Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

rankedvote.co

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 326 posts

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

#51

Post by nerpderp82 »

mkoubaa wrote: post #30
charlesetc wrote: post #28

"How Ranked-Choice Voting elects extremists" https://psephomancy.medium.com/how-ranked-choice-voting-elec... This article recommends instead a STAR voting system which is still simple to implement and understand while not electing extremists in some cases. I would be sad to see NYC and others turn to ranked choice without considering all the alternatives.

This is quite reductive and ridiculous, people don't measure their difference from a candidate on a single axis and vote for the person with the smallest distance.

This is Neural Vector Space Voting, NVSV.

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

#52

Post by tadmilbourn »

zackmorris wrote: post #47

Could something like this be used with polling to show a discrepancy between election outcomes and what voters want? For example, for a presidential election in the US we have the electoral college results and the popular vote (which often differ). It would be nice to also have a ranked-choice result to compare against. Especially when it comes time to consider a revote or when courts become involved with elections (…

I found The Politics Industry by Katherine Gehl super enlightening and well-researched on this very idea (https://www.amazon.com/Politics-Industry-Political-Innovatio...). The basic premise is that the current "market dynamics" of Politics (when viewed like any other industry) actively disincentivizes results. Painting with a somewhat broad brush, it doesn't making sense for a politician to make progress on immigration reform because that lessens its saliency for raising money and turning out the base.

The solution proposed is a combination of "Final-Five" open primaries with ranked-choice voting in the general election. This is what just happened in Alaska and is on the ballot in Nevada in November.

Which reminds me...if you're a Nevada voter, vote YES on ballot question 3!

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

#53

Post by crazygringo »

naniwaduni wrote: post #45
crazygringo wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because of 5 candidates, there are 3 I approve, and 2 I hate. But of the 3 I approve, I love one and only reluctantly accept the other two. People often have strong feelings about their top preference, and approval rating destroys that. And then in my example, the voter is tempted to approve just 1 in order to give them a better chance of winning. (Known as bullet voting.) It's much more intuitive and less cognitive…

> And then in my example, the voter is tempted to approve just 1 in order to give them a better chance of winning. (Known as bullet voting.) This is fine. The probability with which a voter bullet votes vs votes three conveys the degree of preference for that candidates. This is not as informative as score voting on a wider range (because okay, degree of preference doesn't map perfectly linearly with probability of v…

Ranked choice absolutely conveys more information than approval. It's not as much as score voting, but it's mathematically false to say it's the same amount as approval. Among five candidates, approval would be 2^5-2=30 possibilities (almost 5 bits of information, assuming you can't approve/disapprove all because that's the same as not voting), while ranked choice would be 5!=120 possibilities (almost 7 bits of information, assuming ties aren't permitted). It's only with 3 candidates that they have equal information in terms of possibilities (2^3-2=6=3!).

And individuals don't have intransitive preferences, only populations can. (Assuming mental competence.)

Yes score voting would be ideal if it were easy to convert preferences strength into numbers, but one person's 7 can be another person's 3. There's no objective way to do it. The same as approval voting isn't objective, because there's no objective threshold. Whereas ranked voting is purely objective, a person can always express an ordered preference in a consistent, repeatable way.

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

#54

Post by kirse »

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…

Yea, it's been interesting to watch how RCV has filtered into the public consciousness over the past 5-10 years and slowly increased in terms of how many people parrot it as the answer to all our voting ills.

There was a site posted to HN years back that mathematically analyzed a ton of these voting schemes, I cannot seem to find it on Google but it was some sort of hybrid scheme that apparently has the best overall outcomes.

Edit: Given some of the comments below, some good material on these voting systems...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13161396

https://ncase.me/ballot/

https://rangevoting.org/rangeVirv.html

http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/

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

#55

Post by awb »

mnomitch wrote: 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…

> and then we promised to not game the system

That's the key point. Unfortunately, all known voting systems can be gamed.

Here's an interesting video that explains how they can be manipulated: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhO6jfHPFQU

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

#56

Post by colinmhayes »

buzzy_hacker wrote: post #37
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…

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…

Yea what we need is to get rid of districts. Proportional representation is the only great solution.

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

#57

Post by godelski »

bombcar wrote: post #46
buzzy_hacker wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This right here is the problem, these things get way too damn complicated for normal people really fast.

You don't think normal people can understand: "Rate this candidate from 0 to 5 stars?" If so, we really need to rethink a lot of how we ask for people's opinions, because this is probably the most common way.

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

#58

Post by theptip »

kirse wrote: post #54
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…

Yea, it's been interesting to watch how RCV has filtered into the public consciousness over the past 5-10 years and slowly increased in terms of how many people parrot it as the answer to all our voting ills. There was a site posted to HN years back that mathematically analyzed a ton of these voting schemes, I cannot seem to find it on Google but it was some sort of hybrid scheme that apparently has the best overall…

IRV is a Schelling Point, and I think it's important to consider it as such. The biggest critique of alternatives to FPTP is "they are too complicated". When you look at an individual system like IRV it seems hard to sustain that objection, but then a bunch of voting system nerds enter the room, and now we're comparing Condorcet to Borda, and critiquing a bunch of mathematical properties of each system, and drawing graphs of preference-space; at which point the average voter's eyes gloss over and they say "yup, too complicated".

I think this is a perfect case for the maxim "Let not the perfect be the enemy of the good". It seems IRV is sticking, and nobody has made Condorcet or Borda stick; let's go with IRV for now. Once we've abolished FPTP, and everyone is familiar with ranked systems, we can come back and argue for a better option.

As far as I'm concerned, IRV captures 99% of the utility of changing voting systems.

(All that said, I do like the work that https://electionscience.org is doing with Approval Voting, and if we can run experiments in local elections across the country with two new systems, I think that's also positive.)

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

#59

Post by fasthands9 »

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…

One thing that I think gets lost in political debate around voting is that RCV also changes the behavior/selection of the candidates. Its not just that the candidates are identical and you vote with a different mechanism - but candidates have an incentive to moderate. This may mean the outcome is the same (in terms of which candidate wins) but their positions represent the median voter more.

I would imagine approval voting and other voting systems have this too (I'm not going to pretend to know how this would turn out for all of them) and I think that gets lost a bit when analyzing the systems.

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

#60

Post by gamegoblin »

I used to be a hardcore pro-RCV supporter (I liked Yang, and Yang made RCV one of his main issues, outside UBI), but I've become a little more jaded in the last few years.

Empirically, it seems like RCV-IRV (RCV from here on) not much better than Plurality. For example, look at all the countries and cities with RCV and without. It's not at all clear to me that those with RCV are much better than those without.

Both NZ and Australia are dominated by a large center-left and center-right party coalition. Sounds familiar.

NZ has a housing crisis that is even worse than San Francisco. Australia is under the thumb of the mineral extraction industry. All sounds familiar.

(Obviously NZ and Australia beat the US on some metrics, e.g. single payer healthcare if that's your thing, but there are plenty of European countries that have equivalent or better systems without RCV)

There are hundreds of US cities with RCV. None of them are obviously better than those without. They still have all the same fights about zoning and bike lanes and public parking that other cities have.

I'd still prefer RCV over Plurality, but I don't really think it's the panacea some of its supporters thing it is.

Post reply on HN