[HN Gopher] What is ranked-choice voting and why is New York usi...
___________________________________________________________________
What is ranked-choice voting and why is New York using it?
Author : elsewhen
Score : 125 points
Date : 2021-06-22 21:50 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.npr.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.npr.org)
| ortusdux wrote:
| King County is exploring using RCV.
|
| https://www.king5.com/article/news/politics/king-county-to-c...
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| Explanatory note: King County is the county in which Seattle is
| located.
| dont__panic wrote:
| Thank you, I was really confused by this because the NYC
| borough of Brooklyn is actually synonymous with King _s_
| County, and I assumed that OP had merely forgotten the s.
| _gtly wrote:
| There was a helpful visualization/animation of how ranked choice
| voting works in the NY Times:
| https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/nyregion/ranked-cho...
| obelos wrote:
| 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.
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| 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).
| glangdale wrote:
| 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:
|
| 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.
| spicybright wrote:
| This is a good video explaining how it works on a general level:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Z2fRPRkWvY
|
| Really hope it catches on.
| caf wrote:
| Actual results from the last Australian Federal Election showing
| how the count proceeded in each electorate/division:
|
| https://results.aec.gov.au/24310/Website/Downloads/HouseDopB...
|
| (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).
| yonran wrote:
| "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) 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.
| google234123 wrote:
| Will this make New York more or less left wing? I'm actually
| curious.
| sremani wrote:
| 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.
| nemo44x wrote:
| 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.
| slownews45 wrote:
| If it's also tied to open primary system it tends to make right
| wing places more left and left wing places more moderate.
|
| Otherwise you get a pyramid of control that drives towards
| extremes.
|
| Historically, let's say dems = 51% of voters, everyone votes
| party line.
|
| Dems have a primary, and someone (usually pretty far left)
| motivates base and gets 30% of primary vote and wins primary
| with most votes.
|
| Let's assume a 10% of dem's vote in primaries.
|
| So you have 10% * 50% * 30% = 1.5% of voters voting for the
| primary winner.
|
| They then go onto a matchup in general, but because it's a dem
| district, they win there as well (republicans usually also pick
| someone further right).
|
| So 1.5% of more extreme / activist voters end up really
| deciding, because by the time you get to general there is no
| more competition.
| gipp wrote:
| NY primaries are closed, but themselves now use RCV, and have
| much higher turnout than that, since they are usually the de
| facto general election.
| belval wrote:
| This type of voting usually leads to more centrist politicians
| taking office because they are the second choice of the
| majority.
| r3trohack3r wrote:
| I think the answer is: it depends.
|
| 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.
| slownews45 wrote:
| I love RCV where we are.
|
| * 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).
| nickik wrote:
| 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.
| delecti wrote:
| 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.
| bostonvaulter2 wrote:
| 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...
| nickik wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STAR_voting
|
| 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):
|
| https://youtu.be/-4FXLQoLDBA
| asoneth wrote:
| > where they do a runoff at the end to cover some extra cases
|
| One major motivation for the runoff at the end 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.
| taywrobel wrote:
| 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.
| jez wrote:
| 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?"
| nickik wrote:
| 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.
| sethhochberg wrote:
| 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.
| echelon wrote:
| Democracy is an experiment. Trying out RCV may open the avenue
| for new systems to be tried.
| NickM wrote:
| 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.
| the_reformation wrote:
| Worth considering the argument against ranked-choice voting:
| https://www.wsj.com/articles/ranked-choice-voting-is-second-...
| taywrobel wrote:
| Can you summarize or provide a non-paywall link?
|
| It's frustrating that they claim RCV is second best but
| (presumably) put what they argue is best below the fold.
| lalaithion wrote:
| http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/
| chishaku wrote:
| Spoiler alert: they don't argue what's best.
|
| 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."
| thepete2 wrote:
| main points are
|
| 1. may decrease voter turnout by 5-6%
|
| 2. not as obviously fair as traditional voting
|
| 3. increases existing divides
|
| 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.
| r3trohack3r wrote:
| 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
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| 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.
| thepete2 wrote:
| 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.
| tadmilbourn wrote:
| 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).
|
| You can get a sense for what it's like to vote in a ranked-choice
| election here: https://app.rankedvote.co/elections/7568/Best-NYC-
| Pizza-Topp...
|
| And you can see the results visualized here (over 20K people
| voted in this one!):
| https://app.rankedvote.co/elections/7568/Best-NYC-Pizza-Topp...
|
| And you can see Mayor Bill de Blasio eating a pepperoni pizza as
| a result of this here:
| https://twitter.com/therecount/status/1404809865235767315
| lalaland1125 wrote:
| Very nice work!
|
| 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.
| singhrac wrote:
| > 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 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.
| tadmilbourn wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/18/opinion/nyc-mayoral-
| elect...
|
| 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).
| lalaland1125 wrote:
| 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).
| saurik wrote:
| 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.)
| godelski wrote:
| 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).
| tadmilbourn wrote:
| 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.
| xvedejas wrote:
| 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?
| throw5away wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1] https://rangevoting.org/TarrIrvSumm.html [2]
| http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/
| dekhn wrote:
| 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?"
| benlivengood wrote:
| Alaska is now also using RCV for general elections and even has
| open primaries.
|
| I'm hoping RCV spreads quickly enough to more states to break the
| political gridlock and intense partisanship.
| thepete2 wrote:
| It gets rid of "I wanna vote for X, but they don't have a chance"
| and thus leads to more honest votes. IMO the major downside is
| complexity.
| [deleted]
| ehmmmmmmmm wrote:
| It also gets rid of people who are too dumb to understand RCV.
| Hee hee. Intellectual filter on the voting population. :)
| fourseventy wrote:
| dude
| thepete2 wrote:
| I very much want dumb people to have representation.
| [deleted]
| tjscott wrote:
| 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/
| preordained wrote:
| Betteridge's law strikes again!
| Afton wrote:
| You think the answer to the headline is "no"?
| catern wrote:
| 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.
| adjkant wrote:
| 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 :)
| catern wrote:
| 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...
| thepete2 wrote:
| 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?
| catern wrote:
| >you often limit yourself to the incumbents
|
| 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.
| thepete2 wrote:
| *frontrunners, yes
|
| I wasn't aware you could rank candidates equally, that
| makes it simpler indeed.
| munk-a wrote:
| 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.
| thepete2 wrote:
| 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.
| Retric wrote:
| Voting for people you expect to lose is still meaningful
| in traditional voting if you can predict the outcome.
|
| Let's say you're ranked choice would be ABCD. But only B
| or C are likely to win. You vote B. However, if B will
| defiantly win you should voting for A to push them in
| that direction.
|
| Essentially all voting systems involve strategic voting
| if your working with enough information. With
| proportional representation if you prefer A over B over C
| you should vote A, except if voting for A does nothing
| but voting for B moves a seat from C to B then you should
| vote for B etc. Though in practice you're never going to
| have that much info.
| 0xffff2 wrote:
| 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.
| catern wrote:
| People on the West coast never strongly dislike a particular
| candidate and want to make sure they don't win?
| NickM wrote:
| 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.
|
| To put it another way, the spoiler effect is only eliminated
| for non-competitive candidates. If your first choice is a
| fringe candidate that gets eliminated right off the bat, then
| you get to feel good about supporting that third party while
| still having a say in things. But if third party candidates
| start getting competitive, then the spoiler effect comes back.
| cheriot wrote:
| > 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.
| AussieWog93 wrote:
| 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.
| twelvechairs wrote:
| 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)
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed-member_proportional_re...
| InvertedRhodium wrote:
| 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.
| thepete2 wrote:
| Oh no, voting for representatives really is like a kind of
| "winner-take-all" filter.
| lr4444lr wrote:
| Sincere question: are there actual case studies of any
| electorate moving from a 2 party system to a multiparty system
| after RCV was implemented?
| lobe wrote:
| 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.
| ekimekim wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_system_of_Australia#...
| foobarbazetc wrote:
| Your last paragraph shows a lack of depth in understanding
| American history and politics.
|
| -- an Australian/American living in the US.
| munk-a wrote:
| 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.
| blazespin wrote:
| 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.
| s0ss wrote:
| 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.
| dllthomas wrote:
| 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.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Ranked choice voting does not throw away the fourth candidate,
| assuming people are voting for the secular person as 2nd in
| your example.
| wslack wrote:
| His point is that if few rank the fourth candidate first,
| they will be the first eliminated in the runoff process.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Oh, yes, instant runoff is not the way to count, I agree.
| wslack wrote:
| 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.
| kragen wrote:
| 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, and global-warming denial, they
| aren't going to be run well. Democracy is much less bad than the
| alternatives, but even democratic governments constantly screw
| things up.
|
| ______
|
| + Perhaps they _are_ aware but assume their public is too dumb to
| understand the difference.
| gadi1993 wrote:
| 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.
| ant6n wrote:
| 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.
| gadi1993 wrote:
| 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.
| alamortsubite wrote:
| 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.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| 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.
| adjkant wrote:
| Hey, we do live in a Democracy* after all!
| tunesmith wrote:
| 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.
| _AzMoo wrote:
| Why is Instant Runoff Voting the worst possible voting method?
| antognini wrote:
| "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.
| slownews45 wrote:
| 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).
| obelos wrote:
| This is what happened in Burlington, VT that prompted
| them to repeal IRV/RCV:
| https://electionscience.org/library/irv-and-core-support/
| throw_away wrote:
| 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/
| godelski wrote:
| 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)
|
| [0] https://electionscience.org/library/the-spoiler-effect/ (see
| video for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtKAScORevQ)
|
| [1] https://electowiki.org/wiki/Favorite_betrayal_criterion (A
| voter can never get a worse result by expressing the maximum
| support for their favorite candidate)
|
| [2] Voting methods animated (author is a HN user):
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4FXLQoLDBA
|
| [3] VSE (which isn't the only metric btw. Especially compare
| bounds due to strategy): https://electionscience.github.io/vse-
| sim/VSE/
|
| [4] https://electionscience.org/
| ant6n wrote:
| 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.
| djbebs wrote:
| Personally I don't see much benefit for this system, opposed to
| approval voting.
| tunesmith wrote:
| 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.
| rattray wrote:
| Interesting - I wonder how much of that data will be published
| by NY... definitely sounds interesting to explore.
| nine_k wrote:
| Since voting data are anonymized by construction, it should
| even be fine to publish as is.
| spoonjim wrote:
| 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.
| tunesmith wrote:
| 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.)
| mc32 wrote:
| 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)
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > 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.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _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.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Yes, approval voting is a simpler system that also tends to
| reward moderate or "compromise" candidates.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _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.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| 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.
| twic wrote:
| The whole point is to allow this. Why don't you like it?
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Why do you consider that the "wrong" outcome?
| mc32 wrote:
| 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, and 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)
| kyleblarson wrote:
| 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?
| lr4444lr wrote:
| 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.
| _AzMoo wrote:
| 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.
| tadmilbourn wrote:
| 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.
|
| Article on Alaska:
| https://www.vox.com/2020/11/19/21537126/alaska-measure-2-ran...
|
| Article on Utah:
| https://www.sltrib.com/news/politics/2021/05/11/many-utahns-...
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