most likely candidate to win is.
Not all ranked choice methods are identical - if you're interested in this topic, check out https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-2026611/latest.pdf
Could something like this be used with polling to show a discrepancy between election outcomes and what voters want?
For example, for a presidential election in the US we have the electoral college results and the popular vote (which often differ). It would be nice to also have a ranked-choice result to compare against. Especially when it comes time to consider a revote or when courts become involved with elections (a sign the electoral process has failed in some way).
I suspect that election results would differ from ranked-choice polling to such a degree that it would become apparent how elections are manipulated by parties, the media, incumbents, etc etc etc:
https://journalistsresource.org/politics-and-government/the-...
Economic elites drive nearly all policy change in the US through campaign contributions and lobbying (highly correlated), while response to the average citizen's preferences is flat across the political spectrum (no correlation).
IMHO this mismatch is driven nearly entirely by election results being uncorrelated with voters' preferences. Then the vitriol against outcomes is used by the parties to keep us divided so that much-needed legislation can be simply politicized to stop it. Once support approaches 50/50, it dies in committee.
There were 395 bills that died via division this way in the Senate as of 2020:
https://americanindependent.com/mitch-mcconnell-block-bills-...
I tried to cite the most independent article I could find, but they all mention key politicians. Please don't let names muddy the waters, as the motivation behind divisive politics is the constant here.
I found The Politics Industry by Katherine Gehl super enlightening and well-researched on this very idea (https://www.amazon.com/Politics-Industry-Political-Innovatio...). The basic premise is that the current "market dynamics" of Politics (when viewed like any other industry) actively disincentivizes results. Painting with a somewhat broad brush, it doesn't making sense for a politician to make progress on immigration reform because that lessens its saliency for raising money and turning out the base.
The solution proposed is a combination of "Final-Five" open primaries with ranked-choice voting in the general election. This is what just happened in Alaska and is on the ballot in Nevada in November.
Which reminds me...if you're a Nevada voter, vote YES on ballot question 3!
Approval voting is much better.
https://www.electionscience.org/library/approval-voting-vers...
This YouTube video "Simulating alternate voting systems" by Primer seems apposite:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhO6jfHPFQU
Apposite ~ relavant
"apt in the circumstances or in relation to something."
Since many people are talking about STAR voting, also check out this site https://star.vote/ I've found it works pretty well.
What is the science behind this? Is it not obvious that most people want to pick a single alternative? And for precision. If you force people into ranking. Is it not obvious that the effort that goes into picking the top alternative is much higher than for let us say the fifth option. Basically, adding noise that may skew the results.
Oh hey, I made one too. https://betterpolls.com/
Focus on Condorcet ("Virtual Round Robin") counting. De-duping by requiring a google or facebook login (or anonymous with a crappy hacky captcha).
If I am not mistaken SurveyMonkey also has the option to create ranked-choice questions, no?
It allows you to ask the "ranking question" BUT it doesn't do the ranked-choice calculation with the results. So, in theory, you can use it to collect the votes, but you'll need to do the calculations by hand. I actually wrote an article on this exact thing as a bit of an SEO play: https://www.rankedvote.co/guides/applying-ranked-choice-voti...
The tracking/ sign on nag is an instant barrier to use. No thanks.
I feel like drag and drop sorting would be more user-friendly
That is an option! You can choose between the "Grid" ballot type which simulates what's used on real-world paper ballots. There's also "Drag and Drop" which works particularly well on mobile touch devices. People just drag their most preferred to the top! Try it on this demo: https://app.rankedvote.co/decisions/4973/Family-Movie-Night/...
consider making .h04_h1.hero min-height 174px - otherwise the 'get started' button jumps around
What device/browser are you on where it's hopping around? I've been manually testing across devices so that the "typing text animation" stays stable. 174px actually creates a bit more height than I desire on mobile safari/iphone. But knowing what you browser you were on will help me troubleshoot.