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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

#191

Post by wizofaus »

tim-- wrote: post #161
wizofaus wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Doesn't seem compatible with the idea of "two-party preferred" voting which is what's actually used in practice here, though I'm not 100% clear as to whether that's explicitly different to preferential voting/RCV.

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

#192

Post by aldonius »

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…

Whether later-no-harm is a feature or a bug is the biggest difference, I think, between people who like STV/IRV and people who dislike it.

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

#193

Post by elihu »

garaetjjte wrote: post #145
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.

Score voting (also known as range voting) is not a very good system to use in a real election because there's a huge risk that, on a scale of 1 to 10, the extremists will all give their candidate a score of 10 and everyone else 1, whereas the moderates will score their candidates, say, 7 or 8 and score the ones they don't like 3 or 4. The extremists could thus prevail despite being significantly outnumbered by moderates.

Or in other words, it's not safe to vote honestly in a score voting system because you're throwing your voting influence away. The rational thing is to maximize all your votes to be 1 or 10 and nothing in between.

Approval voting is just that. Basically it avoids the problem by forcing everyone to vote tactically.

STAR voting approaches it differently, by using score voting to select the top two, and then doing a runoff with the votes maximized. (Under STAR there's a risk that you might have two extremist ideological clones that make it to the runoff.)

I think plain score voting could work reasonably well in a primary.

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

#194

Post by creata »

DominikPeters wrote: post #141
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... ).

I love this idea: it feels very parsimonious, and it's optimal (in a very narrow sense) by definition. I can't find much criticism of it, though, aside from:

https://groups.google.com/g/electionscience/c/wT1_hN38b8s

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

#195

Post by aldonius »

buzzy_hacker wrote: post #180
johannes1234321 wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Depends on your tradeoffs.

If you elect, oh, 5 people in each district then your proportionality is still granular to about 17% of the vote in the district (for single member districts it's granular to about 50%, of course). And your districts are 5x as large as single member districts are for the same number of representatives. What it does give you though is better electability for local independents.

With mixed-member proportional you can easily get down to couple-percent granularity while maintaining medium-size districts (typically twice as large as single-member).

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

#196

Post by elihu »

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…

> "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."

That is a real thing. I don't remember the name for it though.

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

#197

Post by creata »

dane-pgp wrote: post #126
tadmilbourn wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

> 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 Republi…

If the problem was ballot exhaustion, couldn't that have been solved by doing what Australia does, i.e. asking voters to rank all the candidates? That doesn't seem like a problem with instant runoff voting itself.

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

#198

Post by aldonius »

wizofaus wrote: post #191
tim-- wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Doesn't seem compatible with the idea of "two-party preferred" voting which is what's actually used in practice here, though I'm not 100% clear as to whether that's explicitly different to preferential voting/RCV.

Two party preferred is more a statistical count done on the assumption that {Labor, Coalition} = {Government, Opposition}. Of course it'll be decreasingly relevant now if the teals can stick.

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

#199

Post by godelski »

lostdog wrote: post #117
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…

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…

If centrist is defined by the minimization of distance between a population's preference and a candidate's position then I don't see the problem. Why would you want an extremist? Or why would you want someone that is less representative of the population as a whole? Isn't the point of democracy to minimize this distance?

I'd actually argue that if approval was used Bernie would have won. One can vote Bernie honestly but also approve of Hillary as a safety. And this would have had a larger edge with Score or STAR. Bernie was quite popular and frankly a lot of people that also voted Trump also liked Bernie because he was an outsider.

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

#200

Post by Wowfunhappy »

SoftTalker wrote: post #173
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. S…

I agree, but I'd argue that instant-runoff/RCV is the second-easiest to understand, by far, while also being much better than simple plurality voting. Which is why I strongly favor instant-runoff.
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