Live data from Hacker News

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

rankedvote.co

201–210 of 326 posts

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

#201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What's the added complexity of STAR? STAR is phase 1: sort(sum(candidates))[:2] (almost identical to score/approval/FPTP. We'd just take argmax instead of top two) and phase 2: eliminate other candidates, argmax(sum(candidates)) (identical to score/approval/FPTP). On the other hand RCV is a multi-round system with a while loop. In practice it almost never has fewer than 2 rounds (requires overwhelming majority, which…

> From an algorithms perspective RCV is more complex.

Perhaps, but people aren't computers.

It's admittedly difficult to score this objectively, but I find RCV much easier to understand.

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

#202
post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if there are fewer than 5 candidates, equivalent rankings can still differ for total scores I’m having a hard time following, can you give an example? I’m saying that Borda allows voters to give one candidate 5 points, one other 4 points, etc. and score would allow voters to give as many candidates 5 points, as many candidates 4 points, etc.

I'm objecting to the statement that they're equivalent if you forbid ties. This is only true when you have as many candidates as score slots.

> It's only equivalent if you pick an integer scale [K, K+N] with N candidates, K arbitrary.

or [0, K], K arbitrary.

because you can give multiple candidates the same amount of support in Borda if it is 0.

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

#203
I'm glad there's plenty of people here mentioning the Condorcet Winner. Because that's the one and only voting property that I can't compromise on. If there is a Condorcet Winner, a voting system that doesn't choose it is useless. But it's not like IRV has to be entirely thrown out. As some have suggested, it would be just fine to use a hybrid system like "pick Condorcet Winner if it exists, use [IRV/STAR/etc] otherwise".

I'd like more people to talk about Ranked Pairs / Tideman. It satisfies a ridiculous number of voting criteria, even more than Schulze, but with the huge advantage that it's explainable to a layperson. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranked_pairs

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

#204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> One can vote Bernie honestly but also approve of Hillary as a safety.

No, that's the thing. Many people want to express their preference, and really really didn't want to "approve" of these two people at the same level. It's exactly the same with...

> Bernie was quite popular and frankly a lot of people that also voted Trump also liked Bernie because he was an outsider.

...where these people may have felt positively about Bernie, but they really really preferred Trump, and they would not have "approved" of Bernie if that meant putting him at the same level as Trump.

So now you have two groups of people who would have preferred Bernie as their 2nd place choice, but decide not to "approve" him in order to help their 1st place choices win. Supporters of approval voting just keep ignoring this dynamic of how real people vote in the real world.

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

#205
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 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…

> "And, more importantly, RCV is a stepping stone to multi-member district STV proportional voting"

I agree that proportional representation is a huge deal, but I suspect we can do better than STV by changing what the election results mean. Currently in every system I know of we treat it as a binary choice; a candidate is either a member of the set of candidates who won, or they aren't.

A different way to do it is to allow every candidate who receives some minimum threshold level of support to be elected, but when voting on issues each elected person's influence is weighted by the level of support they received in the election.

This sort of system is compatible with FTPT, RCV, or approval-voting style ballots, but the differences matter less as long as you can say of the vast majority of voters (assuming an omniscient view -- privacy of votes would obscure the actual data) that that voter clearly has a representative in congress, and that voter delegated the same amount of influence to that representative as any other voter. (People who only voted for fringe candidates that don't meet the minimum threshold lose out, but that would probably be rare among people who actually pay attention to politics and aren't casting a protest vote.)

If this were enacted for the U.S. House of Representatives for example, the likely outcome would be that each state would have at least one Republican and at least one Democrat who would wield different amounts of power depending on how popular Republicans and Democrats are in that state. You'd also have Libertarians and Greens and Independents and whatever else. A state might have two representatives after one election and ten after another, and it wouldn't be a problem because influence is the same.

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

#206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the added complexity of STAR? STAR is phase 1: sort(sum(candidates))[:2] (almost identical to score/approval/FPTP. We'd just take argmax instead of top two) and phase 2: eliminate other candidates, argmax(sum(candidates)) (identical to score/approval/FPTP). On the other hand RCV is a multi-round system with a while loop. In practice it almost never has fewer than 2 rounds (requires overwhelming majority, which…

> From an algorithms perspective RCV is more complex. Perhaps, but people aren't computers. It's admittedly difficult to score this objectively, but I find RCV much easier to understand.

Much easier to understand from the voter perspective of the tallier perspective? From the voter perspective I find them fairly equivalent and both are frequently used in the everyday world (scoring might be even more considering 5 star reviews). But from a tallying perspective I think it is very hard to argue that RCV is substantially easier. Again, the score/approval algorithm is identical to the FPTP algorithm (which is trivial). It is simply argmax(sum(candidates)). Just sum the totals in an excel file and pick the largest number. I don't know a single person that has a hard time understanding this and I suspect if they did they would have an even harder time understanding how to tally RCV.

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

#207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> One can vote Bernie honestly but also approve of Hillary as a safety. No, that's the thing. Many people want to express their preference, and really really didn't want to "approve" of these two people at the same level. It's exactly the same with... > Bernie was quite popular and frankly a lot of people that also voted Trump also liked Bernie because he was an outsider. ...where these people may have felt positivel…

So I think your points are valid. I also just want to state that pretty much every cardinal voter I know prefers STAR then Score then Approval. I'm STAR 5, Score 5, approval 4 (only slight preference of STAR over Score). But I think that resolves your concerns. It is just that in practice we find that Approval is easier to argue for and is good enough. From a personal stand point I'll argue with technical people about voting systems if we got approval but I wouldn't be an evangelist anymore.

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

#209
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'll be using yours over the OP's.

Theirs has a sign in/ sign up wall; yours I get to use right away.

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

#210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> From an algorithms perspective RCV is more complex. Perhaps, but people aren't computers. It's admittedly difficult to score this objectively, but I find RCV much easier to understand.

Much easier to understand from the voter perspective of the tallier perspective? From the voter perspective I find them fairly equivalent and both are frequently used in the everyday world (scoring might be even more considering 5 star reviews). But from a tallying perspective I think it is very hard to argue that RCV is substantially easier. Again, the score/approval algorithm is identical to the FPTP algorithm (whi…

With STAR, it's harder to understand the affect of your vote.

RCV means: "I'd like this candidate, but if he can't win, I'll take this candidate instead." (And so on down the list of candidates.) Most people understand the concept of runoff elections. And, it's very very obvious that adding second and third choice candidates will never make your first choice less likely to win (on your individual ballot).

Under STAR, the effect of your ratings are less clear.

Post reply on HN