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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

#321

Post by manholio »

dllthomas wrote: post #317
manholio wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mo…

Sorry, I got confused about the example, you are of course correct, it's a basic center squeeze.

The IRV case here is simply a cheaper way to organize a delayed runoff; voters are usually adept at understanding the implications of strategic voting, as long as it's framed correctly: in case your preferred option does not make it to the second round, would you still go to vote, and which would be your other choice? In Europe there is a long tradition for the two round delayed runoff, but it's certainly not presented to the voters as "you can chose anybody in the order of preference and it will be magically solved by the system".

Two round is in almost any case superior to FPTP, so if you can get it by simply tweaking the ballot paper and allowing second and third choices (IRV), it's an easy upgrade.

Approval voting might be closer to a Condorcet winner in some cases, but it's not a panacea to center squeeze because it's vulnerable to honest voting. What we see in practice is a tendency to function as FPTP, as all sides have an incentive to demonize the center and train their voters to mark a single option. So, in your example, the Sunni or Shia Muslims which can't stand themselves enough to approve each other but would still prefer islam in the second round (if secularism is not available), would lose the approval vote to a well disciplined contigent of Buddhists.

IRV solves that by not providing any help to competitors in the first round, and moving the "lesser evil" decision into the second round, encouraging more honest voting. Short of some Condorcet method (which will never be practical or intelligible by the average voter), IRV is an "acceptable compromise".

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

#322

Post by ClayShentrup »

naniwaduni wrote: post #25
musingsole wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

CES has a whole page on this.

In a nutshell, the reason this works is because the people who approve only X or Y have a pretty similar X versus Y opinion as the whole electorate, just based on random chance. It's just statistical sampling principles.

https://www.electionscience.org/library/expressiveness-in-ap...

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

#323

Post by ClayShentrup »

crazygringo wrote: post #277
naniwaduni wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. No, they're both six. There are 8 unique approval votes (2^3) but two are thrown out -- the all-marked and all-unmarked, so you're left with 6, same as ranked. RCV and approval absolutely do convey equivalent information in…

No they do not convey equivalent information, because the information content isn't just the number of states, it's the encoding mechanism too.

For instance suppose you encode the position of missile strikes on some land area in a 16x16 grid, meaning 8 bits of information.

Another person uses only six bits of information, encoding the missile strike position as degrees and distance from the center point of the grid.

Then it turns out the latter method is more accurate because the missiles tend to always strike pretty close to the center of the grid.

The specific patterns of voter preference that emerge in a realistic scenario are counterintuitive and can end up being more accurately measured by the kind of expression approval voting allows. You can get people who have radically different intensity of preference but the same order of preference so that they look identical to a ranked voting method but appear different to approval voting based on their thresholds.

In addition, you have tactical behavior, as well as the efficiency of how the voting method uses the information on the ballots. When you combine all of these factors together, approval voting tends to perform better than ranked voting methods.

https://www.electionscience.org/library/expressiveness-in-ap...

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

#324

Post by NickM »

tim-- wrote: post #164
NickM wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This adds too much distortion to people wanting to express their sincere preferences, which they can easily do in RCV: A > B > C RCV actually literally has the exact same problem you're describing with voting strategically, it's just subtler and harder to understand. The problem is, if you rank A > B > C, then your subsequent preferences after A only matter if A gets eliminated. If A comes in second place, then your…

This is a feature, not a bug. The point of ranking is not to have your vote redistributed many times, but rather for your #1 preference to go to your preferred candidate. If your preferred candidate does not win, your vote gets a second chance (or more!) to get counted. In the case your describing here, the only way that C wins, is that he gets more votes than A or B.

If your preferred candidate does not win, your vote gets a second chance (or more!) to get counted.

But that's not always the case; this is exactly the point I'm trying to make. The whole problem is that your vote only gets a second chance to be counted if your preferred candidate gets eliminated. If your preferred candidate loses because somebody else wins before your preferred candidate gets eliminated, then none of your later rankings affect the outcome whatsoever. This is why you can't actually vote honestly in IRV if you want your vote to count.

Let me try to illustrate this with an example:

Let’s imagine the US switched to RCV before the 2020 election, and Mitt Romney decides to run as an independent. Now let’s look at, say, West Virgina, which is a pretty red state, and went about 70% Trump 30% Biden in the 2020 election in real life

WV Democrats are still going to vote for Biden, and they’d probably prefer Romney over Trump, so let’s say they all vote in that order, but imagine roughly a third of Republican voters in West Virgina like Romney better than Trump, so we end up with this:

45% vote Trump, Romney, Biden; 25% vote Romney, Trump, Biden; 30% vote Biden, Romney, Trump

Romney gets eliminated first, his voters fall back to Trump, and Trump wins. The Democrats all wanted Romney over Trump, but Biden was never eliminated, so their second choice of Romney had no bearing on the outcome. But, what if they’d strategically voted for the “lesser of two evils”?

now we have: 45% vote Trump, Romney, Biden; 25% vote Romney, Trump, Biden; 30% vote Romney, Biden, Trump

Now Romney is a clear winner, he has the majority of first choice votes, so nobody’s second or third choice even matters. So basically in this example, Biden was a spoiler candidate for Romney, and all those Democrats are going to be super disillusioned when they realize that the “it fixes the spoiler effect" and "you can vote honestly” lines are both wrong, and they could’ve had a better outcome if they’d voted strategically, just like in the old system.

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

#325

Post by zestyping »

crazygringo wrote: post #266
NickM wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's easy to understand and doesn't result in absurd outcomes I mean, I realize this is somewhat subjective, but "more people ranking a candidate first can cause them to lose" seems like a pretty absurd outcome to me. I'm not saying approval voting is perfect either, sure it has flaws, but at least it doesn't violate the monotonicity criterion (or a variety of other important criteria that RCV fails to satisfy).

> but "more people ranking a candidate first can cause them to lose" seems like a pretty absurd outcome to me. It sure does seem absurd, and so thankfully there's no case where RCV does that! :) There seems to be a lot of misinformation thrown around about this, where people seem to be conflating different issues. I'm not sure what your source is, but you might be misunderstanding the Favorite Betrayal Criterion... w…

"more people ranking a candidate first can cause them to lose"

https://electionscience.org/library/monotonicity/ has examples of exactly that.

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

#326

Post by fmajid »

aragilar wrote: post #246
uoaei wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is the important point: some criteria are more important than others in that the societal reactions when one or another criterion is violated are not equal and could engender different outcomes. If approval voting reduces to bullet voting in heated contests, I don't see that as very bad: to put it crudely, it's just the cost of doing business with that particular voting method, but there's nothing to say…

Do you have examples of 'RCV has real, provable problems that will (and have!) create social unrest"'?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Burlington_mayoral_electi...
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