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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

#171

Post by obelos »

clolege wrote: post #66
gamegoblin wrote: post #60

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 N…

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 th…

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.

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

#172

Post by autoexec »

NickM wrote: post #162
theptip wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 d…

> 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.

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

#173

Post by SoftTalker »

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…

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.

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

#175

Post by godelski »

wizofaus wrote: post #146
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…

> "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

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

#176

Post by breuleux »

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 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.

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

#177

Post by godelski »

zestyping wrote: post #169
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…

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. Ap…

> 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.

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

#178

Post by godelski »

NickM wrote: post #99
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…

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…

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.

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

#180

Post by buzzy_hacker »

johannes1234321 wrote: post #144
colinmhayes wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bi…

That is one solution, another is multi-member districts
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