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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

#141

Post by DominikPeters »

c7b wrote: post #62

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 propertie…

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...).

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

#142

Post by themitigating »

NickM wrote: post #94
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…

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…

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...

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

#143

Post by godelski »

gamegoblin wrote: post #81
godelski wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 curre…

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 does…

> 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.

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

#144

Post by johannes1234321 »

colinmhayes wrote: post #56
buzzy_hacker wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 the…

Yea what we need is to get rid of districts. Proportional representation is the only great solution.

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.

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

#145

Post by garaetjjte »

bhauer wrote: post #32

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 Vo…

I'm not convinced that additional complexity of STAR is worth it compared to extremely simple score voting.

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

#146

Post by wizofaus »

bhauer wrote: post #32

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 Vo…

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.

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

#147

Post by JTbane »

bhauer wrote: post #32

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 Vo…

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.

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

#148

Post by ensignavenger »

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…

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.

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

#149

Post by achr2 »

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.

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%.

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

#150

Post by bombcar »

godelski wrote: post #137
lucasmullens wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 posit…

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.
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