Show HN: RankedVote – SurveyMonkey but focused on ranked-choice voting • Hacker News Board

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

#311

Post by bena » Fri, Oct 07, 2022, 8:22 PM UTC

supreme_loquat wrote: post #284

bena wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Beating everyone head to head is not beating the field. He came in third against the field. He only wins when you eliminate all other choices except one opponent. Peltola beat the field. In a FPTP system, she would have just won. 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 rath…

You're just repeating the same points without engaging with anything I wrote. You're still making the assumption that the first choice votes are the most important, and ignoring the fact that people have other preferences that they marked as well. > 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…

What you don't get the field is everyone. It's not a series of one-on-one competitions, it's a race with everyone in it.

You are trying to redefine "the field" to make it mean something not quite the same.

I'm not disagreeing that FPTP is bad. It forces us into these consolidated party situations. But the field is EVERYONE. At the same time. And you ask the voters, "Which one you like the most?" And that answer, in this case was Peltola. So Peltola beats the field. With a plurality, yes, but no one has a better plurality.

I'm not defending FPTP or treating it like a gold standard. But at the very least, the person who came in last in the general should not win the election. He's people's most second choice because for both groups where he is the second the second choice, it's only because they absolutely do not want the last person.

It's less, "He's a moderate I can live with" and more "At least he's not X". Where X is either a Democrat or Palin.

Republicans wanted a have your cake and eat it too moment. They were the ones who went with this process every step of the way until the second it gave them a result they didn't like. They kinda know that crazy wins primaries. But crazy also loses the general. So they tried to bank on getting Democrats to do the work for them. But the plan failed, because there were enough people that just like Peltola on her own.

RCV/IRV is fine. It's not perfect, but it's far better than FPTP and the results are rarely counter-intuitive.

STAR requires you to give a 0 to 5 to every candidate. The end result of the scores look a lot like RCV but with ties. Not to mention, every 0-n scale system devolves into essentially Y/N as people quickly glom onto the notion that they're the values that matter the most.

You can call STAR "two step" if you ignore the actual voting portion. That's the part that makes people work harder just to essentially rank their preferences.

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

#312

Post by tunesmith » Fri, Oct 07, 2022, 8:46 PM UTC

ClayShentrup wrote: post #309

tunesmith wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

KUDOS to you for respecting the Condorcet Winner. After spending a notable portion of my life diving deeply into voting systems, their side effects, and the various poorly-thought-out arguments that people make, I basically only feel wincing pain when a lot of these projects come out. So I'm glad that the concept of the Condorcet Winner hasn't been forgotten. The IRV zealots have basically won the messaging war, usin…

cordorcet methods are overly complicated and don't optimize the right thing. the goal is maximal social utility in the face of strategic behavior. cardinal methods are simpler and generally better at this. https://electionscience.github.io/vse-sim/VSEbasic/

> cordorcet methods are overly complicated

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33111997

> and don't optimize the right thing

Apparently "candidate that would beat all others head to head should win" isn't the right thing? You'll need to explain that.

> maximal social utility

Some folks define social utility as erring toward more passionate voters, which is a potential problem with all cardinal methods. If they don't elect the Condorcet Winner, they are fatally flawed for any election that purports to be democratic.

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

#313

Post by elihu » Fri, Oct 07, 2022, 10:42 PM UTC

LawTalkingGuy wrote: post #283

elihu wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 modera…

> The rational thing is to maximize all your votes to be 1 or 10 and nothing in between. Can't you just scale everyone's votes to the same range?

You could. That would be a reasonable thing to do.

I suppose you could even do an iterative process: rescale, remove the lowest-scoring candidate, rescale, remove the lowest-scoring candidate, and so on until there's a winner. That'd be like STAR but with multiple runoffs instead of one.

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

#314

Post by BuyMyBitcoins » Sat, Oct 08, 2022, 3:47 AM UTC

fdsjgfklsfd wrote: post #256

BuyMyBitcoins wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you mentioned is something closed primaries are designed to counteract.

Closed primaries are the reason we have a polarized two-party system.

States with open primaries suffer from the same polarization. I think the root cause of a polarized two party system goes much deeper than that.

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

#315

Post by manholio » Sat, Oct 08, 2022, 6:52 AM UTC

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…

I don't follow your example. If the religious vote according to their genuine preferences, they would pick their brand of theocracy as the first option and the secular option as the second. IRV would then eliminate two theocracies in the first round and then secularism would win by a landslide in the instant run-off.

Yes, there are games which can be played that increase the chances of some minority group in the second round, for example not listing secularism in the hope that it won't make it to the runoff. But it's a dangerous game of chicken for which the optimal strategy becomes apparent only after the results are tabulated. Alaska is a good example where even with excelent information and pooling data the Palin voters were stil unable to coordinate to skew the results. The existence of that risk is heaven and earth compared to an FPTP election which pretty much guarantees theocracy in your example.

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

#316

Post by dllthomas » Sat, Oct 08, 2022, 3:08 PM UTC

manholio wrote: post #315

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…

I don't follow your example. If the religious vote according to their genuine preferences, they would pick their brand of theocracy as the first option and the secular option as the second. IRV would then eliminate two theocracies in the first round and then secularism would win by a landslide in the instant run-off. Yes, there are games which can be played that increase the chances of some minority group in the seco…

> IRV would then eliminate two theocracies in the first round

Either I failed to communicate the situation I intended or one of us is very wrong about how IRV works.

Reducing the society to 20 people to simplify the proper language a little: We have 7 ballots that start "A;S;...", 6 ballots that start "B;S;...", 6 ballots that start "C;S;...", and one ballot that starts with "S". IRV considers the options in first place, sees that S is the least (only one person ranked it first), and eliminates that option. Which theocracy is picked will depend on things further down the list, but it will never be secularism. In the best case it will pick A, which would lose to S 13:7 in a head to head vote.

If we believe that "the appropriate compromise" between people with genuine disagreement will typically not be anyone's first choice, IRV specifically systematically excludes that appropriate compromise.

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

#317

Post by dllthomas » Sat, Oct 08, 2022, 4:39 PM UTC

manholio wrote: post #315

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…

I don't follow your example. If the religious vote according to their genuine preferences, they would pick their brand of theocracy as the first option and the secular option as the second. IRV would then eliminate two theocracies in the first round and then secularism would win by a landslide in the instant run-off. Yes, there are games which can be played that increase the chances of some minority group in the seco…

> FPTP election [...] pretty much guarantees theocracy in your example

Yes, FPTP doesn't fare better here mechanically. The advantage of FPTP (which, to be clear, I still think is terrible) is that most voters understand that they need to vote strategically and understand how to do that. IRV is often sold on removing the need to vote strategically, and it does not do that, while making the correct strategic choice more complicated than "the better of the front runners".

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

#318

Post by yellowapple » Sat, Oct 08, 2022, 5:45 PM UTC

dllthomas wrote: post #300

yellowapple wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 mode…

> Here they behave the same

Well yeah, in this particular instance they do. That doesn't mean they always do. For example, with the commonly-used Tennessee capital election scenario (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting#Tennesse...), IRV would select Knoxville while FPTP would select Memphis - still not quite optimal for everyone (Nashville would probably be the ideal winner in a "perfect" electoral system), but good enough for the majority and a strict improvement over FPTP.

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

#319

Post by dllthomas » Sat, Oct 08, 2022, 7:17 PM UTC

yellowapple wrote: post #318

dllthomas wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mode…

> Here they behave the same Well yeah, in this particular instance they do. That doesn't mean they always do. For example, with the commonly-used Tennessee capital election scenario ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting#Tennesse... ), IRV would select Knoxville while FPTP would select Memphis - still not quite optimal for everyone (Nashville would probably be the ideal winner in a "perfect" electoral…

Of course they don't always; certainly IRV is sometimes mechanically better. I believe we can construct examples where FPTP would happen to work out better given the same honest votes, although I do think they're more contrived - see below for details. I am more worried about what happens in practice, though; as I said, people understand with FPTP that they need to vote strategically and understand how to do that.

Contrived scenario for FPTP picking the Condorcet winner while IRV fails to:

Back to the "which theocracy, or do we just tolerance?" question, but now each religion has at least two candidates and secular tolerance has a bigger constituency.

    19% S, ...
    16% A1, A2, S, ...
    15% A2, A1, S, ...
    14% B1, B2, S, ...
    13% B2, B1, S, ...
    12% C1, C2, S, ...
    11% C2, C1, S, ...

FPTP picks S, sort of by chance, which is also the Condorcet winner. IRV consolidates the C votes behind C1, then the B votes behind B1, then the A votes behind A1, then discards S.

I think that works out, FPTP makes the right choice for sort of the wrong reason while IRV makes the wrong choice. But I do think the much bigger concern is FPTP-with-strategic-voting behaving better (or at least no worse) than IRV-with-whatever-happens-in-practice.

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

#320

Post by DemocracyFTW2 » Sun, Oct 09, 2022, 2:24 PM UTC

crazygringo wrote: post #88

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 just want to make clear for others: this "ranking" is just bhauer's opinion. Since some people here might interpret it as being presented as objective fact or some consensus opinion. There are a lot of pros/cons to all of the richer voting systems, usually categorized as approval voting, ranked voting, and score voting, in terms of increasing information. But there is absolutely no consensus that approval or score…

There's no way that it would be a good idea to choose a system (ranked choice) that has more complex rules while having known defects over an alternative, simpler system (approval voting) that apparently (based on Wikipedia's short discussion) lacks those defects and has an overall favorable performance when it comes to resistance against tactical voting. FWIW reading the decision rules for ranked choice puts me off.

Purely in theory, one would probably prefer a system where all voters have to rank all the candidates; in practice, however, all of voting, validating, counting, applying the rules, and understanding the rules is significantly more difficult than approval voting where a candidate's points is simply the number of times a voter has marked their name on the ballot. You can (generally or for more important decisions) amend approval voting with a quorum, minimum percentage of approval, or minimal distance between first and second places without damaging the system with too much complexity, something I cannot even fathom how to achieve with ranked choice.