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

rankedvote.co

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

#21
post #13
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…

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.

I'm not super familiar with score, but the advantage in this scenario is that voters call all input the same way and get borda + IRV + a potential condorcet winner.

If you allowed same scores then you can't do both simultaneously and/or the UX gets really funky.

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

#22
post #9

A question and a comment: 1. Would it be straightforward to add other voting systems? The easiest one to add would be approval voting ("Check off any option you'd support"). This has very similar benefits to ranked voting, and is more appropriate in many situations. 2. Your description of "How Ranked-Choice Voting Works" describes the "first round" and then the "next round" and "repeat until a winner is found." While…

On #1 -- It could be, but trying to stay narrowly focused. There are some great services out there like OpaVote that do a wide array of voting options and calculation methods.

On #2 -- That's a great point. And one that hopefully people start to better understand by using RankedVote and seeing all the "Rounds" happen at once. But, yeah, for many it's a new term. How would you make it more clear?

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

#23

though I think the app looks great. I’ve never seen the point of ranked choice. Approval voting seems faster to vote, easier to implement and explain

Because of 5 candidates, there are 3 I approve, and 2 I hate. But of the 3 I approve, I love one and only reluctantly accept the other two. People often have strong feelings about their top preference, and approval rating destroys that. And then in my example, the voter is tempted to approve just 1 in order to give them a better chance of winning. (Known as bullet voting.) It's much more intuitive and less cognitive…

Even in your situation it doesn’t make sense to me to use ranked choice. Might as well use score voting so you can say how much more you prefer one candidate to another.

All voting systems have drawbacks, but I think approval is best relative to effort and impact.

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

#24

Hi HN! I’ve been running RankedVote as a solo founder for over a year and have had great success (and luck) with it being used to educate voters in New York City and Alaska. Bill de Blasio even ate a piece of pepperoni pizza as the result of one contest held on RankedVote. BUT…what I’m looking for at this stage are use cases outside of direct voter education where RankedVote can be applied. By crossing over into ever…

What should we get for our team lunch today?

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

#25

though I think the app looks great. I’ve never seen the point of ranked choice. Approval voting seems faster to vote, easier to implement and explain

Isn't approval voting just a signified form of Ranked Choice Voting -- one without prioritization? So the strength of RCV would then be more built in tie-breaking.

No. Approval voting is actually a minimized score voting system, and although intuitively a two-point feels like this should convey less information, the way the aggregation rule works (straight addition—or specifically in the approval voting case, tallying), you're actually extracting significantly more information out of a set of approval votes than you would from a ranked choice vote.

To put it another way: given a (sufficiently large) set of [0,1] score votes, you can generate a set of approval votes that give a very good estimate for the score voting results by mapping each score vote to an approval vote by randomly picking a number in [0,1) for each vote and marking options scored above that threshold. Handwaving a bit, this implies that at scale approval voting and arbitrary-precision score voting give the same results with pretty good probability.

Now, score voting with arbitrary precision pretty clearly conveys more information than ranked choice! You can extract an RCV from a score vote directly, but this loses substantial information about how far apart the options were rated. Conversely, if you extract a score vote from an RCV, you ... well, you can get something like Borda count. For other RCV aggregation algorithms a score vote extraction is not quite as clean, but it's substantially less clear whether the information "lost" is real or an accidental artifact of the RCV itself. Certainly you can argue all day over the merits of Borda count and variants vs other IRV aggregation algorithms, but then score voting with arbitrary precision not only strictly dominates Borda count, but also is clearly conveying additional information about degree of preference on top of that which is obviously useful and not encoded in ranked choice votes at all!

Bonus: a surprisingly large number of decisions are dominated by no more than three viable choices that are clearly preferred over all others. When selecting for among three options, there are seven unique approval votes (the all marked/unmarked votes, expressing no preference, are equivalent), and only six ranked unique choice votes. It should be pretty clear that RCV and approval don't convey equivalent information in this case!

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

#26
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…

Did you ever try star voting?

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

#27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks! And I hadn't come across Poller before. Pretty cool. FYI - RankedVote actually uses a type of Borda Count as its tiebreaking mechanism. Not quite what you're saying, but is better than picking a name out of a hat! You bring up a lot of interesting points on what people feel happy with after voting. None of these systems is perfect. Each can be picked apart in various ways. That's why I tend to frame things in…

Oh interesting. If you don't mind me asking, what is the tie breaking mechanism? And totally agreed on the framing. Also, prepare yourself for the feedback of "we should have a runoff election with the top two" and then people completely rejecting the concept that you've already done the runoff. :)

Hehe...a bunch of Nate Cohn's in your friend group? :-)

In the event multiple choices have the same number of votes and those choices are the lowest vote getters in the round, RankedVote calculates a Borda Score for each of those candidates across all ballots that were cast. Basically just saying "Ok, these three candidates were tied, which one was ranked lowest on average across the entire group of voters?" And then eliminate that one.

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

#28
"How Ranked-Choice Voting elects extremists"

https://psephomancy.medium.com/how-ranked-choice-voting-elec...

This article recommends instead a STAR voting system which is still simple to implement and understand while not electing extremists in some cases. I would be sad to see NYC and others turn to ranked choice without considering all the alternatives.

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

#29

Hi HN! I’ve been running RankedVote as a solo founder for over a year and have had great success (and luck) with it being used to educate voters in New York City and Alaska. Bill de Blasio even ate a piece of pepperoni pizza as the result of one contest held on RankedVote. BUT…what I’m looking for at this stage are use cases outside of direct voter education where RankedVote can be applied. By crossing over into ever…

What should we get for our team lunch today?

Early on, I saw these relatively big spikes of traffic every week day in the early afternoon. Turns out it was a school that was voting on what game to play at recess. Similar idea.

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

#30

"How Ranked-Choice Voting elects extremists" https://psephomancy.medium.com/how-ranked-choice-voting-elec... This article recommends instead a STAR voting system which is still simple to implement and understand while not electing extremists in some cases. I would be sad to see NYC and others turn to ranked choice without considering all the alternatives.

This is quite reductive and ridiculous, people don't measure their difference from a candidate on a single axis and vote for the person with the smallest distance.
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