[HN Gopher] Seattle residents launch Approval Voting initiative ...
___________________________________________________________________
Seattle residents launch Approval Voting initiative for
representative elections [pdf]
Author : troydavis
Score : 69 points
Date : 2021-11-18 15:30 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (seattleapproves.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (seattleapproves.org)
| Taikonerd wrote:
| Perhaps this link should point to the main
| https://seattleapproves.org site, instead of a PDF?
| yboris wrote:
| I learned about Approval Voting from the amazing podcast by
| 80,000 Hours
|
| https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/aaron-hamlin-voting-...
|
| It's an amazing in-depth interview about Approval and other types
| of voting systems.
| hash872 wrote:
| Gentle reminder that approval voting has been tried & discarded
| by a number of organizations over the decades (it's literally
| centuries old!) The main issue is that consistently 80+% of
| voters 'bullet vote', or simply select one candidate despite
| their options. Is it a terrible flaw or something that makes AV
| unusable? Of course not- but it should cool some of the more
| heated claims.
|
| The IEEE, Mathematical Association of America, and the Dartmouth
| Alumni Association have all tried & discarded AV- as they
| consistently found that the vast majority of voters bullet vote
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approval_voting#Other_organiza...
|
| Moreover, it's inferior to a simple runoff with a large number of
| candidates. As Dartmouth found, when you have 6-8+ candidates,
| even with AV the plurality winner will be a pretty small chunk of
| total votes cast (like less than 40 or even 30%). Pretty ironic
| result for a method that claims that to help find the consensus
| solution!
|
| Unpopular opinion, FPTP _with a runoff_ is superior to AV or RCV
| just for sheer workability & finding the consensus candidate.
| Even more unpopular opinion, voting systems just don't matter
| that much- healthy democracies have been plenty stable with FPTP
| (the UK has like the most extreme version possible), unhealthy
| democracies will be unstable no matter which voting system is
| used
| [deleted]
| ClayShentrup wrote:
| This is nonsense. For instance, in the last approval voting
| election for the board of trustees at Dartmouth, there was an
| average of 1.8 approvals per ballot for four candidates. The
| average voter voted for almost half of the candidates.
|
| http://scorevoting.net/BulletBugaboo
|
| Approval voting is beloved by game theory experts specifically
| for its immense resistance to strategy. It was adopted by a 64%
| landslide majority in Fargo and a 68% landslide majority in St
| Louis.
| lalaland1125 wrote:
| Approval voting isn't resistant to strategy. Whether or not
| to bullet vote or not is a very complicated strategic
| decision that has huge effects.
| godelski wrote:
| No voting system is resistant to _all_ strategies, but some
| strategies are worse than other strategies.
| godelski wrote:
| Gentle reminder that instant runoff voting has been tried &
| discarded by a number of organizations over the decades (it's
| literally centuries old!) It's been tried in America and
| discarded in the past several times in many different places.
| It is also how they vote in Australia (which is similarly
| divided as the US).
|
| I don't disagree that Approval has issues. I think we can
| improve upon these with score or STAR. But I think it is very
| naive to start a post with such a criticism and then ignore
| that it applies even more strongly to the alternative method
| being presented (either Exhaustive Voting or Two-Round).
| hash872 wrote:
| I'm not for IRV, you're confusing that with a 'normal' or two
| round runoff. In a normal runoff there are two rounds, the
| second round is a few weeks or a month after the first one-
| the French, most famously, do this for their President. I
| agree that IRV is pretty terrible
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-round_system
| godelski wrote:
| I'm a little lost at the response. My comment ends
| mentioning Two-round.
| clairity wrote:
| > "...with AV the plurality winner will be a pretty small chunk
| of total votes cast (like less than 40 or even 30%). Pretty
| ironic result for a method that claims that to help find the
| consensus solution!"
|
| that's not ironic. that's closer to the complex reality of
| heterogeneous interests and perspectives. what's unnatural is
| the idea that 50+% of a group would naturally, in an unbiased
| setting, pick only 2 viable candidates out of millions, and
| then vote consistently for one of them.
| hash872 wrote:
| Many people find selecting a candidate for political office
| with 20-30% support to be deeply suboptimal. You're flirting
| with your government being perceived as illegitimate by
| regular citizens. At the national level these are incredibly
| powerful offices- imagine a divisive President ruling the US
| having won under 30% of votes cast. This is how civil wars
| start. Yes there are a few countries whose systems work out
| that way (the UK at times), and it's been criticized for
| decades.
|
| >what's unnatural is the idea that 50+% of a group
|
| This is literally how a runoff works- a pragmatic system
| that's been used for decades by 50+ countries globally. It
| also enhances democratic legitimacy, as the majority of
| people feel invested in having voted for the eventual winner.
|
| (To be fair, I will say that using AV to select the top two
| candidates who then go to a runoff is pretty interesting)
| clairity wrote:
| what you're literally suggesting is that manufacturing
| consent is the righteous course. democracy shouldn't hinge
| on getting the vote 'right' or on the 'legitimacy' of a
| single elected representative. we're at a point in history,
| where we can instead have dozens/hundreds of
| representatives without much administrative burden via
| technology.
|
| plurality of perspective and expertise is what makes a
| society stronger, not a singular hegemony. the legitimacy
| of government emerges from the totality of its actions (and
| non-actions), not from cult of personality.
| ClayShentrup wrote:
| There's no such thing as a guaranteed majority nor is that
| the point of voting.
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20190219005032/https://sites.goo.
| ..
| garmaine wrote:
| > Unpopular opinion, FPTP with a runoff is superior to AV or
| RCV just for sheer workability & finding the consensus
| candidate
|
| You had me up until here, but there's no way this claim is
| true. FPTP with a runoff is exactly how San Francisco elections
| are held, and it has made the elections there essentially a
| one-party system. Voters get to choose between two
| establishment wings of the Democratic Party at each runoff.
| It's even worse than plain old FPTP.
| hash872 wrote:
| San Francisco uses ranked choice voting or IRV, not a two-
| round runoff. I should've used a different term to avoid
| confusion. Here's what I mean by a two-round system
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-round_system
|
| I don't think that the voting system has made SF 'essentially
| a one-party system', as tons & tons of cities across the US
| just use normal FPTP and are still very Democratic. Just as
| tons of rural states just use normal FPTP and are still very
| Republican. This is what I mean by, voting systems are
| overrated and just don't have the large effects that
| enthusiasts want them to have. It's a seductive argument for
| left-brained engineering types who are systems thinkers, but
| it's just not empirically true
| jfengel wrote:
| In the US we do have something like a runoff. We have primary
| elections and then general elections. It's not quite the same
| thing, but neither is it the same as plain FPTP.
|
| The American system acknowledges the fact that there are long-
| term stable coalitions. Even if you went to a single election
| with a runoff, you're going to end up with similar dynamics.
| Most of the candidates will say, "If I'm your first choice,
| your second choice should be that other guy who is in my
| coalition and believes most of the same things that I do."
|
| There may well be other candidates on the ballot, but they'll
| usually find themselves unable to win without a coalition to
| present a slate of candidates. They're in exactly the same
| position as "third party" candidates already are.
|
| The systems aren't identical and don't produce identical
| outcomes, but they're a lot closer than I think people make it
| out to be. A simple procedural change isn't going to fix what's
| wrong with the American body politic.
|
| There is no perfect tiny party out there with all the right
| answers that everybody would agree with if only the two main
| parties would just get out of the way. That is what each of
| hundreds of tiny parties tell themselves. And that's why
| there's really no such thing as a "third party". Really, there
| are hundreds of "hundredth parties" who disagree with each
| other as much as they disagree with the two main parties,
| because they haven't put forth the effort of hammering out and
| nurturing the uneasy coalitions that go into making a dominant
| party.
| snarf21 wrote:
| I'd agree with you _IF_ all our primaries were on the same
| day and there wasn 't this caucus >> primaries in a new state
| each day
| jfengel wrote:
| That's a weirdness for the Presidential election, the only
| elected national office holder. That one is weird a lot of
| different ways.
|
| But for the various state and district offices, that
| doesn't matter. There, you really are voting at the same
| time as all of the other people with an interest in it.
|
| I'd say the bigger issue is that for a number of places,
| only one party really has a chance, and the general
| election is a foregone conclusion. Voters really only get
| one bite at the apple, during the primaries. (The voters
| for the other party never really get a bite at the apple,
| but they are so far outnumbered that no tweak to the voting
| system will fix that. They have to hope that the elected
| representative will keep their interests in mind.)
| troydavis wrote:
| I'm co-leading this initiative. It's democracy, not politics: a
| simple, non-partisan, candidate-neutral change that leads to far
| more representative[1] winners.
|
| If anyone would like to invest time or money to make this happen,
| please contact us or donate here: https://SeattleApproves.org/
|
| [1]: https://electionscience.github.io/vse-sim/VSEbasic/ ,
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7btAd1HYvjU&t=1329
| slownews45 wrote:
| I've seen approval voting up close, approval and top 3 make it
| to council seats.
|
| One issue seems to be domination by majority?
|
| For example, let's say 55% of electorate is hard left, 45%
| moderate to conservative.
|
| Under approval those 55% can vote for all 3 lets say hard left
| candidates, no moderate's make it in?
|
| RCV, once someone has gotten their candidate in, their vote is
| exhausted. Seems to come out much better. Still might end up
| with 2 hard left, one moderate, but that seems fairer to me.
| gowld wrote:
| Multi-winner elections are different from single-winner
| elections. Approval voting doesn't work there, because as you
| note, people with fewer acceptable preferences get fewer
| votes.
| slownews45 wrote:
| Interesting, that limitation should perhaps be highlighted.
|
| I think the appeal of the simple ballot is what drove
| adoption (ie, vote for as many as you like, top X win).
|
| In California the trick is they treat all open seats as one
| office.
| xvedejas wrote:
| Voters voting strategically are known to adjust their
| thresholds in approval voting to have the largest effect
| they can on the output, assuming they have some idea of the
| support base of candidates. That said, Range Voting is sort
| of a solution to this, and it's expected there that
| candidates will scale their top and bottom choices to the
| top and bottom scores respectively.
| ClayShentrup wrote:
| This is actually completely backwards. IRV favors extremists
| whereas approval voting tends to find the most broadly
| appealing candidate.
|
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-4FXLQoLDBA
| slownews45 wrote:
| That's not how its working here. We are getting near 100%
| representation from about 56% of votes.
|
| The ballot is approval style voting, you can vote for X of
| Y candidates.
| xvedejas wrote:
| if X is a fixed number, then it's not approval voting. In
| approval voting, there is no limit, either minimum or
| maximum, on the number of candidates you can vote for. If
| X is limited, then you get something a bit more like
| plurality voting, since the spoiler effect is in play.
| jpfed wrote:
| As others have said, if they're limiting the number of
| approvals you can make on your ballot, then that's not
| how approval voting is supposed to be administered.
|
| If they're just adding up each candidate's votes, that's
| not how approval is supposed to be tabulated in a multi-
| winner context (which is more complicated); see https://e
| n.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportional_approval_voting
| pxx wrote:
| That's not approval voting. If X is equal to the number
| of open seats that's literally just the definition of
| multiple winner plurality voting.
|
| Approval voting is a single winner system.
| aldonius wrote:
| Did you have three votes, or more than three? If you had the
| same number of votes as there were positions to be filled,
| that's a plurality block vote. Winning slate takes all.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_non-transferable_vote
|
| > RCV, once someone has gotten their candidate in, their vote
| is exhausted.
|
| Hi, Australian here. What happens with multi-winner single
| transferable vote is that there's a _quota_ and then ballots
| for candidates who have reached quota get _reweighted_ (not
| quite the same thing).
|
| This quota-and-reweighting system can (and must!) be applied
| to multi-winner Approval too - jpfed linked the wiki article.
| otterley wrote:
| Can you compare this against ranked-choice voting with instant
| run-offs?
| godelski wrote:
| The first link there does actually compare against ranked
| choice. It is just called IRV. There's a larger comparison
| that includes more types of ranked choice (also called
| "ordinal") here[0]. Though I particularly like this
| animation[1]. I'll also add that there is a lot of nuance to
| voting and VSE isn't everything. There's a lot of factors to
| consider including: how do strategies work? Is it scalable?
| Can it easily be counted and/or verified statistically? How
| easy is it for voters? How effective are (strong and weak)
| spoiler candidates? And many more questions. For the most
| part cardinal methods (like Approval) fair better on all
| these accounts. There is a slight tradeoff to VSE. Note STAR
| in [0] has a slightly lower VSE than RP/Schulz (ranked), but
| a tighter grouping (better vs strategies). But also STAR is
| more complex for voters and counting than Approval is (I'd
| still argue STAR is easier for voters and counters than
| ordinal systems). So these are the types of tradeoffs you're
| making
|
| [0] https://electionscience.github.io/vse-sim/VSE/
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4FXLQoLDBA
| clairity wrote:
| i'd actually love to see a voting system developed that's
| closer to a conjoint, which is a statistical method
| designed to _reveal_ preferences, rather than relying on
| _stated_ preferences (which are notoriously unreliable). it
| 's more complicated, but we have plenty of technology
| nowadays to make it practical.
|
| one method of implementing this (from thinking about it for
| all of 2 minutes), is developing a list of the top 10-20
| issues that voters care about in a given election and
| providing tradeoff choices for each, then matching them to
| the candidate closest to their revealed preference. of
| course, the biggest issue with method is that it moves the
| problem up one level, from voting to choice design.
|
| [0]: https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Conjoint_analysis
| godelski wrote:
| I honestly think it is very difficult to determine what
| voters' actual preferences are. I mean think of your
| standard political compass tests. Or even Meyer Briggs.
| They can change day to day or mood to mood and lots of
| questions tend to be leading. While I love the idea, I
| think logistically it would be a nightmare and greatly
| reduce transparency. It would also be far more vulnerable
| to so called experts manipulating the system if they
| aren't acting in good faith.
| clairity wrote:
| it's exceedingly difficult to fairly aggregate voter
| preferences, but all current voting systems seem to
| reduce all that complexity down to a singular choice in
| the overwhelming majority of cases. that's a _shitload_
| of information discarded, to put it crassly.
|
| the neat thing about conjoint is that it multiplexes the
| choice-making (when designed well), so that the choice
| burden scales reasonably while also better representing
| collective choice. nothing is goign to be perfect, but
| conjoint could potentially be better than all current
| systems, probably by an order of magnitude or more.
|
| it's relatively complicated, so yes, 'experts' (i disdain
| this term, frankly) could in theory manipulate the
| system, but transparency of voting data (just like now)
| and survey design (the more likely bias vector) would
| make that difficult. transparency would allow competing
| independent journalists, academics/researchers, political
| analysts, etc. to weigh in and balance out biases (not
| perfectly of course), as well as verify results.
| stocknoob wrote:
| Referendums exist to get a state-wide policy change. In
| the last election, historically conservative states voted
| for liberal policies like legalized marijuana, $15 min
| wage, etc.
|
| For politicians, for me, it's more about (perceived)
| character vs. their stated policies.
| clairity wrote:
| you could certainly include character traits among choice
| decisions, but that's more fraught by subjectivity. that
| said, that's the magic of conjoint done well: turning
| subjective hidden preferences into (more) objective
| choice revelation.
|
| currently, there is no option to choose a candidate
| supporting marijuana legalization, $15 minimum wage, pro-
| life, and pro-gun policies (as an example), since we
| practically only have two relatively fixed packages of
| pre-ordained, all-or-nothing policy positions to choose
| from. revealed preferences would pressure parties into
| fielding candidates that better match the non-partisan
| preferences of constituents. or better yet, it would lead
| to the waning of the two-party system altogether, toward
| a more direct representative democracy.
| hollasch wrote:
| That would work if all candidates are interchangeable if
| they assert the same plank. In practice, however,
| candidates X and Y may both have identical planks but
| wildly different levels of efficacy. People aren't
| machines.
| emaginniss wrote:
| Sorry, but I think that's a terrible idea. Unless we're
| talking about ballot initiatives, I would hate for us to
| focus more on policy-based voting. What we should be
| doing as citizens is voting for someone based on our
| belief that they will represent our interests in the
| long-term. If you vote for someone solely because they
| agree with you on a couple of issues, you could be voting
| in someone truly reprehensible. I would prefer to vote in
| someone with integrity that I disagree with than someone
| untrustworthy that says the things I want to hear.
|
| Additionally, all of this ignores the possibility that a
| representative could change their stance on an issue
| after receiving more information on an issue. Presidents
| and Supreme Court justices have changes their stances
| once their terms have begun or events have taken place
| during their time in office. I would hate a system that
| relies on tightly binding the representatives to narrow
| definitions of hot-button issue stances.
| wfhpw wrote:
| My prior intuition was that rank-choice voting would be
| preferable to approval voting, but this [1] was pretty helpful.
| Thanks!
|
| [1] https://electionscience.org/library/approval-voting-
| versus-i...
| ISL wrote:
| What blocks us from attempting a similar approach state-wide?
| Seattle's top-two approach has already made a big difference in
| making the general election relevant and competitive.
|
| Where I see trouble these days is with Federal elections. Being
| able to vote for _anyone but X or Z_ would be a wonderful way
| to send a signal as a voter. I suspect that both the east and
| west sides of the state would feel similarly (East: "Anyone
| but X!", West: "Anyone but Y!". Result: M gets elected, who is
| thankfully neither X nor Y.).
| godelski wrote:
| > What blocks us from attempting a similar approach state-
| wide?
|
| Same thing that makes it difficult by attempting to do it
| country wide. That it is larger and more difficult. It would
| be nice if we could just wave a hand and change everything at
| once, but that also wouldn't be very democratic. What is also
| nice is that we can experiment, refine, and test at smaller
| levels before we advance to larger elections.
| pagibson wrote:
| Despite the claim that this isn't political, it's very
| difficult not to see this in light of the fact that Seattle's
| city council has the only elected Marxist in the U.S.
|
| Kshama Sawant fought for the $15 minimum wage, the Amazon tax,
| numerous renters' rights protections, a ban on police use of
| chemical weapons against protestors, and is now continuing the
| fight for rent control. She's currently facing a right-wing
| recall campaign because big business was unable to defeat her
| in the 2019 election, despite Amazon dumping $1.5 million into
| various races for citywide office.
|
| A few here have remarked that approval voting tends to select
| more "moderate" candidates over "extremes." This isn't a
| neutral preference, it's obviously ideological, and targeted at
| one specific legislator in Seattle. Voters should reject this
| measure as a transparent attack on the most effective and
| sincere fighter for working people in the country.
|
| Full disclosure, Kshama and I are both members of Socialist
| Alternative. I may be limited in my ability to respond today,
| as I'm rushing right after work to a volunteer shift to make
| sure she stays in office. I'll try my best to check in
| occasionally!
| plandis wrote:
| > most effective and sincere
|
| Those are not adjectives that I think the majority of people
| would ascribe to Sawant.
| [deleted]
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| This seems like a bit of a hot take. Are the people behind
| this initiative connected to conservative or anti-Sawant
| organizations?
| abeyer wrote:
| Sawant and her supporters have had a pretty loose
| relationship with the truth in general, so I wouldn't put
| too much stock in that. It seems far more likely that if
| it's specifically in response to recent events that it's
| actually the fact that "conservative" (by Seattle
| standards, where we just elected the first republican in 30
| years to a city office) candidates did quite well in the
| Nov elections where they were running against far left
| candidates and had squeezed out any more moderate voices in
| the primaries.
| erehweb wrote:
| I'm confused by how "all you approve of" should work. In an
| election with Center-Left, Center-Right and Fascisf, if my
| preferences are in that order, do I approve of the Center-Right
| candidate? I suppose they are better than the Fascist, but I
| wouldn't really approve of them except if it was a choice between
| them and the Fascist. Is "approves of" dependent on the candidate
| set?
| abeyer wrote:
| I think that's part of the point -- you get to draw that line
| and decide if you're more in favor of promoting your favorite
| over all others vs opposing your least favorite. Where you
| decide to put your approval mark favors one vs the other.
| lukeschlather wrote:
| The key feature of this proposal is that it only applies in our
| open primaries. The top two vote getters advance to the general
| election for a normal FPTP with only two candidates. Personally,
| I think this is an elegant way to get third parties into the
| process without the complexity of the various IRV concepts.
| [deleted]
| godelski wrote:
| Voting systems is one of the few political things I'm very
| passionate about (those of you that know me will know I won't
| shut up about this). I really do think this is one of the most
| important things we can do to fix our democracy. I've always been
| saddened that Ordinal systems have captured the public eye but
| Cardinal systems haven't. Everything I have read suggests that
| Cardinal is leagues better: scalability, ease, verifiability,
| resistance to strategies, and vse. I'm really happy to see more
| and more Approval initiatives (I'm a bigger fan of STAR, but
| Approval is good enough that I'd shut up about voting).
|
| I also suggest other users look for Clay[0] in these threads.
| He's the co-inventor of STAR and writes a lot about voting. Also
| a HN user.
|
| [0] https://twitter.com/ClayShentrup
| jpfed wrote:
| I have long liked and advocated for approval voting (or
| cardinal methods more generally), or barring that, basically
| anything but FPTP.
|
| But I'm disillusioned. Many non-plurality methods (including
| approval) can effectively solve the spoiler problem (i.e.
| satisfy IIA)... but I no longer think that spoilers are the
| absolute most important problem to solve.
|
| The most important problem is single-seat districts creating
| anti-majoritarian, disproportional legislatures. Because of how
| people geographically sort themselves among the likeminded,
| even independent districting commissions will not be able to
| effectively prevent anti-majoritarian legislatures.
|
| For this reason, I believe that we would greatly benefit from
| explicitly proportional representation. This can be
| accomplished through cardinal or ordinal means - I no longer
| care about that dimension. That doesn't mean that we wouldn't
| enjoy some incremental benefit from approval or really any non-
| FPTP system. We would. Seattle should go ahead and do its
| thing. But the fight for better forms of democracy can't stop
| with any system that retains single-seat districts.
| Apofis wrote:
| Just getting rid of first-past-the-post would do wonders for
| our country and by the looks of it approval voting is inferior
| to run-off voting by a mile.
| pxx wrote:
| I'd argue that instant-runoff is _worse than plurality_. It
| complicates the voting system, makes the wrong tradeoffs
| (lack of monotonicity is a very serious one), and I'd really
| like to hear more about why you think approval voting is
| worse than runoff (instant or otherwise).
| Apofis wrote:
| I don't support every candidate on the ballot equally
| because I believe every candidate's abilities to do the job
| vary. First choice, second choice, third choice is not hard
| to explain and I do not understand why some people think
| Americans have been lobotimized. NYC now has run off voting
| and it turned out marvelously, with Eric Adams being
| elected.
|
| https://vote.nyc/page/ranked-choice-voting
| cpeterso wrote:
| IRV is also very hard to explain to average voters.
| Approval voting is easy to explain: you get to give a
| thumbs up or down to every candidate.
|
| In a local mayoral election that used IRV, I've seen some
| candidates tell their supporters to vote for them in every
| slot. Either those candidates didn't understand IRV
| themselves, or they didn't want to try to explain IRV to
| their supporters.
| Apofis wrote:
| But I don't support every candidate I would vote for
| equally.
| mjevans wrote:
| I prefer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schulze_method
|
| Though with a candidate modification: add 'none of them /
| no confidence' as a virtual candidate that can never be
| removed by the runoff processes. If 'NoT' is the winner
| then the entire election is thrown out and all of the
| candidates are banned from the re-run.
| godelski wrote:
| Condorcet methods are also hard to explain to voters. The
| tabulation is rather complicated. At least in comparison
| to something like cardinal methods. In light of recent
| recounts I think this is a really important factor to
| consider. While Condorcet methods have the best VSE, they
| aren't winning by a huge margin. Besides, VSE isn't
| everything.
| godelski wrote:
| > by the looks of it approval voting is inferior to run-off
| voting by a mile.
|
| I'm curious why you think this? I think exactly the opposite.
| RCV/IRV has major problems, especially for strong spoilers.
| They are also more difficult to tabulate and with the recent
| events of the last election the importance of ease to
| tabulate went up in my priority list (making me even question
| my preference of score over approval). In fact, IRV also
| favors extremists, which is something I really don't want.
| noahtallen wrote:
| For more context, this post has some cool interactive
| features to explain the voting types:
| https://ncase.me/ballot/
|
| Another problem with RCV is that it's difficult to
| understand, at least when you get into the runoffs. That
| makes it harder for people to understand and trust the
| election system, which is also very important.
| godelski wrote:
| I'm not too big of a fan of this site but it is nice. One
| thing I wanted to point out is the spoiler effect. Often
| we talk about it but similarly we generally only talk
| about a weak spoiler. So I wanted to show an example of a
| strong spoiler[0]. In this example Hexagon splits
| Triangles votes just by a little, but the sum of Triangle
| and Hex are larger than Square. But here IRV has Square
| winning but Approval has Hex winning.
|
| This is one big issue for me with IRV vs Cardinal
| systems. Both handle _weak_ spoilers but IRV doesn't
| handle ''strong,, spoilers. Understanding that these are
| two different types of spoilers is really important. It
| is "Bernie vs Hillary" and "Cruz vs Trump." Even with IRV
| we'd still see the parties trying to prevent strong
| primary candidates from running independently because
| they could spoil the election. With cardinal methods
| (approval, score, star) this is far less of a concern and
| thus I think more democratic of an election. I honestly
| think we should be much more concerned with strong
| spoilers than weak spoilers (weak spoilers don't affect
| elections much anyways).
|
| [0] https://imgur.com/a/vV15A7Z
| Apofis wrote:
| Considering our present division, I have a big "spider-
| sense" tingle that approval voting will simply result in
| everyone just voting all blue or all red, that sounds
| like a bad deal to me. Run off voting would give
| moderates a good chance of putting the country right side
| up again.
| noahtallen wrote:
| I completely agree; I tend to like approval voting just
| because it is nearly as good as the other scoring methods
| while being very simple.
| godelski wrote:
| Exactly. I say
|
| STAR: 5, Score 4, approval 4, IRV 1, FPTP 1
|
| It would be ranked in this order too, but there's more
| expressivity here than an ordinal system can provide.
| r00fus wrote:
| All your assertions are actually complaints about our
| existing plurality voting system.
|
| IRV/Approval/Borda/Condorcet voting systems all improve
| those factors. That they have some edge conditions that
| could be theoretically exploited belies that fact that
| plurality voting (ie, FPTP / one person one vote) is a
| complete train wreck for spoilers and favoring extreme
| voting.
|
| No voting system is perfect (Arrow's impossibility theorem)
| but some are harder to exploit than others. Staying with a
| broken system because the proposed replacement isn't
| perfect is a poor justification.
| nitrogen wrote:
| It looks like nobody's linked to this older visualization
| yet, so I will: http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/
|
| The non-monotonicity shown there for instant runoff
| voting seems to be more undesirable than any downsides of
| approval voting.
|
| IMO the point of elected representation is to be
| representative, not to elect specific people, so the
| possibility of a lesser known candidate winning over a
| major party's favorite candidate isn't a problem.
| godelski wrote:
| Down below I actually give an example of IRV/RCV not
| solving a strong spoiler case. Clay has also written
| extensively on the subject matter so I'll defer to him.
| I'll especially defer to him on explaining how IRV
| actually encourages extremists.
|
| I think the problem here is that people get caught up in
| VSE. I get it, that's what I was caught up in when I
| first started learning about this stuff. Then I had to
| really dig through strategic voting and spoilage. The
| nuance of the systems actually do make a very big
| difference in the outcomes.
| r00fus wrote:
| I'd love to hear how our current electoral system is in
| any way preferable to RCV (or Star Voting for example).
|
| Because for many municipalities, it's not whether they
| move to Approval vs. RCV or IRV or Star, etc - it's
| moving away from the dumpster fire of plurality voting.
| nitrogen wrote:
| It seems likely that a given municipality will only have
| the political energy to change voting systems once. Given
| that, it would be preferable to move to something that
| isn't RCV/IRV in the first place.
| ClayShentrup wrote:
| Hi
| godelski wrote:
| It's the guy from the comment!
|
| Always good to see you Clay. Hope you are doing well.
| kibwen wrote:
| _> Everything I have read suggests that Cardinal is leagues
| better_
|
| Speaking as a fellow kin who also won't shut up about this,
| right now we need to just acknowledge that _ANYTHING_ is better
| than first-past-the-post. At this point I honestly don 't care
| which alternative it is, none of them are worse than the
| current system. In every jurisdiction where _any_ form of
| alternative voting system is on the ballot, I will throw my
| support behind whatever effort has the most momentum,
| regardless of whether it 's approval, star, RCV, whatever.
| First-past-the-post is killing us with its inevitable descent
| into bipolarization, and we can figure out a perfect solution
| once we've stopped the bleeding (keeping in mind that voting
| system reform is merely a necessary first step, and not
| sufficient on its own).
| godelski wrote:
| > ANYTHING is better than first-past-the-post.
|
| I disagree with this stance. Mostly because how these methods
| are presented. RCV has gained such popularity because its
| claims of preventing spoiled elections. But people think
| that's Bernie spoiling Hillary and not Stein spoiling no one.
| RCV only prevents weak spoilers where cardinal systems
| prevent strong spoilers.
|
| The reason I'm so concerned with this is because this is also
| why RCV got repealed in the past. IN AMERICA. This is my big
| fear. We all get excited about it, implement a system that
| doesn't solve the problems we are seeking to solve, and then
| go back and look for other solutions. We have a solution now,
| and a wide breadth of them. They just aren't the popular
| ones.
| [deleted]
| hirundo wrote:
| > Instead of reading "Vote for one," the ballot instructs voters
| to "Vote for as many as you approve of."
|
| So they've changed it from vote for one to vote for zero. Thanks
| but it's been a long time since a politician I approved of made
| it onto my ballot. Better wording would be "Vote for as many of
| the lesser evils as you want." Otherwise I have to lie in order
| to vote.
| gowld wrote:
| Voting for 0 has always been acceptable.
| polka_haunts_us wrote:
| There's a significant difference between "Not Voting" and
| "Voting for 0". Other than Nevada, most states don't allow
| "Voting for 0". The closest thing we get is writing in Mickey
| Mouse where writeins are allowed.
| jesterpm wrote:
| That surprises me. You can add Washington state to the list
| that allow voting for none of the candidates[1].
|
| [1]: https://www.sos.wa.gov/elections/faq_vote_by_mail.aspx
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| Changing the voting system changes the incentives for different
| kinds of candidates to run.
|
| Suppose right now you have a Democrat, a Republican and a
| moderate. In first past the post, the moderate splits the vote
| with whichever major party candidate is most like them, causing
| the one less like them to win. Also, everybody knows this and
| then only votes for one of the major parties. So then the
| moderate doesn't bother to run and the only thing on the ballot
| is the one evil or the other.
|
| With approval voting, if the moderate runs, most of the
| Republicans approve of the Republican and the moderate (because
| better the moderate than the Democrat) and most of the
| Democrats approve of the Democrat and the moderate (because
| better the moderate than the Republican). So then the moderate
| runs, and wins. And you get a candidate you might actually want
| to vote for.
| nitrogen wrote:
| This comment has an interesting solution to that problem:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29270854
| philwelch wrote:
| You know, when I lived in Seattle, my biggest problem when voting
| was never, "I approve of too many of these candidates and it's
| hard for me to choose just one".
| r00fus wrote:
| Is this a case where "one person one vote" going away may allow
| more candidates to actually appear?
|
| If you're a fringe single-issue candidate, you can more easily
| push your issue by running on that issue (while adopting most
| other parts of the most similar mainstream candidate).
|
| In our current system you would be a spoiler. With a better
| voting system like Approval, you would not. I prefer RCV to
| Approval (so the single-issue candidate can signal issue
| strength) but either are a big improvement to the status quo.
| blacksmith_tb wrote:
| Well, having lived and voted in SF and Portland, I would say
| that I can think of races where I would have been fine with
| several of the contenders, but would have really not wanted an
| outlier to win, so AV seems like it could work. In my undergrad
| days I got to experience a ranked system, which is interesting,
| but seems sort of inefficient.
| titanomachy wrote:
| Inefficient in what way? Surely the small amount of computing
| power needed to process the ballots and determine the winner
| is not significant when compared to the increased democratic
| power of the system.
|
| Or do you mean inefficient in the sense of "more effort for
| voters"? You could always just rank your favorite candidate
| as 1 and leave the rest blank, which should give you the same
| amount of voting power you had in a single-vote system.
| blacksmith_tb wrote:
| Mostly the potential for ties and then run-offs, which
| obviously can happen with other systems too.
| godelski wrote:
| I'd argue that cardinal systems are much more efficient, on
| two accounts. First, you just need to do reduced sums to
| determine the winners, whereas ranked systems you have
| blocks at each round (preventing it from being
| asynchronous). Second, you have a better embedding space
| for cardinal systems than ranked. In ranked you're saying
| that your preference is equidistant. This is not a
| requirement in cardinal systems (e.g. score or star). Thus
| you can express that you ''really,, like candidate A over B
| rather than just A is better than B.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| I don't live in the US, but I can't remember a single election
| where I wasn't ok with more than one candidate for majority
| positions. And it is really enraging to see random extremists
| win because the people vote strategically.
|
| Are you sure your situation isn't due to too few candidates?
| bpodgursky wrote:
| I live in Seattle and would benefit from being able to protest-
| vote for goodspaceguy or whoever the lunatic of the month is,
| at the same time I hold my nose and vote for the least awful
| "likely" candidate.
| taurath wrote:
| I don't think the voting system will be around very long if
| we end up with goodspaceguy.
| philwelch wrote:
| If enough people do the same thing, you just end up electing
| GoodSpaceGuy.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| Yeah. They won't, though.
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