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Show HN: RankedVote – SurveyMonkey but focused on ranked-choice voting

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Re: Show HN: RankedVote – SurveyMonkey but focused on ranked-choice voting

#131

Post by bena »

theptip wrote: post #110
NickM wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 l…

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…

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.

Re: Show HN: RankedVote – SurveyMonkey but focused on ranked-choice voting

#132

Post by lambertsimnel »

tunesmith wrote: post #101
crazygringo wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> ranked choice is what has the growing momentum Using that as justification for why ranked choice should be adopted is circular reasoning.

To the extent that the real victory would be replacing plurality voting, but the current progress is specific to a particular alternative, I don't think it is circular. Of course, it would be a circular argument for which system would be best.

Re: Show HN: RankedVote – SurveyMonkey but focused on ranked-choice voting

#133

Post by godelski »

theptip wrote: post #119
godelski wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 tr…

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 can…

> 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.

Re: Show HN: RankedVote – SurveyMonkey but focused on ranked-choice voting

#134

Post by fasthands9 »

RyanCavanaugh wrote: post #75
fasthands9 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

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.

Re: Show HN: RankedVote – SurveyMonkey but focused on ranked-choice voting

#135

Post by godelski »

fasthands9 wrote: post #116
godelski wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 po…

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.

Re: Show HN: RankedVote – SurveyMonkey but focused on ranked-choice voting

#136

Post by mrguyorama »

dane-pgp wrote: post #100
NickM wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 l…

> I fear RCV is going to poison the well for any FPTP alternatives for a long time to come. Which, cynically, might be the reason it has achieved the level of adoption that it has so far. We at least have to consider the possibility that the current major parties will only (disingenuously) support reforms that will, in the long run, further entrench their duopoly.

American republicans are consistently against RCV simply because it consistently makes them lose more because there's more broad support for more middle of the road contenders. Before republicans realized they should fight it, and started running a narrative against it, you could have asked any american and they would not have had a notable opinion on voting methods.

Any fight against RCV is purely a republican fight against more equitable and realistic representation for americans. It's not hard to understand, as plenty of schoolkids use RCV every year for school and mock elections. It is strictly better than plurality voting in terms of getting more people elected that more people are at least a little happy with. It by and large results in a more represented public.

If, by some magic, we end up in a world where politics is a utopia and the extremely contrived "issues" with RCV finally are worth caring about, THEN we can move to replace it, which will be easier in an environment that allows more nuance to politics, like RCV does.

For now, RCV is an easy way to get a broadly better political system. It is currently only disliked by like 1000 turbonerds who spend their time making absurdly complicated voting systems to solve ever more contrived voting situations, situations that broadly aren't the problems currently facing the world, and every other opponent is a republican who either believes incorrect partisan rhetoric ("it's more than one vote!") or cynically understands how it will cause them to lose elections and for some reason think that's a bad thing.

Re: Show HN: RankedVote – SurveyMonkey but focused on ranked-choice voting

#137

Post by godelski »

lucasmullens wrote: post #93
elihu wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 arou…

> If it's a close three-way election, you might cause your favorite candidate to lose by ranking them first. Could you explain that? I can't think of a situation where putting the candidate I want to win as #1 would cause them to lose. Ranking other close candidates as #2/#3 could cause my #1 to lose, but I don't think voting for someone as #1 alone would possibly harm them.

So what I think the parent is referring to is called the Favorite Betrayer Criteria[0]. The short is that there are two forms of the spoiler effect: strong and weak. RCV handles the weak case but does not handle the strong case. I explain part of why cardinal methods handle the strong case in this comment[1]. The truth is that we're far more concerned with the strong case than weak case because from our current position this is the more frequent type of spoiler (and arguably is more frequent in general).

[0] https://electowiki.org/wiki/Favorite_betrayal_criterion

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33111242

Re: Show HN: RankedVote – SurveyMonkey but focused on ranked-choice voting

#138

Post by AtNightWeCode »

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.

Re: Show HN: RankedVote – SurveyMonkey but focused on ranked-choice voting

#139

Post by DominikPeters »

mnomitch wrote: post #5

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 tha…

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).

Re: Show HN: RankedVote – SurveyMonkey but focused on ranked-choice voting

#140

Post by clolege »

wnoise wrote: post #123
clolege wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't Borda Count just Score voting where you enforce that voters can't give two options the same amount of support? I would be curious why people would prefer Borda over Score if so.

Not at all. Score Voting as usually defined is continuous on [0,1]. Rescaling to e.g. [1,5] doesn't change this. Restricting to integers on that does; but if there are fewer than 5 candidates, equivalent rankings can still differ for total scores. It's only equivalent if you pick an integer scale [K, K+N] with N candidates, K arbitrary. That said, I prefer score, or even approval, as that's what strategic score devol…

> 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.

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