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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

#151

Post by gamegoblin »

godelski wrote: post #143
gamegoblin wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ma…

> 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.

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

#152

Post by [deleted] »

crazygringo wrote: post #88
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 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…

[deleted]

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

#153

Post by crazygringo »

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…

> 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.

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

#154

Post by garaetjjte »

JTbane wrote: post #147
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.

Doing so would be ill-advised because it increases chances of winning for candidates that you actually dislike.

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

#156

Post by garaetjjte »

unholiness wrote: post #127
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…

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.…

>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)

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

#157

Post by notriddle »

JTbane wrote: post #147
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.

The only voting system that isn't "vulnerable" to bullet voting is FPTP, since it obligates you to bullet vote.

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

#158

Post by NickM »

crazygringo wrote: post #112
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…

> 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 cou…

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).

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

#159

Post by barbariangrunge »

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…

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

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

#160

Post by bfung »

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…

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.

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