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

"Vulnerable to bullet voting" is the same thing as "violating the later-no-harm principle," which means that some forms of ranked voting are vulnerable, while others aren't.

- Borda Count is vulnerable to bullet voting, for the same reason as Score (giving points to anyone other than your first choice makes it less likely that your first choice wins, because it increases the score of your second and third choice).

- Condorcet systems are vulnerable to bullet voting, because the ordering of your second and third choices can potentially change who the Condorcet winner is.

- Instant Runoff is "immune" to bullet voting because the ranking of choices beyond the highest non-eliminated choice are ignored. This is also directly responsible for it being vulnerable to the spoiler effect, which makes non-bullet-voting pointless (your top choice must also be the choice most likely to win the 1-1 fight at the end, which means the remainder of your choices are highly unlikely to win, so why bother?).

> Peltola beat the field. In a FPTP system, she would have just won.

FPTP sucks and does not elect representative winners, that's exactly why we need to get rid of it. RCV is just iterated FPTP and as such, carries a lot of the same baggage and problems (while adding a lot of complexity and other new problems).

> He only wins when you eliminate all other choices except one opponent

No, this is exactly backwards. Begich is the only one in this race that can win without artificially eliminating someone (which is what RCV does by ignoring lots of information on the ballots). Peltota can only win by eliminating Begich as Begich wins in the head to head, in order to get this win lots of votes that voters expressed have to be discarded.

> Democratic second choice votes for Begich only exist because Democrats would prefer him to Palin. They don't want him so much as don't want her. And if they can't get Peltola, they much rather have Begich.

That's exactly the point, the voters farthest to the right prefer Begich to Peltota, the voters farthest to the left prefer Begich to Palin, and there's a few people in the middle who prefer Begich to both. Begich was the best candidate considering the whole field of preferences - admittedly a weak compromise candidate for some, but a strong compromise candidate for others and the first choice for many (and as I mentioned before, we can't know how many consider Begich a weak compromise vs a strong compromise candidate, anything you say about the sizes of those groups is just your personal speculation).

> The only reason there's noise about Peltola's win and RCV is because she's a Democrat. Look at all the hubbub being thrown about trying to say Begich should have won.

For some people, sure, but for those of us actually trying to push for positive change this has nothing to do with democrats or republicans. This has to do with RCV not electing the condorcet winner and having a non-monotonic election.

> You'd rather the person who came in third in the general win. And don't think people wouldn't complain about that.

Yes I would, if they win the head to head vs everyone else. You're still treating FPTP like some kind of gold standard. Sorry but that's not a good metric.

> STAR is RCV/IRV with extra steps that doesn't scale.

STAR has exactly 2 steps, a summation step and then a step to compare the top two winners. RCV is a whole iteration process and thus a lot more complex and a lot less scalable. STAR is also precinct summable, whereas RCV requires tallying in a central location which is another thing which makes RCV much less scalable.

You would be largely wrong for single-victor elections, and even trivially so for those without more than three major candidates in the race (to wit: most of them). So you're going to have to make that argument.

> But the reality is that approval voting is easily subject to bullet voting manipulation, which destroys all of the information that it would otherwise contain in theory.

No, this is not the reality. At an individual level, bullet voting is part of your strategic frontier of (all sincere!) votes, but the only strategic bullet vote is for your sincere favorite who is also a likely candidate to win. It is possible to get your most preferred candidate elected over a more widely approved candidate, but this still requires a plurality of second-candidate approvers to prefer your most preferred candidate (and enough to bullet vote them!), which is, like, not the worst outcome in the world, realistically speaking.

Meanwhile, at a campaign level, it only makes sense to push bullet voting to (a) people who most prefer your candidate, whose only viable competition is a more widely preferred candidate who shares largely the same voter base, which in context is basically betting on your targeting specificity, and (b) people who are going to vote for multiple candidates, none of which are yours, who you're convincing to vote against their own interests.

Also, you don't have a 100% success rate on convincing people to bullet vote, so your ability to convince people to bullet vote your candidate is still a proxy for strength of preference. You're making it a lossier proxy, but since you're destroying information from people who you were able to convince to follow your suggested voting strategy, this is not really a winning strategy unless you're already winning.

All in all, bullet voting simply is not remotely as much of a bogeyman to approval voting as it is to some ranked voting systems. There is some degree of strategic influence available, but it certainly happens less easily than in a ranked vote and is weaker in approval voting than in pretty much any other voting system under discussion—I challenge you to find a bullet voting "manipulation" that manages to make approval voting contain less information after aggregation than your favorite ranked choice model.

> Every mathematical model must assume that individual's preferences are transitive, or we'd go mad.

It's okay to accept some error. People genuinely have non-transitive preferences. This only has to drive you mad if you insist on generating a total ordering.

Well that's the whole point I was making. In STAR if they really don't like Hillary but prefer her to Trump, they can vote Bernie 5, Hillary 1, Trump 0. Yes, they've very marginally increased the likelihood that Hillary reaches the runoff instead of Bernie, but in doing so they have ensured that in the runoff their vote will contribute to Bernie over Hillary or Hillary over Trump (depending who reaches the runoff). If they aren't willing to give up even one point on a 5 point scale in order to express that preference in the runoff, I'd argue that they have essentially admitted that their preference for Bernie to win is so strong that it overrides any of their other preferences. It's just an honest vote. It could perhaps be a miscalculated vote if they don't understand the implications of that kind of vote, but if they understand and still vote as such then it's honest.

If anything I consider this an advantage of STAR over RCV. Political polarization has gotten to a ridiculous point and we should be encouraging finding common ground. STAR helps facilitate this kind of dialog on a societal level while RCV implicitly tells people they can have their first choice without needing to find any common ground with other camps. In RCV there is not even the option to have your lower choices counted alongside your first choice in any given elimination round. STAR gives voters the ability to choose whether to compromise or not.