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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

#291

Post by godelski »

crazygringo wrote: post #273
elihu wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with RCV is there's a big difference between giving an honest opinion and voting tactically. In RCV it's safe to put your first choice first if either they're an overwhelming favorite to win, or they're so weak they're sure to get eliminated right away. If it's a close three-way election, you might cause your favorite candidate to lose by ranking them first. It's hard to develop any kind of intuition arou…

> you might cause your favorite candidate to lose by ranking them first That's a flawed characterization that keeps getting repeated. As I explain in another comment below, in theory you could get your favorite candidate to win by further downranking the candidate who would otherwise win. One way of accomplishing that is to move other candidates up higher above your actual preferred candidate. But in reality, there's…

It isn't a flawed characterization. It is called the Favorite Betrayer[0] (also known as Strong Spoiler Effect) and has been seen in practice. We should also talk about rank's failure of the Monotonicity Criterion[1][2] because that's relevant here too.

To claim it is impossible in practice is to deny history.

[0] https://electowiki.org/wiki/Favorite_betrayal_criterion

[1] https://electionscience.org/library/monotonicity/

[2] https://electowiki.org/wiki/Monotonicity

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

#292

Post by godelski »

naniwaduni wrote: post #274
godelski wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably. But I don't think the public really wants their voting systems to be highly vulnerable to strategic voting. That does just give elites an edge and ends up with less equitable representation. (strategies exist for ALL voting systems. But not all strategies are equally as bad)

Also, not all "strategies" fit people's intuitive notion of "strategy", which is colored by FPTP having a really glaringly awful strategic incentive for dishonest voting.

Most cardinal systems make it difficult to vote strategically. That's actually what the difference with star and score is about. But this is also why so many in the thread are talking about monotonicity and favorite betrayer. Failing these criteria means your voting system is highly susceptible to manipulation. Essentially allowing candidates to win that shouldn't have won.

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

#293

Post by dllthomas »

manholio wrote: post #252
dllthomas wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not convinced that instant runoff is actually better than FPTP. Without tactical voting (and good information to support it) the first thing IRV does (along with most variations that in practice get the label "RCV", though of course this doesn't apply to all ranked methods) is to throw out the compromise candidate that everyone likes. In the current situation, I am concerned that most people will prefer their par…

Even if your technical argument would be correct (it's not), you would be trying to fix the problems of democracy by purposefully skewing the vote away from the desires of the electorate. That's a bad idea because it prevents democracy from working and exposing the leaders to the unfiltered democratic will of the people; so you get unaccountable leaders that can maintain power by gaming the system instead of catering…

Uh, no. Insofar as "the desires of the electorate" is a thing that exists, I am insisting that IRV sometimes does a piss poor job of picking it. In an election where 90% of the electorate prefers A to B, we shouldn't necessarily be picking A but we clearly shouldn't be picking B (especially with no indication of strength of preference); IRV can, and I think does in some cases that are both dangerous and realistic.

Getting a little more concrete:

Imagine a society split roughly evenly between 3 religions. Let's say 35% follow religion A, 30% follow religion B, 30% follow C, the remaining 5% belong to other religions or no religion. Approximately everyone with a religion (in our model; reality is more complicated but not sufficiently to make things inapplicable) prefers that society be organized as a theocracy according to their religion, would sufficiently accept secular tolerance, and violently opposes living under another religion's theocracy.

In this imaginary society, what is "the desire of the electorate"?

If everyone votes their honest maximal preference then the plurality says Theocracy A, which is violently opposed by 65% of the population! Picking secular tolerance over Theocracy A is not just something I (probably) prefer from the outside, but is actually preferred by the vast majority of the population over what IRV would pick!

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

#294

Post by autoexec »

fdsjgfklsfd wrote: post #255
autoexec wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The people who picked Palin as their first choice threw away their second choice. You don't get to rank a bunch of choices and then claim your vote didn't get counted because every one of your choices didn't win the election. People who picked Palin as their #1 choice won against Begich. Their vote went to Palin exactly as they wanted. Palin lost, but the voter who put Palin first voted for the person they wanted a…

Yes, it does mean throwing your vote away under Hare RCV. People who ranked Begich second had their vote thrown away when he was eliminated.

People who ranked Begich second still had the vote for their #1 pick counted. It doesn't matter who your #2 pick was if your number #1 pick is still in the race. That's the entire point of picking a #1 candidate.

A vote that is counted in the final contest of an election is not a vote "thrown away" even though the person they voted for lost. Voters have to be allowed to pick a candidate who ultimately doesn't have enough supporters to win an election. That's how elections work.

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

#295

Post by crazygringo »

godelski wrote: post #289
crazygringo wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think (without data, happy to be proven wrong) that the US population is fairly strongly bimodal on most issues. Many issues that people care a lot about (for better or worse...) have two clear centers of gravity, We'll you'll be happy then! :) Because this is commonly believed but actually totally untrue. There's an entire book about it, "Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America" by Morris P. Fiorina. The up…

> The upshot is basically that if you ask people binary yes/no questions (or binary left/right votes), the population appears divided, bimodal. SHOCKING! (I laughed a little too much at this comment) But this is also why surveyists tend to ask the "strongly disagree, disagree, neutral, agree, strongly agree" questions. Because it can measure the temperature better. This is effectively a type of cardinal voting too. A…

It's actually really interesting, when you look at political science literature and essayists.

You have those insisting that the population is divided and there just aren't that many centrists, and then you have those insisting that the population is centrist and there aren't that many extremists.

And they're always looking at the same exact bell curve, and then the first group decides the center is only an arbitrary 10% wide so most people are divided (45% on either side), and the second group decides that the center is an arbitrary 80% wide, so only a small number of people are extremist (10% on either side).

It's the same damn bell curve.

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

#296

Post by achr2 »

bena wrote: post #270
achr2 wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's say you have three candidates A, B, C. A is left, B is center, C is right leaning. Polling shows that voters are leaning: - 15% BAC - 15% BCA - 25% ABC - 45% CBA If everyone voted as they desired, then the instant runoff would be between B and C, with B winning with 55% of votes. If a subset of C voters instead strategically vote ACB (6%), this would change the runoff to be between A & C, with C winning 60%.

First, a run off between A and C wouldn't have C with 60%. C would have 54%, the 6% of C voters would have to come from CBA. And if A is in the runoff, that 6% stays with A. These are post facto strategies though. You can only implement that strategy if you can guarantee all of that information. Which you can only do after the election. The first problem is that polling is an estimate. If you are wrong by a couple of…

Oh I don't disagree, and am in the strong support of anything that moves away from FPP. The only addition I will make is that these (potentially unfounded) fears is what leads people to continue to vote strategically, such as voting BAC instead of ABC to avoid the potential of C using the strategy.

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

#297

Post by achr2 »

crazygringo wrote: post #271
achr2 wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's say you have three candidates A, B, C. A is left, B is center, C is right leaning. Polling shows that voters are leaning: - 15% BAC - 15% BCA - 25% ABC - 45% CBA If everyone voted as they desired, then the instant runoff would be between B and C, with B winning with 55% of votes. If a subset of C voters instead strategically vote ACB (6%), this would change the runoff to be between A & C, with C winning 60%.

And just to be clear, this makes sense. Because the relevant fact here isn't that some CBA voters put A at the front (ACB). It's that they moved B from 2nd to 3rd. So of course, that lessens support for B, so B no longer wins. People seem to present this as a flaw, when it's reflecting actual changes in voting. And this is basically impossible to do so strategically, because nobody has this level of accurate detail p…

The only issue is that the (potentially unfounded) fear of strategic voting on the other side leads people to vote strategically in the same FPP manner by voting ABC instead of BAC to avoid C. But I greatly long for anything that moves us from the anti-democratic FPP.

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

#298

Post by yellowapple »

dllthomas wrote: post #293
manholio wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if your technical argument would be correct (it's not), you would be trying to fix the problems of democracy by purposefully skewing the vote away from the desires of the electorate. That's a bad idea because it prevents democracy from working and exposing the leaders to the unfiltered democratic will of the people; so you get unaccountable leaders that can maintain power by gaming the system instead of catering…

Uh, no. Insofar as "the desires of the electorate" is a thing that exists, I am insisting that IRV sometimes does a piss poor job of picking it. In an election where 90% of the electorate prefers A to B, we shouldn't necessarily be picking A but we clearly shouldn't be picking B (especially with no indication of strength of preference); IRV can, and I think does in some cases that are both dangerous and realistic. Ge…

> If everyone votes their honest maximal preference then the plurality says Theocracy A, which is violently opposed by 65% of the population!

I'm failing to see how that's worse than FPTP, which in practice would also result in picking Theocracy A (because the 5% representing the Secular Tolerance Party would be one of those "third parties" which get blamed for spoilers under FPTP).

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

#299

Post by godelski »

crazygringo wrote: post #295
godelski wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The upshot is basically that if you ask people binary yes/no questions (or binary left/right votes), the population appears divided, bimodal. SHOCKING! (I laughed a little too much at this comment) But this is also why surveyists tend to ask the "strongly disagree, disagree, neutral, agree, strongly agree" questions. Because it can measure the temperature better. This is effectively a type of cardinal voting too. A…

It's actually really interesting, when you look at political science literature and essayists. You have those insisting that the population is divided and there just aren't that many centrists, and then you have those insisting that the population is centrist and there aren't that many extremists. And they're always looking at the same exact bell curve , and then the first group decides the center is only an arbitrar…

I don't think I see as much of a problem out of academic literature (there are clear problem groups though, not denying that), but more that the problem is how the information is conveyed to the population. Both the media perception as well as how radicals present information. I'm always reminded of John Cleese's skit on extremism[0]. When he lists the enemies of liberals and conservatives "moderates" are included in both. I think we see this a lot as we often paint people that are moderates as "on the fence." We see this with the popularity of subreddits like r/ENLIGHTENEDCENTRISM[1]. With one of the top posts suggesting that centrists see "compromise" and "a little genocide" as okay.[2] But is this not the playbook of authoritarians (right or left)? To remove all nuance from the conversation. Centrists aren't people who go to the middle of divisive opinions, they just don't cleanly fit into either camp but pull elements from both. I think nuance is the most important thing we can do to fight extremism in either direction.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXCkxlqFd90

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/ENLIGHTENEDCENTRISM/top/?t=all

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/ENLIGHTENEDCENTRISM/comments/cw2bbh...

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

#300

Post by dllthomas »

yellowapple wrote: post #298
dllthomas wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uh, no. Insofar as "the desires of the electorate" is a thing that exists, I am insisting that IRV sometimes does a piss poor job of picking it. In an election where 90% of the electorate prefers A to B, we shouldn't necessarily be picking A but we clearly shouldn't be picking B (especially with no indication of strength of preference); IRV can, and I think does in some cases that are both dangerous and realistic. Ge…

> If everyone votes their honest maximal preference then the plurality says Theocracy A, which is violently opposed by 65% of the population! I'm failing to see how that's worse than FPTP, which in practice would also result in picking Theocracy A (because the 5% representing the Secular Tolerance Party would be one of those "third parties" which get blamed for spoilers under FPTP).

I don't claim it's worse; I'm not convinced it's better. Here they behave the same, and I think it's a pretty significant failure on both their parts. If I had to argue that IRV is worse than FPTP, I'd point out that voters already know what sort of strategic voting FPTP expects of them, while IRV is often sold on the premise that voters don't need to vote strategically and so is more likely to hit those failure modes in more damaging ways as we learn... but there's a degree of devil's advocate there. I do worry that it might be worse, but I do not claim that it is.
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