[HN Gopher] Show HN: RankedVote - SurveyMonkey but focused on ra...
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Show HN: RankedVote - SurveyMonkey but focused on ranked-choice
voting
RankedVote is a web app that allows you to run online contests and
make decisions using ranked-choice voting (RCV). RCV is an
electoral system used in Maine, Alaska, New York City and dozens of
cities across the United States. RankedVote's goal is to build
support for RCV by giving people an easy way to run contests and
make decisions online.
Author : tadmilbourn
Score : 180 points
Date : 2022-10-06 14:50 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.rankedvote.co)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.rankedvote.co)
| endisneigh wrote:
| though I think the app looks great. I've never seen the point of
| ranked choice. Approval voting seems faster to vote, easier to
| implement and explain
| tadmilbourn wrote:
| Thanks! And both approval and RCV are steps in the right
| direction. For whatever reason, RCV has been implemented more
| broadly (but still just a tiny fraction of the US).
|
| I've been very encouraged by the results in Alaska after the
| special election that just happened there in August. 85% found
| it simple. 73% ranked multiple candidates. And the election
| workers implementing it had a flawless go of it.
|
| Some data from one of the groups that helped educate voters:
| https://alaskansforbetterelections.com/polling-shows-alaskan...
| dane-pgp wrote:
| > 85% found it simple. 73% ranked multiple candidates.
|
| But what's conspicuously absent from these statistics is how
| happy the voters are with the outcome (compared to a
| counterfactual world where the election had been carried out
| under FPTP and a potentially different candidate won).
|
| Sadly it was an outcome which allowed Sen. Tom Cotton
| (R-Ark.) to make the argument[0] that:
|
| > 60% of Alaska voters voted for a Republican, but thanks to
| a convoluted process and ballot exhaustion -- which
| disenfranchises voters -- a Democrat 'won.'
|
| This is exactly the sort of well-poisoning that supporters of
| other voting reforms are afraid of.
|
| [0] https://www.independentsentinel.com/60-of-voters-cast-
| ballot...
| adamredwoods wrote:
| Approval voting allows bullet voting, which is not ideal:
|
| https://fairvote.org/the_troubling_record_of_approval_voting...
| wnoise wrote:
| (a) bullet voting isn't actually a problem
|
| https://www.rangevoting.org/BulletBugaboo.html
|
| (b) Approval voting only incentivizes bullet voting when that
| is very close to actually capturing the voter's intent. The
| strategic thing to do is vote approve on all those you like
| better than whoever you think the most likely candidate to
| win is.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Because of 5 candidates, there are 3 I approve, and 2 I hate.
| But of the 3 I approve, I _love_ one and only reluctantly
| accept the other two.
|
| People often have strong feelings about their top preference,
| and approval rating destroys that.
|
| And then in my example, the voter is tempted to approve just 1
| in order to give them a better chance of winning. (Known as
| bullet voting.)
|
| It's much more intuitive and less cognitive load to rank
| options by preference than to decide on an arbitrary threshold
| of approval. You already know your ranking; you have to
| strategically decide on an approval cutoff.
|
| (Also, between the candidates you disapprove of, you still
| often think some would be better/worse than others, and want
| that to count too.)
| endisneigh wrote:
| Even in your situation it doesn't make sense to me to use
| ranked choice. Might as well use score voting so you can say
| how much more you prefer one candidate to another.
|
| All voting systems have drawbacks, but I think approval is
| best relative to effort and impact.
| naniwaduni wrote:
| > And then in my example, the voter is tempted to approve
| just 1 in order to give them a better chance of winning.
| (Known as bullet voting.)
|
| This is fine. The probability with which a voter bullet votes
| vs votes three conveys the degree of preference for that
| candidates. This is not _as_ informative as score voting on a
| wider range (because okay, degree of preference doesn 't map
| perfectly linearly with probability of vote), but it's an
| perfectly adequate proxy.
|
| By comparison, ranked choice, despite feeling like it gives
| you the ability to choose relative ranks, _doesn 't actually
| convey more information_ because it says _nothing_ about your
| degree of preference! "Candidate A is perfect in every way >
| Candidate B agrees with me on all policy decisions but is my
| ex > Candidate C literally wants to murder me" looks _exactly
| the same_ on a ranked choice ballot as "Candidate A is
| perfect in every way > Candidate B literally wants to murder
| me > Candidate C literally wants to murder me and also kicked
| my dog".
|
| > It's much more intuitive and less cognitive load to rank
| options by preference than to decide on an arbitrary
| threshold of approval. You already know your ranking; you
| have to strategically decide on an approval cutoff.
|
| Spoken like someone who doesn't have intransitive
| preferences!
| crazygringo wrote:
| Ranked choice _absolutely_ conveys more information than
| approval. It 's not as much as score voting, but it's
| mathematically false to say it's the same amount as
| approval. Among five candidates, approval would be 2^5-2=30
| possibilities (almost 5 bits of information, assuming you
| can't approve/disapprove all because that's the same as not
| voting), while ranked choice would be 5!=120 possibilities
| (almost 7 bits of information, assuming ties aren't
| permitted). It's only with 3 candidates that they have
| equal information in terms of possibilities (2^3-2=6=3!).
|
| And individuals _don 't_ have intransitive preferences,
| only populations can. (Assuming mental competence.)
|
| Yes score voting would be ideal if it were easy to convert
| preferences strength into numbers, but one person's 7 can
| be another person's 3. There's no objective way to do it.
| The same as approval voting isn't objective, because
| there's no objective threshold. Whereas ranked voting is
| purely objective, a person can always express an ordered
| preference in a consistent, repeatable way.
| wnoise wrote:
| Do I contradict myself?
|
| Very well then I contradict myself,
|
| (I am large, I contain multitudes.)
| dane-pgp wrote:
| > The probability with which a voter bullet votes vs votes
| three conveys the degree of preference for that candidates.
|
| I can see why that would be a useful assumption, but is
| there really empirical evidence to confirm that?
|
| A much bigger factor in determining what the voter does, I
| would guess, is whether they hear activists for their party
| telling them (perhaps disingenuously) that their candidate
| won't win if you "betray" them by approving your second or
| third preference.
|
| So there will be probability distributions of parties that
| try spreading such a message, and people who hear such a
| message, and voters who are loyal enough or risk averse
| enough to follow the advice, but I don't think the combined
| distribution matches closely enough to the genuine "degree
| of preference".
|
| As a result, some candidates will get a tactical boost at
| the expense of their rivals, and eventually all voters will
| start to question whether they should have voted
| differently.
| [deleted]
| musingsole wrote:
| Isn't approval voting just a signified form of Ranked Choice
| Voting -- one without prioritization?
|
| So the strength of RCV would then be more built in tie-
| breaking.
| naniwaduni wrote:
| No. Approval voting is actually a minimized score voting
| system, and although intuitively a two-point feels like this
| should convey less information, the way the aggregation rule
| works (straight addition--or specifically in the approval
| voting case, tallying), you're actually extracting
| significantly more information out of a set of approval votes
| than you would from a ranked choice vote.
|
| To put it another way: given a (sufficiently large) set of
| [0,1] score votes, you can generate a set of approval votes
| that give a very good estimate for the score voting results
| by mapping each score vote to an approval vote by randomly
| picking a number in [0,1) for each vote and marking options
| scored above that threshold. Handwaving a bit, this implies
| that at scale approval voting and arbitrary-precision score
| voting give the same results with pretty good probability.
|
| Now, score voting with arbitrary precision pretty clearly
| conveys more information than ranked choice! You can extract
| an RCV from a score vote directly, but _this loses
| substantial information_ about how far apart the options were
| rated. Conversely, if you extract a score vote from an RCV,
| you ... well, you can get something like Borda count. For
| other RCV aggregation algorithms a score vote extraction is
| not quite as clean, but it 's substantially less clear
| whether the information "lost" is real or an accidental
| artifact of the RCV itself. Certainly you can argue all day
| over the merits of Borda count and variants vs other IRV
| aggregation algorithms, but then score voting with arbitrary
| precision not only _strictly_ dominates Borda count, but also
| is clearly conveying additional information about _degree_ of
| preference on top of that which is obviously useful and not
| encoded in ranked choice votes at all!
|
| Bonus: a surprisingly large number of decisions are dominated
| by no more than three viable choices that are clearly
| preferred over all others. When selecting for among three
| options, there are seven unique approval votes (the all
| marked/unmarked votes, expressing no preference, are
| equivalent), and only six ranked unique choice votes. It
| should be pretty clear that RCV and approval don't convey
| equivalent information in this case!
| musingsole wrote:
| Wow, thank you!!
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| > I've never seen the point of ranked choice.
|
| I'm waiting to see RCV pushed by someone's who ideology doesn't
| exactly benefit from it in their area. It's not a second place
| always wins, but I have seen a lot of examples of _" My party
| will not win in my area, but it's kinda close, and RCV gives me
| a higher statistical probability of "my side" getting in"_.
|
| Maybe approval voting is better, I'm not sure how likely it is
| for unpopular candidates to win in close areas. If it suffers
| from the same issues as ranked choice or not.
|
| I'm tired of it all being game.
| SamBam wrote:
| I'm for any form of multi-vote system (RCV, Approval, etc)
| because (1) they tend to more accurately reflect the will of
| the electorate, and (2) they may help to break the strangle-
| hold of a two party system in the US.
|
| The two-party system is so dominant in the US because of the
| first-past-the-post voting system. With such an election
| (even disregarding the financial power of the parties, or the
| role of the electoral college) third-party candidates never
| have a shot, because any intelligent voter knows that a vote
| for them is a spoiler for their second-favorite candidate.
|
| Multi-choice voting systems generally reduce or eliminate
| spoiler effects, which both allows a third party to build
| support, _and_ reduces the chance that an election will go to
| a candidate with lower support simply because the other side
| had their vote split.
|
| Even when we're not talking about the two-party system,
| multi-vote systems better reflect the will of the people. My
| city has a ranked choice, multi-seat election for city
| council. All councilors are at-large, meaning you're voting a
| group of about ten of them in, and selecting from a pool of
| about 20 candidates. There's almost no other system that
| could accurately capture the majority of the people's
| positions.
| brianolson wrote:
| Oh hey, I made one too. https://betterpolls.com/
|
| Focus on Condorcet ("Virtual Round Robin") counting. De-duping by
| requiring a google or facebook login (or anonymous with a crappy
| hacky captcha).
| SamBam wrote:
| A question and a comment:
|
| 1. Would it be straightforward to add other voting systems? The
| easiest one to add would be approval voting ("Check off any
| option you'd support"). This has very similar benefits to ranked
| voting, and is more appropriate in many situations.
|
| 2. Your description of "How Ranked-Choice Voting Works" describes
| the "first round" and then the "next round" and "repeat until a
| winner is found." While those of us who understand RCV understand
| that these rounds are automatically built into the system, I
| think it's never made clear to a newbie that the voters don't
| have to go back and vote again.
| tadmilbourn wrote:
| On #1 -- It could be, but trying to stay narrowly focused.
| There are some great services out there like OpaVote that do a
| wide array of voting options and calculation methods.
|
| On #2 -- That's a great point. And one that hopefully people
| start to better understand by using RankedVote and seeing all
| the "Rounds" happen at once. But, yeah, for many it's a new
| term. How would you make it more clear?
| SamBam wrote:
| #2: At the very least I'd throw the word "automatically" into
| either step 2 or 3.
| tadmilbourn wrote:
| Thanks for the nudge! Great to have fresh eyes on these
| things and love your thinking. I added an "automatically"
| to step 3. More importantly, I changed "Voters rank." to
| "Voters rank once" in the headline of that section.
|
| P.S. Gotta love Webflow for making changes like this super
| quick.
| charlesetc wrote:
| "How Ranked-Choice Voting elects extremists"
|
| https://psephomancy.medium.com/how-ranked-choice-voting-elec...
|
| This article recommends instead a STAR voting system which is
| still simple to implement and understand while not electing
| extremists in some cases. I would be sad to see NYC and others
| turn to ranked choice without considering all the alternatives.
| mkoubaa wrote:
| This is quite reductive and ridiculous, people don't measure
| their difference from a candidate on a single axis and vote for
| the person with the smallest distance.
| mnomitch wrote:
| I am generally an RCV fan, but I think you're writing off
| this critique a bit too quickly.
|
| Even with multiple axes the critique is still correct right?
| And I think (far from an expert) that there's decent evidence
| to support hotelling's law and median voter theorem.
| mkoubaa wrote:
| I dont put critiques of voters in the same category as
| critiques of election systems.
| godelski wrote:
| > people don't measure their difference from a candidate on a
| single axis and vote for the person with the smallest
| distance.
|
| Good news, that's not how it works. You are minimizing the
| distance in a hyperspace, not a single axis. People draw a
| singular axis (or two) to simplify and explain the concept.
| But still, the distance is measured in a hyperspace.
| charlesetc wrote:
| Don't they? Isn't that axis just "how much they like the
| candidate"?
| mkoubaa wrote:
| The point being made about extremism hinges on the axis
| being "ideological left/right" rather than "how much I like
| the candidate"
| godelski wrote:
| No, it is how much they like a candidate on a certain topic
| and then they consider all topics, which are weighted. But
| also the distance measurement of voting systems aren't in
| reality a single axis. So this doesn't really matter
| anyways because it is already accounted for.
| nerpderp82 wrote:
| This is Neural Vector Space Voting, NVSV.
| buzzy_hacker wrote:
| In the real world, moderate candidates (green in the example)
| get more support/votes than extremists so it's unlikely they
| would get the fewest first place votes. Also, if green is only
| able to get a tiny sliver of first-choice preferences, I don't
| think they should be elected, even if they are in the middle of
| the 1-dimensional spectrum.
| FireInsight wrote:
| Since many people are talking about STAR voting, also check out
| this site https://star.vote/ I've found it works pretty well.
| tunesmith wrote:
| Would you consider a variation where the Condorcet Winner is
| awarded the win if the Condorcet Winner exists, and where in the
| cases there isn't a Condorcet Winner, IRV is applied to the Smith
| Set?
| ajl666 wrote:
| AtNightWeCode wrote:
| What is the science behind this? Is it not obvious that most
| people want to pick a single alternative? And for precision. If
| you force people into ranking. Is it not obvious that the effort
| that goes into picking the top alternative is much higher than
| for let us say the fifth option. Basically, adding noise that may
| skew the results.
| gamegoblin wrote:
| I used to be a hardcore pro-RCV supporter (I liked Yang, and Yang
| made RCV one of his main issues, outside UBI), but I've become a
| little more jaded in the last few years.
|
| Empirically, it seems like RCV-IRV (RCV from here on) not _much_
| better than Plurality. For example, look at all the countries and
| cities with RCV and without. It 's not at all clear to me that
| those with RCV are much better than those without.
|
| Both NZ and Australia are dominated by a large center-left and
| center-right party coalition. Sounds familiar.
|
| NZ has a housing crisis that is even worse than San Francisco.
| Australia is under the thumb of the mineral extraction industry.
| All sounds familiar.
|
| (Obviously NZ and Australia beat the US on some metrics, e.g.
| single payer healthcare if that's your thing, but there are
| plenty of European countries that have equivalent or better
| systems without RCV)
|
| There are hundreds of US cities with RCV. None of them are
| obviously better than those without. They still have all the same
| fights about zoning and bike lanes and public parking that other
| cities have.
|
| I'd still prefer RCV over Plurality, but I don't really think
| it's the panacea some of its supporters thing it is.
| tunesmith wrote:
| Well I think you'd need to draw more of a causal link between
| those outcomes and the voting system. Maybe their elections
| really all are democratic outcomes, and there's something
| completely independent of the ballot-counting process that is
| causing bad outcomes.
|
| If you zoom out and think about the entire voting process, it's
| rife with inefficiencies and bad assumptions:
|
| A ballot proposal implies that the proposal is well-described
| and doesn't have perverse effects.
|
| A voting day implies the voting population is ready to decide,
| and fully understands the proposal, and that everyone with an
| interest is aware of that interest and has an opportunity to
| vote.
|
| A counting method implies that the outcome will actually
| reflect the democratic will of the population.
| godelski wrote:
| You might want to look into cardinal methods (I have a longer
| post above). They are not vulnerable to the strong spoiler
| effect (when you like two candidates a lot they can end up
| splitting the vote in RCV). The most popular ones are STAR and
| Approval. They're both trivial to implement, infinitely
| scalable, and trivial to understand the tallying process (all
| while providing high VSE).
| clolege wrote:
| I recently asked Fairvote volunteers which cities/countries
| they point to as RCV done "right". All of the places I'm
| familiar with have poor reputations for their politics (SF,
| Australia) or have had problems with it (NY's democratic
| primary, Alaska).
|
| All they could come up with is statistics that more women and
| people of color are elected with RCV, and there is not enough
| evidence yet that Approval voting will do the same.
| obelos wrote:
| Those studies also don't demonstrate any causality, only
| correlation. It seems not unlikely that districts willing to
| try an experimental voting method also are more interested in
| running diverse candidates.
| lambertsimnel wrote:
| NZ and a great many European countries use neither plurality
| voting nor RCV-IRV for their nationwide legislative elections.
| (France and some US states use a two-round system, which is
| essentially a bastardised form of RCV-IRV.)
|
| Some European countries (at least France and Ireland) use RCV-
| IRV or a two-round system for their presidential elections, but
| Australia, NZ and several European countries are constitutional
| monarchies, and therefore don't have presidential elections.
| cphoover wrote:
| I feel like drag and drop sorting would be more user-friendly
| zackmorris wrote:
| Could something like this be used with polling to show a
| discrepancy between election outcomes and what voters want?
|
| For example, for a presidential election in the US we have the
| electoral college results and the popular vote (which often
| differ). It would be nice to also have a ranked-choice result to
| compare against. Especially when it comes time to consider a
| revote or when courts become involved with elections (a sign the
| electoral process has failed in some way).
|
| I suspect that election results would differ from ranked-choice
| polling to such a degree that it would become apparent how
| elections are manipulated by parties, the media, incumbents, etc
| etc etc:
|
| https://journalistsresource.org/politics-and-government/the-...
|
| Economic elites drive nearly all policy change in the US through
| campaign contributions and lobbying (highly correlated), while
| response to the average citizen's preferences is flat across the
| political spectrum (no correlation).
|
| IMHO this mismatch is driven nearly entirely by election results
| being uncorrelated with voters' preferences. Then the vitriol
| against outcomes is used by the parties to keep us divided so
| that much-needed legislation can be simply politicized to stop
| it. Once support approaches 50/50, it dies in committee.
|
| There were 395 bills that died via division this way in the
| Senate as of 2020:
|
| https://americanindependent.com/mitch-mcconnell-block-bills-...
|
| I tried to cite the most independent article I could find, but
| they all mention key politicians. Please don't let names muddy
| the waters, as the motivation behind divisive politics is the
| constant here.
| tadmilbourn wrote:
| I found The Politics Industry by Katherine Gehl super
| enlightening and well-researched on this very idea
| (https://www.amazon.com/Politics-Industry-Political-
| Innovatio...). The basic premise is that the current "market
| dynamics" of Politics (when viewed like any other industry)
| actively disincentivizes results. Painting with a somewhat
| broad brush, it doesn't making sense for a politician to make
| progress on immigration reform because that lessens its
| saliency for raising money and turning out the base.
|
| The solution proposed is a combination of "Final-Five" open
| primaries with ranked-choice voting in the general election.
| This is what just happened in Alaska and is on the ballot in
| Nevada in November.
|
| Which reminds me...if you're a Nevada voter, vote YES on ballot
| question 3!
| alphabet9000 wrote:
| consider making .h04_h1.hero min-height 174px - otherwise the
| 'get started' button jumps around
| zeristor wrote:
| This YouTube video "Simulating alternate voting systems" by
| Primer seems apposite:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhO6jfHPFQU
| smellymonkey329 wrote:
| Apposite ~ relavant
|
| "apt in the circumstances or in relation to something."
| bhauer wrote:
| Ranking the voting systems: STAR Voting > Approval Voting >
| Ranked Choice Voting > Plurality ("pick only one") voting.
|
| Ranked Choice Voting is marginally better than plurality voting,
| but it has problems. The chief defect with Ranked Choice Voting
| is its non-monotonicity, whereby increasing your support for your
| genuine favorite can actually hurt their odds of winning. This
| may be what happened in Alaska [1].
|
| STAR Voting is a slight modification to Score Voting, where you
| simply score each candidate and are not forced to rank them. You
| are given the discretion to give multiple candidates the same
| score if you so choose. STAR is highly expressive and simple to
| count: just sum the scores.
|
| Approval Voting is appealing because of its simplicity. Both
| ballots and how they are counted would require only superficial
| changes versus plurality, such as changing the prompt from "Vote
| for only one" to "Vote for as many as you like." Approval has a
| good balance of utility and simplicity.
|
| If we are going to invest time and effort into achieving voting
| reform, it would be a shame to spend that effort on RCV rather
| than superior alternatives.
|
| [1] https://electionscience.org/commentary-analysis/rcv-fools-
| pa...
| JTbane wrote:
| STAR voting can be easily gamed- tell your supporters "vote MAX
| for me and 0 for everyone else". Anyone who gives more than a 0
| to their second choice candidate will hurt their first choice.
| garaetjjte wrote:
| Doing so would be ill-advised because it increases chances of
| winning for candidates that you actually dislike.
| notriddle wrote:
| The only voting system that isn't "vulnerable" to bullet
| voting is FPTP, since it obligates you to bullet vote.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| A problem with all of these systems is that they are harder to
| understand, resulting in reduced voter confidence, or they
| demand more from the voter.
|
| Any kind of ranking is going to mean you need to know enough
| about each candidate to put them in some kind of order. Maybe
| OK if there are two candidates but much harder after that. Most
| people will rank their favorite on top and then just randomly
| rank the remainder.
|
| Simple plurality or majority vote is easiest to understand and
| easiest for the voter. You vote for the one candidate you like
| the best. If the isn't a majority for one and that is required,
| you have a runoff between the top two.
| kirse wrote:
| Yea, it's been interesting to watch how RCV has filtered into
| the public consciousness over the past 5-10 years and slowly
| increased in terms of how many people parrot it as the answer
| to all our voting ills.
|
| There was a site posted to HN years back that mathematically
| analyzed a ton of these voting schemes, I cannot seem to find
| it on Google but it was some sort of hybrid scheme that
| apparently has the best overall outcomes.
|
| Edit: Given some of the comments below, some good material on
| these voting systems...
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13161396
|
| https://ncase.me/ballot/
|
| https://rangevoting.org/rangeVirv.html
|
| http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/
| theptip wrote:
| IRV is a Schelling Point, and I think it's important to
| consider it as such. The biggest critique of alternatives to
| FPTP is "they are too complicated". When you look at an
| individual system like IRV it seems hard to sustain that
| objection, but then a bunch of voting system nerds enter the
| room, and now we're comparing Condorcet to Borda, and
| critiquing a bunch of mathematical properties of each system,
| and drawing graphs of preference-space; at which point the
| average voter's eyes gloss over and they say "yup, too
| complicated".
|
| I think this is a perfect case for the maxim "Let not the
| perfect be the enemy of the good". It seems IRV is sticking,
| and nobody has made Condorcet or Borda stick; let's go with
| IRV for now. Once we've abolished FPTP, and everyone is
| familiar with ranked systems, we can come back and argue for
| a better option.
|
| As far as I'm concerned, IRV captures 99% of the utility of
| changing voting systems.
|
| (All that said, I do like the work that
| https://electionscience.org is doing with Approval Voting,
| and if we can run experiments in local elections across the
| country with two new systems, I think that's also positive.)
| gamegoblin wrote:
| A group in Seattle actually got an Approval voting ballot
| initiative enough signatures to get on the ballot this year
| (where RCV has been trying and failing for decades), but
| the City Council, sensing their re-election chances under
| such a system in danger, intervened and modified the
| initiative to add RCV as a 3rd option, because they know
| they have a better election odds with RCV, and RCV will
| probably beat Approval on name recognition alone.
|
| A cynical take would be that IRV has gotten traction in the
| US precisely because it _does not_ seriously threaten the
| existing power structure. It might nibble away on a few
| edges, but if you look at all the countries and cities with
| IRV, they are not obviously better than those still stuck
| on FPTP.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| IRV is hard to evaluate though. How long would it take to
| teach a member of the general public to evaluate IRV
| results?
|
| You also cannot have meaningful estimates until all results
| from every district are in. How long it took in New York to
| get any results might leave people disillusioned and
| opposed to anything but FPTP.
|
| Using Borda and Condorcet is also clearly a straw man, as
| AFAIK nobody is actually pushing for those in practice. The
| real runners seem to be IRV, Approval and STAR. Of those
| IRV is clearly the most compared to evaluate.
|
| IMI they are all pretty simple and in an ideal world it
| wouldn't matter that much. However, we need to be highly
| aware that as soon as a major election gets won with
| anything but FPTP, we'll see the losing party "flood the
| zone with shit" to undermine the election results and the
| method. We've already seen the beginning of this after the
| election in Alaska. We need to keep it as simple as
| possible, otherwise the shit will drown everything else
| out.
| godelski wrote:
| > IRV is hard to evaluate though. How long would it take
| to teach a member of the general public to evaluate IRV
| results?
|
| This is always an interesting point to me. I often hear
| arguments that STAR and Approval are too difficult for
| the voters and far more complex (there's plenty of
| comments here suggesting that). While I disagree, that's
| a matter of opinion (I think both are trivial fwiw). But
| on the other hand, how votes are tallied is much harder
| to argue. Ordinal systems use a while loop where you pop
| an element each iteration and reallocate votes. Cardinal
| methods are sum then argmax. It is a joke to think that
| voters would understand Ordinal methods better than
| Cardinal methods with respect to how votes are tallied.
| theptip wrote:
| > How long would it take to teach a member of the general
| public to evaluate IRV results?
|
| I'm puzzled by this. You can do it with pencil and paper
| in a few minutes? It's simple addition. You can easily
| build a website that visualizes each step if you think
| addition is difficult for people. It's trivial to compute
| in a spreadsheet.
|
| > might leave people disillusioned
|
| This is speculative; if it is true, you can find evidence
| by talking to, e.g. Alaskan voters. (IOW, Citation
| Needed.)
|
| > clearly a straw man
|
| I'm simply painting a picture by recounting my experience
| of what happened in the last thread on HN where voting
| systems came up, not making a strong claim about these
| specific systems being the runners up. My point still
| stands if you substitute any other systems, in this
| thread for example
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33111242. The point
| I was making had nothing to do about the merits of those
| specific systems; the point was that a big technical can
| of worms gets opened, and the average voter has no
| interest in digging in to compare N solutions on M
| technical axes, Arrow's theorem, etc. This is what people
| mean when they say "alternate voting systems are
| complicated".
| godelski wrote:
| > It's simple addition.
|
| Not quite. The tallying algorithm is `while (no candidate
| > 50% of votes): pop min(candidates),
| reallocate_votes(min(candidates))`. On the other hand
| cardinal methods are `argmax(sum(candidates))`. For
| comparison, FPTP is `argmax(sum(candidates))` too. The
| only difference is that FPTP is a one-hot vector. I'd
| argue that the average person intuitively understands
| cardinal methods without any training.
| theptip wrote:
| You're right, my bad. Computing `reallocate_votes()` is
| not as trivial as I suggested.
|
| I do wonder if many people actually care to work through
| that step; in all of the public discourse around the
| Alaska vote, it's simply presented as a table with the
| reallocations already summed. For example,
| https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-democrats-win-
| in-a....
|
| The general algorithm of "reallocate the votes from the
| candidate that is being eliminated" is conceptually
| simple, even if it's annoying to tabulate. I do stand by
| my claim that it would be very easy to build a website
| that can visualize this process without getting bogged
| down in the tabulation. See every site that's giving
| analysis on the Alaska results for examples.
|
| I want to see actual UX studies on this; for example has
| anyone polled in Alaska to see whether people understand
| the result?
| godelski wrote:
| > Computing `reallocate_votes()` is not as trivial as I
| suggested.
|
| I agree that it isn't hard, but I'm glad we both agree it
| isn't trivial.
|
| > I do wonder if many people actually care to work
| through that step
|
| I don't think most people care to be honest. But I think
| what does matter is recount events. I often point to what
| happened in Arizona as a perfect example. It would be
| substantially easier to create a narrative that an
| election is rigged if the tallying is more complicated.
| Malicious people like to hide in complexity and will
| often oversimplify a complex topic. Because of this, I
| think one of the most important factors in creating a
| secure election is ensuring that the tallying system is
| simple. While malicious actors will always act
| maliciously, we can reduce their effectiveness through
| this simplicity.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| To add to the simplicity case: STAR and Approval voting
| are on essence how many online rating systems like IMDB,
| Yelp or Rotten Tomatoes work. Those seem very intuitive
| to users. (Edit: ignoring cases where those platforms
| hide votes etc)
| tunesmith wrote:
| Condorcet is actually quite simple, and the voting
| community does it a huge disservice by insisting on talking
| about it in very complicated ways.
|
| Condorcet is just "if a candidate would beat all others
| head to head, then that candidate is the winner".
|
| But the voting community insists on immediately jumping to
| all the crazy tie-breaking algorithms you need to implement
| if there is a "loop" (Smith Set).
|
| My opinion has always been that those two concepts should
| be severed. All the "flaws" of Condorcet actually only
| apply to when tiebreakers are used. The flaws do not apply
| when there is a Condorcet Winner.
|
| (The Smith Set isn't hard to understand either. It's just
| "these candidates beat all others head to head.")
|
| And when there isn't a Condorcet Winner, that is actually
| valuable information. It means that the population was not
| ready to decide. It may warrant a later runoff, giving the
| population more opportunity to research the remaining
| Smith-Set candidates, and decide through additional debates
| or whatever else. As an alternative, people can always
| choose to apply any old method for the tiebreaker - even
| IRV! Condorcet-IRV (where IRV would only be applied to the
| Smith Set) strictly dominates IRV-only, in every way.
| godelski wrote:
| > There was a site posted to HN years back that
| mathematically analyzed a ton of these voting schemes, I
| cannot seem to find it on Google but it was some sort of
| hybrid scheme that apparently has the best overall outcomes.
|
| Do you remember what was on it? I'll just drop a few links
|
| https://electionscience.github.io/vse-sim/
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4FXLQoLDBA
|
| http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/
| elihu wrote:
| > There was a site posted to HN years back that
| mathematically analyzed a ton of these voting schemes, I
| cannot seem to find it on Google but it was some sort of
| hybrid scheme that apparently has the best overall outcomes.
|
| It might have been "To Build a Better Ballot":
|
| https://ncase.me/ballot/
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13161396
| kirse wrote:
| Good looking out, RangeVoting.org was the site I was
| thinking of but that HN post drove the discussion.
| TimPC wrote:
| Isn't giving each candidate a score even more gameable than
| ranking candidates. If I like candidate A and think candidate B
| is their best opposition I can give candidate A 5.0 and
| candidate B 0.0 even if my real opinion of candidate B is 3.0.
| Lowering candidate B's score artificially definitely helps
| candidate A.
| unholiness wrote:
| Absolutely. Naive exaggeration is a fantastic way to make
| your vote count more than others in score voting. It also
| encourages more negative campaign tactics, since convincing a
| voter to rank your opponent 0 rather than 4 is literally 4
| times as powerful as convincing them to rank you a 5 rather
| than a 4.
| avarun wrote:
| I think you misread the comment you're replying to.
| Calculating a total score is simply summing the scores
| assigned to a candidate from each voter, so there's no way to
| "lower candidate B's score artificially". There's no
| averaging going on here.
| barbariangrunge wrote:
| Ranked voting is supposed to prevent winner take all strategic
| voting. Voting by score encourages you to score everybody at
| zero except your favourite(s). This arguably means there will
| be less information in the vote tallies, although it gives
| voters more control over how their opinion will be responded
| to, and that is valuable
| scythe wrote:
| Regarding the Score/Approval/STAR trio, I always felt that
| there was a clear fourth possibility missing from the list, so
| I invented it:
|
| https://pastebin.com/PCgSaBS8
|
| Still, I'm not much of a political campaigner, so it hasn't
| gone very far.
| dane-pgp wrote:
| That's a clever system, thanks for sharing it. What I
| appreciate most about it, though, is the explicit goal of
| "being easier to count by hand", which I think many advocates
| of voting-reform overlook.
|
| You even say "by sorting ballots into each of thirteen piles
| corresponding to the thirteen possible rankings of three
| candidates", which shows you've actually thought through what
| the process would look like for the people doing the
| counting.
|
| When people are proposing voting systems, they really need to
| consider that their process is being carried out in an
| adversarial environment, where different groups have
| incentives to cheat, or accuse the voting system of producing
| the "wrong" result (e.g. due to the unintuitive outcome, or
| the complex tactical thinking needed to optimally fill in the
| ballot), or claim that voting machines were running
| backdoored firmware (which is a destabilizing claim whether
| it is in fact true or false).
|
| That last point is perhaps the most important. I think that
| as time goes on, the pressure to automate the counting
| process and give instant election results (or worse, do the
| elections online) is only going to grow, and any voting
| reform which (if done manually) slows down the counting
| process, or for any other reason in practice requires people
| to trust machines that are selected and maintained by
| officials from one political party, is going to do even more
| harm to democracy than FPTP does.
| buzzy_hacker wrote:
| STAR and Approval have different pros and cons, they are not
| objectively superior. I think RCV is better, _in my opinion_.
|
| STAR and Approval both have their own tactical voting problems.
| If you really like A, are meh about B, and dislike C, it's
| clear you should rate A high / give A your approval and rate C
| low / do not give C your approval. But what about B? It has
| nothing to do with what you actually think about them, it has
| to do with what you think their odds of beating C and A are.
| You want B to do well enough to beat C, but not well enough to
| beat A. This adds too much distortion to people wanting to
| express their sincere preferences, which they can easily do in
| RCV: A > B > C
|
| And, more importantly, RCV is a stepping stone to multi-member
| district STV proportional voting (plug for
| https://www.fixourhouse.org/), which is the golden goose; way
| more important to implement proportional representation than
| squabble about STAR vs RCV, and RCV gets us closer to
| proportional representation.
| bombcar wrote:
| This right here is the problem, these things get way too damn
| complicated for normal people really fast.
| godelski wrote:
| You don't think normal people can understand: "Rate this
| candidate from 0 to 5 stars?" If so, we really need to
| rethink a lot of how we ask for people's opinions, because
| this is probably the most common way.
| elihu wrote:
| The problem with RCV is there's a big difference between
| giving an honest opinion and voting tactically.
|
| In RCV it's safe to put your first choice first if either
| they're an overwhelming favorite to win, or they're so
| weak they're sure to get eliminated right away. If it's a
| close three-way election, you might cause your favorite
| candidate to lose by ranking them first. It's hard to
| develop any kind of intuition around how your vote will
| impact the race in these situations -- I think in the
| long run voters tend to learn that voting for third
| parties isn't safe, so two parties continue to dominate.
| defrost wrote:
| > I think in the long run voters tend to learn that
| voting for third parties isn't safe, so two parties
| continue to dominate.
|
| The empiricval evidence in countries with long term
| ranked voting (Australia, say) is that bicameral party
| systems ( _only_ Democrats or Republicans have any
| realistic chance) wither and die, and smaller blocs have
| a better chance of survival and impact | influence in the
| House and Senate ..
|
| Two parties "dominate" in Australia (or rather three
| parties, which are effectively two - the Nat-Liberals
| being an Rural-Urban conservative coalition of long
| standing) but nowhere near the degree to which two
| parties dominate in the USofA; more importantly minority
| opinions have gravitas and can sway the major vote - none
| of this bipolar US Dem-Rep deadlock.
| buzzy_hacker wrote:
| Also it's not just about the nominal parties that win,
| it's the composition of politicians in those parties, and
| RCV selects for more broadly agreeable candidates.
| lucasmullens wrote:
| > If it's a close three-way election, you might cause
| your favorite candidate to lose by ranking them first.
|
| Could you explain that? I can't think of a situation
| where putting the candidate I want to win as #1 would
| cause them to lose. Ranking other close candidates as
| #2/#3 could cause my #1 to lose, but I don't think voting
| for someone as #1 alone would possibly harm them.
| godelski wrote:
| So what I think the parent is referring to is called the
| Favorite Betrayer Criteria[0]. The short is that there
| are two forms of the spoiler effect: strong and weak. RCV
| handles the weak case but does not handle the strong
| case. I explain part of why cardinal methods handle the
| strong case in this comment[1]. The truth is that we're
| far more concerned with the strong case than weak case
| because from our current position this is the more
| frequent type of spoiler (and arguably is more frequent
| in general).
|
| [0]
| https://electowiki.org/wiki/Favorite_betrayal_criterion
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33111242
| bombcar wrote:
| I wonder if fixing the "strong case" spoiler actually is
| NOT what some "spoiler voters" would want, simply BECAUSE
| they want to spoil for the other party to try to move
| that party toward where they want it to be.
| godelski wrote:
| Probably. But I don't think the public really wants their
| voting systems to be highly vulnerable to strategic
| voting. That does just give elites an edge and ends up
| with less equitable representation.
|
| (strategies exist for ALL voting systems. But not all
| strategies are equally as bad)
| achr2 wrote:
| Let's say you have three candidates A, B, C.
|
| A is left, B is center, C is right leaning.
|
| Polling shows that voters are leaning:
|
| - 15% BAC
|
| - 15% BCA
|
| - 25% ABC
|
| - 45% CBA
|
| If everyone voted as they desired, then the instant
| runoff would be between B and C, with B winning with 55%
| of votes.
|
| If a subset of C voters instead strategically vote ACB
| (6%), this would change the runoff to be between A & C,
| with C winning 60%.
| TimPC wrote:
| The problem is not understanding how to rate a candidate
| but understanding what the ratings will accomplish and
| what voting strategy should be used to get your intended
| outcome.
| bombcar wrote:
| They can do that - but the game theory around "don't rate
| the candidate you don't want ..." stuff is way too
| complicated.
|
| And if it is not as simple as "Bob got the most votes,
| Bob won" it's going to get harder and harder to explain
| exactly what is going on, which is going to get people
| annoyed and angry.
|
| As long as the result is the same as would have come from
| first past the post, nobody will care.
| godelski wrote:
| > They can do that - but the game theory around "don't
| rate the candidate you don't want ..." stuff is way too
| complicated.
|
| I'm not understanding your point. In cardinal systems a
| non rating is equivalent to a rating of zero. Just like
| in ordinal systems a non ranking is equivalent to ranking
| last place.
|
| > And if it is not as simple as "Bob got the most votes,
| Bob won" it's going to get harder and harder to explain
| exactly what is going on
|
| This makes it seem like you're in favor of cardinal
| methods actually. Tallying their votes is pretty trivial.
| You sum the scores of all candidates and then argmax the
| totals. I don't think people have a hard time
| understanding this. It is essentially the same as what
| happens with FPTP! I mean this is objectively a simpler
| algorithm than those used by even the simplest ordinal
| methods.
| NickM wrote:
| _This adds too much distortion to people wanting to express
| their sincere preferences, which they can easily do in RCV: A
| > B > C_
|
| RCV actually literally has the exact same problem you're
| describing with voting strategically, it's just subtler and
| harder to understand. The problem is, if you rank A > B > C,
| then your subsequent preferences after A _only_ matter if A
| gets eliminated. If A comes in second place, then your "B >
| C" preference has no impact, and C may be elected whereas if
| you "dishonestly" voted for B first you might have allowed B
| to win.
| godelski wrote:
| That's not quite right. In ranked systems you're saying
| that your preference of A over B is the same as your
| preference of B over C. This is often not the case. In
| fact, this is why ranked systems almost always fail the
| favorite betrayer and monotonicity criteria. I explain more
| with examples in a longer post below.
| tim-- wrote:
| This is a feature, not a bug.
|
| The point of ranking is not to have your vote redistributed
| many times, but rather for your #1 preference to go to your
| preferred candidate.
|
| If your preferred candidate does not win, your vote gets a
| second chance (or more!) to get counted.
|
| In the case your describing here, the only way that C wins,
| is that he gets more votes than A or B.
| zestyping wrote:
| You have to consider factors beyond just the decision
| algorithm -- elections must be inclusive, fair, and accurate
| as well. RCV makes auditing a lot harder due to
| centralization, the complexity means there is more room for
| software problems and process problems, and the spoiled
| ballot rate increases, especially among people who are less
| privileged. When you look at the whole picture, RCV is
| probably a net negative.
|
| Approval doesn't have these problems; it's a clear win.
| godelski wrote:
| > RCV makes auditing a lot harder due to centralization,
|
| I'd argue that the algorithm is far more complex. It is
| `while no winner: pop(min(candidates));
| reallocate(min(candidates))`. This while loop is quite a
| problem. Cardinal systems (except STAR) are
| `argmax(sum(candidates))`, which is actually identical to
| Plurality. The difference is that Plurality requires a one-
| hot vector. This algorithm is trivially parallelizable too.
| STAR doesn't require a while loop but is more complex
| because it does have 2 phases (which RCV is almost always
| going to be more than 2 phases given that while loop).
|
| The trivializes of cardinal systems tallying algorithm
| makes statistical audits also trivial. I just can't imagine
| the mess we'd be in if what happened in Arizona happened
| with an ordinal method like RCV. It would be much easier to
| create a narrative of fraud.
| [deleted]
| colinmhayes wrote:
| Yea what we need is to get rid of districts. Proportional
| representation is the only great solution.
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| Districts are good to make sure there are some local ties
| between citizens and representatives and not only
| represantitives from one region remain.
|
| Take the German system: there are district level elections,
| so that there is one person elected in each electoral
| district. These get half the nominal seats. Then the other
| half of parliament is filled up with candidates to match
| the proportional vote. The fill up is a bit complicated,
| especially if a party has a lot more directly elected folks
| than proportionally mandated, which leads to growth of
| parliament and discussions how that growth can be avoided.
| (Larger districts and only 1/3 directly elected or not
| every directly elected candidate really making it or not
| holding up the exact proportionality or whatever) But it
| combines the factors mostly fine and avoids many of the
| problems of the pure systems.
| buzzy_hacker wrote:
| That is one solution, another is multi-member districts
| fasthands9 wrote:
| One thing that I think gets lost in political debate around
| voting is that RCV also changes the behavior/selection of the
| candidates. Its not just that the candidates are identical and
| you vote with a different mechanism - but candidates have an
| incentive to moderate. This may mean the outcome is the same
| (in terms of which candidate wins) but their positions
| represent the median voter more.
|
| I would imagine approval voting and other voting systems have
| this too (I'm not going to pretend to know how this would turn
| out for all of them) and I think that gets lost a bit when
| analyzing the systems.
| godelski wrote:
| That's kinda the entire point. One of the (many) metrics for
| voting systems is called Voter Satisfaction Efficiency (VSE).
| This is basically a global L2 distance from each voter to
| each candidate. To maximize VSE we want to minimize that
| distance. In other words, we want winning candidates to be
| most representative of a population's opinions and values.
| You can see a comparison of different systems here[0]. Note
| that there are other criteria that matter, but there are
| plenty of methods that have high VSE and the other criteria
| we want. Also note that the spread in different types of
| strategies represents the method's vulnerability to
| manipulation. If a strategy still yields a high VSE then it
| is not an effective strategy.
|
| [0] https://electionscience.github.io/vse-sim/
| fasthands9 wrote:
| If I'm not mistaken this link is exactly what I am
| describing. It simulates how close the _winning_ candidate
| is to voters based on how people would vote. But it
| explicitly doesnt simulate how candidates would shift due
| to changing incentives.
|
| In other words - it treats elections as a one side game
| where voters pick strategy (voting methods/preferences) and
| the candidates are stable. But it is a two-sided game where
| politicians change opinions/policies based on system as
| well.
| godelski wrote:
| That is a hard thing to capture, but strategy is a decent
| way to approximate it. I do think this is fair criticism
| for what it is worth, but I don't think anyone has been
| able to create an accurate model for this (for any voting
| system) and I'm not sure you can accurately model this
| tbh.
| RyanCavanaugh wrote:
| RCV-IRV doesn't encourage moderate candidates because, in a
| polarized environment, moderate candidates are much more
| likely to be no one's first choice and get eliminated as a
| result.
|
| This isn't hypothetical -- you can look at the results in
| Seattle's City Attorney race, which strangely ended up
| electing a Republican to a citywide office for the first time
| in 20 years, and where the outcome under RCV _would have been
| the same_ because the moderate candidate (the reasonably
| well-liked incumbent) didn 't secure enough first-place
| votes, either in FPTP or in RCV-IRV.
| zajio1am wrote:
| > moderate candidates are much more likely to be no one's
| first choice and get eliminated as a result.
|
| If i look at my country's upper chamber, which is elected
| with two-round system, then it is quite the reverse.
| Extremist candidates rarely pass to second round and if
| they do, they are eliminated there.
| fasthands9 wrote:
| That is interesting but I don't know if that's always true.
| In Alaska, its pretty clear that Senator Murkowski, who was
| always somewhat moderate, has really leaned into being even
| more moderate since RCV was introduced there.
|
| Presumably, she knows that she will face little penalty for
| rebuffing Trump or McConnell on the issues they have for
| which the right position is unpopular - since there isn't
| much of a chance of her being dethroned by a right person.
|
| I do take your point that the dynamics can be weird and
| aren't always "go to the median". And perhaps having a
| weird dynamic where the introduction of a different voting
| strategy or other party changes things dramatically - is
| not a good thing for trust.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| This is also where it would be great to skip primaries, since
| primaries favor more extreme candidates.
| gamegoblin wrote:
| This is actually not the case - RCV suffers from the "center
| squeeze" effect [1], in which moderates are squeezed out in
| the early rounds. That said, things like Approval have the
| opposite problem, in which moderates are given an advantage
| (some approval people will say this is a feature, not a bug).
|
| For an edge case, consider an election with 3 factions:
| socialists, libertarians, and fascists. There is also a 4th
| candidate, a boring status quo moderate, running. Imagine the
| populace is split 1/3 between the first 3 factions as their
| 1st choice, but _everyone_ selects boring status quo
| moderates as their 2nd choice, because everyone in the first
| 3 factions hates the other ideologies.
|
| The boring status quo moderates get eliminated in round 1,
| and eventually 1 of the 3 extremes will win, resulting in 2/3
| of the country being very angry. Not ideal.
|
| Obviously this is just an unrealistic edge case, but it
| demonstrates the effect.
|
| [1] https://electowiki.org/wiki/Center_squeeze
| godelski wrote:
| > That said, things like Approval have the opposite
| problem, in which moderates are given an advantage (some
| approval people will say this is a feature, not a bug).
|
| This is a weird way to say that representing the population
| is a bug.
|
| Your example election would be a compelling argument if
| population preference was more of a multimodal distribution
| rather than closer to a unimodal distribution. Despite the
| US's current division, it is nowhere near as divided as
| your scenario.
| gamegoblin wrote:
| To be clear, I personally prefer approval to IRV. But raw
| approval gives _undue_ advantage to moderates. Approval-
| to-runoff being clearly superior than raw approval, for
| this reason. And STAR being a little bit better than
| that.
|
| The RCV people's main criticism of Approval is that it
| doesn't allow you to express different levels of support,
| and they aren't _totally_ wrong (even though their
| preferred mechanism of IRV doesn 't get them there,
| either).
|
| I think (without data, happy to be proven wrong) that the
| US population is fairly strongly bimodal on most issues.
| Many issues that people care a lot about (for better or
| worse...) have two clear centers of gravity,
|
| e.g. for gun control and abortion most people are in the
| orbit of a "mostly ban" or "mostly allow" group, with
| very few people falling into some nuanced middle ground.
| godelski wrote:
| > But raw approval gives undue advantage to moderates.
|
| If by "moderates" you mean "most liked" then I'm not sure
| what the problem is here. The point of voting is to find
| the most universally agreed upon ruler. You may call this
| unfair, but I would say that it is MORE unfair to give
| advantage to fringe groups rather than giving advantage
| to the masses. I thought the point of democracies was
| about having rule by the masses. If you think fringe
| groups should have the advantage I'd like to hear your
| argument.
| gamegoblin wrote:
| > If you think fringe groups should have the advantage
| I'd like to hear your argument.
|
| I'm not sure what gave you the impression I think that.
| My comments clearly suggest that my view is that STAR >
| Approval-to-runoff > Approval > RCV-IRV > Plurality. My
| reasoning is that I place a very high value on the
| condorcet and favorite betrayal criteria.
| godelski wrote:
| My apologies then. It was the italicized "undue" that
| made me think that this was your position. I read it as
| "undeserving".
|
| As for the condorcet winner, that is quite hard actually.
| But if we consider a weak condorcet winner (where it is
| true 90+% of the time), that isn't as hard. I do think
| simplicity, transparency, and reduced vulnerability to
| strategy is a worthwhile trade-off for a strong condorcet
| winner. But of course, this is just my personal opinion
| and what's the preferred optima depends a lot on personal
| preferences.
| lostdog wrote:
| Voters will realize that approval gives benefits to
| centrists, and they will change their voting strategies
| and stop approving centrists. None of the math analyses
| shared here take that into account.
|
| For example, say three fictitious candidates are running
| for dogcatcher, Bernie, Hillary, and Trump. Does your
| hardcore Bernie supporter friend believe that approving
| Hillary doesn't hurt Bernie? Will they choose not to
| approve centrist candidates, leading to extreme results
| in elections?
| bfung wrote:
| There's always going to be a trade-off when dealing with
| humans: voting result optimization vs ease of voting.
|
| That's always been the issue, not that we don't know of better
| result counting theories.
|
| Even in the 2020s, the ballots are explained over and over,
| "Connect the horizontal line", or "fill in the box completely"
| -- it's a binary input to capture the best information from the
| lowest denominator.
|
| STAR would change the input from binary to an order N, and the
| number of mistakes or "that's not what I intended" will happen.
|
| The average HN reader probably can fill in boxes pretty good,
| but the outside world not so much. RCV is a decent compromise.
| breuleux wrote:
| I don't think the voting system matters as much as we think.
| The main attack vector that interest groups use against
| democracy is shaping the public opinion in the direction that
| benefits them. Certainly, some systems may be easier to game,
| but ultimately interest groups will do neither more nor less
| than the minimum required to win. If they only need to make 30%
| of the population rabid in order to win, that's what they will
| do, but let's not fool ourselves into thinking they couldn't
| make 51% of the population rabid if they needed to.
|
| Basically, if people's stated preferences are ill-thought-out
| and/or manipulated, then even the perfect voting system that
| perfectly reflects the people's preferences will yield bad
| results. Voting reform in this case would be fixing the
| symptoms, not the disease. The disease, in my view, is that
| given the sheer complexity of the issues, the poor attention
| budget of people, the outsized influence of media, the
| impossibility of directly interacting with decision-makers,
| there's basically no way people can make an informed decision.
|
| Personally I think we should ditch elections and just pick
| representatives purely at random, and then pay them to think
| about their preferences full time, discuss them with each
| other, directly interview candidates for executive positions,
| and so on. The basic idea is that I think collective decision
| making probably reaches an optimum around Dunbar's number and
| falls off precipitously beyond that.
| unholiness wrote:
| Every voting system has some flaws (see: Arrow's impossibility
| theorem), and Instant Runoff Voting definitely saw its worst-
| case scenario rear its ugly head in Alaska: A Condorcet winner
| existed (Nick Begich), he lost, _and_ voters whose first choice
| was Plain and second choice was Begich could theoretically,
| retrospectivally, all changed their first votes from Palin to
| Begich to have him win rather than Mary Peltola.
|
| It's important that I say retrospectively. This was a house
| race with national coverage, tons of high-quality polling from
| pollsters with nothing better to do, and it was _still_
| absolutely not clear from that polling that Begich would do
| better than Palin in round 2, or that Palin was likely to beat
| Begich in round 1. If I had the opinions of those
| hypothetically strategic voters, and I were completely
| strategic, and completely tuned into that polling, I still
| would have voted honestly. The strategy was only apparent after
| the fact.
|
| Thinking about "defense in depth" against this scenario, we'd
| be remiss not to mention Condorcet ranked choice voting
| methods, which always elect a Condorcet winner, and only resort
| to (game-able) elimination procedures if there isn't one. Not
| only would that have resulted in a better outcome in Alaska, it
| would have made the possibility of strategic voting much, much
| more remote, both because a strategic scenario would be much
| less likely, and because that strategic scenario would be much
| less visible before the election.
|
| With score voting, strategies are always available and almost
| always obvious: just exaggerate your score differences between
| the most likely candidates. The fact that strategic dishonesty
| would have helped in Alaska is a fair criticism of IRV, but the
| real commonness of strategic scenarios in STAR and score are a
| more primary feature.
| garaetjjte wrote:
| >see: Arrow's impossibility theorem
|
| Arrow's theorem only applies to ranked systems. That said,
| cardinal systems are still susceptible to strategic voting
| (Gibbard's theorem)
| jasonlotito wrote:
| That's a very misleading article that plays loose with the
| math. e.g. It makes assumptions on things that are flat out not
| true (for example, assuming people would vote for thing they
| clearly didn't vote for).
|
| If an article is going to sit there and make up votes that
| didn't occur, I can't really trust it.
| lucasmullens wrote:
| RCV has made real ground, and halting its progress for STAR
| voting seems misguided. There's no consensus here, but you're
| stating the ranking like it's some objective fact. Imo, RCV's
| growing popularity only increases the popularity of other new
| voting systems (note that we're having a conversation about
| them, because someone used RCV).
| duxup wrote:
| I read the linked article and I found it kinda scatterbrained.
| It seemed to dispute claims or tweets about how a vote works,
| along with what head to head voting outcomes would be.
|
| I do find how the math works out interesting. But I don't find
| either disputes all that compelling.
|
| The head to head polling is interesting... but that's not how
| the election works. The fact that two systems would be
| different seems normal to me.
|
| Folks who go to a ranked choice vote and pick just one, that's
| their choice too. Same with people who don't vote and so on.
|
| Not to say the article is worthless, it is interesting, but I'm
| not sure I agree with the conclusions.
| crazygringo wrote:
| I just want to make clear for others: this "ranking" is just
| bhauer's opinion.
|
| Since some people here might interpret it as being presented as
| objective fact or some consensus opinion.
|
| There are a lot of pros/cons to all of the richer voting
| systems, usually categorized as approval voting, ranked voting,
| and score voting, in terms of increasing information.
|
| But there is absolutely no consensus that approval or score are
| better than ranked. (In my opinion, ranked comes out ahead, and
| I talk about why in another comment here.)
|
| But most of all, ranked choice is what has the growing
| momentum, as a lot of reform organizations have concluded it's
| the best practical solution. But what's most important is that
| we adopt _one_ of them, and it would be a shame to spend our
| effort squabbling over which alternative, than giving support
| to the one that has the most momentum and chance of succeeding
| now. We 're really only even having this conversation now
| _because_ of the success reform groups have had in promoting
| ranked voting.
| manholio wrote:
| > I just want to make clear for others: this "ranking" is
| just bhauer's opinion.
|
| It's also a non-sensical claim, any voting system "ranking"
| depends on specifics of the electoral system. For example,
| larger multi-winner districts using some sort of proportional
| or Condorcet system are always better that any ranked or
| approval result in a single winner districts.
| tunesmith wrote:
| > ranked choice is what has the growing momentum
|
| Using that as justification for why ranked choice should be
| adopted is circular reasoning.
| lambertsimnel wrote:
| To the extent that the real victory would be replacing
| plurality voting, but the current progress is specific to a
| particular alternative, I don't think it is circular. Of
| course, it would be a circular argument for which system
| would be best.
| [deleted]
| NickM wrote:
| _it would be a shame to spend our effort squabbling over
| which alternative, than giving support to the one that has
| the most momentum and chance of succeeding now_
|
| I think the bigger shame would be to spend so much effort
| promoting RCV, only to have people become jaded and
| disillusioned with voting method reform in general when they
| realize RCVs many glaring problems.
|
| The biggest problem with RCV IMO is that it _looks_ like it
| eliminates the spoiler effect, but it _really_ only
| eliminates it in simple cases where the third-party
| candidates are not competitive. This suddenly becomes very
| obvious and painful in cases like Burlington, 2009 or Alaska,
| 2022 where voters were told "RCV is great because you can
| vote honestly", only to realize post-election that this was
| entirely false, and that they threw away their votes and let
| the election go to a candidate they despise.
|
| Trust is extremely important in political movements, and very
| easy to lose. I fear RCV is going to poison the well for any
| FPTP alternatives for a long time to come.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _RCVs many glaring problems_
|
| But all the voting methods have glaring problems, and
| _every_ method is going to result in people complaining
| after their preferred candidate loses but would have won
| using another method.
|
| RCV isn't going to poison the well any more than other
| systems. STAR voting and approval voting, for example, open
| themselves up to the criticism that voting itself becomes a
| subjective process, which could "poison the well" even
| more. When people have to worry about what it means to give
| a 3 vs a 4 to a candidate, or whether to approve 1 or 2 or
| 3 people?
|
| Ranking candidates is an objectively accurate statement of
| preference (in contrast to STAR/approval which are
| subjective), and while instant runoff isn't perfect, it's
| easy to understand and doesn't result in absurd outcomes or
| people not understanding how to vote.
|
| You can criticize RCV for sure, but if you want to defend
| another method, you have to show how its drawbacks aren't
| even worse.
| NickM wrote:
| _it 's easy to understand and doesn't result in absurd
| outcomes_
|
| I mean, I realize this is somewhat subjective, but "more
| people ranking a candidate first can cause them to lose"
| seems like a pretty absurd outcome to me.
|
| I'm not saying approval voting is perfect either, sure it
| has flaws, but at least it doesn't violate the
| monotonicity criterion (or a variety of other important
| criteria that RCV fails to satisfy).
| godelski wrote:
| Approval also doesn't violate favorite betrayer, which
| RCV does.
|
| From a voter perspective, monotonicity and favorite
| betrayer seem to be two of the most important factors
| when determining "absurd outcomes." At least in my
| opinion.
| uoaei wrote:
| I think this is the important point: some criteria are
| more important than others in that the societal reactions
| when one or another criterion is violated are not equal
| and could engender different outcomes.
|
| If approval voting reduces to bullet voting in heated
| contests, I don't see that as very bad: to put it
| crudely, it's just the cost of doing business with that
| particular voting method, but there's nothing to say the
| results are compromised as a result. What would be way,
| way more troubling for the general public is being able
| to say "but that candidate was the clear favorite, why
| did the runner-up get the seat?" after the votes are
| counted. RCV has real, provable problems that will (and
| have!) create social unrest and a skepticism of the
| election's results when something like the monotonicity
| criterion is violated, not to mention the spoiler effect
| is not completely eliminated under RCV.
|
| Further I believe bounded rationality can be applied here
| and very many people would still take the approach of
| filling in more than one bubble even in "strategic"
| settings, because people aren't perfect rational utility-
| maximizing agents, and anyway I don't see an acute
| disadvantage of using approval voting if that's the
| biggest gripe people seem to have about it.
|
| In short: think of elections in a more 21st-century-
| Nobel-winner sense, not in a rote 20th-century-econ-
| professor sense.
| themitigating wrote:
| You mean when the candidate they wanted to win doesn't?
|
| Oh, republicans are already attacking it because of Alaska
|
| https://washingtonmonthly.com/2022/09/06/sarah-palin-and-
| the...
| dane-pgp wrote:
| > I fear RCV is going to poison the well for any FPTP
| alternatives for a long time to come.
|
| Which, cynically, might be the reason it has achieved the
| level of adoption that it has so far. We at least have to
| consider the possibility that the current major parties
| will only (disingenuously) support reforms that will, in
| the long run, further entrench their duopoly.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| American republicans are consistently against RCV simply
| because it consistently makes them lose more because
| there's more broad support for more middle of the road
| contenders. Before republicans realized they should fight
| it, and started running a narrative against it, you could
| have asked any american and they would not have had a
| notable opinion on voting methods.
|
| Any fight against RCV is purely a republican fight
| against more equitable and realistic representation for
| americans. It's not hard to understand, as plenty of
| schoolkids use RCV every year for school and mock
| elections. It is strictly better than plurality voting in
| terms of getting more people elected that more people are
| at least a little happy with. It by and large results in
| a more represented public.
|
| If, by some magic, we end up in a world where politics is
| a utopia and the extremely contrived "issues" with RCV
| finally are worth caring about, THEN we can move to
| replace it, which will be easier in an environment that
| allows more nuance to politics, like RCV does.
|
| For now, RCV is an easy way to get a broadly better
| political system. It is currently only disliked by like
| 1000 turbonerds who spend their time making absurdly
| complicated voting systems to solve ever more contrived
| voting situations, situations that broadly aren't the
| problems currently facing the world, and every other
| opponent is a republican who either believes incorrect
| partisan rhetoric ("it's more than one vote!") or
| cynically understands how it will cause them to lose
| elections and for some reason think that's a bad thing.
| theptip wrote:
| I don't see a problem in the Alaska election. Perhaps I'm
| missing something? I posted this in a previous discussion
| but I'll repost because I'm keen to hear other
| perspectives.
|
| From https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-democrats-
| win-in-a...
|
| > 40 percent of voters had chosen Peltola as their first
| choice, 31 percent had chosen Palin and 29 percent had
| chosen Republican businessman Nick Begich III. Under the
| rules of ranked choice voting, Begich -- as the candidate
| with the fewest first-choice votes -- was then eliminated,
| and his votes were redistributed to whomever his voters
| ranked second.
|
| > Unsurprisingly, most of Begich's votes (50 percent) went
| to his fellow Republican, Palin. But an impressive 29
| percent went to Peltola, and 21 percent were "exhausted,"
| meaning there was no second-choice pick, and the votes were
| essentially thrown out. That combination was enough for
| Peltola to win. While Palin gained more votes from the
| redistribution than Peltola did, Peltola was starting from
| a higher total, and receiving 29 percent of Begich's votes
| was enough to keep her ahead of Palin. In the end, Peltola
| received 51 percent of the votes counted in the final
| round, while Palin received 49 percent.
|
| Sounds fair to me. Some of Begich's voters expressed a
| "Begich or nobody" preference. Many Begich voters expressed
| a "Peltola over Palin" preference. It's not clear to me why
| pairwise preferences are meaningful, they don't encode
| nuances like the above.
|
| The objection about the spoiler effect is confusing to me.
| I see that there are certain situations where ex post, you
| get some weird outcomes where _hypothetically_ ranking your
| preferred candidate lower would have helped your candidate.
| But I don't think it's possible to identify these cases ex
| ante, and I don't see how they can in practice affect
| anyone's voting strategy. (Though maybe it's enough to get
| bad press like https://electionscience.org/commentary-
| analysis/rcv-fools-pa...?)
|
| I think you can spin these technical narratives like "you
| threw your votes away because, if there had been a head-to-
| head it would have gone differently". But taking a simple
| explanation of what happened like the above, it's hard for
| me to see why the result is actively unfair.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _I see that there are certain situations where ex post,
| you get some weird outcomes where _hypothetically_
| ranking your preferred candidate lower would have helped
| your candidate._
|
| It's not even _that_ strong -- it 's outcomes where
| ranking your _second_ -most preferred candidate above
| your preferred one will help get that _second_ -most
| preferred candidate elected, as opposed to a third one
| you detest -- if you know your most preferred candidate
| won't be elected.
|
| Which makes sense, of course. But it's also "cheating" to
| manipulate the system if those aren't your actual
| preferences, and it wouldn't even work in practice
| because you'd have to know how everyone voted in the
| first place to know if it was worth it.
|
| You're right, it seems fair to me too in this instance.
| ensignavenger wrote:
| What is most interesting to me is the number of exhausted
| votes. Did those folks not pick a second candidate
| because they did not want to support either choice as a
| second, or did they not know how the voting system
| worked?
|
| It sounds like the real problem here is education, which
| will be a challenge with any different voting system, and
| some a lot more so.
|
| It will probably be better the next time around.
| NickM wrote:
| It's not nearly as complex as you're making it out to be.
| Palin was the spoiler candidate in Alaska. If Palin
| hadn't run, Begich would have won. Additionally, if Palin
| > Begich > Peltola voters had "dishonestly" voted Begich
| > Palin > Peltola, Begich would have won and those voters
| would have gotten a better outcome for themselves. By
| honestly ranking their preferences, they threw away their
| say in the outcome.
|
| Now don't get me wrong, as a Democrat there is a part of
| me that is happy Peltola won, but this was clearly a
| pretty messed up outcome given that Begich was the
| condorcet winner _and_ that Alaska is a very red state.
| Republicans are right to be upset about the way this
| election played out.
|
| Now obviously FPTP also has the possibility of spoiler
| candidates, but at least in that case it's pretty easy to
| understand the situations in which you might be throwing
| away your vote. Do you think most of those Palin voters
| had any idea that they could have elected Begich by
| voting strategically? Complex, opaque voting systems like
| this are super bad for democracy IMO.
| autoexec wrote:
| > By honestly ranking their preferences, they threw away
| their say in the outcome.
|
| When Begich came out as the loser, every one of the votes
| he got went to the voter's #2 choice which was either
| Palin or Peltola (and a surprising 29% of Begich voters
| had Peltola as their #2 choice!)
|
| The only people who "threw away their say in the outcome"
| are the ones who didn't rank their preferences. They
| basically opted out of having a vote if their one chosen
| candidate didn't win by not making a #2 choice.
|
| It's very clear with ranked choice voting when you might
| be throwing away your vote, it happens only when you
| don't specify who your vote should go to if your first
| pick doesn't have enough supporters. Every single person
| who selected a #1 and #2 choice had a say in the outcome
| of that election.
| gfunk911 wrote:
| Do we know for a fact the breakdown of 2nd choices on
| ballots where Palin was the first choice? If not, you are
| only speculating.
|
| It seems possible that Palin lost due to voters
| incorrectly expressing their preferences by not putting a
| 2nd choice. If that is a routine thing, then it is indeed
| a problem with ranked choice voting in the real world,
| but it is NOT a structural flaw as you are claiming.
| bena wrote:
| Especially since Begich only wins the Condorcet because
| he's preferable to Palin to Democrats.
|
| In a primary system, Begich doesn't even get to the
| general. So it becomes Palin against Peltola.
|
| Begich can only win in a head to head matchup in a
| general election against any single candidate. He cannot
| beat the field, because he is consistently someone's
| second choice in the overall field.
| yellowapple wrote:
| It would be an even greater shame to be stuck with first-past-
| the-post while we squabble over its replacement.
|
| I vastly prefer score or approval voting over ranked-choice,
| but I also vastly prefer even ranked-choice over FPTP and will
| be voting accordingly here in Nevada. We can always adopt score
| or approval voting later.
| malnourish wrote:
| Same. "Perfect is the enemy of good" as they say.
|
| I used to be _vehemently_ opposed to RCV; I 'm still
| _against_ it. It 's leagues better than FPTP and my hope is
| that it opens the door for improvements like STAR or anything
| that can satisfy the Condorcet criterion.
| zestyping wrote:
| It's not clearly better than FPTP. There are arguments that
| it might be a little better in terms of choosing an
| outcome, but it definitely makes auditing a lot harder, has
| implementation risks due to complexity, and significantly
| increases ballot spoilage.
|
| When you take all those factors together, I think it's
| overall worse.
| dllthomas wrote:
| I'm not convinced that instant runoff is actually better
| than FPTP.
|
| Without tactical voting (and good information to support
| it) the first thing IRV does (along with most variations
| that in practice get the label "RCV", though of course this
| doesn't apply to all ranked methods) is to throw out the
| compromise candidate that everyone likes.
|
| In the current situation, I am concerned that most people
| will prefer their particular flavor of theocracy to finding
| ways to get along (which they probably prefer to anyone
| else's flavor of theocracy). We already struggle with
| similar dynamics a bit, but it's the devil we know and I
| really don't want it magnified.
| godelski wrote:
| I want to say why the cardinal systems (STAR/Score/Approval)
| are usually better than the ordinal (Ranked/RP/Schulze). It is
| all about ,,embedding''. More efficient embedding systems mean
| you can get a higher information gain. Let's look at two
| different elections but with the same premise.
|
| Suppose you REALLY like both candidates A and B. Then suppose
| that you really dislike candidate C.
|
| Ranked:
|
| A > B > C (A/B position determined by flipping a coin)
|
| Ordinal:
|
| A:5 B:5 C:0
|
| What's interesting here is that the first (ranked) system tells
| us (embeds) that our preference for A over B is the same as our
| preference of B over C. But in the second case we are able to
| tell the system that we actually like both A and B equally and
| that the distance to C is much larger. Ranked does not capture
| how we don't like C and doesn't capture that we do like B.
| Because of this the ranked systems frequently fail the favorite
| betrayer criteria (RCV fails btw). In a realistic scenario this
| means that in a ranked system Bernie would spoil the election
| for Biden (or vise verse). Although Gary Johnson wouldn't be a
| spoiler in either Ordinal nor Cardinal I'd argue that a weak
| spoiler is less of a worry than a strong spoiler.
|
| I will also argue that Ordinal methods are far simpler to
| calculate and do statistical verification on. Ranked systems
| require a while loop where we pop an element from our array
| each iteration and reallocate that element's votes until there
| is a singular winner. Cardinal systems on the other hand are
| simply an sum argmax. This sum argmax can be done in parallel
| and also makes it far easier to verify elections with random
| subsets of votes (a fairly common practice btw). The simplicity
| of the algorithm used to tally votes is extremely important and
| increases the transparency of the election.
|
| At the end of the day, the two systems are
|
| Ranked: "Put the candidates in order of preference"
|
| Cardinal: "Rate each candidate from 0 to 5 stars"
|
| People are very used to both types of questions. I see several
| arguments saying the latter is more complicated but this
| clearly isn't true or we'd have to change the vast majority of
| surveys.
|
| I also want to state that there are no globally optimal voting
| systems. Yes, there are plenty of flaws in cardinal systems.
| But because no global optima exists we have to instead argue
| that the tradeoffs are worth it. There are some objectively
| better systems than others though. To play fair like this I
| will say that I believe that the above advantages are worth the
| slight reduction of VSE in a 100% honest election that you'd
| obtain from using either RP or Schultz style elections.
| zajio1am wrote:
| Approval voting fails in a situation that is pretty common in
| Europe (e.g. French presidential elections) - you have center
| left, center right, far left and far right candidate. If you
| vote for center left/right, you have to decide whether to also
| approve center right/left candidate, which may be contrary to
| your values, corrupt and incompetent, but at least not
| communist or fascist. That is why later-no-harm property of IRV
| is important.
| garaetjjte wrote:
| I'm not convinced that additional complexity of STAR is worth
| it compared to extremely simple score voting.
| godelski wrote:
| What's the added complexity of STAR?
|
| STAR is phase 1: sort(sum(candidates))[:2] (almost identical
| to score/approval/FPTP. We'd just take argmax instead of top
| two) and phase 2: eliminate other candidates,
| argmax(sum(candidates)) (identical to score/approval/FPTP).
|
| On the other hand RCV is a multi-round system with a while
| loop. In practice it almost never has fewer than 2 rounds
| (requires overwhelming majority, which almost never happens
| with more than 3 candidates).
|
| From an algorithms perspective RCV is more complex.
| obelos wrote:
| As a practical consideration, the runoff in STAR does offer a
| legal advantage in some districts where a runoff is legally
| mandated.
| FireInsight wrote:
| https://star.vote/ is pretty good. I've used it for some votes
| for a small community with usually more than fifteen different
| options, and it's worked pretty well!
| wizofaus wrote:
| As far as I can tell RCV is equivalent to what we've been using
| in Australia since federation to elect lower house candidates
| (we call it prefential voting and use it at all levels of
| government). I'm curious in what case "increasing your support
| for your genuine favorite can actually hurt their odds of
| winning"? I skimmed the link to the article you referenced and
| it appears that there were _two_ republican candidates which is
| the main reason neither won - I don 't believe I've ever seen a
| case here where one party had two candidates on the same ballot
| paper and I suspect it's probably illegal. I've also never seen
| a ballot paper with more than about 15 choices (and it's very
| rarely more than 10), so vote splitting is rarely a problem (it
| can be for minor parties with similar policies/leanings etc.).
| On that basis I'm pretty sure there's never been a case in this
| country where anyone has lost an election due to gaining higher
| primary levels of support - indeed it's pretty rare that the
| winning candidate doesn't have at least 35% of the primary vote
| (though exactly that happened in our recent federal election,
| as a total across all seats), and exceedingly rare for it to be
| less than 30%. There are certainly plenty of cases where the
| winner isn't the one with the highest primary vote, but it's
| typically only a few percentage points lower, and mostly
| affects the more progressive candidate because for many seats
| there are two such candidates with solid levels of support but
| only one mainstream conservative candidate.
| godelski wrote:
| > "increasing your support for your genuine favorite can
| actually hurt their odds of winning"
|
| This is referring to the monotonicity criterion[0]. The page
| has both toy examples and real world ones. It includes some
| hints about possible violations in Australia, but your voting
| system isn't very transparent so it is difficult to audit
| these situations.
|
| As for vote splitting, I think it would be better to look at
| Favorite Betrayer[1][2]. Sometimes also called the strong
| spoiler effect. This is actually a big problem. It is why
| candidates like Bernie Sanders pledge to not run as
| independent after losing the primary. If you don't violate
| this condition such pledges are entirely unnecessary.
|
| [0] https://electowiki.org/wiki/Monotonicity
|
| [1] https://electowiki.org/wiki/Favorite_betrayal_criterion
|
| [2] https://electionscience.org/library/the-spoiler-effect/
|
| [0] https://electowiki.org/wiki/Monotonicity
| tim-- wrote:
| I don't believe that there is anything stopping two
| candidates from one party. I believe I have even seen it
| before, but I can't find a reference.
| charleslmunger wrote:
| Not all ranked choice methods are identical - if you're
| interested in this topic, check out
| https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-2026611/latest.pdf
| c7b wrote:
| Feature suggestion: the system automatically tells you when you
| have a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet_paradox situation
| and offers to decide the outcome based on a coin flip instead.
|
| Only half joking there, the amount of negative results about
| ranked-choice voting in social choice theory is quite amazing.
| I'm not sure whether I'd place it on the efficiency frontier of
| the 'complex but has desirable properties' versus 'easy to
| understand but far from perfect' trade-off.
| DominikPeters wrote:
| In case there is no Condorcet winner, there is actually a more
| principled way to randomize over alternatives than just
| choosing each with the same probability, known as maximal
| lotteries (e.g., https://pub.dss.in.tum.de/brandt-
| research/fishburn_slides.pd...).
| dane-pgp wrote:
| While we're offering troll feature suggestions, I have another:
|
| Add a calculation for how many person-hours such a ballot would
| have taken if carried out by hand (based on scientifically
| validated assumptions about how long one person takes to sort
| through a stack of N votes).
|
| This would also let you give a figure for how much money had
| been saved by people entrusting their democratic process to an
| inscrutable and unaccountable online system, and therefore the
| size of the financial incentive to do so.
| metayrnc wrote:
| If I am not mistaken SurveyMonkey also has the option to create
| ranked-choice questions, no?
| tadmilbourn wrote:
| It allows you to ask the "ranking question" BUT it doesn't do
| the ranked-choice calculation with the results. So, in theory,
| you can use it to collect the votes, but you'll need to do the
| calculations by hand. I actually wrote an article on this exact
| thing as a bit of an SEO play:
| https://www.rankedvote.co/guides/applying-ranked-choice-voti...
| tadmilbourn wrote:
| Hi HN! I've been running RankedVote as a solo founder for over a
| year and have had great success (and luck) with it being used to
| educate voters in New York City and Alaska. Bill de Blasio even
| ate a piece of pepperoni pizza as the result of one contest held
| on RankedVote.
|
| BUT...what I'm looking for at this stage are use cases outside of
| direct voter education where RankedVote can be applied. By
| crossing over into everyday uses, RankedVote can better promote
| ranked-choice voting to people who are unaware of it.
|
| Recently, I've seen it used for anything from mascot naming
| contests, to monthly book club selections, to scrum
| prioritization, to deciding what character should be included in
| a new version of a video game.
|
| Question to the HN Community: Where would you use ranked-choice
| voting in your life (or at work) to make decisions?
| burkaman wrote:
| What should we get for our team lunch today?
| tadmilbourn wrote:
| Early on, I saw these relatively big spikes of traffic every
| week day in the early afternoon. Turns out it was a school
| that was voting on what game to play at recess. Similar idea.
| WORMS_EAT_WORMS wrote:
| Really well done and congrats!
|
| I think the market specifically for "Ranked-Choice Voting" is
| probably way smaller than the need for "easy/better/awesome
| polling and survey tools".
|
| Just keep that in mind as you grow and good luck with
| everything
| tadmilbourn wrote:
| Thanks for the kind words!
|
| And, you're exactly right. The online world of people
| specifically interested in tools for ranked-choice voting is
| quite small. The question I'm trying to answer is what use
| cases does ranked-choice voting work better than other
| existing survey/polling options? That way, someone could be
| looking for a solution to that specific problem. Right now,
| most of RankedVote's users are already aware of RCV and then
| try to apply that in some scenario at work where a simple
| voting tool would have been the alternative.
| clairity wrote:
| ranked choice is a primitive form of conjoint analysis, so
| that might be an avenue for exploration. marketers aren't
| always statistically rigorous in how they poll and analyze
| markets (which is one of the reasons product management
| rose in prominence, because of the promise of more analytic
| rigor). even simple versions of conjoint can be an
| informative tool in the toolbox, but the studies and the
| existing tools are expensive.
|
| i don't know for sure that there is a big enough market
| there for VC, but i'm sure a good marketer could make a
| nice business out of it.
| clolege wrote:
| Distributed chess games. One team uses ranked choice, the other
| uses approval.
|
| Seattle will be voting to adopt one of the two for city
| primaries next month, and it would be sweet way to pit the two
| systems against each other.
| mritchie712 wrote:
| "What feature should we build next?" Could be a good one. I
| don't know that it's actually a good thing to ask of your
| users, but I could definitely see people thinking it's a good
| thing to ask.
| specialist wrote:
| I've used misc voting systems in product development.
|
| Approval voting for bug triage.
|
| Ranked Choice Voting for prioritization (eg features, reqs).
|
| Roman Eval (thumbs up or down) for acceptance testing and
| hiring candidates.
|
| Using democracy at work is super light weight and fully
| transparent. Helped a lot with accountability.
|
| Initially I had to be the heavy, coercing the team to honor
| their own votes. Over time, as people grokked it, teams would
| self-enforce. aka Empowerment.
|
| Just to reiterate about administrative burden, quickly voting
| on stuff greatly reduced time spent nursing the misc bug
| tracking and project management tools. A huge win.
| goodpoint wrote:
| Please support Condorcet voting.
| nerpderp82 wrote:
| How about on HN, you only have 10 article upvotes a day, use
| them wisely.
| mnomitch wrote:
| Hi! I actually made a similar site for my own purposes -
| https://poller.io - and I've been using it with friends for a
| while.
|
| One interesting finding. I was expecting that Instant Runoff
| would be the method we all preferred. I also included plurality
| winner, Borda Count and the Condorcet winner (if there was one)
| in the list of results. After using this with friends for
| decisions, I realized that a lot of choices that did very well in
| borda count were getting eliminated in the IRV. If you have a lot
| of options in the poll, there's a good chance that an option that
| will make the majority happy gets eliminated because it has very
| few first place votes. Academically, I knew this was a
| possibility, but in practice it happened a ton. This made us
| change to borda counts as our method of choice for things (and
| then we promised to not game the system). But... if there's a
| Condorcet Winner, we always go with that.
|
| I also thought that having a borda count as the method of
| eliminating the "last place" choice in each IRV round would be
| kinda nifty. This still lets people game the system though, and
| is kind of a gross hack.
|
| Just letting you know our experience in case it is helpful for
| future options on polls! Good luck!
| skybrian wrote:
| Did you ever try star voting?
| mnomitch wrote:
| No, but only because I have been too lazy to update the code.
|
| If I had more free time, I would probably add Star and
| Approval and then try to use Star with my group of friends.
| Maybe OP can save me the trouble by adding to his site ! :)
| godelski wrote:
| Honestly, for things like "where should we eat" Approval is
| the method I do with my friends. It's quick and easy. No
| need to write anything down. Just thumbs up if you like the
| suggestion and then we take the place with the most thumbs
| up.
| nerpderp82 wrote:
| Shouldn't there be some Coq or Agda or gasp Rust code that
| implements all these voting algos that we can agree on and
| share?
| tadmilbourn wrote:
| Thanks! And I hadn't come across Poller before. Pretty cool.
| FYI - RankedVote actually uses a type of Borda Count as its
| tiebreaking mechanism. Not quite what you're saying, but is
| better than picking a name out of a hat!
|
| You bring up a lot of interesting points on what people feel
| happy with after voting. None of these systems is perfect. Each
| can be picked apart in various ways. That's why I tend to frame
| things in terms of "does this move things forward from the
| status quo?"
| mnomitch wrote:
| Oh interesting. If you don't mind me asking, what is the tie
| breaking mechanism?
|
| And totally agreed on the framing. Also, prepare yourself for
| the feedback of "we should have a runoff election with the
| top two" and then people completely rejecting the concept
| that you've already done the runoff. :)
| tadmilbourn wrote:
| Hehe...a bunch of Nate Cohn's in your friend group? :-)
|
| In the event multiple choices have the same number of votes
| and those choices are the lowest vote getters in the round,
| RankedVote calculates a Borda Score for each of those
| candidates across all ballots that were cast. Basically
| just saying "Ok, these three candidates were tied, which
| one was ranked lowest on average across the entire group of
| voters?" And then eliminate that one.
| awb wrote:
| > and then we promised to not game the system
|
| That's the key point. Unfortunately, all known voting systems
| can be gamed.
|
| Here's an interesting video that explains how they can be
| manipulated: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhO6jfHPFQU
| clolege wrote:
| Isn't Borda Count just Score voting where you enforce that
| voters can't give two options the same amount of support?
|
| I would be curious why people would prefer Borda over Score if
| so.
| mnomitch wrote:
| I'm not super familiar with score, but the advantage in this
| scenario is that voters call all input the same way and get
| borda + IRV + a potential condorcet winner.
|
| If you allowed same scores then you can't do both
| simultaneously and/or the UX gets really funky.
| clolege wrote:
| you can do both simultaneously if you count ranked ballots
| like an election office would: you throw away all tied
| rankings, and rankings that come after :)
| wnoise wrote:
| Not at all. Score Voting as usually defined is continuous on
| [0,1]. Rescaling to e.g. [1,5] doesn't change this.
| Restricting to integers on that does; but if there are fewer
| than 5 candidates, equivalent rankings can still differ for
| total scores. It's only equivalent if you pick an integer
| scale [K, K+N] with N candidates, K arbitrary.
|
| That said, I prefer score, or even approval, as that's what
| strategic score devolves to, but without huge amounts of
| information loss.
| clolege wrote:
| > if there are fewer than 5 candidates, equivalent rankings
| can still differ for total scores
|
| I'm having a hard time following, can you give an example?
|
| I'm saying that Borda allows voters to give one candidate 5
| points, one other 4 points, etc. and score would allow
| voters to give as many candidates 5 points, as many
| candidates 4 points, etc.
| wnoise wrote:
| I'm objecting to the statement that they're equivalent if
| you forbid ties.
|
| This is only true when you have as many candidates as
| score slots.
| tunesmith wrote:
| KUDOS to you for respecting the Condorcet Winner.
|
| After spending a notable portion of my life diving deeply into
| voting systems, their side effects, and the various poorly-
| thought-out arguments that people make, I basically only feel
| wincing pain when a lot of these projects come out. So I'm glad
| that the concept of the Condorcet Winner hasn't been forgotten.
|
| The IRV zealots have basically won the messaging war, using
| what I believe to be unethical tactics. IRV is not the only way
| to count RCV, but they act like it is. But power is power, so
| until society suffers enough with lousy results, it's just
| going to be the FPTP pain all over again, dressed up in
| different clothing.
| DominikPeters wrote:
| The resulting voting rule (Borda except if there is a Condorcet
| winner) is commonly known as Black's rule
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black%27s_method).
| [deleted]
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