A lot of nitpicking here, as is typical on HN, but the Australian experience is instructive. We can vote for the Greens without "throwing our left-of-centre" vote away and still preferring Labor to Liberal. Ranking only up to 5 is reasonable - if you want the simplicity of the old system, and don't want to research beyond 3 candidates, don't!
I can't see the weird complaining about having to learn more about candidates - there's usually only a few viable well-known candidates. You don't have to go research the Natural Law Party or Animal Justice or whoever.
The only cautionary tale is the whole horse-trading element of preferences does lead to some weird candidates making it in at the margins. We had someone who was semi-famous for engaging in a Kangaroo poo fight get in this way:
But this "preference whispering" is more of a big deal when preferences were allocated by parties - we had an option where you could vote a single '1' for a given party and it was their preferences that wound up being automatically applied (if you didn't go through hand-numbering all the preferences). So minor party deals became a huge deal. It's not going to be so big if you only have to number 5 and don't even have to keep numbering.
In this US, you would rarely need to do any additional research.
There are almost always only 2 choices - the Democratic candidate and the Republican candidate.
Anyone voting for another candidate is simply saying that's who they /REALLY/ wish would win, but most people aren't willing to throw their vote in the garbage to virtue signal. That 3rd party candidate almost never has a chance at winning. Neither does the alternative from your own party.
Stacked ranking simply allows you to say "I hate both candidates from the major parties, and I'd rather have this other person in office, but since I have to pick one of the two of them, I guess I'll pick X."
> If people could confidently vote for another party there wouldn't be just two parties.
If multimember districts are used with RCV yes. If not it tends to maintain a duopoly. Australia’s Senate uses RCV like voting with multimember districts and has more diversity than its House which uses single member districts.
That said there is some benefit to using RCV even with single member districts as in theory it tends to moderate the candidates a bit as they want to appeal to more people. That said I think it’s a serious missed opportunity to press RCV without multimember districts.
While multimember districts would be a huge improvement, I wonder if we also should start having the conversation if geography based representation is the right approach for the internet age.
I for one, have more in common with a minority identity widely dispersed across the country but connected through the internet than I do my next door neighbors. My niche identity never gets proportionately represented in government because I'm overwhelmed by local majorities.
No. Government and politics are primarily local because most problems are local.
For instance, I have zero clue about life in NYC. Letting me directly influence decisions in NYC is wholly unfair. I have no skin in the game! How good or bad their transportation is doesn’t affect me. Whether their local tax rate is high or low doesn’t affect me. But it most definitely does affect them.
Likewise, nobody in NYC is affected by the repeat wildfires we’ve had recently on the west coast. Letting them directly say, “Nah, it’s no big deal” is also unfair.
I definitely empathize, though. Lots of my beliefs aren’t represented where I live, either.
The Congress does not decide the New York local tax rate or how west coast cities handle their forest. You can have a local government and Congressional elections that are not tied to your specific location. As far as I know now the only position that both someone in California and someone in New York would vote for is POTUS.
There is always a trade-off between the representation of regions, demographic groups, and opinions. Single-member districts are the right solution when regional representation is the most important concern and the representation of various opinions is the least important one. Sufficiently large multimember districts are the opposite.
When it comes to regional representation, the right district size depends on population and mobility. If you live in a rural area, a single-member district probably covers you local area reasonably well. In major cities, the boundaries of electoral districts are often arbitrary and meaningless. If you live in one district, work in another, and use shops and other services in a third, which of the three is most important to you? And what happens if you move to another place within the city?
I think that RCV is at best a hack, a compromise for people who don't want to get too far from FPP.
IMHO if you are electing individual people (a mayor, a US president, a city council, a US Senator) then STV is more equitable (it is pretty close to RCV if you are electing a single person). But if you are electing parties (like the US House) then MMP is a fairer solution
> But if you are electing parties (like the US House)
I'm not sure why you are phrasing it this way. Voters don't pick a party for their House representative, they pick a candidate. Each House district election is independent of all the others.
Yes but if each house district is FPP 3rd parties generally don't get a look in, people who vote for them get no representation at all, and can produce governments where the party with the most seats got fewer votes than the others.
MMP provides local representation, and proportional representation (at the expense of having larger local seats, or more representatives).
Voters pick a candidate knowing that the candidate will have to play within a two party legislature.
Third party legislators are shunned. Their bills get no traction, and they get no committee assignments. If they are seriously divergent, the House could easily have them removed.
Further evidence for this exists in the demise of ticket splitting: if you vote R at the top of the ticket, you're very likely to vote R the rest of the way down the ticket, regardless of who the downballot R's are. It wasn't always this way, but has been for some time.
Ranked ballots in single member districts are really a hack on electoral reform movements. It creates the appearance of improving the system while only solving one of many problems.
The hack worked in Canada and GB, where it was used to divide, confuse and ultimately scuttle the electoral reform process.
I'm Australian so I might be biased, but I don't like MMP. It seems to be optimising for democratic outcome (well at least a parliament that looks like the distribution of first party votes) while ignoring all other factors.
Many countries that use it seem to have weak governments that can't get much done. There is parties that won't work together because one is secessionists (Catalans), right wing (national rally in France, AfD in Germany), different ethnic group (Arabs in Israel, Flemish vs French speakers in Belgium). Some parties seem to get more popular if they refuse to compromise.
This can end up in endless elections (e.g. Israel), inability to form government for years (e.g. Belgium) or parties that aren't acceptable for mainstream parties to form coalitions with becoming the only opposition (e.g. National Rally). Even well run countries like the Netherlands and Sweden can seem to take forever to form a government.
RCV mostly allows one party to form a majority government and get things done. There is clear accountability. While at the same time there is still the incentive to appeal to a broad base. And over time new parties can break into the system if they are appealing enough.
You seem to be assuming that doing something is usually better than doing nothing. I believe the opposite is true in politics. It's difficult to make things better with political decisions, but it's much easier to break things or make them worse. If you can't convince a clear majority that something is a good idea, doing nothing is probably a better choice.
Presidents, prime ministers, and governors are always enemies of liberal democracy (the republic for those more familiar with American terminology). Nobody should be given that kind of power, but unless we can figure out how to run a country without such leaders, we have to tolerate them as a necessary evil.
It works well here in NZ - I think that part of it is that we've built a political culture around MMP that understands that to be successful at MMP parties need to build coalitions and compromise (very transparent public compromises) - the current government is the first we've had in 3-4 decades where one party could form a government by themselves, and they still formed a coalition of sorts
Just to be clear - most of the countries you give as your examples aren't MMP systems, they are other proportional representation systems, and the problems you have with it are common to proportional representation systems broadly rather than MMP.
It's interesting you gave France as an example, because they have a nice workflow/system to avoid this.
There are presidential elections every 5 years, which are "standard", if no candidate gets over 50% of the votes, there's a second round between the first two candidates from the first round. A month later, there are legislative elections, the concept being that people will send the new president a parliament he can work with if they're OK with him. Macron won with 20 something % in the first round ( second round was against the aforementioned National Rally, so his victory was guaranteed), but his party got 50%+ in the legislative elections because people decided to give him a chance to enact his program, even if he wasn't their first choice. That isn't always the case, and if the far right wins the presidential elections next year i'm certain they won't have a parliamentary majority.
To avoid a popular wave sweeping everything, the legislature id bicameral, the aforementioned legislative elections only for the lower chamber, the National Assembly. The higher chamber, the Senate, which is more limited in powers but can still exert influence over the lower chamber's law making, is indirectly elected by mayors, local/departmental/regional councilors with staggered 6 year terms ( every 3 years half the seats are up for election).
IMHO it's overall a good system that allows for everyone to be represented, enables governments to be stable ( but doesn't force it). The main thing i'd improve is ranked choice voting for single seat elections ( presidential, local).
And besides all that specific to France, i disagree about "classic" MMP. It forces cooperation and compromise, much better than a party forcing through with whatever they want because there's nobody that can opose them.
That’s not correct, Chirac won the parliament in 2002, the first time the presidential election was for 5 years. The former system (7 years president) allowed more diversity and that’s how he got to work with a left prime minister, 10 years after having been himself the prime minister of a left president.
I see RCV and STV used interchangeably. And the way I’ve seen RCV described in the US it is just STV with a better name for easier marketing. But I may be missing some subtlety. I also prefer MMP for parliamentary systems but changing the US to use MMP is several orders of magnitude harder than implementing RCV, which can be done state by state. It can even be implanted using multimember districts without changing anything. So it gives the US the best path to a better electoral system I think.
What I like about RCV is that it benefits moderate candidates. You can also argue that moderate candates have more influence at a national level, and if your representatives have more influence they have more bargaining power on behalf of your state.
All in all RCV can be a moderating factor AND it does not require top down changes to the election system.
> That said there is some benefit to using RCV even with single member districts as in theory it tends to moderate the candidates a bit as they want to appeal to more people.
RCV has a bigger impact when used in conjunction with primaries. The is a not unusual situation where more extreme candidates win primaries when the more moderate candidate would have won the election by a larger margin. The more extreme candidate then ends up elected because the district has been jerrymandered to belong to their party.
Yeah. The solution there is to get rid of primaries altogether. And they’re unnecessary with RCV.
Although I think they’re unnecessary already under the current system and the US would be a lot better off without them. You could get rid of them and just leave it up to the parties themselves to decide which candidate they will back for each district via whichever means they prefer internally amongst party members.
> The USA is a two-party state because of the voting system.
There's much more to it than that. The two-party system is codified into many laws. A lot of effort goes into maintaining it; the voting system isn't up to that job.
> The USA is a two-party state because of the voting system. If people could confidently vote for another party there wouldn't be just two parties.
There are plenty of other parties, for example: Libertarian, Green, and Constitution.
In practice, these minor parties (could be) funded by the opposite end of the spectrum to weaken the other side (just a hunch).
But that gets at one possibility of why these minor parties never do better than, say Ross Perot (who got no electoral votes, but sunk Bush41 in 1992): scale.
It takes a whale of a party to carry a pond the size of the US.
And really, the remaining two nominal parties seem wings of a deeper, stateful organization putting on a show every couple of years.
Plurality voting systems lacking runoff elections lead to two-party states. Maurice Duverger pointed this out in 1964.
The Convention of States is a campaign by the Tea Party movement to form an Article V convention, but they are more likely to present a balanced budget amendment, not electoral reform. Key people involved like Jim DeMint have also advocated for a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage—a pretty silly idea if you ask me.
The 16th and 17th Amendments, plus the Federal Reserve Act, all in 1913, along with the capping of the House of Representatives at 435 members in 1910, have driven the growth of the Administrative State. And the debt.
So now there is a quasi-aristocracy running plays and putting on these electoral shows every couple of years.
Calls for substantial reform.
Technical people understand the need for clean architecture and political systems.
Humans are not code, but our political- and tax systems are a Byzantine train wreck. On a good day.
But go ahead and worry about DeMint's opinions, boss.
I agree that our political system is a train wreck, but I don't see why the political positions of the people you're suggesting amend the Constitution wouldn't be relevant.
I submit that perhaps the communication challenge may be rooted in the modern insistence in making ansolutely everything political.
A Federalist construct would seek to assign appropriate tasking to each level of government, and have DC manage international and inter-State concerns.
Arguably, a single, monolithic state try to manage every personal and local concern leads to gridlock, Q.E.D.
Incorrect. I voted in today's NYC mayoral primary. There are 13 candidates on the Democratic primary ballot. Perhaps 3 are considered "front-runners" but everyone's aware it's entirely possible at least a couple of the others could wind up winning. The race is entirely up in the air.
Because NYC is overwhelmingly Democratic, this election almost certainly determines who will be mayor.
And not only do you need to do your research on these many candidates, but there are similar lists of more than 2 candidates for Borough President, Comptroller, etc.
Welcome to actual democracy where you suddenly do get to express meaningful choices that aren't just between a single candidate preselected by two parties! And know that if your first-choice candidate doesn't win, your vote isn't effectively thrown out. :)
> And not only do you need to do your research on these many candidates, but there are similar lists of more than 2 candidates for Borough President, Comptroller, etc.
Can you say how many such choices "etcetera" was eliding here? And if possible if there were roles where you had no idea about any of the candidates beyond stuff like incumbency ? I can see New York City is too big to make just having a Mayor on the ballot enough to properly establish democratically elected local government, but in general it seems Americans elect way too many roles.
Yeah :/ that does seem excessive. Delegates to the Judicial Convention in particular don't look to me to have a role that justifies expecting citizens to choose eleven of them each cycle.
I believe those, in particular, are part of the party infrastructure, and just on there because it's a Democratic Party Primary ballot.
We elect some form of party-apparatus delegates here in California too, though the Democratic Party here holds those elections separately and privately.
The only one I've ever been actively aware was happening was because I was dating someone working for a prominent state politician, and got dragged along to vote for people I'd never heard of in some park.
Fake democracy where you get to choose viable candidates exclusively from one party, and only one party.
Aka a party dictatorship, the same as they have in most authoritarian states, and ideologically enforced in a similarly regressive manner. If you're not of the party, you will be an outcast and blockaded from any chance at winning. The opposite of democracy, and very clearly so.
Literally anyone can run in the Democratic primary, you just have to be registered as a Democrat, which is just filling out a form where there are no wrong answers.
Have you even been following the NYC primary at all? "Ideologically enforced" is hilarious. The difference between, say, the current #1 and #2 candidates Adams and Wiley is basically the difference between Trump and Bernie Sanders, and the the rest are everything in between and then some.
If you think anything is being ideologically enforced in this race, if you think anyone is being "outcast and blockaded" -- I mean, this dude Paperboy Love Prince [1] is actually on the ballot, not even joking -- then quite frankly you're delusional. This isn't Communist China, this is the Democratic Party which is, well, famously a bit of a mess.
I don't know where you live or what news you read, but if you're trying to claim America isn't democratic and open then, ha... you sure picked the wrong race to use as an example! :)
What you say is true if general elections in the US, but often not the primary elections where a party determines who its candidate will be. At that stage it's pretty common to have a wider field of candidates.
Also, ranking could change the US dynamic of only have 2 choices. Being able to vote 3rd party and then then choose someone from one of the two main parties might drive a lot more people to vote 3rd party because they wouldn't feel it's hurting the chance of having a candidate that represents at least some of their views. This may not change national elections much, but for Senate, and especially House members it could make a difference. Enough to force more coalitions and compromise between parties instead of winner take all. Sure, that outcome isn't guaranteed, but it seems more likely to produce that sort of result than what we have now.
Americans may not know that most countries don't have public primaries the way that the US does - here in NZ it varies from party to party - at one extreme the Greens hold a very public transparent democratic process, at the other the National party use closed 'smoke filled' rooms
With that argument China is also a democracy, since you can vote who will get to run the party. I'd argue that a proper democracy requires new parties to be easily formed and quickly gain momentum and power if they have support from a fraction of the population. I don't think that ranked choices allows for that, as even if the third party "Greens" in this case got 25% of the votes they'd get thrown away in favour of peoples secondary choice.
Minor nit: I believe only party members vote on party leadership, and it's actually difficult to get into the party. Also, I'm under the impression that the voting is multi-tiered, where you vote on your level and region on which member gets elevated to the next level.
It's actually an interesting system, and as usual, it seems adding indirection solves some problems while introducing others.
I don't know how you got from my comment to China. I speculated that ranked choice might have more of an impact on which candidates are selected in primary elections. If you think voting for who will be the party's candidate is undemocratic then we're already there, that's already how it works, and I don't see anything in my comment that would lead to a single-party system like China. Maybe you could elaborate on why you think ranked choice in primary elections would take us to a single party system.
What I don't understand is why you think 3rd parties should rapidly gain power if they only have support from a fraction of the population. Why should their power be disproportionately larger than the # of people supporting them? I don't think it's very democratic to have a candidate with only 25% of the vote win the election.
I mean... are you suggesting that some system where someone could get elected with only 25% of the vote would somehow be more democratic? If a party or candidate can only get 25% of the vote in an election for a single position, like mayor, they aren't going to get elected, that's just democracy, right?
RCV makes it more likely a third party could get 50% of the vote though, since people can vote for it without worrying about "throwing their vote away", or throwing the election to a right-wing party when they want to vote for the lesser left-wing party.
I think once people see that their 'other party' preferences are at least being represented in the early rounds, they will gain confidence in their ability to express their actual desires in the ranking. The understanding that third parties actually have a real chance if they get enough voters' first choices will wake up the Ds and Rs that they can't just coast and hand wave anymore or they'll get tossed out.
Yes if this voting style extended to primaries or other elections with multiple candidates from one party, it also has benefits. You can vote for the less popular candidate that better suits you, while falling back to the popular one you're willing to settle for. Preferences are generally reported, so people will see 'unpopular' options actually getting votes and things shift over time.
More over, a way this can actually play is that there's a third candidate Z who has policies many people strongly agree with, but, since they aren't a member of the big parties and don't attract mainstream news focus, few believe they'll win. Under RCV and several other systems, many R and D voters will put Z first, because it can't hurt. They expect Z will be eliminated, since they "know" R or D must win, and their R or D second choice is what they expect to matter but at least they made their preference clear.
And then Z wins with 55% of the vote. Even though this is a surprise to Z's voters, it's a pleasant surprise. They wanted Z they just didn't expect it to be possible.
Under FPTP this can be made to happen, but you have to persuade people Z can actually win, because they're worried they are "throwing away" their vote until it really happens. Consider Brighton Pavilion in the UK. In 2005, Brighton was held by a Labour Co-Op incumbent, and the Green candidate came a close third. The Greens had to really sell the message that when Lucas stood in 2010 they genuinely had a chance to elect her, if only people who supported Green policies looked past the Red/Blue split and gave Caroline their vote.
They made it happen, but it was close, turnout was up considerably, and much of that new turnout voted for Lucas. If you voted for Lucas despite vague Tory leanings, and she hadn't won, you've have been devastated because right behind her was the new Labour candidate whereas even a modest fraction of Lucas' votes going to the Tory would have won them the election.
Once she'd shown it was possible Caroline Lucas never looked back, and she now routinely secures a clear majority in elections not the mere plurality required to win.
But this has been hard for her party to replicate elsewhere, and while Lucas is an especially personable candidate that can't explain the entire phenomenon. There are likely other constituencies in the UK where Greens could secure a majority if the voters believed the Green candidate has a chance and didn't vote their second or third choice to prevent their least preferred from winning.
I'm actually not bullish for RCV, but this sort of problem is exactly why it makes sense.
> There are almost always only 2 choices - the Democratic candidate and the Republican candidate.
We really need to get rid of the canonization of the party. If there are only going to be two candidates, let it be two individuals. The party shouldn't even be listed on the ballot. If you haven't done enough research to know which individual belongs to the party you support, then you haven't done enough research to vote. More individuals make this even better because it becomes a forcing function that forces people to actually learn about the individuals they are voting for and each individual's policies.
If I ruled the world, I'd go further and require a short 5 question pop quiz about the policies of the candidate you chose and you need 3 out of 5 questions correct for your vote to count.
>...If I ruled the world, I'd go further and require a short 5 question pop quiz about the policies of the candidate you chose and you need 3 out of 5 questions correct for your vote to count.
Yeah, we know how that goes when we try to keep the "wrong" people from voting in the US.
> Anyone voting for another candidate is simply saying that's who they /REALLY/ wish would win, but most people aren't willing to throw their vote in the garbage to virtue signal.
Interesting to apply the term "signaling" to a behavior which other people cannot observe.
> In this US, you would rarely need to do any additional research.
>
> There are almost always only 2 choices - the Democratic candidate and the Republican candidate.
In NY, what's being discussed in the OP, the ranked choice system is being used only for the primaries. Whoever wins the Democratic party will certainly win the mayoral general election -- but ranked choice voting isn't being used there anyway.
So what you're describing isn't actually the context of ranked choice voting in this election.
In Chicago, another city where the Democrats always win, they actually have, since 1999, non-partisan primaries. Just one primary, for all parties, top two candidates go on to the general election -- so the general election can be between two generals. It would be interesting to see instead a single ranked-choice election, no primary at all.
> There are almost always only 2 choices - the Democratic candidate and the Republican candidate.
I’m an immigrant so some of this may be wrong, but the party system in the US seems to operate very differently to that in most other countries.
Primaries make races far more focussed on the individual representative so there is less incentive for serious third parties to emerge as their potential candidates can instead challenge an incumbent in a primary within the same party affiliation.
With voters registering with an affiliation rather than joining a party as a member and being subject to that party’s rules, so far as I can tell there is no way for a party to prevent someone from running under their banner so long as they win the primary.
The whole point of this kind of voting is that you would have to relay on primaries. You can just put up 2 or 5 candidates per party without hurting the parties chances of winning.
Primaries mostly exist due to the FPTP voting system - dropping that would remove a pretty big reason to have them at all which could lead to cheaper elections... campaign fundraising was ever reigned in - rather, the elections will probably be cheaper but it's unlikely you'd notice due to the insane campaign budgets that are common.
Cost of elections is not an issue, but replacing FPTP with ranked choice makes candidate less dependent on the party.
Remember Trump 2016 elections, when Trump disagreed with the way debates were conducted. Trump had to bend because there could be only one Republican candidate.
Not saying Trump was right, but making candidate less dependent on the party (i. e. redistribute the power from the party committee to the candidates) would be good thing.
If ranked voting happened everywhere at same time, the independents, who outnumber both Democratic and Republican party numbers combined, might become a force onto themselves and change everyone's assumptions on 3rd party candidates. This won't likely happen without national voting reform, but it is an interesting thought experiment.
At the very least you might given enough independents are elected, hand them the balance of power where the governing party has to deal with them to get bills passed rather than the increasingly difficult task of skimming votes from the rival party.
What you really need is a Don "keep the bastards honest" Chipp type to splinter off one of the major parties and form a viable third party with a group of like-minded moderates. Given the state of the GOP it could be time for the likes of Mitt Romney and Liz Cheney backed by operative groups such as the Lincoln Project to give it a crack.
Local elections usually have more interesting options for candidates.
For example the recent mayoral election in Portland, where the incumbent was pretty much a Democrat and was challenged by a couple of more progressive candidates. The incumbent ended up winning with less than 50% of the vote
Does this vary in different parts of the US? Where I live many municipal elections are nonpartisan (no D or R next to someone's name). In some cases (e.g. jungle primary) there may be multiple viable candidates from the same party
New York is a fusion voting state with all sorts of parties. Most, like the “Rent is Too Damn High” party fade, but there is a bunch of third parties of varying degrees of relevance.
Do you have something US-specific to indicate that this would be the case? Neither empirics nor theory support your claim. https://rangevoting.org/TarrIrvSumm.html
The very first line of your source references Australia as an example of why ranked voting would not give third parties any influence.
This seems like an odd choice, given that Australia currently has five different parties in Parliament, and has in recent history had a third party be the deciding "vote" on who forms government. It seems like an even odder choice for you to reference it as a counterpoint in this specific case given that one of those parties is literally called "the Greens".
The goal of voting for a 3rd party is go get to 5% of the popular vote to fully fund the party across the next election cycle.
Libertarian party has come the closest, earning 3.1% in 2016 while total 3rd party votes were over 5.5%. If the Green Party voters had voted LP we’d have validated a 3rd party that year.
So much political messaging focuses on fear of the other major party that people feel they have to vote opposition rather than voting for who they really want. US elections have been fear driven for years.
Not ever. The Federalists collapsed before we got a Whig, and the Whigs before we got a Republican, and those and the Democratic (ex-Democratic-Republican) parties are the only four that have won the Presidency.
> but third parties have won at every other level of government including Governors, Representatives, and Senators.
Sure, but its easy to overcount them; state two-party systems (where they haven't been effectively one-party systems) haven't historically always aligned with the national two-party system (e.g., Missouri’s [ed: or, in the real world, Minnesota’s] Farmer-Labor Party was the second (and later first) party in the state for years, alongside the Republicans, before it merged with a local third party—and thereby joined the national Democrats—as the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party.
I would consider Sanders to be a pretty legitimate third party candidate - VT democrats have coalesced around him recently but his initial bid for Senate was pretty spectacular. He managed to ride an extremely popular mayoral career into a state that is extremely dominated by Burlington population-wise. Burlington metro is roughly as large a proportion of the VT voting block as NYC metro is for NY.
> I would consider Sanders to be a pretty legitimate third party candidate -
While he identifies as a socialist by ideology and has some association with the Vermont Progressive Party, AFAIK he has always run for federal legislative office as an independent, not third-party, candidate.
> VT democrats have coalesced around him recently but his initial bid for Senate was pretty spectacular.
IIRC, his original House campaign was spectacular, but Democrats in VT coalesced around him in his 8 terms in VT’s sole House seat.
I would mention that everyone's favorite example in this category (Bernie Sanders) does secure the democratic primary nomination for senate each election - he just refuses to leverage it in the general election. But failing to do that would lead to a much harder general election since the Dems would likely put up a competing candidate and split the vote three ways.
A third party candidate gave America one of the worst presidents ever - Woodrow Wilson was essentially elected on a fluke because Teddy split the vote with Taft - the two together had a strong majority of the overall vote while Wilson only took home 41%.
FPTP systems strongly encourage bipartisan politics but it's silly to say third parties have never won and it's also incorrect. Early American politics were much more diverse before things coalesced around the slavery question leading up to the civil war - after the war there was a brief re-emergence of multi-party politics but it quickly collapsed back down to two as campaigning became less policy driven and new media opened up the door for a lot more fear-based advertising.
I would agree that it's highly unlikely that a third party candidate would ever win in the current political atmosphere - though if the GOP continues to move toward Trump and the Dems shift way to the left we might see a third party fiscal conservative have a real shot at it.
This video [0] argues that most Australians fail to understand how the system works and that the mainstream political parties actively mislead voters into thinking that their voice is "wasted" if they vote for a 3rd party
Most don't understand the upper house (Senate) system as it applies weighting on the redistribution of votes and there is a choice between above the line (party preference) and below the line (tick every box): but the lower house system is fairly straight forward.
Anyone moderately awake during the election cycle is keenly aware we have a preferential voting system (and the basic mechanics) as preference deals between parties are keenly covered by the media.
There is another great little thing in Australian voting that plays on this - political parties get paid per #1 vote (I think it is about $4 or something).
This means you pick the party you want to win, they get paid, and then preference from there.
No? It is instructive of how parliaments work. IRV doesn't explain the multi-party house and senate given that every other country with a parliament also has a similar distribution. If you're only looking at Australia vs America you're doing the wrong analysis (it is far too limited). Australia vs France just outright disproves your supposition (they use a 2 round system). Or we can look at Germany who has a similar distribution and who also uses MMP (like Australia). In fact, both France and Germany have more parties represented than Australia.
I do not understand why Australia is the instructive example and why this is frequently propositioned.
I disagree about the consistent distribution in parliaments. I do think that parliamentary governance is, overall, just a better way to elect heads of state - but up here in Canada we have a parliament and, while the NDP certainly does hold some sway, we're drifting toward a two party system. Surprisingly, it seems most likely that the CPC might collapse and get absorbed into the LPC which then provides conservative opposition to the NDP - but time will tell whether the CPC can recover now that Harper is gone.
(I purposefully avoided the common party names since they have connotations how Americans view politics that are extremely inaccurate).
> but up here in Canada we have a parliament and we're drifting toward a two party system
Actually this is kinda my point:
Canada: Liberal + Conservative = 81.1% (90.5% with Bloc, 97.6% w/ NDP, )
Australia: Liberal + Labor = 84.8% (95.4% with National)
Germany: CDU + SPD = 56% (68% w/ AfD, 79.7% w/FDP, 89.4% w/ Left)
France: REM + LR = 71.8% (79.9% w/ MoDem, 85.4% w/ UAI, 90.8% w/SOC)
I can continue if needed...
These 4 countries have 4 different voting systems but what they have in common is a parliament where seats are assigned proportionately to votes (there's no winner take all). Canada and Australia seem to be the closest to America than the others. (Note that I used house numbers for all because they have larger sample sizes so there's a lower bias in distributions)
So it is pretty clear that IRV is ''not,, the defining feature here that causes multi-party systems, nor weaker coalitions. Though we'd have to get more into game theory about coalitions to talk more accurately and I want to stress that while I believe voting methods is a strong tool to prevent these things it isn't the only necessary tool (it's just the biggest step forward we can make given the current US system).
> (I purposefully avoided the common party names since they have connotations how Americans view politics that are extremely inaccurate).
I think this is fair. As I've argued elsewhere America's two party system is closer to a two coalition system. Which actually Australia is a better example of two coalition domination, IMO, than Canada (though I would say a close runner up).
The difference is that RCV results in the "least worst" candidate winning. They receive the most #1 votes, but unless they achieve an outright majority, if they only have a plurality then they only win by being the most preferred alternative vote by the voters.
So the situation is that the leading parties have to spread their ideological base to incorporate more of the electorate.
In addition, Australia has compulsory registration at 18 and compulsory voting (well, actually compulsory attendance at a voting location, the ballots are all secret).
So the candidates have to appeal most to a plurality of their electorate, and they have to appeal least worse alternative to a majority.
>These 4 countries have 4 different voting systems but what they have in common is a parliament where seats are assigned proportionately to votes (there's no winner take all).
That is wrong. Australian lower house seats are single member aka winner takes all.
Yes? I said those 4 examples use different election styles, not that Canada doesn't use FPTP...
> Australian lower house seats are single member aka winner takes all.
>> The lower house, the House of Representatives, currently consists of 151 members, each elected using full-preference instant-runoff voting from single-member constituencies known as electoral divisions (and commonly referred to as "electorates" or "seats").[0]
(And the upper house uses STV with proportional representation)
Winner-take-all refers to
>> a legislative body is elected by dividing the jurisdiction into geographic constituencies, each electing exactly one representative. Although this may result in diverse representation due to different political groups making up majorities of different districts, within each district, only one political party or group will be able to elect a candidate[1]
Yes, I am using more of an Ameri-centric usage of the word (since we commonly use it referring to the electoral college and not local elections), but pointing this out isn't exactly a great rebuttal. The "winner-take-all" definition is vague and a given considering the impracticality of implementing a non-winner-take-all system without a significantly larger number of representatives. Consider that in Australia they do not have greater than a 10% variation of electorates. If we give more seats and apply proportionate seating this is functionally equivalent to just dividing the electorate further and using winner-take-all. Thus if we follow this usage, there is no election that would _not_ be winner-take-all (or making our term meaningless). This is not the system we see in America where the phrase winner-take-all is applied to electorates that are nowhere near uniform. But I apologize for the confusion and hope this comment clarifies my more (American) natural usage of the term.
And if this is why you're throwing my comment out the window I think you missed the entire point and I do not appreciate the lack of good faith here.
>Yes? I said those 4 examples use different election styles, not that Canada doesn't use FPTP...
FPTP is a winner takes all electoral system. You said Canada had "a parliament where seats are assigned proportionately to votes (there's no winner take all)".
>Winner-take-all refers to
>>> a legislative body is elected by dividing the jurisdiction into geographic constituencies, each electing exactly one representative. Although this may result in diverse representation due to different political groups making up majorities of different districts, within each district, only one political party or group will be able to elect a candidate[1]
This is exactly what Australia and Canada's lower houses have. And looking it up now, France too.
>considering the impracticality of implementing a non-winner-take-all system without a significantly larger number of representatives
The Australian senate has 76 senators. The Australian house of Reps has 151 members. The Australian senate elected with a non-winner-take-all system. The Australian house of reps is elected via a winner-take-all system.
>If we give more seats and apply proportionate seating this is functionally equivalent to just dividing the electorate further and using winner-take-all.
It is not. To illustrate: imagine a country of 1 million where instead of left-wing and right-wing parties they have left-hand and right-hand parties. So there everyone votes for the right-hand party except for the 10% of people who are left-handed. As handedness is fairly evenly distributed, in a single member electorate system it would be basically impossible for the lefties to take a single seat. So you'd expect the parliament to be 100% right-hand party no matter if it comprised a single member or 10,000. However with a proportional system (e.g. SLV) with electorates of 10 or more you could expect the parliament to roughly reflect the 90/10 split.
We see this in the real world, where places with single member seats (e.g. Canada, France, Australia lower house) have worse parliamentary diversity than those with multi member seats (e.g. Germany, Australia upper house).
>And if this is why you're throwing my comment out the window I think you missed the entire point and I do not appreciate the lack of good faith here.
As you haven't made it very clear at all, what is your point?
> As you haven't made it very clear at all, what is your point?
I think the issue we're having here is that you're focusing on a very narrow part of my argument which I'm saying isn't actually that important. The majority of my argument hasn't actually been addressed. I've historically learned not to argue with those that greatly narrow your argument (as opposed to focusing on one part).
> France: REM + LR = 71.8% (79.9% w/ MoDem, 85.4% w/ UAI, 90.8% w/SOC)
As i explained in great detail elsewhere here, you can't use that out of context. French legislative elections are after presidential ones to send the just elected president a new parliament he(or maybe soon she) can work with. If Macron loses next year, REM will have close to nothing. So, it's more like "president's party gets around a majority". Note that this isn't always the case, and Chirac's second term was with a socialist majority parliament he had to work with.
Australia has a bi-cameral system structured very much like the US, with the lower house being geographic regions of roughly equal population, while the upper house is State based, with equal representation of each State.
In terms of voting, our lower house is ranked choice, our upper house is party-list based ("vote 1 above the line") with the option of individual selections instead ("number the candidates of your choice from 1").
Australia ends up with a two-sided lower house, but the conservative side is actually a coalition of business and rural parties. So it is actually multi-party, in fact, there's a spat going on right now between the urban "Liberal" (right wing conservative fiscally "liberal") and "National" (rural agrarian socialists, privatizing gains, socializing losses, internally split between being pro-resource-extraction industries and agricultural industries).
So we have that same multi-party representation, just our coalitions are more rigid.
I remember there was also some parties that would name themselves suspiciously similar to existing parties and parlay that in to political power via the horse trading you mentioned.
There's still a huge problem with the Australian system - seat-based voting. I live in one of the safest seats in Australia, and thus my vote has literally zero effect on any election result - votes only have impact in swing seats.
This is also very unfair on third parties - under proportional representation, winning 10% of the vote nationwide means 10% of seats. Under Australia's system, unless those votes are very concentrated in specific seats, it means zero seats.
OTOH while he seemed principled, he often just seemed to vote along with the Coalition then publicly regret it afterwards - helping them get what they wanted on refugees and then being surprised at how inhumane it all was and the extent that the government reneged or slow-played a lot of the concessions he obtained.
If I remember rightly, that was one of his first votes and he wisened up after that. There was an interview early in his term where he admitted he was unfamiliar with the term "balance of power", but he seemed to learn quickly.
Because when people are forced to vote, they are on average more likely to vote for a random name they heard on TV than for a candidate with a program they read and the background they studied.
In an optional voting society, parties are incentivized to radicalize and enrage their supporters so they bother to go vote.
In Australia everyone knows the two parties and has a rough idea what they support. I doubt there is very much "random name voting" going on which is shown by the consistent voting patterns over the years.
A democratic society, where all votes are equal, benefits when everyone votes, even without a testing how well-informed they are. It encourages personal ownership of collective problems.
For every apathetic member who is voting based on ignorance, there is a zealous member voting based on dogma. The more votes we collect, the more accurate is the representation of the whole.
> The more votes we collect, the more accurate is the representation of the whole.
This isn't true. If voters are voting randomly (or effectively randomly) then that's just noise in the system. Worse, if voting is based on candidate exposure (i.e. voting on who had more TV ads rather than policy) then the votes are explicitly not representative of voter preference (unless the candidate that advertises the most also happens to be the true preference of voters, but we should not assume this to be true). Your statement is only true given a large amount of assumptions which typically do not hold true in practice. It holds true if voters are both informed, vote purely honestly (no strategy or no manipulation which includes through ads), and candidates are fairly representative of public opinions. I don't think anyone would argue that these three assumptions hold true in most elections. Real world doesn't have idealistic conditions.
So no, more voters does not result in better representation.
Very odd argument indeed, particularly because it equally applies to non-mandatory voting. The deisre to vote could be based on randomness and candidate exposure. Thus whatever underlying assumptions one makes, more people voting gives better representation for any meaningful definition of representation.
> because it equally applies to non-mandatory voting
Yes, this is because voting is often non-intuitive. There's a reason we haven't found an amazing system in thousands of years. The problem is that people are trying to apply "common sense" rules and not testing them to check if their assumptions hold true. It follows the typical rule of "if people think the solution to a long standing problem can be solved with common sense it probably cant." Which should be obvious since the problem is long standing... But here's the thing, we've done a lot of testing and aren't going in blind. Unfortunately when solutions are "common sense" we end up not looking at data because why would we? We already know the answer ;)
I think you're making an assumption about the assumptions of the person you're replying to.
Many voter beliefs are implicit and how we express our political preferences can sometimes be reducible to a simple matter of group allegiance.
People don't need to be highly informed to effectively participate if the voter's top priority is to support a certain group interest (i.e., a union member supporting labour) rather than individual legislators or laws.
There is a problem with what is called the "donkey vote" where the person at the top of the ballot is more likely to get a "1" vote than the person at the bottom.
However, in practice, people accept voting guides from parties that direct their preferences and they vote the way their choice of party decides.
That's why there is horse trading between parties before the election on "preference deals" where they agree to different ordering on the guides.
Smaller parties use this to engage larger parties by demanding some of their policy requests in return.
The argument is if you're compelled to vote you're compelled to take interest. You have to register to vote anyhow, those who wish to remain apolitical are free to do so.
Yes, was just saying if you really object it's not a big deal legally. Although most people don't as you say. Having elections on Saturdays definitely helps.
Also loads of locations and little queuing. Also increasingly you get sausage sizzles that seems to becoming a tradition to go get your sausage sandwich.
I find it amazing hearing about people in USA queuing for hours year after year. It doesn't have to be that way.
The whole Ricky Muir / preference-whispering / group-ticket-voting issue was related to the Senate which is a combination of both PR (proportional representation) and STV, a whole additional bucket of worms over the plain STV of single member electorates.
Great to see this on Hacker News! I'm a former YC Founder who's been working with NYC on voter education for this year's elections through RankedVote (https://www.rankedvote.co).
What would you say to someone like me who feels that IRV is perhaps the worst possible alternative voting system to advocate for? It feels like someone at some stage must be very dishonest, or otherwise dangerously uninformed, to think that IRV is worth advocating for over alternatives like approval voting, range voting, or any Condorcet voting system. I'm very worried that most places will have the political will to improve the voting system only once in a century and we'll have wasted it on a system that's unusually ill-behaved. I'm particularly concerned about IRV's non-monotonicity, whereby it's possible to hurt a candidate by ranking them higher, and likewise it's possible to help a candidate by ranking them lower. How can anyone feel they're voting honestly in an honest election when this is the case?
Two reasons: Arrow’s impossibility theorem and the fact that people are not perfect logicians.
I honestly thought that after learning Arrow’s impossibility theorem that Condorcet is not especially important. Since we can’t have a perfect voting system, we have to pick an imperfect one, and among the alternatives, it’s important to capture information from voters. Instant runoff captures a lot of information.
Approval voting I think is much too tactical and, strictly speaking, worse than IRV. No contest.
IRV lets people express their preferences in a fairly understandable way. The strategy I see people talking about is “rank all the front-runners, and use the leftover spots to rank the people you want to win, even if they’re not likely to win.”
So if A B C and D are front-runners, and E and F are the two other candidates you like, you come up with a ranking for those six and put the top five on your ballot.
The idea that people who like this system are “dangerously misinformed” or “dishonest” is needlessly inflammatory.
First off, Arrow's doesn't apply to all systems. You'll need to look into both Gibbard's and Gibbard-Satterthwaite's theorems.
Second off, just because you can't find a global optimization in a highly dimensional space doesn't mean there aren't local optimizations along criteria we care more about. Appealing to Arrow's is a cop-out.
> Approval voting I think is much too tactical and, strictly speaking, worse than IRV. No contest.
You're going to have to back this up with some strong evidence. Approval has higher VSE, is simpler, is more resistant to spoilers and tactical voting.
> IRV lets people express their preferences in a fairly understandable way.
Actually your argument holds true for any ordinal or cardinal system. Cardinal even having more flexibility since you can give two candidates the same score. And in cardinal if you want to rank your candidates, no problem. Better yet, you have better encoding opportunities because you can specify the distance between your ranking instead of the uniform spacing that ordinal systems force upon you. (BTW, given what the person above you wrote, I would assume that they know how ranked voting works and explaining how it is going to come off as you calling them dumb).
One big problem with approval voting is that it presents voters with a difficult conundrum: what do you do with candidates you don't particularly like but would still strongly prefer over one-or-more other candidates? If people are too lenient with their approval it increases the risk of someone no one really likes getting elected over someone a majority would have preferred. If people are too stringent you start running into the same problems as FTTP.
Approval voting has some nice mathematical properties, but I think in practice trying to pidgeon hole people's preferences into a binary decision would be a major source of voter frustration and lead to tactical voting.
Fine, go STAR or Score/Range. Honestly I prefer those systems (in that order and I'd argue most people that are pro cardinal systems have that same preference[0]). Nice benefit is that people can bullet vote and we collapse to Approval which is a "good enough" system.
> but would still strongly prefer over one-or-more other candidates?
In fact, this is why I argue for STAR or score. It encodes information for better than a ranked (ordinal) system. In any ranked system you encode your preference with equidistant from one another. Where as when you score you can indicate a much stronger preference.
Here's an example. Let's say I REALLY like candidate A, moderately like candidate B, and strongly dislike candidate C.
Ranked:
A > B > C (with my encoding I'm saying that my preference of A over B is the same as my preference of B over C)
Scoring
A: 10, B: 7, C:0 (with this encoding I can indicate that my preference of A over B is not as large as my preference of B over C. Obviously we are capturing more information here)
Let's just encode information better, I agree. But also let's consider other factors like how easy it is to count the votes (which every cardinal system is going to beat ranked systems).
[0] That same preference where the distance between STAR, Score, and Approval is smaller than the distance between preference of Approval over IRV (e.g. STAR: 10, Score: 8, Approval: 7, IRV: 3, Plurality: 0).
Small correction: The term "bullet voting" means voting for one candidate only (001000), rather than voting 0 or 1 on each candidate (101011). It is caused by low engagement from the voters, who only take the time to learn about one candidate, their favorite. It has been a problem for approval voting in practice, and it is unclear to what extent it affects score methods in practice.
I think STAR is slightly worse than Score, is comparable to Approval, is much better than IRV, and is likely better than Condorcet methods. STAR has some odd behavior which can be explored in a 3-person race. Score has less-problematic behavior caused by risk-taking with equilibrium voters (not like voters behave in any way similar to Nash equilibria though, and who knows what the real-world behavior will be).
However, STAR's main benefit may be in overcoming political resistance, if its properties are simpler to convince voters. Majority criterion sounds nice even when it is inefficient. Much like Top Trading Cycles losing to Gale-Shapley in school choice algorithms (excluding Boston).
> However, STAR's main benefit may be in overcoming political resistance, if its properties are simpler to convince voters. Majority criterion sounds nice even when it is inefficient.
Out of respect for you taking the time to respond, I will elaborate my claims more specifically. My assertion regarding bullet voting is isolated to elections where the voting body cannot be bothered to engage carefully, because they barely care about the race. In addition, the drawbacks must be then compared with other voting methods, which may face the same bullet issue in equal measure. The bullet voting comparison I am making is between Score and Approval; I think Score will face less bullet voting than Approval does.
A typical example where bullet voting should occur is a down-ballot election. Examples of low-engagement elections at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approval_voting#Other_organiza... bear out that these elections degrade in behavior to plurality. However, it can't be determined just from this behavior that IRV or Condorcet would do any better.
1-3 have major engagement from voters and I do not expect approval voting to suffer unduly from bullet voting. 4, an alumni association, should. However, the question then becomes, what about other voting methods? Because if the voter has weak information on the other candidates, he may simply bullet vote under all voting methods. In this context, Score needs testing. Voting values between 0 and 1 would give a much better idea of how voter engagement is affecting their votes, rather than their second choice always collapsing to zero. This is why I claim that it is "unclear to what extent it affects score methods in practice". Granular cardinal scores in even one such election would mean a lot for determining voter behavior.
I do not support FairVote's arguments and consider them dishonest. Notice that in my original post, I carefully describe bullet voting as a consequence of low engagement, which is supported by past real-world low-engagement elections. This is very distinct from FairVote's arguments, which are not sophisticated and demonstrate a willingness to make blind claims. The distortions that FairVote argues for require more justification than they give.
I don't believe much in that simulation. While I agree with your characterization of it as the "best computer modeling" in voting theory, it would still be considered a fatally flawed paper under the standards of most fields, and I faced some heavy obstacles when trying to analyze it. I think this field needs more/better academics. I described some of my objections at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27612876
> In addition, the drawbacks must be then compared with other voting methods, which may face the same bullet issue in equal measure.
A robust cross-system analysis shows that approval voting is more robust to strategy than almost any other method. Most ranked voting methods, for example, fail the favorite betrayal criterion.
1. Extensive game theoretical analysis, and even computer modeling, has shown that approval voting resists tactical behavior better than virtually any other voting method.
There's even an entire book focused on the game theory and tactics of voting methods, which advocates score voting, approval voting being score voting on a 0 to 1 binary scale.
Approval voting elections have been successfully held in 2020 and 2021 in Fargo in St Louis respectively, and there were no indications of voter confusion or anything like that.
I disagree that cardinal voting is understandable. It’s how we rate restaurants and review products on Amazon, and I don’t think it translates to an election with multiple options.
The issue here is not just how logical humans “homo economicus” behaves, but how actual voters behave.
Not really interested in engaging with the rest of this comment right now, but suffice it to say that I don’t think you’re accounting for human behavior in practice, which is messy and illogical. I don’t think it’s reasonable to say that I’m appealing to Arrow’s impossibility theorem as a cop-out—I’m saying that since we don’t have a game theoretic solution the the problem, we should look at the actual behavior of imperfect, irrational humans as the deciding factor.
> I disagree that cardinal voting is understandable. It’s how we rate restaurants and review products on Amazon, and I don’t think it translates to an election with multiple options.
I disagree but also don't see this as a problem. If you rank candidates you still get the majority of the desirable properties. Rank with non-equal distances, even better. Hell, it isn't even bad if you bullet vote (that's just approval voting). Investigating non-optimal ways of voting under any voting system is an extremely important analysis. So for the voter there is no problem. I'm also kinda put off that you give real world examples of humans using cardinal methods and then claiming that we can't understand it (HN is using cardinal voting...)
But we also have to consider the counting of votes side of "understandable." Plurality is pretty damn easy, and this is clearly why we use it. Approval is almost as easy (just just sum multiple columns). Range/Score isn't much harder. Then STAR introduces 2 rounds of counting. Then we look at IRV and we see that we have tons of rounds. This isn't typically so bad in a presidential election where there are realistically about 4 candidates, but that complexity increases real fast elsewhere. Just watch NYC. There's going to be at least 5 rounds (probably more). This is far more complex. We only have to look at Arizona to understand why this part of the "understandable" question is important.
For anyone like me who hadn't heard of Gibbard's theorem, it's actually even simpler (and more depressing) than Arrow's theorem. To quote Wikipedia:
For any deterministic process of collective decision, at least one of the following three properties must hold:
1. The process is dictatorial, i.e. there exists a distinguished agent who can impose the outcome;
2. The process limits the possible outcomes to two options only;
3. The process is open to strategic voting: once an agent has identified their preferences, it is possible that they have no action at their disposal that best defends these preferences irrespective of the other agents' actions.
So basically, it's impossible to completely eliminate strategic voting. No matter the method: ranked vs. cardinal vs. anything else you dream up can't help.
> it's impossible to completely eliminate strategic voting. No matter the method: ranked vs. cardinal vs. anything else you dream up can't help.
I think this comment is a defeatist at best and deceitful at worst. Just because there is no global optimization does not mean that all optima are equal. We can in fact have optima that are better than one another (including all optima we know about!). This is a common feature of highly dimensional solution spaces.
The big issue here is that not all criteria are weighted equally, by desire of effectiveness. So we find an optima where we optimize features that have a large weights and care less about optimizing features with small weights. By doing this we can compare systems in their desirability and select the best ones. This is not cause for throwing up your hands and giving up.
As an example: cardinal systems, when compared to ordinal (ranked) systems, are more resilient to strategic voting and simpler (both for the voter and for the people tallying the votes, aka transparency). The cost? Slight decrease in maximal VSE. BUT if we look at the min, mean, median, or modes of VSE given different strategies cardinal system outperform ordinal (aka, desirable). You can see this by comparing with this chart[0]. For example with STAR0-10 we have maximal VSE of .983 and minimal of .912 (actually this makes it strictly better than plurality!). But if we look at our best ordian, RP, we see RP has a maximal VSE of .988 and minimal of .870. So on terms of maximal there's a 0.005 difference but on minimal there's a difference of 0.042! We can easily tell here that STAR is much more resistant to strategic voting than RP (Shulze is even worse!). Doing the same for IRV we see .07/.115 (max/min comparison of STAR0-10 vs IRV on VSE).
So we can compare. We can select better methods. But is there a ''perfect,, solution? No. But don't let the lack of the ability to create a perfect system detract from the ability to compare systems. Not all is lost.
> I think this comment is a defeatist at best and deceitful at worst.
Wow, very HN! I don't actually mind very much, but seriously, consider applying the principle of charity?
I agree with you, and did before you wrote this comment too! Hence my use of the word "completely". I was just surprised that strategic voting couldn't be completely eliminated; before yesterday I expected that you could, in exchange for losing other nice properties. Of course being impossible to eliminate completely doesn't mean it shouldn't be minimized.
>Gibbard's theorem states that a deterministic process of collective decision cannot be straightforward, except possibly in two cases: if there is a distinguished agent who has a dictatorial power, or if the process limits the outcome to two possible options only.
.. it also mentions that gibbard's is specifically about irv.
All that aside, I can't understand the idea that we only get to change things once. My understanding of history is at odds with the concept.
> .. it also mentions that gibbard's is specifically about irv.
No, Gibbard's is not limited to any particular voting method. I think you're misreading the next paragraph (and also confusing IRV, which is a particular method, with ranked choice, which is a whole category of methods). Note the distinction between Gibbard and Gibbard-Satterthwaite:
> A corollary of this theorem is Gibbard–Satterthwaite theorem about voting rules. The main difference between the two is that Gibbard–Satterthwaite theorem is limited to ranked (ordinal) voting rules: a voter's action consists in giving a preference ranking over the available options. Gibbard's theorem is more general and considers processes of collective decision that may not be ordinal: for example, voting systems where voters assign grades to candidates.
> it also mentions that gibbard's is specifically about irv.
This isn't true
> I can't understand the idea that we only get to change things once.
Those of us concerned about IRV and promoting cardionality actually looked at history. Between 1910 and 1920 40 US cities used Bucklin voting (similar to IRV, slightly better even) and all repealed them[0]. So looking at history we see that people recognized the need for a better voting system, implemented something similar to IRV, saw that it didn't make things better, and subsequently said "fuck it, we'll go back to FPTP because it is easier." (I should also mention that in Australia, since 1949, 90% of Lower House elections, which use IRV, are equivalent to using FPTP[1])
So we're looking at history (and modern times) and saying "hey, this didn't work and actually ended up causing us to take a step backwards. Maybe we shouldn't repeat the same mistake."
I hope this clarifies our differing understanding of history.
A little, I think we may have different ideas about what the difficulties were in the early 1900s vs now - I believe that the circumstances are different enough now that broad conclusions about what is and isn't feasible cannot be drawn, but that's just a piece of the puzzle and I think your point deserves merit.
What I would ask, then, is rather than not doing IRV, what should we do, in your opinion?
I'm looking at this as a sort of crisis situation, as our ability to affect our politics is in a state of constant erosion, and the process of capture at work here can only end in systemic collapse - the further power gets concentrated, the more centralized our decision making becomes, and the more vulnerable we become to systemic single point of failure.
I would love to see STAR voting become a thing. I think of IRV in the current context as a proof-of-concept that might show people that we can change the structure of voting. I can't see anyone wanting to go back to FPTP, because I don't really see anyone who thinks it's even remotely working.
I thought Gibbard-Satterthwaite (or maybe just Gibbard's version) applied to cardinal systems as well. This seemed likely to me for some reason, as if an ordinal method could approximate any particular cardinal discretization by just including "ghost" candidates that can be packed (ordinally) between your actual candidates.
> I thought Gibbard-Satterthwaite (or maybe just Gibbard's version) applied to cardinal systems as well.
Correct, but it is also a weaker version of Arrow's (also as Clay points out, Arrow's isn't really about voting[0]...)
> This seemed likely to me for some reason, as if an ordinal method could approximate any particular cardinal discretization by just including "ghost" candidates that can be packed (ordinally) between your actual candidates.
Okay, but this just adds complexity. Cardinal is already simpler than ordinal systems (both for voters _and_ for those counting the votes). There's absolutely nothing wrong ranking candidates in a cardinal system (it's actually pretty unlikely that you'll have the same preference for multiple candidates so this is going to naturally happen). The difference? In cardinal you can better express your preference of one candidate over another (I give an example here[1]). So now we've added "encoding efficiency" to the added benefit of cardinal systems.
Cardinal systems are better than ordinal systems in almost every single way (the only thing I can think of ordinal systems doing better at is that RP and Schulze perform better on maximal VSE, but as I discuss here[2] that is pretty limited as well as unlikely considering strategic voting and the ability to manipulate people exists).
I wouldn't choose to use the word "dishonest" but I sympathize - in nearly all news media explanations of "ranked choice voting", the description solely explains instant runoff, and makes no mention whatsoever that there is a choice of algorithm that comes with the choice to use ranked ballots, such as Condorcet. The words "instant runoff" are almost never mentioned.
Choice of language matters, and "ranked choice voting" (to solely mean "instant runoff voting") is a conceptually misleading term meant to load the debate. It dis-educates rather than educates on how voting systems work.
Advocates of other voting systems have to first start out by explaining this misdirection and unpacking the wrong mental model, then get to the merits of one voting system vs. another - because people have been told that "ranked choice voting" works a certain way and only a certain way.
I’d say that part of the cost of switching voting systems is educating voters how the new system works. Many voters simply don’t care about the finer details and just have a couple desiderata—we want to have our vote count, and we want to be able to vote for our favorite candidate.
Instant runoff is super easy to explain and achieves those desiderata, at least to some extent.
It’s hard to quantify the differences in mathematical terms against soft concerns like “we can educate voters and explain how this system works”. For that reason, I would like to see a non-mathematical argument against IRV, one that accounts for the other half of the voting problem.
> Instant runoff is super easy to explain and achieves those desiderata, at least to some extent.
Except IRV doesn't. Not only are cardinal systems easier but IRV doesn't achieve the most desired feature that people are looking for: no spoilers (or alternatively put, allowing votes for 3rd parties without "wasting" your vote). In fact IRV increases spoilage while cardinal systems (which is alternatively proposed) decreases[0]. Meaning we're doing the opposite of what we're trying to accomplish.
As for simpler, I'll refer you to this[1]. The short story is just rate candidates. And if you end up ranking, no worries. It's more difficult to mess up.
I'm always baffled by this claim that simple explanations favor instant runoff.
Here's approval voting: "Upvote the candidates you like. The candidate with the most total votes wins." It's not just mathematically simpler, it's simpler in informal terms, a smaller change from current plurality voting, and it seems less messy in the strategic dynamics insofar as we've tested these different systems for real.
Even score voting is easier than IRV. You can rank if you want to. But you can better specify preference because you're not ranking with the same preferential distance between candidates and people. We use score all over the place (we could call Hacker News score voting with a small range: -1/0/+1).
> Approval voting I think is much too tactical and, strictly speaking, worse than IRV.
On the contrary, approval voting gets better results than IRV with any measure of strategic or honest voters. See extensive computer simulation results by Harvard stats PhD and voting methods expert Jameson Quinn. Brown (50/50) is probably the most realistic setting.
A simple example of IRV strategy is next year's Alaska senate race. Murkowski would beat either rival head-to-head but is likely to be eliminated based on first-place votes. So Democrats want to strategically rank Murkowski 1st in order to help her survive to beat Tshibaka (Trump Republican) so they at least get their lesser evil.
Here's a good comparison of approval voting vs. IRV by experts. Full disclosure, I was a CES co-founder and have written extensively on this topic for 15 years.
> I honestly thought that after learning Arrow’s impossibility theorem that Condorcet is not especially important.
I've visited Kenneth Arrow at his home and co-founded a non-profit that interviewed him. His theorem only applies to social welfare functions, not voting methods, if properly understood. But if anything, the moral is to AVOID ranked voting methods and instead use rated voting methods.
> On the contrary, approval voting gets better results than IRV with any measure of strategic or honest voters. See extensive computer simulation results by Harvard stats PhD and voting methods expert Jameson Quinn. Brown (50/50) is probably the most realistic setting.
If you look at the graph with the honest strategy you get better results with IRV which is basically his point.
We shouldn't assume 100% honest strategy in reality. It is an idealistic metric. It's not practical since people aren't 100% informed. Nor should we only consider optimal strategy. We need to consider the max, min, and median to determine robustness and better estimate real world results. Both the max and min for Approval is better than the max and min of IRV (in other words, the range is smaller and the expected result is more representative).
> IRV lets people express their preferences in a fairly understandable way. The strategy I see...
That's the concern though. You likely don't want to just "express your preferences." You need to strategically rank candidates. But then what are you being asked to do exactly when you go to vote? I don't think it would fly if the instructions on the ballot gave you guidance on how to "strategize" your rankings. But if it doesn't give that guidance, it's misleading.
And I understand that all voting mechanisms have their own unique pitfalls; so we have to fall back to pragmatic questions. And one major pragmatic question is: What's the status-quo/What is everyone already accustomed to? Asking a large voting body to switch methods is not easy and I think it's being motivated largely by a misleading "grass-is-greener" claim about rank voting.
The non-monotonicity tactical voting possibility is overblown: it only really works in the toy "which is the favourite pizza of these 30 students" examples.
In real world elections, the conditions where it is even theoretically possible arise only rarely (A > B > C with three choices, but B > A and A > C with two choices, and A's lead over B significantly greater than B's lead over C in the three choice scenario, and A's lead over C in the two choice scenario more than twice B's lead over C in the three choice scenario) and more importantly, they're not predictable enough beforehand. Advocating this kind of tactical vote stands at least as much chance of hurting your candidate as helping them, so nobody does it.
When you analyse real-world large scale IRV elections, you find that cases where the IRV winner isn't the Condorcet winner are rare, and this balances against the very real benefit of having a counting method that is easy to explain and understand.
The non-monotonicity is actually pretty important and we have real world examples of this. Clay mentions the Alaska race in this comment[0]. We've seen this issue in Southern states that used this to disadvantage black voters. This is also the reason Bernie would spoil Biden (and vise versa). So I'm not sure what you're getting at.
Let's look at the "Bernie would spoil Biden" example.
The idea is that the Republicans endorse only one candidate, Trump, and the Democrats endorse two: Bernie and Biden. In the non-tactical voting case, the second-last round votes shake out like:
Trump 45
Biden 28
Bernie 27
Bernie is eliminated, the votes in his pile split 24 / 3 between Biden and Trump (a preference flow of 89% to Biden) and the final round of counting ends up:
Biden 52%
Trump 48%
..but tactical voting intervenes! A small number of Trump voters (2% of the total electorate) are organised to tactically switch their votes to 1. Bernie 2. Trump, resulting in a second-last round of:
Trump 43
Bernie 29
Biden 28
Now Biden is eliminated, the votes in his pile split 20 / 8 Bernie/Trump (a weaker preference flow of 71% to Bernie, because of Biden voters too conservative to vote for Bernie) and the final round is now:
Trump 51
Bernie 49
Tactical voting has won the day!
However, this really illustrates the problems here for the prospective tactical voter:
1. They need pretty perfect information to pull this off. Not just on first round votes, but on how the preferences are going to flow as well. If those Biden votes flowed a little weaker to Trump, all they'd have done is elect Bernie instead; if Trump had been a little stronger overall than they expected in the no-tactical-voting, their tactical voting attempt might have backfired completely and turned a fair Trump win into a loss! Opinion polling just isn't this precise.
2. They have a co-ordination problem. If they switch too few votes, the scheme fails and they just elect Biden with a greater margin than before; too many and the scheme fails and they elect Bernie, a candidate they're presumably less happy with actually getting the Presidency than Biden.
3. All of this only works if the balls line up perfectly in the first place, even setting aside the problem already mentioned of how you know the balls are going to line up. If the second-last round votes are instead Trump 45 / Biden 30 / Bernie 25 then the Bernie to Biden preference flow has to fall under 66% for the scheme to be possible.
Rather than trying to engage in this dubious and risky tactical voting attempt, the Trump campaign would be far better served just spending their resources trying to turn out more of their voters. After all, the theoretical possibility only exists when the margins are tight in the first place.
A tangential matter is that even in an IRV election it still probably makes sense for the parties to either endorse only a single candidate each - otherwise their candidates will waste some of their resources attacking their co-party candidate when they could have launched them against their main opposition - or at least mutually agree to distribute campaigning material advising to give a second preference to their co-party candidate (a so-called "preference swap" arrangement).
Honestly IRV is _even worse than plurality_. It doesn't solve the problems it sets out to solve (it entrenches two-party domination [1]), it has ridiculous monotonicity violations [2], all for a lot more complication in counting the votes (you can't distribute the counting well without transmitting the contents of all of the ballots) and possibly wrecking the secret ballot (you can encode and buy specific down-ballot rankings).
Seriously, it's all of the disadvantages and very limited upside.
> you can't distribute the counting well without transmitting the contents of all of the ballots
There are only so many combinations of rankings that are possible. It shouldn't be hard to encode each of those possible orders and transmit them as a whole.
> There are only so many combinations of rankings that are possible.
O(n^2) isn't great though...
The algorithm to count is rough and requires many rounds (since you count, knock out the lowest candidate, recount, and repeat until a >50% favor is achieved by one candidate). Cardinal systems on the other hand just require summing the columns and taking argmax. This is far simpler (in fact we can do most of this in parallel making a far better runtime).
Why do you push IRV rather than simpler methods with higher VSE like Approval or STAR? Shouldn't we be highly advocating for a system that does not fail the favorite betrayer criterion? And I think Arizona is the perfect example why transparency and low complexity is essential (higher VSE is an added bonus given these).
Simple...because it's being used in a significant (and growing) number of places. Approval and STAR are great methods as well. But they're not what's in use in Maine. Or NYC. Or will be in use in Alaska.
So, in the spirit of focusing where I can have the most impact, I've chosen to most directly support RCV.
First past the post is the enemy here. Not RCV, STAR, or Approval.
> because it's being used in a significant (and growing) number of places.
Which is because of advocation over the last (mostly) 2-3 years. We're only two states in, that's not significant momentum. FYI, we have approval in Fargo and Lane County/Eugene are close to passing STAR (I'd argue RCV hinders that effort due to confusion).
> First past the post is the enemy here. Not RCV, STAR, or Approval.
I'd disagree actually. The enemy is non-representative voting.
Why I'll actually fight IRV is because history. We've gone down this path before and had states/cities/counties use IRV and then revert back because it didn't solve the problems they set out to solve. So, what is different this time around? There's a "good enough" bar that needs to be met. IRV doesn't meet that.
IRV is only better than FPTP in a limited set of circumstances, and can often be worse at selecting the winner.
Most importantly, IRV will not break us out of the two-party system, which is the root of many problems in American politics.
Are you aware that IRV significantly increases spoiled ballot rates, and disproportionately in low-income areas? It's actively harmful, roughly equivalent to knocking a couple percent off of the Black vote.
Please reconsider your support for it. I am sure you have good intentions; my guess is that most IRV supporters probably aren't aware of the harm they're doing. I also thought IRV was an okay system (not perfect but better than plurality etc.) until I learned this information relatively recently.
> Most importantly, IRV will not break us out of the two-party system, which is the root of many problems in American politics.
I want to expand on why this claim is true, since IRV is frequently propositioned as a way to solve spoilers. Most importantly IRV does not pass the Favorite Betrayer Criterion[0] which states
> voters should have no incentive to vote someone else over their favorite
IRV only handles weak spoilers (e.g. Jo Jorgensen spoiling Trump) and not strong spoilers (e.g. Sanders spoiling Biden).[1] We're not actually concerned about Jorgensen spoiling Trump or Stein spoiling Biden. We're concerned with Sanders spoiling Biden (or vise versa). This is where the favorite betrayer criterion comes in.
IRV isn't even the best ordinal (i.e. ranking candidates) system because it fails the monotonicity criterion[2], which states
> A ranked voting system is monotonic if it is neither possible to prevent the election of a candidate by ranking them higher on some of the ballots, nor possible to elect an otherwise unelected candidate by ranking them lower on some of the ballots (while nothing else is altered on any ballot).
This is an extremely undesirable property and will continue to promote tactical voting. I can go into it more but maybe just check out Clay's works or ask him yourself since he's here in the thread. He's far more informed on this stuff than I am since he's an actual expert.
If anything, this "momentum" argument says you get more value by supporting STAR voting and/or approval voting than a method that already has traction.
I have a strong preference of cardinal over ordinal systems, but I won't say all ordinal systems are flawed. I rather like condorcet methods but I think their complexity is too much of a barrier. I've started to come around to Election Science's similar decision of pushing for Approval over STAR because of this and I will gladly argue how STAR is far less complex than IRV (STAR has a max of 2 rounds and IRV will almost always have significantly more. The only time it has two rounds is if there are strictly 3 candidates).
I joke about a conspiracy theory of this being the reason that IRV is propositioned instead of a more representative and better system like cardinal voting but honestly I believe that the reason is just because it gained more momentum early on. There's been CGP Grey videos on IRV (which proposes the exact misunderstandings I'm discussing in these threads), Hasan Minhaj (ditto), and others. There's been no major celebrity that is advocating for cardinal style voting. And at the end of the day understanding why cardinal is better than ordinal is not trivial to understand, unless you understand information encoding but that's not common knowledge (though it should be here and I'm surprised it isn't).
> And at the end of the day understanding why cardinal is better than ordinal is not trivial to understand, unless you understand information encoding but that's not common knowledge (though it should be here and I'm surprised it isn't).
Do you think there is a need to educate voters on how to tactically vote in ranked choice voting? Every voting system has strategies to use it effectively and most voters are not used to the tactics necessary for ranked choice voting.
We see a lot of education in how to use the ballot simply, but very little education on "advanced tactics".
In particular, a lot of NYC voters aren't ranking either Wiley or Adams, which is a huge mistake as those are very likely to be in the final round.
Thanks! The idea is to use software to promote this reform (as well as Final-Five Voting...which is Open Primaries + RCV)
As for advanced tactics, if you're really into it, Rob Richie, the CEO of FairVote (leading national advocacy org) put this in the New York Times over the weekend. It spells out a bunch of scenarios (e.g. "I want Garcia to win and Stringer to lose.") and how to tactically vote for each.
BUT the point I'd want to drive home is that ranked-choice allows you to be FAR more able to "vote for who you believe is best" than in the more common most votes wins approach (where you have to be strategic the moment a 3rd candidate enters).
Yeah, that article is exactly what I was thinking about, but I think it would be better if it mentioned more general tactics (such as the inherent advantage of making sure to rank front runners since they will last longer).
Once this NYC election is over we should look at the voting records and see how many votes were lost due to poor tactics (forgetting to rank front runners).
Huh... yeah, so this pizza ballot (which I'm just going to have to assume is similar to the real ballot, as otherwise I'm not sure why they are doing this ;P) definitely isn't at all what I was expecting, as I was at least expecting to get to rank all the candidates; I can definitely see some weird effects happening with a ballot like this if people have to decide to use up ranking slots on people they dislike just so they can provide comparative rankings between them as maybe they'd end up in the final round. I mean, wasn't the entire point of this that I'm supposed to get to just vote for the people I like in the order I like them, rather than having to second guess stuff like "well, I hate both of these people, but since I hate this one less than that one and I bet a lot of people like both of them I'd better rank at least one of them above a candidate I prefer"? (And yes: I appreciate the trilemma that says that no voting system is perfect, but truncating the rank mechanism is seeming to leave some of the goal sitting on the table.)
> Every voting system has strategies to use it effectively and most voters are not used to the tactics necessary for ranked choice voting.
Just to respond to this one small point, but I think the most common mathematical definition of "fairness" in market designs (including voting mechanisms) is that your utility-maximizing action should be identical to your true ranked preferences (this is called "strategy-proof"). In the case of voting, Gibbard-Satterthwaite says that there's no strictly strategy-proof mechanism (under a few restrictions) but I think the instant-runoff voting which NYC is using is mostly strategy proof (i.e. strategies only exist in rare circumstances).
Fwiw the burden of learning about all these candidates seems high to me, but apparently New Yorkers don't ind.
> I think the instant-runoff voting which NYC is using is mostly strategy proof (i.e. strategies only exist in rare circumstances)
The very comment you are replying to pointed out that "a lot of NYC voters aren't ranking either Wiley or Adams" which is a failure to apply strategy where it manifestly exists. "There are front runners" doesn't seem to be a rare circumstance.
Well, you're right, but we mean different things. These voters are failing to rank their true preferences (you and I believe), which is going to lead to a less optimal outcome than if they had. But if they did rank their true preferences (i.e. they are ok with Wiley or Adams, but just at the bottom of their list), then it would be fine.
This is a valid communication problem with ranked lists, but it's not that there exists a "strategy" per se besides ranking all of your acceptable outcomes.
> These voters are failing to rank their true preferences (you and I believe)
I expect they are being honest about their preference order, but that this has less of an impact on the outcome (in whatever direction they desire) than if they had been dishonest about their preference order.
This does assume that they actually prefer one of the front-runners to the other by a more-than-negligible margin; perhaps that isn't the case.
> This is a valid communication problem with ranked lists, but it's not that there exists a "strategy" per se besides ranking all of your acceptable outcomes.
There were more than six candidates, and voters could only rank their top five. Voters with more than 5 "acceptable outcomes" need to vote strategically when they get near the bottom of that list.
Alternatively, there is also no such thing as "strategy" in FPTP - "you just vote for one of your acceptable outcomes". That's... not a useful definition of the words involved.
Edited to add: It occurs to me that perhaps you weren't aware of the cutoff in the NYC case and were speaking of IRV with a full list? In that case I agree that strategy being necessary is substantially more rare, leaving aside for the moment whether it is sufficiently rare.
I think that it would be interesting to see this pizza example for comparing ranked voting against acceptance voting.
After all, in this example the plurality vote winner is still the clear, uncontested winner in ranked choice, so this example makes it look like ranked voting is just a way of complicating a process that "just works". I know this is not actually true, but this is how some people see alternative voting methods.
On the other hand, with acceptance voting you would probably get a different result as most meat eaters are indifferent towards mushrooms while many vegetarians would be passionately against pepperoni. So, I suspect that with acceptance voting the results could be switched, for better or for worse.
> You can get a sense for what it's like to vote in a ranked-choice election here:
That’s a neat visualization. The step where mushroom pulls ahead of sausage really shows the flow.
Though I do question the integrity of a pizza topping poll that manages to exclude pineapple-ham, not individually, but as a joint entry. Did it miss the filing deadline?
> And you can see Mayor Bill de Blasio eating a pepperoni pizza as a result of this here:
Worst mayor ever eating one of the worst pizza toppings ever.
This isn't very good reporting by NPR. The downsides they list are just straw men easily dismissed by RCV proponents, and they give an appearance of fair-and-balanced coverage while making opponents of RCV sound like Luddites. (It also seems like they got all their information from, say, chatting with people from FairVote and not by actually reading online discussions like this one here.)
RCV does have some serious problems. Eliminating the candidate with the least first-place votes at each round means a high probability of rejecting compromise candidates that may be a lot of voters' second choice. Also, placing your first-choice candidate first isn't always a safe choice. RCV is non-monotonic, which means it's possible that ranking someone first might actually cause them to lose. That's weird, and I think it's a good enough reason to investigate other options.
I think we should use approval voting in single-winner state and national elections. It's simple and it solves the problem of 3rd party candidates being spoilers (which is why most voting reform advocates dislike FPTP in the first place) without introducing any new problems. STAR is also a pretty good system.
Approval voting is currently used in Fargo ND and they recently adopted it in St. Louis as well.
There's a lot at stake when we change our election systems. I think one of the biggest risks is that we adopt RCV widely and then when people figure out that it's not actually all that great, they aren't going to want to try something different. They'll either say "democracy just doesn't work very well and there's nothing we can do about it", or they'll go back to FPTP because they were misled by a successful PR campaign that sounds like it has the backing of voting system experts. Voting systems should be changed rarely, and when it happens we should use the best available system, not chase the latest fad.
If I approve of two candidates, but I like one more than the other, approval voting doesn’t seem to allow me to express that preference. Do I vote for both candidates, or only the one I like the most? As a naive voter who isn’t going to research that question, will I make the right choice?
It's a hard question. I think it comes down to: are you more afraid of your top choice losing, or your least-favorite choice winning? If the former, then just vote for your first choice. If the latter, vote for everyone but your first choice. (This is an improvement over FPTP because you at least have the option to support multiple candidates if you want to.)
Some people don't like this aspect of approval voting, and really want to give an ordering or a score.
Score voting is like approval voting, but you give a score. All the scores are totaled up, and the winner has the highest total. This is a pretty good system, but it has a problem: honest voters who aren't enthusiastic about a candidate might rate their candidate 6/10, whereas a very opinionated partisan voter might rate their candidate 10/10. So, the people with the most extreme opinions have more influence: 6 partisans gives a score of 60, whereas ten unenthusiastic voters also gives an equal score of 60.
Under score voting, strategic voting means always maximizing your positions: always 10/10 or 0/10, nothing in-between. Basically this is the same as approval voting. So, I'd suggest that approval voting is usually better because it puts strategic voters and honest voters on an equal playing field.
There's another voting system called STAR (score then automatic runoff), in which you use score voting to select the top two candidates, and then you do an instant runoff by maximizing all the votes for the top two candidates. For instance, if our top two candidates are A and B and if someone marked candidate A as 7 and candidate B as 4, then that turns into A:10 and B:0. If another person has A as 6 and B as 6, then they don't have a preference and that ballot is dropped.
STAR isn't perfect (what if an extreme party runs two ideologically-similar candidates and they both make it to the runoff?) but it's a pretty reasonable compromise system that allows voters to score candidates rather than just making a yes/no choice.
approval voting is a special case of score voting where the range of scores is limited to 0 and 1. if you want to express different levels of preference, you can expand this range and get full score voting. the downside is this puts a heavier burden on the voter to decide on scores (if it's 0-99, i give my first choice 99, but what do i give my second choice? 98? 75? 50? my choice might depend on what i expect other voters to think makes sense as a score)
> RCV does have some serious problems. Eliminating the candidate with the least first-place votes at each round means a high probability of rejecting compromise candidates that may be a lot of voters' second choice. Also, placing your first-choice candidate first isn't always a safe choice. RCV is non-monotonic, which means it's possible that ranking someone first might actually cause them to lose. That's weird, and I think it's a good enough reason to investigate other options.
This is actually not true and the opposite of what happens. With RCV, people feel comfortable putting compromise or 3rd party candidates first because they know they aren't throwing away a vote. It creates a system where there is more middle ground and less black and white 2 party systems.
With IRV, you can put a compromise or third-party candidate first _only if they have no chance_. In other words, it's purely symbolic.
As soon as the third-party candidate starts to become competitive, the spoiler effect returns. It becomes risky to vote for your true favourite, and voters are forced to vote strategically as they do now. So IRV will not help us escape from polarized two-party politics; it will continue to entrench the duopoly.
IRV has other serious problems with fairness (a much higher spoiled ballot rate, disproportionately in low-income areas), practical implementation (requiring a redesign of ballots and counting software), and security (it isn't summable, which makes it harder to conduct a risk-limiting audit).
Approval is also imperfect, but it is simple, cheap, effective, and has none of these problems.
help me out here, I don't understand how the spoiler effect returns if the third party candidate becomes competitive. Wouldn't that just mean they have a chance of winning? Suppose Dave Chappelle ran in 2020 and 40% of people voted for him and they all had Biden ranked at #2. 15% rank Biden #1, and 45% rank Trump #1 with no #2 marked. Biden wins, no?
edit: found your explainer elsewhere, currently reading.
edit edit: Huh, that is weird.
That's a pretty good example, because it illustrates a disconnect between how people expect IRV/RCV to work and how it actually works.
Biden would be eliminated first, because he had the fewest 1st choice votes in the first round.
The Dave Chappelle voters' 2nd choices for Biden don't matter: they're thrown out because Biden was eliminated.
So, it comes down to Chappelle with 40% and Trump with 45%. If none of the Biden voters listed Chappelle as their second choice, then Trump wins. If enough voters had Chappelle as their second choice, then Chappelle wins.
The lesson from this example is: it's quite possible that your second choices don't matter, because they're eliminated too early. We could come up with other examples that show that it isn't always safe to put your first choice first, either. IRV/RCV is non-monotonic, which means in some cases you can cause a candidate to lose by ranking them higher.
I agree with what /u/zestyping says in the other comment, so I won't repeat it. But here's a video explaining the strategic voting issue: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtKAScORevQ
The intuition for "something strange could happen" is that IRV only uses some of the information on the ballots. Initially it uses just the top ranking on each ballot, and then at other points in the process, it might flip to using the second ranking on some of the ballots, and so on. There are these sudden trigger thresholds that cause big discontinuities in what gets counted—and that should feel weird. We have this pile of ballots that could all count for A or B; why should that decision depend on some unrelated other ballots?
That's the mechanism by which ranking someone higher can cause them to lose. Only some of the second ranks on the ballots will get to count, and depending which ones get counted, we could get a totally different outcome. Suppose A, B, and C are all competitive in an election, with no one having an outright majority, but A has a little more support than B, who has a little more support than C. It could be the case that A is in a winning position because C supporters mostly like A as their second choice; when C gets eliminated first, those ballots count for A and A wins. But let's say B supporters all like C as their second choice, and you persuade some B supporters to switch to A. If enough of them switch away from B that B is eliminated first, then all those B supporters' ballots will count for C, and that can cause C to win. So by campaigning for A, you made A lose!
The general idea is that if B and C are close, which way it tips can have a sweeping effect on whose second choices get counted, which can affect A. It should feel intuitively scary that a small shift in one part of the election can have a magnified effect on a different part. It's not good for systems to be unstable like that.
If some people change their vote from A-B-C to B-A-C, that can cause A to be eliminated instead of B in the first round, and B in the second (if C beats B but C doesn't beat A). Changing the winner from B to C.
Read "22. Does RCV satisfy the monotonicity criterion?"
Say, there's 3 candidates. You want A to win. You think A will lose to B in a 1-on-1 match, but would win C. So you vote C-A-B (or C-B-A, doesn't matter) to increase the likeliness that B got eliminated in the 1st round. Of course, you're now saying that you prefer C over A in a 1-on-1 race. But that's fine because other people will vote for A.
Concretely, let's say this is people's actual choice.
31 B-A-C; 39 A-B-C; 30 C-B-A
B wins.
Now, if 2 people preferring A (voted A-B-C) strategically change their vote to C-B-A.
I simply don't get why the person preferring A doesn't rank A first. This scenario only works if you have exactly 3 candidates and the numbers are tight and everyone is tactically voting instead of voting their conscience.
In reality most preferential voting schemes have many candidates, and there's too much chaos to coordinate this kind of scenario.
Meanwhile plurality voting has candidates winning with way less than 50% of the vote, and claiming some mandate from god.
The sooner we ditch FPTP the sooner we get to something like Condorcet, or STV with multimember districts.
> I simply don't get why the person preferring A doesn't rank A first.
Well, that's kind of the point of the example. A normal person who wants A to win would put A as their first choice. But doing that can actually cause their preferred candidate to lose, which is exactly the opposite of the voter's intent. FPTP has a different set of problems that one could argue are worse, but one of the few good things about FPTP is that you can't say about some election result "that candidate lost because I voted for him/her".
Non-monotonic results don't happen in every election, but they're something that can happen.
It just doesn't feel likely that this could be successfully coordinated or occur in a decentralized way organically in a sufficiently large election.
Consider how little trust a lot of people have in polling. You would need a very high amount of trust in it if you were going to dishonesty rank your choices based on it. And if strategic voting is going to be based on polling, wouldn't we expect people then start strategically lying to pollsters?
An individual person might not be able to coordinate such a thing, but you can bet that campaign strategists are going to be very interested in crafting their messages to get the results they want. I mean, right now we have campaigns and PACs that sometimes promote a minor candidate they're ideologically opposed to because they'll siphon votes away from their major-party opponent.
What strategies will they employ in RCV elections? I don't know, but given the way campaigns already operate with continuous polling, elaborate voter databases, and modern ad-tech that can target exactly the right message to exactly the right people to influence their behavior slightly, I see election systems with wonky outcomes as an attack surface against democracy.
> The system has too much chaos.
There's too much fog-of-war for individual voters to make optimal strategic voting choices, but the Cambridge Analyticas of the world can use that to their advantage. I don't like that information asymmetry, and it seems the best way to defend against it is to have voting systems that are as close to the ideal (which is that candidates win by having the most public support) as possible.
One important distinction to make is that RCV isn't the same as Instant Runoff Voting (IRV); rather, IRV is a specific (the most commonly championed, as far as I can tell) implementation of RCV, likely because it's the easiest to explain.
Note that all RCV implementations have limitations, per the oft-cited https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theore... which outlines a number of ostensibly desirable attributes then demonstrates that no RCV implementation can satisfy all of them.
But that's not to say that approval voting methods are flawless, either. One often cited desirable property is the Condorcet criterion, namely, if one candidate beats all others in head-to-head matchups, that candidate should be the winner. (There's a related Condorcet Loser criterion which is the inverse: if one candidate loses to all others in head-to-head matchups, that candidate should not be elected.)
Suppose we applied approval voting to a simplified view of the 2016 election. (Y to indicate approval, N to indicate disapproval)
- 48%: Partisan R. Trump (Y) > Stein (N) > Clinton (N)
- 48%: Partisan D. Clinton (Y) > Stein (N) > Trump (N)
- 3%: 3rd-party, very slight D lean. Stein (Y) > Clinton (Y) > Trump (N)
- 1%: 3rd-party, very slight R lean. Stein (Y) > Trump (Y) > Clinton (N)
Stein beats both Clinton and Trump in head-to-head matchups, 52% to 48%. But with an approval voting system (selecting Clinton with 51% approval), this fails the Condorcet criterion! (IRV is no better here, to be clear. And Condorcet methods have their own pathologies.)
As far as I know, the label RCV as it's commonly used in the United States (and advocated most prominently by FairVote) usually means the same thing as IRV. Perhaps there are some minor differences in terms of specifying exactly what happens if a ballot doesn't rank all the candidates, or ranks two candidates equally. Perhaps using RCV to mean an exact system rather than a whole category of voting systems is imprecise, but I think that ship has already sailed.
It's also sometimes called alternative vote, and the Australians call it preferential voting.
I've wondered if IRV couldn't be substantially improved by using Borda count for the elimination step rather than eliminating the candidate with the least first-choice options. (I think there's an actual name for that system, but I don't remember what it is.)
(Further, Borda count fails the majority criterion, namely there are situations where a candidate is the first pick of a majority of the electorate, yet fails to win. Some proponents of Borda count argue this is a feature, not a bug.)
The wiki article for Borda count has a solid table of various voting systems and whether they satisfy various criteria:
You're right that Borda count on its own isn't a great system. Though an RCV-style system that eliminates candidates on the basis of least-Borda count would be something else. It might be better than either normal IRV or plain Borda count on their own. (Though I still think I'd rather go with approval voting or STAR.)
I looks like what I was thinking of is Baldwin's method, actually. Failing monotonicity is still a problem, but it's actually pretty cool that it satisfies the Condorcet criterion. That seems like a pretty big step up from plain IRV.
Approval voting may lead to election of weak candidates, no? Like there's a strong right candidate, disapproved by left, there's strong left, disapproved by right, and there's meh candidate approved by both. Either strong right or strong left might be better for both left and right.
Thank you for pointing to the flaws of RCV though. It has flaws, but still looks like an improvement.
In London mayor they were using "Contingent vote" system, which is AFAIU RCV with only two options, which is weaker than RCV. And in the next elections they switched it to FPTP, which is unfortunate.
Regarding your comment about approval, isn't that the intended outcome? You elect the candidate that the most people approve of, regardless of whether or not there are other "stronger" candidates. The population would be better served than if one of the "strong" left or right candidates were elected.
You could also just not vote for any other candidates if you don't think they'd do a good job. In your example, the left or the right could just not vote for the "meh" candidate if they truly don't believe they would be a good person to lead, and if they do vote for them, then they should be happy at the outcome regardless.
Yeah, it's literally "elect the candidate with the highest approval rating" which seems like a fair and reasonable outcome.
(That's assuming that people vote honestly, but according to at least one analysis [1], the outcome isn't very much less democratically optimal if people vote strategically in approval voting rather than honestly.)
> You elect the candidate that the most people approve of, regardless of whether or not there are other "stronger" candidates.
It may be a strategic voting: I approve anyone who is not democrat (or republican).
> The population would be better served than if one of the "strong" left or right candidates were elected.
Not necessarily. Perhaps it is better when left/right candidates alternate (driving important changes in their area of interests), than weak candidates elected every time.
We've had this in Australia since day 1 of Federation.
One important factor the article didn't quite emphasise is how this voting system can break up the two party duopoly without creating 1920s-Reichstag-esque anarchy.
It's completely normal to put a third party as your first preference, while still indicating that you'd prefer Kodos to Kang.
In practical terms, it means the Dems would actually have to do some work in order to win the black vote, and likewise for the Republicans and working class white people.
Worth noting Australia is still generally a 2-party system in the lower house (1 representative each area) but less so in the senate (where each state elects the top 12 senators). Australians still look at envy at the New Zealand and German systems of Mixed Member Proportional representation (MMP)
MMP is a fantastic system, but it can face resistance if it relies on Closed Party Lists[0], which allow a party to put a potentially controversial candidate at the top of the list, almost guaranteeing them a seat and forcing party supporters to accept that as the cost of choosing the party.
Open lists are better, but I believe they still have the problem that they make it unclear where representatives' mandates come from, especially if a representative can resign and be automatically replaced by someone lower on the list without a by-election.
Other problems exist with list-based systems, such as treating independent candidates differently to candidates with established parties, and the possible use of "decoy lists"[1].
The best implementation I've seen of MMP, though, is that used in Baden-Württemberg, which avoids party lists by filling the proportional seats with the candidates who came closest to winning the elections in their local districts.[2]
I don't see a practical party with closed list, as long as the minimum threshold isn't too low. Don't like the people at the top? Vote for a small party which will join the coalition.
Even more fundamentally, politics is a "team sport". The vetting of individuals when power boils down to alliances and other relations with the politicians is stupid waste of voter's time.
We here in NZ would also like some kind of ranked choice in conjunction with MMP - as it stands, people are still reluctant to vote for smaller parties that may not reach the 5% vote threshold required.
Edit: I may have confused RCV with STV. Regardless, it would be nice to know that if my first option didn't make it into Parliament that I could prefer a second party, and so on.
As the wiki article for STV helpfully states, "Another name for STV is multi-winner ranked-choice voting". Also, "Instant runoff voting (IRV) is the single-winner analogue of STV".
So ranked choice voting is a super-set with many flavours within.
The two jurisdictions in Australia that use Hare-Clark (Tasmania and the ACT) no longer have a political duopoly.
MMP would probably work well in South Australia (where overall the electorate is fairly evenly split right-left, but many of the right-leaning voters are locked up in a few geographically large rural electorates and the left-leaning voters are distributed more evenly across more urban and suburban electorates).
Fellow Aussie and RCV-enthusiast here, but minor correction: RCV was introduced in 1918 in response to elections where a minority candidate won due to vote splitting.
It looks like the article got the Australian implementation somewhat wrong.
Under cons, it says that voters have to rank all candidates on the ballot paper.
In reality you have a choice. You can either rank all, or if you are lazier you can just select your favourite candidate and then your first choice candidate's preferences will be used instead.
Also for some larger ballots (usually the senate with nearly 100 options) there is now a requirement to only rank say the top 10 or so for the ballot to count, so you don't need to number all 100.
This is one of the best features of the Australian system. If you want to do the basic effort you can just tick one box, but if you care about the ordering you can also make your preferences count if you so choose.
As an outsider looking in to American politics, I feel changing to preferential voting is the best bang for buck change to move away from extreme politics. Hopefully this catches on elsewhere.
In reality you have a choice. You can either rank all, or if you are lazier you can just select your favourite candidate and then your first choice candidate's preferences will be used instead.
This is not true. In the elections for the Australian House of Representatives (single-member electorates, comparable to the mayoral election under discussion where there is a single winner), you must number every box for your vote to count.
In elections for the Australian Senate (multiple member electorates) you don't have to number every box, but you have a choice: you can either vote "below the line" for individual candidates, in which case you must number at least 6 boxes for your vote to count (the ballot paper advises you to number at least 12); or you can vote "above the line" for groups of candidates (in which case you only have to number one, but the ballot paper advises you to number at least 6). A vote "above the line" for a group is equivalent to numbering the candidates in that group in order from top to bottom, but it doesn't imply a vote for a candidate in any other group.
The voting systems in Australian states and territories vary from the above; some of them do allow only numbering a single candidate in single-member elections ("Optional Preferential Voting" or OPV) and some still have group-ticket voting in multi-member elections where you can assign your vote to the preference ticket submitted by a candidate (though hopefully the last few jurisdictions to still have this will be getting rid of it, because it is being gamed).
In Canada in 1952, the province of British Columbia switched to a ranked ballot and it nearly ended in disaster.
The ranked ballot was an attempt by the traditional Liberal and Conservative parties to keep a rising socialist party from gaining power, as they assumed no Liberal or Conservative voter would choose the socialists as their second choice.
But there was so much animosity between the parties that most voters chose a fringe right-wing party as their second choice, as a protest vote.
The two traditional parties were wiped out and the fringe right-wing party narrowly won, despite having no leader and little governing experience.
Fortunately, saner heads took over the fringe party and quickly steered it to the political center as a sort of big tent party for former Liberal and Conservative voters. But it could have gone very differently.
The ranked ballot idea was quickly dropped, but the event shaped British Columbia politics for the next 60+ years. That fringe party elected by accident became the province's natural governing party.
I suppose the moral of the story is that no voting system can prevent irrational voters from shooting themselves in the foot.
What aspects of parliamentary systems make it difficult to apply lessons from their voting systems to the voting systems used to elect representatives to the US Congress?
> We've had this in Australia since day 1 of Federation.
Australia adopted the preferential system in 1918.
> It's completely normal to put a third party as your first preference, while still indicating that you'd prefer Kodos to Kang.
The evidence shows most voters don't, which is why Australia's IRV elections still maintain a duopoly. In spite of the fact that the senate, which uses (proportional) STV, has escaped duopoly.
I've always seen the proportional nature as being key to other countries lack of a two party system (though they have two major coalitions). I'm curious why you think many look to Australia's IRV as the reason for it being a multi-party system when many parliamentary systems that don't use IRV have even more parties. How do you combat this common misconception? Also it seems dishonest to not consider coalitions when US parties aren't as uniform as most other country's parties. If we look at coalitions it does not appear that Australia (or most others) have escaped duopoly.
And as always, good to see you in the comments and thanks for all the information.
Ranked choice does avoid vote-split issues, but is insufficient for breaking a two party system because the races are still single-winner. That we still have primaries makes it worse.
Proportional representation is what is desperately needed to break the two party system.
It's worth mentioning that the way this has taken away seats from the two major parties is not mostly through the rise of third parties, but the election of independents unaffiliated with any party. This has invariably occurred in electorates which are so homogeneous they were safe for one or the other major party, usually (but not always) rural.
The most spectacular example of this was the election of three rural independents who then proceeded to install Julia Gillard from Labor as Prime Minister, even though they were conservative. Their stated reasons were Labor's promise to build a fibre-to-the-premises broadband network and their assessment of the conservative leader. Other examples include members in wealthy Sydney suburbs who, while otherwise conservative, wanted action on climate change, and members in farming electorates unhappy with the way the Nationals have been captured by mining and housing development interests and failed to represent farmers.
(The Nationals, formerly the Country Party, always join the conservative Liberals in coalition, apparently having forgotten the purpose of coalitions.)
An exception is the Greens, who usually score one seat based on the central business district of Melbourne. This includes very high density apartment towers, and student accommodation for the University of Melbourne, and is demographically odd.
Many observers believe the rural independents may eventually coalesce into a new party which displaces the Nationals. I see no evidence thay the Liberals' several humiliating losses to independents in "safe" seats is causing them to rethink their policies. This may or may not change once they are unable to rely on whatever replaces the Nationals to form government.
> One important factor the article didn't quite emphasise is how this voting system can break up the two party duopoly
I'm not convinced this is true. 2 parties control 80%. 2 coalitions control 95%. I'm also not sure how you can look at America and not recognize that our parties are more similar to coalitions (come on, AOC/Bernie are not the same party as Pelosi/Biden).
A better explanation is that Australia uses a parliament which has proportionate representation. My evidence of this is that other parliaments without IRV have similar party structures as Australia. So we have examples where you remove one aspect and things don't change, I don't think that makes for strong evidence that the thing removed is causing the effect (how can it cause an effect somewhere that it doesn't exist!).
So don't compare Australia vs America to prove IRV creates more parties. Compare Australia/France/UK vs America to prove parliament causes the desired outcome.
Would you mind elaborating a bit on that point? From what I've seen RCV does tend to have a really strong moderating pull on elections that something like MMP manages to dodge, but it does mean that big tent parties will often experience strong pull off and, honestly, the African American community is often under served by a lot of Dem economic policies - though I'm really speaking in demographic generalities here.
Here's my obligatory plug for approval voting. Approval is the "checkboxes instead of radio buttons" voting method. Select any, instead of select one. Vote for whoever you want and the candidate with the most votes wins. It gets rid of a lot of the drawbacks of FPTP while retaining its simplicity, unlike IRV.
I've always wanted to get people to vote on voting systems with a variety of voting methods and see what wins by what method. I'd vote this:
[ ] FPTP
[x] Approval
[x] IRV
Approval > IRV > FPTP
As an aside: It's a pet peeve when people call instant runoff voting (IRV) "ranked choice voting (RCV)." There are many kinds of RCV, and IRV is just one, and it has some pretty undesirable properties (a condorcet winner doesn't always win, so there can be a losing candidate that the majority prefers over the winner).
So many plugs for approval voting in these threads, but it just seems so terrible for what people really want to express.
For example, in 2016, plenty of people wanted Sanders more than Clinton. Who are they supposed to "approve?" Many of them would note their preference by just approving Sanders and not Clinton, which is the opposite of what a voting system is supposed to help achieve.
People voting for the only candidate they want just doesn’t strike me as a failure. The failure comes when someone has to vote for someone who is not their preferred. That said, the 2016 Dem primary doesn’t seem like a useful example for testing the constraints of any voting system since there were really only two viable candidates. All methods work equally well under those conditions. Why would someone approve both of the only two candidates when only one of them could win?
That's where something like STAR voting is even better. Just score people 0 to 5 on how much you like them. Gets rid of strategic voting, spoiler effect and works super well for large sets of choices as well. It's in essence like we score movies or restaurant reviews which makes it familiar as well.
Suppose you are left, and there are three candidate, left, center, right.
Honestly you would rank then as 5, 3, 1. But center candidate is better for you than right. So you are going to vote 5, 5, 1. So STAR voting is effectively an approval voting.
> But center candidate is better for you than right. So you are going to vote 5, 5, 1. So STAR voting is effectively an approval voting.
Obviously not true. If you did that, and left and center make it to the runoff, your vote has zero power. And also flawed for other reasons I discuss in that blog link.
Let’s be honest, it’s hard enough getting Americans to the ballot on Election Day, we don’t need to introduce more complexity.
Ranking requires far less brain power than a rating system would.
Maybe the energy expenditure between the two is small for the HN group but for the general public, the aversion to doing the mental work would be enough to dramatically reduce turnout.
This goes for all countries, not just America.
Not to mention how easy it is to spread lies for something as simplistic as FPTP. The more complicated a system is, the easier it’ll be to spread lies about it.
I'm not sure why you claim that ranking requires less brain power. Ranking becomes especially burdensome as you have more candidates/options. On top of that ranked voting seems much simpler on the surface than it actually is. The actual calculation is quite opaque in comparison.
They are supposed to approve of each candidate individually. This avoids problems such as the one you allude to in your example where Sanders may lose to Clinton despite more total people approving of Sanders, simply because Clinton supporters (the larger group) rank Clinton>Sanders while Sanders supporters (a minority of voters) only rank Sanders.
Exactly. What about if it was Sanders, Clinton, Kasich, and Trump? As a far left voter, do I have to approve Kasich if I really don't want Trump to win?
In RCV, it's simple: Sanders, Clinton, maybe Kasich to ensure Trump doesn't win. There are 100% problems in IRV that Clinton or Kasich may be the first elimination there, meaning moderates can get screwed even with preference, but it's still way better than Approval IMO. The answer is a better RCV system than IVF, but let's start by getting rid of FPTP. I'd love to see some nuanced RCV methods that combine IRV, Ranked Pairs, Condorcet Winners, etc to basically improve IRV eliminations and take "shortcuts" like steps that consider what % of ballots you're on. Basically, approval voting has its place, but it should be within RCV.
Does it make understanding the tally harder for the layman? Yes. But if designed right, it simplifies the voting end so that people can essentially approval and rank vote together. Rank everyone you approve/would accept, and rank in your true preference order. That's what we should be solving for IMO.
> Basically, approval voting has its place, but it should be within RCV.
An "approval-within-RCV" system would replicate multiple score voting (aka range voting). Why not skip the charade and advocate for a score voting system like STAR instead?
I won't comment on the first link, but I don't buy that second link at all. Assuming that it's referring to the C code from elsewhere on their site[0] (boldly claimed to be 'the world's first "reality based" statistics') then isn't it weird to model honest range voting by just adding some Gaussian noise to the true utility and then scaling the results back into [0, 1]? At that point your computer simulation just measures how closely the voting system agrees with range voting.
I don't think it's as simple of a question as you suggest.
Think of a food you disapprove of. Ok, now if you're stranded on a desert island, do you approve of it now? If you're at your usual grocery store you might disapprove of certain foods, but if you have to go to a much smaller one you may switch some of those to approve.
Also: for better or for worse, IRV tends to harm moderate candidates (who might be everyone's second choice, but nobody's first choice). Approval voting, on the other hand, tends to favor moderates (since they get one vote from a large percentage of the population, even if they're not on the top of anyone's list).
> As an aside: It's a pet peeve when people call instant runoff voting (IRV) "ranked choice voting (RCV)."
Honestly I've just shifted to referring to ranked systems as "ordinal," which is also the proper term, though doesn't use layman language. I honestly believe that Fair Vote has pushed this terminology to create confusion. Their site has historically had many misleading errors, especially w.r.t. spoiler effects (ignoring the favorite betrayer criterion).
I'd go as far as to say Approval > FPTP > IRV. FPTP has good properties like monotonicity (for a good example see http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/), easily distributed counting, and preservation of the secret ballot that IRV does _not_ have.
You really don't get much bang for your buck by switching to IRV; I'd say it's a negative deal overall.
If we're comparing Approval and FPTP in terms of easily distributed counting, it's worth noting that a ballot paper with N candidates can be marked in N different ways with FPTP and 2^N ways with Approval.
That may not be a problem for computers, but if you want to avoid the potential failure modes of (and conspiracy theories related to) electronic voting machines, there is a big difference between an election official trying to place a ballot on one of 10 piles versus trying to find the correct one out of 1024 piles.
A system like MMP can avoid this problem by using FPTP counting of ballots and then topping up the number of seats for each party to make the distribution of winners match the distribution of total votes.
You don't need the n bits of information from each ballot. You can just transmit the aggregate counts. A human can easily put tally marks in each of n buckets. In fact, a computer would likely do the same instead of creating an exponential number of buckets...
If you insist on a degenerate formulation, just split the ballots into n different elections and transmit the results of each one of those elections. We can use the same equipment we have today.
I like this, although with paper ballots it would mean counting (up to) N times as many pieces of paper, which would be (up to) N times slower/more expensive.
I can't quite grasp this. Candidates A B C i prefer in that order. I look at the polls and see A and B are close, but i much prefer them to C, so I approve of A and B. But the results come in and B won over A by 1 vote. Lets say me and 5 other people thought and acted that way. We're disappointed because we were not able to express our preference.
Lets say we 5 people do the opposite and only approve of A because we want to avoid the above, but it turns out C wins by 1 vote over B. We're disappointed we took a gamble to avoid the first situation and ended up with the second.
I understand RCV 1 2 3 may lead to weird situations downballot and horse trading, I know those examples but they seem infinitely harder to game out and vote defensively on compared to approval.
The explanations of approval all seem to rely on the falsehood that the voter approves of their choices equally.
I don't like instant runoff. It seems like it systematically rejects compromise, and I think finding the proper compromise is an important goal of a voting system.
For instance, imagine a sectarian society split roughly equally between 3 religions, with 4 candidates running. The first three push theocracy favoring their respective religion, while the fourth favors tolerance and secular government.
If, statistically, most of the citizens favor their flavor of theocracy, are happy to put up with secular tolerance, and are vehemently (maybe violently) opposed to living under another religions theocracy, it seems that clearly the best choice is that fourth candidate.
If everyone votes their honest preferences, the first thing IRV does is throw away that fourth candidate.
The vote might not go that way if enough people recognize the situation and vote strategically, ranking what they see as the proper compromise artificially high. But that's true of any voting system and undermines major selling points of RCV.
That's true - but approaches that identify those best compromises get mathematically more and more complex as the system gains fidelity.
We shouldn't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. If a place wants to implement another voting system, I'd be interested to see how it plays out, and if the voters see the winner with legitimacy.
IRV is relatively simple and candidates in NY are still attacking it because of the complexity it has over FPTP.
You don't get a lot of chances to change the voting system. Tacoma, WA changed to IRV for a while, but it didn't make any difference in who got elected, then they threw it out a few years later. Good luck getting a better system in place now.
Did they eliminate the primary process? The real value of IRV (IMO) is when you can have a Sanders and a Clinton (or a Trump and a Rubio) both on a general election ballot.
I think approval voting is both simpler and better at finding compromise, though it does have other weaknesses. There will always be tradeoffs, and perfect ... good ... etc, as you say. I just worry that IRV in particular might not actually be good.
But in practice that's extremely unlikely -- because there's always a significant proportion of the population that isn't tribalistic (or religious, in your case) the fourth candidate will tend to receive a decent proportion of first-place votes.
Alternatives have their own problems as well, where approval voting doesn't let you specify intensity of preference, or systems that let you granularly specify intensity of preference are not only too complicated for voters to understand, but also fairly arbitrary in how they compare intensities.
I don't think that's true at all. I agree that I picked a particularly extreme example to make the issue clear, but fundamentally IRV is a statement that the compromise we choose must be the first choice of a large portion of the population. I think that is a bad strategy, and situations where it picks poorly won't be uncommon.
Most RCV systems in practice use IRV (including, IIUC, the New York system under discussion), and I believe I was correct in what I attributed to IRV vs RCV more generally.
I don't believe I conflated the two. The title says RCV, but the algorithm described in the article is specifically IRV and I thought I was clear what I was talking about?
I really hate that Instant Runoff Voting, which is almost literally the worst possible voting method with ranked choice ballots, has somehow gotten the name “Ranked Choice Voting” stuck to it.
It’s like if “Democratic Elections” became a specific name for Plurality voting.
Yeah, when you name the spec after one particular implementation, you're gonna cause confusion. Anyway, I handle it by just using RCV to refer to how the ballot is filled out. The vote counting method is IRV.
Worst possible ranked choice alternative, not worst possible voting method (i.e., still better than FPTP, but not without its weaknesses). Frustrating as there are more straightforward, and objectively better mechanisms which are ignored in favor of IRV. It's hard not to feel conspiratorial that maybe the Powers That Be want worse voting mechanisms.
This page is a good explainer of IRV's weaknesses and shows some of the alternatives: https://ncase.me/ballot/
Since you mention it, let me offer a candidate for "worst possible voting method (that has actually been used in a democracy)", namely "plurality-At-Large".[0]
It basically takes the worst properties of FPTP and extends them to an entire governing body, allowing a party with less than 50% support to win 100% of the seats (by design).
Fortunately it has been mostly abandoned in the US thanks to the Voting Rights Act and subsequent SCOTUS decisions.
> Fortunately it has been mostly abandoned in the US thanks to the Voting Rights Act and subsequent SCOTUS decisions.
A close variant (vote for up to N, top N win, at large) is used in a lot of local elections still; all multimember district methods are banned in House elections specifically to prevent plurality at large from being used there. (Though the Senate uses temporally-segregated two-seat plurality at large in every state.)
"Worst possible" might be a bit strong, but an important property that a voting system should have is that it finds the Condorcet winner if one exists. The Condorcet winner is the candidate who beats every other candidate in a head-to-head election. IRV is not guaranteed to find a Condorcet winner.
The problem with IRV is that you can have a candidate who is everyone's second choice, but then loses out on the first ballot because too few people ranked them first.
I've been voting RCV and I've yet to see this actually occur in practice. The candidates who are marketing themselves so well that they are second on almost everyone's ballot (in a 13 person race!) are generally FIRST on a fair number (relative to all 13 folks).
One of it's big downsides is that you can, in some cases, cause a candidate to lose by ranking them too highly. In voting-theory terminology, it fails the monotonicity criterion. In at least that one respect it's worse than first-past-the-post. (I mean, imagine if people could say "Gore would have won in 2000 if only a few less people had voted for him". That sounds nonsensical, but that's how IRV works sometimes.)
I think first-past-the-post and IRV are both bad voting systems that are unsuitable for real-world use in elections with more than 2 candidates. Approval voting is simpler than IRV and (as far as I know) it isn't worse than FPTP in any way, so I think we should push for that.
> Approval voting is simpler than IRV and (as far as I know) it isn't worse than FPTP in any way
FPTP might be better than approval voting, because approval voting favors weak moderate candidates with no agenda.
With FPTP the people alternate lefts and rights and the system develops. With moderate candidates the system may stop progressing: no reforms, no bugfixes.
If the voting public prefers a weak moderate candidate with no agenda, then that's the candidate that should win. I think weak moderates usually flop, though, if there's no particularly compelling reason for people to want that person to be president.
The way I look at is that it's a kind of relief valve. If both major parties (assuming there are two, maybe there'll be more...) nominate not-so-great candidates, then the voters have an option to elect someone like Tom Hanks. I mean, I would have voted for Tom Hank in 2016 if I had an approval voting ballot and he was one of the options.
> If the voting public prefers a weak moderate candidate with no agenda
No voting public prefers other candidates, and moderate candidate as backup.
I give you an example I posted in another thread:
* 60% want a dem candidate to win
* 40% want a rep candidate to win
* 70% are willing to join strategic voting to avoid allowing other party to win
In this case, the dem candidate looks like a correct winner.
With ranked choice the the dem candidate would win.
But with approval voting strategic "moderate" candidate wins. If they are moderate, that's good. But they can easily be just weak nobody.
It is not exactly what voting public prefers. That choice is a fake choice, like a girl, do you want to go to bed or be thrown into a forest with angry wolves.
> if there's no particularly compelling reason for people to want that person to be president.
The reason is to not let opposing party win. Strategic voting.
> If both major parties (assuming there are two, maybe there'll be more...) nominate not-so-great candidates, then the voters have an option to elect someone like Tom Hanks.
And they will if it is some form of ranked choice, but not just approval.
I don't think 70% are likely to vote for anyone unless they're exceptional in some way an almost universally liked. Candidates like Michael Bloomberg or Lincoln Chafee or John Kasich or Jon Huntsman or anyone else trying to go after the moderate vote just wouldn't get those kinds of margins. But anyways, that's beside the point.
In approval voting, strategic voting for moderate/novelty candidates is like this (assuming you have a favorite and least favorite major party candidate and the novelty candidate is somewhere in the middle): you can vote for the novelty candidate if you want. Doing so might cause your favorite major-party candidate to lose if you happen to be the tie-breaking vote. Or it might cause your least-favorite major party candidate to lose to the novelty candidate. You can decide whether the prospect of having your favorite candidate lose to the novelty candidate is worse than the prospect of having your least favorite major party candidate lose to the novelty candidate and vote accordingly. In all cases, if you vote for your favorite candidate you're always helping them win, and if you vote for the novelty candidate you're always helping them win.
How strategic voting works for RCV is that you can put your favorite major party candidate first, the novelty candidate second, and the least favorite candidate last. You know that putting the novelty candidate in the middle won't harm your favorite candidate's chances of winning, since that's a property of RCV (later no harm). However, what you don't know is whether putting your favorite candidate first will help or harm your favorite candidate, and you don't know whether putting the novelty candidate second will help or harm the novelty candidate. Maybe putting your first choice second or third will cause them to win. Maybe putting the novelty candidate first will cause your favorite candidate to win against your least favorite candidate.
This is complicated and hard to reason about, unless you have detailed information about how other people are going to vote. Which seems to imply that such a system would tend to disempower individual voters and empower whoever has access to detailed information about the intentions of the voting public: campaigns that can afford internal polling, Facebook, Google, etc..
A succinct version (others have linked more detailed, largely outcome-oriented analyses, which are also valid and important) is that, of seriously-considered ranked-ballots methods, it both throws out the most information from the ballots and uses information rather unequally across ballots, attempting to simulate FPTP elections with narrower candidate pools until you get a majority winner.
The really unfortunate thing about NYC's ranked choice voting is that you're limited to ranking only 5 candidates. This means you still need to engage in tactical voting.
You can't just rank the candidates you like, in the order you like them, because your genuine top 5 choices might not include the people who are most likely to win. You'll be "throwing your vote away" unless you include the most-likely-to-win candidates - that is, unless you vote tactically.
I've seen lots of discussion in NYC where people are trying to figure out the right tactical voting to do given their views and given the fact that they can only rank 5 candidates. Ranked choice voting is supposed to make tactical voting essentially irrelevant, so this is disappointing.
I don't disagree it's not ideal if you have more than 5 choices you like, but let's not over criticize a small flaw without appreciating the massive progress here. I read "horrible and unfortunate" and can see how people would take that to mean "back to FPTP".
I voted today and put 3 small candidates and two who "have a chance". I'm really excited to see how those 3 candidates shake out in the rounds, and that alone might give them a lot more power next race. That's super exciting to me and I think we can celebrate that and then push to improve the issues after :)
Yes, sorry, "horrible" was a bit strong and I edited that out of my comment immediately after posting it, heh...
I do appreciate the progress, but I worry that people will regard this incarnation of ranked choice voting as "more complicated" when the entire point is that it's less complicated for the individual voter...
Could you elaborate how RCV is less complicated? Just by eliminating tactical voting? In traditional voting you often limit yourself to the incumbents, isn't that a lot fewer choices?
Limiting yourself to the likely candidates requires a level of awareness around polling - that information is practically forced down our throats since voting in America pretty much requires it, but polling information (what other people think of the candidate) isn't an important piece of information for the voter - it's their opinion the system ideally wants them to express.
RCV is, at a maximum, equally as complicated as FPTP style voting since you have the option to elect only a single choice on your ballot (unless they're doing something weird). The form of the ballot may be visually more overwhelming but that's just from unfamiliarity.
Right, but you can argue ranking N items takes more thought thank picking 1. I like the "interoperable" way, just making choices 2 and onward optional.
Given the wording in the article I'm almost certain that underfilling the selection wouldn't result in a spoiled ballot. People can continue to just pick their favorite dude and go one with their lives. From a survey mentioned in the article apparently only a quarter of potential voters choose to only make a single choice[1].
A voting system where you're limited to only voting for the incumbent is indeed very simple (although not very democractic)... I assume you meant "limit yourself to the frontrunners". :)
In an election where there's exactly two candidates, RCV (or most other alternative voting systems) is the same as simple majority. You're right that with exactly two candidates, tactical voting isn't a concern, and simple majority voting is the simplest and best system. But many elections do not have exactly two candidates - primaries being the most salient example.
With RCV/alternative voting systems, you don't need to know who's popular or "electable" or any of that. You can just go with your most naive, direct take on the candidates.
Say you like two candidates A and B, but most of all you want to make sure candidate Z loses. Just rank A and B first, then everyone else equally, then candidate Z. You don't have to think about who is most likely to beat Z - you don't even have to follow the election at all.
Even if they didn't limit it to 5, you still need to engage in tactical voting in IRV if you don't want to risk throwing your vote away. The spoiler effect is actually still there, it's just harder to understand. The problem is that your second choice only counts if your first choice is eliminated, so it's very possible that none of your rankings matter and have no influence on the outcome if you don't pick one of the top two candidates as your first choice.
> it's very possible that none of your rankings matter and have no influence on the outcome if you don't pick one of the top two candidates as your first choice.
I'm not sure what you're describing. As long as one of the top two candidates appear on your ballot (at any rank) then you have influenced the last round of voting.
Suppose you have three candidates, A, B, and C, and the votes look like this:
45% of voters rank A 1st, B 2nd, C 3rd
25% of voters rank B 1st, A 2nd, C 3rd
30% of voters rank C 1st, B 2nd, A 3rd
Nobody has the majority, so B is eliminated, and A wins round 2 with 70%. But 30% of voters preferred B over A, and if they had ranked B first, then B would've won in the first round with 55%. By voting honestly, the C voters threw away their votes. None of their later rankings mattered, because C was not eliminated before a victor was declared.
All of the strategic situations with instant runoff seem to require more detail on the outcome than anyone can predict in practice. So I’m not sure this will ever actually be a thing for voters think about.
I'm struggling to find a source, but I did read an article once about how some elections in Australia have fallen back to "lesser of two evils" precisely because of the need to vote strategically in order to make sure your vote isn't spoiled.
But suppose you're right and voters rank candidates honestly because they can't predict how to vote strategically; ultimately, I think that is arguably even worse, because even if voters can't predict how to vote strategically in advance, they can certainly still feel resentful after the fact when the results are tallied and it becomes clear that they got screwed over by voting honestly. At least in plurality voting, it's easy to understand the tradeoffs and choose whether you want to vote for a spoiler candidate or not. Surely it will not lead to greater voter enfranchisement for people who find out after they voted that they accidentally spoiled their own votes, and could've had a say in the outcome if they'd expressed their rankings differently.
If this still all sounds hypothetical, keep in mind that this is exactly what happened in the 2009 Burlington, VT mayoral election. The Republican candidate acted as a spoiler for the Democrat (who had the broadest popular support) and instead the Democrat was eliminated and the third-party Progressive candidate was elected. This led to wide-spread dissatisfaction and IRV was repealed there in 2010.
Also, if my example seemed too abstract, let's imagine a real-world presidential election using IRV in a red state like West Virginia. In 2020, Trump got about 70% of the vote. Now suppose Mitt Romney ran as well in a three-way race against Trump and Biden. Since Romney is also a Republican, then it's likely some of the Trump voters would've ranked him first, but most of the Democrats would've still preferred Biden. But since Romney is more moderate than Trump, the Democratic voters would probably still prefer him over Trump. Now the results might look like this:
45% of voters rank Trump 1st, Romney 2nd, Biden 3rd
25% of voters rank Romney 1st, Trump 2nd, Biden 3rd
30% of voters rank Biden 1st, Romney 2nd, Trump 3rd
This seems like a fairly plausible real-world situation, and it also seems pretty easy to imagine how Democrats could look at the polling numbers and realize that Biden is never going to win in their state, and that ranking Romney 1st is their only chance to stop Trump.
How much time must people be putting into politics that they have such nuanced views that make it impossible to express a clear opinion on 4 top candidates and stick a major party candidate in spot 5? I guess New York politics must be vastly different from the West coast, because it's pretty uncommon to see a single race with more than 5 candidates in the first place, and truly unheard of for there to be 5 candidates that have any chance of winning in my experience. Having such strong opinions that this qualifies as "really unfortunate" sounds absolutely exhausting to me.
What's great about RCV (not IRV specifically) is that if the ballot data sets are retained, you can write software to recount them using other RCV algorithms. I'm curious when we'll next have a Condorcet Winner that isn't the IRV winner.
Would that be meaningful when the method is known to the voters ahead of time? It’s like the team with fewer total yards winning the Super Bowl... wouldn’t be that surprising since both teams know that it’s points that decide the game.
I suppose some meaning could be lost if people are voting tactically from the awareness that they're in an IRV election. But on the other hand, if a voting system's implementation incentivizes voters to vote against their true preferences, then that by itself should be an indication that the voting system is flawed. (It's not true that every voting method incentivizes tactical voting; this is a common misreading of Arrow's Theorem.)
I agree that Arrow's Theorem is often misread (as it doesn't apply to score-based voting systems, or single-winner elections) but it's perhaps more important to mention the Gibbard–Satterthwaite theorem here, which is similarly misrepresented.
That theorem effectively says that all sensible voting systems will in certain conditions allow a voter to gain a better outcome by voting insincerely (i.e. tactically). However, it doesn't say how easy it is for a voter to determine the correct tactical vote to make, so potentially a voter would need perfect information about all the other votes cast in order for their tactic to succeed.
I don’t like rank choice voting because it can result in someone with fewer first place votes than the first or second candidate to win if the conditions are right.
We’ve seen surprise results where an obscure candidate has won when too many top choices split the first choice votes and someone relegated to the floor vacuums up all the throwaway votes (people think they have to “spend” all their votes)
> an obscure candidate has won when too many top vs fixates split the first choice votes and someone relegated to the floor vacuums up all the throwaway votes
That’s the point. The compromise candidate won. If the top candidates had spent less time mud slinging they may have remained in others’ top two or three.
> approval voting is a simpler system that also tends to reward moderate or "compromise" candidates
I don't have a strong preference between approval and RCV. But I think people closer to politics would. Being able to "be behind" one candidate is a meaningful promoter of civic engagement; forcing that decision is deeply entrenched in our politics.
That makes approval voting a tougher sell for implementation than RCV. Given how much better RCV and approval voting are than FPTP, it seems sensible to go with RCV.
Implementation is actually a lot simpler. With approval voting, there is no change to the physical paper ballot; you just allow the voter to punch multiple holes on a single ballot, to represent the candidates she "approves" of.
That's not the phase of implementation that's difficult with any of these systems. It's getting the rules changed. Approval voting changes civic engagement in a fundamental way. (It also has much less real-world data behind it.)
> That makes approval voting a tougher sell for implementation than RCV.
Approval voting was passed by a 2-1 landslide majority in both Fargo and St Louis. Public opinion research by the Center for Election Science shows random American voters are much more supportive of approval voting than IRV, relative to the status quo. By a huge margin.
You're last name doesn't have to be Arrow to know that there's a potential for a non-compromise candidate to win, indeed for the candidate that a majority don't want in office to win.
> there's a potential for a non-compromise candidate to win
Agree IRV isn't the perfect system. But we have the downsides of being broadly explicable (Condorcet method's weakness), continuous with existing civic culture (approval voting's weakness), squeezing the centre (RCV/IRV's weakness) and being better than autocracy (plurality's weakness).
With some irony, the game of reforming voting systems is itself a plurality mechanism. IRV, re-branded as RCV, has taken off. It has precedence. The distance between each of RCV's competitors and it is dwarfed by the distance between each of them and FPTP. Given that, unifying around the winning "candidate" makes sense.
Put another way, bringing up approval voting in an IRV vs. FPTP discussion favors FPTP. If one wants a world in which approval voting reigns, I think it would be easier to get there with IRV as an in-between.
I've never really understood the criticism of Condorcet's method being hard to understand. If one candidate would beat all other candidates head-to-head, that candidate should be the winner. That's really it. People get hung up on the loop-breaking algorithms when they're not really the point.
As I explain elsewhere, the problem is you can have a a pool of good candidates who SPLIT/dilute the top votes (and none win) and then you can have the poor candidate who does not split the vote and all the secondary votes go to this unlikely candidate and that candidate wins... to the chagrin of most voters (who cast votes for the top contenders).
> I don’t like tank choice voting because it can result in someone with fewer first place votes than the first or second candidate to win if the conditions are right.
Any system other than plurality allows a candidate with more first place votes to beat one with fewer. Any system other than plurality or majority/runoff allows a candidate with fewer first place votes than the second place.
But, much as I dislike IRV, I’m rather skeptical of the “winner should always be one of the top two by first-place vote count” criteria suggested.
OTOH, using any ranked ballots method, I can see an argument to do a wide open “primary” using the method and then if the winner is not also the majority first-place winner doing a separate “runoff” election using the same system of, say, 5 runoff candidates, determined as:
(1) the candidate that won using the ranked-ballots voting method selected
(2) any of the top two by first place votes not selected by (1)
(3) the first candidate elected by the selected ranked ballots method when the candidates admitted to the runoff by (1) and (2) are disregarded, plus enough candidates elected by the same method disregarding all previously-admitted candidates to complete the pool of 5 candidates.
The idea being to deal with the risk of “candidate was elected due to insufficient exposure and vetting” risk, without fundamentally compromising the desirable behavior of the selected ranked-ballots method.
> I don’t like tank [sic] choice voting because it can result in someone with fewer first place votes than the first or second candidate to win if the conditions are right.
The rest of the comment seems to explain that the problem is that poorly considered candidates win because people don't give as much care below the top spot in a wide pool of candidates:
> We’ve seen surprise results where an obscure candidate has won when too many top choices split the first choice votes and someone relegated to the floor vacuums up all the throwaway votes (people think they have to “spend” all their votes)
I think its an understandable concern under any single round ranked-ballots method where you arr likely to have a large pool of cnadidates. But it can be simply remedied with a two-round system using the same method iterated to select a manageable pool of candidates (possibly gating in the top couple first-place vote getters even if they otherwise wouldn’t be in the top) for the runoff round, which still uses the same ranked-ballots method with more confidence that all the candidates have been vetted because there is a narrower field.
This keeps the integrity of whatever ranked-ballots method is chosen while avoiding the (small, but not nonexistent) risk of winning by flying under the radar.
Because the way people understand it is that if candidate #1 doesn't win, then candidate #2 would win, maybe candidate #3, but not candidate #5. And people are often disappointed to learn that the first, second or third, 1st choice vote-getters are not the winners but rather the #1 3rd, 4th, or 5th choice vote getter can end up winning (again because people think they HAVE to cast all votes --which obviously they don't, but that enables the possibility of the throwaway candidate winning)
Nope! This is a problem with high-cardinality ordinal voting methods. Since factorial is a very fast growing function, you can easily encode a pattern in down-ballot candidates and buy and verify a specific ballot.
Commonly what's done is that we truncate the ballot and only allow people to express, say, 5 preferences.
I feel like approval voting gets overlooked too much in discussions of voting systems. It's so much simpler than instant runoff, and so much less prone to spoilers than first-past-the-post.
Yeah, I'm a big fan of approval voting, the amount of tactical voting is much less compared to most other voting systems (including Plurality and Ranked Choice). In particular a big flaw of Ranked Choice Voting is the center squeeze effect. This site has a good overview of it: https://electionscience.org/library/the-center-squeeze-effec...
The system allows ppl to vote a third party without „wasting“ their vote. It favors consensus candidates — that’s great when a single representative is needed (like a major).
For parliaments, however, the system favors the two main parties, since a candidate needs those 50% support. This means parliament, which _should_ reflect the pluralism of society, will not actually reflect that pluralism.
In effect, this ranked ballot business is a way to appear to engage in voting reform without actually wanting to change anything about the outdated 2-party system.
In Canada, the liberals promised election reform. Until it turned out that ranked ballot was not going to be recommended by the electoral reform commission. Since that was the system the Liberals wanted in order to improve their chances in future elections, and they had little interest in actually representative voting systems, they scuttled the process and reneged on their promise that this would be the last election using the first past the post system.
It frankly forced me to research more candidates than I would have. The amount of familiarity I have for every e.g. City Council candidate (which were RCV) versus DA candidate (who were standard voted) is night and day.
IIRC in some applications of ranked choice voting it's possible to rank an arbitrary number of choices. So even voting the old-fashioned way would be fine.
An Australian comic author has written an easy to understand comic about exactly this. Let Dennis the election koala explain it, with a worked example: https://www.chickennation.com/voting/
Thank you, I was really confused by this because the NYC borough of Brooklyn is actually synonymous with Kings County, and I assumed that OP had merely forgotten the s.
Without MMP it's not going to change who gets in. The 49.9% of people opposed to Kshama Sawant get no voice (yes, that's city of Seattle, but easier example for non-locals) in IRV(RCV) nor FPTP.
Tacoma did this a few years ago and nothing came of it.
I'm a bit skeptical of ranked choice voting- one of the key issues for the US that rarely gets discussed is that we can't use it to elect our President, due to the 12th Amendment, unless you're OK with the states selecting him/her instead. The 12th Amendment states that the Presidential winner has to have a majority of the Electoral College votes on the first round of voting- no multiple rounds- otherwise each state gets to cast one vote to pick who out of the top 3 candidates gets the job. (Yes it technically says 'the House' picks, but it's not the full House of Representatives- instead they give each state 1 vote).
I've presented this to various ranked choice voting enthusiasts, and have never heard a good response. Feel free to read the plain text of the 12th Amendment for yourself, it seems quite clear to me!
'The person having the greatest Number of votes for President, shall be the President, if such number be a majority of the whole number of Electors appointed; and if no person have such majority, then from the persons having the highest numbers not exceeding three on the list of those voted for as President, the House of Representatives shall choose immediately, by ballot, the President.'
> one of the key issues for the US that rarely gets discussed is that we can't use it to elect our President, due to the 12th Amendment, unless you're OK with the states selecting him/her instead. The 12th Amendment states that the Presidential winner has to have a majority of the Electoral College votes on the first round of voting- no multiple rounds- otherwise each state gets to cast one vote to pick who out of the top 3 candidates gets the job
This sounds like it would preclude a nation-wide RCV implementation (without a constitutional amendment), but a per state implementation of RCV would still be an improvement over the current system in my opinion. I don't see how that would run afoul of the constitution, but I'm not a lawyer.
Well that's easy: you're mistaken. The 12th amendment manager the election by the electors, these are representatives. So someone needs a simple majority of the 538 electoral votes when those are tallied in January. How the states determine which electors to send is up to each state. New York could select it's electors based on a ranked choice ballot.
Sorry, I left a key part out- the issue is combining ranked choice voting AND a multiple party system. If you only had 2-3 parties, I agree with you. However I think what the RCV people are hoping for is a multiparty system, yes? So once you get above 4 parties, the odds of multiple states all having picked a different candidate increases, so that no one gets a majority.
Extremely simplified example- the South all chooses the Republican candidate, the West Coast all chooses the Democratic candidate, the Midwest all chooses the Populist candidate, the Northeast mostly chooses the Whig candidate. Alaska chooses the Alaska Independence Party candidate. Vermont and New Mexico chooses the Green Party candidate. See the problem now?
Couldn't states just develop complex rules for sending their delegations that knock losing candidates off the list and redistribute local votes based on national electoral gridlock? That sounds somewhat similar to the way the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact is supposed to work.
I guess in theory. You'd need a bunch of states to cooperate together (so both red & blue), plus Congress has to bless it. Contrary to what the popular vote people seem to believe, the Compact Clause (Article I, Section 10, Clause 3) of the Constitution states that "No State shall, without the Consent of Congress... enter into any Agreement or Compact with another State"
that may be the case, but we might have better politics if our other elections were done with ranked choice. If it can reduce the power of the parties, that is a net win.
If you want to get involved bringing RCV to vote in your state, all 50 states have an RCV movement. You can find and join your states movement here: https://www.rankthevote.us/states
The "slate" strategy (called "horse-trading" in this article) was strongly entrenched for that election. The idea is that if you and other people all support some "slate" that is a subset of the running candidates, then if you all rank those candidates in the same order on your ballot, it can boost every one of those candidates chances of being elected (this strategy is most effective in multi-seat races, such as this 9-seat city council race).
The reason this works is that if a candidate meets the quota of first-choice votes needed to earn a seat, they are elected. If more people chose them as first choice than the quota, some of the ballots will instead roll over and count for their second choice (etc etc).
Which ballots move on? This is largely influenced by the overall proportion of second-choice votes. So if everybody packed the two candidates in the same order, it maximizes the number of ballots for that candidate that will be used in the second-choice tally.
All voting systems have tradeoffs. The nice property of this one is that I was able to elect multiple city councilors who supported policies that mattered to me. Likewise, as long as 1/9th (plus one) of the city's population put a candidate as their #1 choice in that election, that candidate was guaranteed a seat. That sounds pretty fair to me!
If electoral systems interest you, I highly recommend William Poundstone's "Gaming the Vote: Why Elections Aren't Fair (and What We Can Do About It)". It focuses on the USA, so it's maybe better appreciated by American readers, but I found it highly entertaining and edifying, as I have several of the author's other works.
Downside with RCV is it really doesn't do anything it purports to do, but major upside is it encourages voter education. Which, IMHO, is by far the biggest problem with American politics.
Care to elaborate? I fail to see how it "doesn't do anything it purports to do". It allows people to pick/rank multiple candidates, which neuters the whole "least of two evils" problem traditional elections have. It would also destroy the two party duopoly, If it were used more widely. That'd be great.
Even if IRV keeps the same two parties in power forever, there is still scope for it vastly improving politics by improving the platforms of those parties.
For example, if large numbers of Democrat voters decided it was safe to vote Green and put the Democrats as their second choice, the Democrats would quickly start to adopt more Green policies for fear that the two-party system kicks them out and the Greens become the major left-wing party.
As another example, if the Democrats were confident that there are more voters out there who are moderates than far-left voters, they could confidently oppose some far-left policies while knowing that they would still be the second-preference of far-left voters. That would allow them to appeal to more GOP voters and avoid being associated with fringe policies, while also expanding the Overton Window.
Another downside is that while it does prevent spoilers, RCV doesn’t prevent other forms of vote splitting. It keeps an unlikely outlier candidate from tanking the consensus candidate, but it doesn't prevent splits between three or more viable candidates. This is especially problematic because one most important supposed qualities of RCV, according to its advocates, is that it makes more candidates more viable.
No, you don't want dumb people to have representation, because idiots will spread misinformation (everything from climate change being fake to masks being unnecessary) and adopt corrupt practices to garner their votes. Smart people are less vulnerable to misinformation.
You want people who believe science, have a sense of foresight for several years, understand international politics, and how resources and economics work to decide the future of the country.
“Lots of people don't fill out all the choices” is an important downside. We’ve had Instant Runoff Voting in San Francisco since 2004, and people still don’t fill out all the choices, so their votes are discarded whereas the voters probably would have voted among the final two choices had there been a runoff election. For example, in June 2018 London Breed won the mayoral election against two candidates who were closer aligned politically (Jane Kim and Mark Leno, who were further left) https://dbaron.org/sf-elections-rcv/#%7B%22election%22%3A%22... and in Nov 2019 Chesa Boudin won the District Attorney race against 3 candidates who were more moderate https://dbaron.org/sf-elections-rcv/#%7B%22election%22%3A%22... . In both cases, the margin of victory was far more narrow than the number of votes that were exhausted in the final round of voting, so due to insufficient voter education I would consider vote splitting still a significant problem even with IRV. (Another possibility is that the ballots are exhausted by the 3 candidate limit in San Francisco.)
* You can vote for the random third party candidate without worrying about throwing away your vote.
* You seem to get a bit more moderation where we are if you also have an open primary / no primary type voting which gets really nice.
California does top two past the pole of any party inf the general which means even republican votes can matter in a dem on dem election (common out here) or dem votes can pull back things in a R vs R general (rarer but does happen).
In RCV your first point is not actually true. Its better then First Pass the Post (like literally anything else). Score based voting actually does have the effect you want.
Both are miles beyond first past the post, and both scare many people just because it's something new and different.
Hopefully you can support any change locally that gets us off of first past the post. Once we get some voting changes, hopefully that makes future changes even easier to make... though I know that's wishful thinking.
Actually, that's debatable. There was an interesting simulation done awhile back [1] that compared voting systems, and they found that if people voted honestly then IRV is better, but if people vote strategically the result isn't any more democratically optimal than FPTP. Which is what we should probably expect to happen when voters figure out that it's only safe to put your first choice first when they're the overwhelming favorite to win or they have no hope of winning. Otherwise it's complicated: you could cause your favorite candidate to lose by ranking them too high.
Obviously this is one simulation and results would be different with different assumptions. But I think it's worth pushing back on the idea that IRV is way better. It solves the problem of minor candidates being spoilers, but what if people actually start voting for minor candidates and they become major candidates? With 3 or more major candidates IRV starts looking like not such a great system.
The problem with talking about this is that the problems with FPTP are readily apparent and easy to explain. The problems with IRV aren't obvious and are harder to explain.
But minor candidates being spoilers have come up at all levels of elections many times for decades.
Splitting the vote happens frequently, again at all levels of elections (at least nationally in terms of the primaries for US Presidents).
If you vote for your favorite candidate, and your candidate is not the last-ranked candidate, you cannot cause your candidate to lose by putting them first.
But it sounds like you’d agree that FPTP needs to go. Great, me too. That’s the real focus for me: let’s start using different methods that eliminate, even to small degrees, the problems of FPTP.
I do agree that FPTP needs to go. I'm worried though that replacing it with RCV substitutes problems we know and understand with another set of problems that we don't know to be worried about because we haven't experienced them yet.
> If you vote for your favorite candidate, and your candidate is not the last-ranked candidate, you cannot cause your candidate to lose by putting them first.
Wikipedia has an example. (Technically it's two voters difference, since a change of one voter's vote would, I think, change the result at most from a win to a tie.)
Call my cynical but there's no way this is happening in NYC unless the establishment has crunched the numbers and decided it benefits them. Vermont state elections, Cleveland, etc. I could see those switching as a genuine experiment. But NY is too tightly under the control of the entrenched establishment to be doing this unless the establishment benefits.
I think it's more complicated than that. Ranked choice voting was put on the ballot and 75% voted in favor, so if it's some scam from the powers that be, they did get a lot of people to agree with them.
I believe the underlying problem was that in 2009 an expensive runoff election was needed, and that was the catalyst to start thinking about IRV. Saving tax dollars is about all you can find for the underlying motive.
The WSJ editorial board’s argument is very weak, and seems very partisan. They cherry picked a few very strange, rare scenarios that would still not be any different with the current first past the post system.
Ranking things in order of preference is something we do all the time. “They’re out of my favorite fruit, but I’ll get this other one instead.” “You don’t have that chair in this color? Okay, I’ll take that other color.” etc
The WSJ editorial board says, “Major parties could be weakened to the benefit of more extreme candidates.” That already happens with first past the post. The 2016 GOP primary season for President is an example of this: the eventual GOP candidate did not win 50% of the vote in the majority of 2016 primaries. Instead, more GOP voters wanted a more moderate candidate, but the many moderate candidates split the vote. Thankfully the WSJ article points this out, but totally undersells it, and doesn’t make a strong case to at least use it in those situations.
RCV reduces the chances of an extreme point of view getting elected, because they have to be able to get approval from at least 50% of everyone voting, rather than relying on their opponents to split the vote.
Get more people running, so we have more options to vote for, and we can express more accurately who and what we support. RCV, or one of the many other alternatives to FPTP, is the best shot at doing this, and in my opinion one of the few ways to truly improve the US’s democracy without a bunch of massive changes that are even less popular with politicians (limiting donations, lobbying, etc).
Very weak evidence offered but the motivation behind the article was near the top.
"They also appeal to more ideological voters—especially on the left—by arguing that they can express their views with more precision in a ranked-choice system."
As I'm guessing you know (but for the benefit of others), although the WSJ news section is rated quite middle of the road, their editorial board is rated as right-leaning as "The American Conservative", "Newsmax," and Fox News online news.
I personally think none of them are good enough points, they can all be dealt with. And 3 just means you can vote for who you like best, not just the ones in power.
Yeah, the idea of "increases existing divides" is extremely bad faith.
It lets similar candidates make a case for their small differences, but allows:
* voters to not waste their vote on one of 10 different similar candidates, hoping they picked the one with the most backing so they don't get a split vote
* more than just two or three candidates to run and have a reasonable chance of winning
The more people running, the better. Sure, there's some level where it gets a little over the top, but there are safeguards in place for that like minimum number of signatures from verified residents of a city/county/state, so there's currently extremely little risk of RCV being enacted and 100 candidates showing up on ballots.
And even if that did happen, so what? Look up a few of the candidates and pick the one that seems to represent you best.
We had a ranked ballot election here in Canada and it was amazing! Candidates when out knocking on doors could say, "I might not get your first choice but help me understand what I could do to be your second choice." It was a less divisive election and there were new young candidates were on the ballot that wouldn't have run under the old first-past-the-post system. There is less incentive for attack campaigns in these types of elections.
In a reality where people have limited time and mental energy to properly rank order all candidates for all positions, the jungle (non-partisan) primary practiced in Louisiana and some other states is a wonderful alternative. The unfortunate reality of RCV is that it provides a disproportionate amount of voting power to those who have more resources to spend time on assessment of their true preferences.
(The count continues even after a candidate gets over 50% just in order to get a notional "two candidate preferred" count between the last two remaining).
In social choice theory, May's theorem states that simple majority voting is the only anonymous, neutral, and positively responsive social choice function between two alternatives.
It’s exciting to see another community replace the most pessimal voting method with the second most pessimal one! (In terms of Bayesian regret). I hope the experience is not so frustrating that they end up repealing it as several other municipalities have done after being dissatisfied with IRV/RCV’s weird behaviors.
I recently built a visual exploration of ranked-choice voting that might be of interest: https://vinaybhaip.com/ranked-choice. At the end of the the visual explanation, it allows you to simulate different elections
back when I was a postdoc my group had a journal club and some joker decided to include a paper comparing different alternative voting schemes (US seems to be mostly "majority vote and full runoffs with ties).
We made it through instant runoff, and a few other approaches, and then Of course, the Joker decided to lay a landmine at the last minute (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theore...) at which point the hardcore quantative biologists all started paying attention. "Wait... there are interesting math problems relevant to politics? Math... solves a real world problem? Why am I working in biology?"
Possibly naive question here but in my limited exposure to articles about RCV it seems to be popular in more historically liberal areas. Is that true and why might that be the case?
New York City is the one driving the news cycle right now (and rightfully so as 8 million people have the potential to use RCV for the first time). And people view NYC as pretty liberal.
But a great thing about RCV is that it's not inherently partisan or favoring of left or right. As a result, in addition to being used in places like New York City, San Francisco, and Maine...it recently passed for use in Alaska and nearly two dozen cities in Utah. That's a pretty diverse set of locales across the U.S.
Because liberal (progressive) areas are full of people who are advocating for change. What that change should actually be varies greatly between individuals, so there is lots of fragmentation and in-fighting. The idea that you could vote for your specific niche but fall back to your preferred monolith is desirable because you don't feel like you're wasting your vote by voting for a minor party who will likely never win a seat. Conservative areas are full of people who want to maintain the status quo. They have varying ideas about how things should be but are unified by the fundamental idea that things shouldn't change. Since there is far less fragmentation, there is far less need to give your voice to a niche so they're happy to have their vote go directly to a monolith.
The progenitor Kenneth Arrow was pretty wonkish even among economists. RCV appeals to technocrats, who like the provability of its assertions. It's also a change from tradition. People with these tendencies tend to skew left.
There was a candidate like that in California (for the state senate?). Anyway, his whole pitch was “If you elect me, I will allow you to vote through me as a proxy. Every bill will have you able to vote and then I’ll vote the way people have told me to vote”
I am somewhat sure this dude existed and he may be the same guy who ran as a name full of 1s and 0s that decoded as ASCII to some nonsense.
It's unfortunate that NPR isn't aware that there are ranked-choice voting methods other than IRV, which is what they describe in this article.† Australia, for example, uses a variant of Hare-Clark STV, which is a much better ranked-choice voting method than IRV (though it reduces to IRV in single-winner elections), and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schulze_method is a ranked-choice voting method used by many organizations which guarantees that the Condorcet winner, if any, wins—a property STV lacks.
All these methods are vulnerable to Arrow's paradox, but many of them would produce better results in practice than IRV or especially the antiquated first-past-the-post method normally used in the US.
In general, though, you can't expect democratic elections to produce results of higher quality than the voters, and the last year and a half of covid response has made it clear that the voters are of very low quality—not just in New York, but worldwide. As long as your healthcare, retirement, and policing are run by people who believe in astrology, creationism, witchcraft, Holocaust denial, vaccine-caused autism, and global-warming denial, they aren't going to be run well. Democracy is much less bad than the alternatives, but even democratic governments are spectacularly incompetent. Putting them in charge of anything important is like giving a machete to a chimpanzee.
> The most commonly known fact about George [H.W.] Bush’s opinions while he was president was that he hated broccoli. During the 1992 presidential campaign 89 percent of the public knew that Vice President Quayle was feuding with the television character Murphy Brown, but only 19 percent could characterize Bill Clinton’s record on the environment. Also during that campaign, 86 percent of the public knew that the Bushes’ dog was named Millie, yet only 15 percent knew that both presidential candidates supported the death penalty. Judge Wapner (host of the television series “The People’s Court”) was identified by more people than were Chief Justices Burger or Rehnquist.
It might sound like I'm picking on the US in particular here, but the US is just where we have the most data. The situation is nearly as bad, or even worse, everywhere else.
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† Perhaps they are aware but assume their public is too dumb to understand the difference.
A weird take on the U.S. constitution: it actually established 4 "branches" of government. Citizen oversight was one of 4 powers designed to keep government in check. It's hard to look at today's America and feel like citizens have much oversight of government. Our "branch" has been systematically eroded. The current first-past-the-post system has been gamed heavily by two parties to reduce the impact citizens have on the outcome of elections.
RCV helps restore civilian oversight (many forms of voter suppression, i.e. gerrymandering, are less effective under RCV). My current thinking: feeling this will result in more "left" or "right" leaning governing bodies is a reflection of how citizen's want their government run. If the "silent majority" is right leaning, this will result in right leaning politics; left would yield left. But the "leaning" of the politics is less important to me as an outcome. The most important outcome is that citizens are restored to their rightful role in government: acting as a proper "check and balance" to the other 3 branches.
This "pyramid of control" observation is extremely under-appreciated. We are living in a time of extreme polarization and division, not just between parties but within them, as societies try to deal with an increasingly complex world where shifting battlefronts no longer align with traditional ideological boundaries, all while we're being mesmerized by the novel psychological environment that social media creates.
Even if the "pyramid of control" doesn't drive parties towards extremes, it perhaps drives them towards memes; that is, simplistic but clear ideas that stand out among the noise. Unfortunately, while that might be enough to create a coherent identity for a party, it doesn't do anything to guarantee that the party has any sort of broad support from the population, which further alienates people from politics.
You end up with Candidates who are neither principled nor charismatic but have blessings of Party Boss and fits in a narrow zone of like/dislike factor.
I imagine less. In primaries you attract voters that are more fanatical and extreme so they have a better chance of pushing through a candidate they see as ideologically pure. When the opposition party has no chance of winning it becomes the de facto election and you have a better chance of ending up with polarizing candidate.
NYC isn’t as super progressive as people think but there is certainly a progressive streak and they are louder than their numbers. They organize and they vote in primaries and that has been their strategy the last decade to assume outsized power. Because many moderate liberals won’t likely vote for a Republican in today’s climate it works. Hence BDB as mayor whom is despised by moderate liberals.
So this should redirect power to the Democratic machine in NYC and make it more difficult for far left progressives who really been hijacking the Democratic Party by virtue of the primary system.
RCV doesn't solve what is claimed in the article. It is interesting since countries that they give as examples are clear evidence of this. (Yes, I'm going to advocate cardinal systems like Approval, Range/Score, and STAR)
> More moderate candidates.
RCV doesn't encourage this at all. Australia is a clear example of this. In the house Liberal and Labor (the two major parties) control 85% of seats. The next major party (National) is part of a coalition with the Liberals and this sums to 95%. Things are only slightly better in the senate. Look at any country that uses IRC/RCV and you'll see a similar pattern. The system didn't encourage more parties and more moderates, Australia still has divided politics like America.
As to the more parties, I have an alternative explanation. They use a parliament, which uses proportionate representation. Don't buy it? Go look at countries with parliaments and don't have IRV and you'll find similar distributions. We also need to recognize that in America our parties are closer to coalitions in other countries out of the necessity. I'm not sure how anyone can look at someone like AOC or Sanders and think they are the same "party" (by other country norms) as Biden or Pelosi (similarly on the Republican side, though Trump caused a consolidation).
> ranked-choice voting can drastically reduce the possibility of spoilers.
Yes, but no. It reduces spoilers when a candidate is not going to win anyways (e.g. Jo Jorgensen spoiling Trump). But this does not prevent spoiling when candidates are similar (e.g. Bernie spoiling Biden), which is the specific type of spoiling that we are concerned about![0] This is known as the Favorite Betrayer[1] and is of grave concern if we want more parties (IRV/RCV fails this)
> More cost-effective __than other runoff elections__
The reason for the qualifier is because cardinal systems are extremely cost-effective. They have higher VSE than RCV (maximal VSE is from Condorcet methods, but not significantly higher than any cardinal system[2][3]), they scale better (you give candidates independent values instead of comparing, although you can rank if that's easier for you and you don't mess anything up), and you don't have to do any run-offs/mini-elections/rounds (STAR requires 2 rounds of voting max), which it isn't uncommon for IRV to cause many rounds of voting. This greatly increases complexity and reduces transparency (cardinal systems are trivial to calculate).
Why is transparency important? Just look at Arizona. Now imagine if the system was more complicated (no matter what side of the argument you're on there should be an argument for a clear and easy to calculate system for the winner. Multiple rounds of vote counting greatly increases complexity and chance for mistakes, which compound).
> Less negative campaigning.
There's no evidence for this. Australia's ads don't look that different from American ones. So I'm not sure what they are getting on about. There's plenty of attack ads.
I also want to plug Election Science[4] (I'm not affiliated), another non-partisan voting group (they previously advocated for STAR but have shifted to Approval with the explanation being that Approval is "good enough" and lower complexity/higher transparency)
Thanks for the contrary evidence. It's an oft-cited benefit of public financing of campaigns. I now can't remember where I got the notion that RCV helps too.
Ranked Choice Voting is not really a good idea. It has very strange unintuitive behavior.
Doing Score based voting is just much better and arguably simpler and less work.
I specially like the Star-Voting, where they do a runoff at the end to cover some extra cases. They also have a few variants for multi-winner and representational voting.
Its also much more familiar for people from real live, like online review.
P.S: Wow a lot of down-votes. RCV is just the alternative that got the most marketing, but once you start looking into the different systems I really don't understand people can stick with RCV just because its slightly better then the system before. If you are gone invest all this effort in improving the system, why not go to something easier and objectively better.
This video shows the issue very well (one of the people involved in Star voting made it):
Do you have any data around how many people in practice rank candidates between 2 and 4 (assuming a 1-5 scale)?
Given how polarizing politics tends to be, especially in a two party system such as America, I’d wager that most people put all 5’s for candidates of their party and all 1’s for candidates of the other party.
I don't have data at hand as I have not researched this topic in a long time, but from everything we know, people tend to not do only min or max. From everything we know, the majority of people don't vote purely strategically, specially when the voting system gives you serious disincentives to do so.
There is a clear intensive not to do that as it seriously hurts your overall preference. And Star Voting makes this even stronger compared to normal score voting because of the run-off.
Even if you assume that everybody is a 100% total party zealot it still only breaks down to approval voting and that is still a pretty good system.
> Given how polarizing politics tends to be,
Politics is polarized because of the voting system, if you look at actual data of preferences then you would see that there is far more agreement then can be expressed.
> I’d wager that most people put all 5’s for candidates of their party and all 1’s for candidates of the other party.
You would lose that wager. Most people are not party activists.
But the thing is that's beside the point. Even if they do that, it still allows them to express approval of multiple candidates, instead of just one in plurality voting. And the fact that there's no weird elimination rounds means that:
- it's easier to teach people ("most votes wins")
- it's easy to double check the results ("most votes wins")
- it's incentive compatible (you never put someone you hope loses above someone you hope wins)
Even if you never use 2 – 4 on a 1 – 5 scale, it's still better because you're making the same decision for multiple candidates.
Only using the max and min scores in score voting / range voting has a name: approval voting. For each candidate, you're answering the question: "Would I be ok with this person being elected?"
Giving 5s to your preferred candidates and 1s to your disliked candidates is not necessarily a problem, as others have pointed out, that's just approval voting and a good technique in its own right.
If you want to avoid that, the runoff at the end of a STAR (Score Then Automatic Runoff) is explicitly designed to incentivize voters to provide more differentiation between candidates.
NYC is an interesting example to use here because city and state politics are almost wholly dominated by one party. Instead of general elections being a Republican vs Democrat contest, you (in general) see elections around here being decided in Democratic primaries, along a spectrum that is generally far-left to center-right.
The presumed next mayor of NYC is going to be decided within the democratic party primaries today (or over the coming weeks as rounds of RCV progress), not in the general election later in the year. There's still a major spread of ideologies involved, but they're clustered within one party - which seems to have a lot of people thinking tactically about their votes, instead of just going straight-up party line.
> where they do a runoff at the end to cover some extra cases
One major motivation for the runoff at the end in techniques like STAR (Score Then Automatic Runoff) is to encourage voters to give different scores to candidates (assuming they actually feel differently about them) rather than strategically voting all 5s and 1s and basically making it the same as approval voting.
Well, maybe. Or disillusionment with IRV might spoil the waters for other attempts at reform, when people start to realize all the claims about ranked-choice eliminating the spoiler effect are actually false.
Certainly that's what happened in Burlington, VT where a spoiler candidate swung the 2009 mayoral election, and IRV was subsequently repealed. They didn't say "oh oops, well this experiment failed, let's try approval voting instead"; they just went back to plurality voting and that was that.
I'm Israeli and I was recently shocked to learn the rest of the world trusts electronic voting and vote by mail. We have a very simple and strict voting process here - the key feature which builds the trust in voting is that every 4 poll workers are responsible for the integrity of only up to 800 votes. We don't have fraud allegations because you would have to blame over 150 different people simultaneously (and often much more, on the order of hundreds of people, when you take into consideration the practical constrains) to change a single seat. It's very simple to convince a person of the integrity that this process. We have a high turnout which completely contradicts the claim that mail / electronic voting increases turnout. Electronic voting / mail voting give the power of changing the results to a handful of people who control the voting machines / know the voter rolls. Whether they will or had abused it is anyone's guess - but pretending that controversy over election process is inevitable is plainly wrong. The entire premise of elections is to prove to the losing side that the process was fair, so I find it unbelievable so many countries overlook that and give things like convenience and corona safety a priority.
Most western democracies don’t have a problem with fraud allegations in voting. It’s really only the US. And even there, the allegations are mostly a political ploy to push for policies that disenfranchis voters of other parties. Which again doesn’t exist in other Western democracies.
French had massive mail voting fraud in 1975, after which they banned it.
The entire point of elections is proving your government is trustable, you can't trust your government with it because then it's like a self signed certificate, circular trust problem.
Who rigs elections in Russia? The government. Who is most likely to rig elections? The government.
You can't trust government with elections, and just because the government shows you documents doesn't mean anything. Governments fabricate documents all the time. If all you require from corrupt politicians to remain in control is a bunch of mailed documents, you can be sure they'll get those documents mailed. I'm just completely dumbfounded people living within countries with these elections think they are democracies.
>We have a very simple and strict voting process here - the key feature which builds the trust in voting is that every 4 poll workers are responsible for the integrity of only up to 800 votes
Can you say more about this? So at each polling place 4 workers are assigned 800 votes, and then they rotate out to a different group of 4? I don't see how that inspires more trust than our current system, the government could simply be lying that they rotated the 4 poll workers out. Or, in a large city this would be a complete cluster as you'd need hundreds of poll workers on standby to rotate in & out every 30 minutes or so. I would definitely be interested in hearing more though
I can't see the weird complaining about having to learn more about candidates - there's usually only a few viable well-known candidates. You don't have to go research the Natural Law Party or Animal Justice or whoever.
The only cautionary tale is the whole horse-trading element of preferences does lead to some weird candidates making it in at the margins. We had someone who was semi-famous for engaging in a Kangaroo poo fight get in this way:
https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/it-was-people-play-w...
But this "preference whispering" is more of a big deal when preferences were allocated by parties - we had an option where you could vote a single '1' for a given party and it was their preferences that wound up being automatically applied (if you didn't go through hand-numbering all the preferences). So minor party deals became a huge deal. It's not going to be so big if you only have to number 5 and don't even have to keep numbering.