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

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

#71

Post by godelski » Thu, Oct 06, 2022, 5:38 PM UTC

gamegoblin wrote: post #68

fasthands9 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is actually not the case - RCV suffers from the "center squeeze" effect [1], in which moderates are squeezed out in the early rounds. That said, things like Approval have the opposite problem, in which moderates are given an advantage (some approval people will say this is a feature, not a bug). For an edge case, consider an election with 3 factions: socialists, libertarians, and fascists. There is also a 4th ca…

> That said, things like Approval have the opposite problem, in which moderates are given an advantage (some approval people will say this is a feature, not a bug).

This is a weird way to say that representing the population is a bug.

Your example election would be a compelling argument if population preference was more of a multimodal distribution rather than closer to a unimodal distribution. Despite the US's current division, it is nowhere near as divided as your scenario.

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

#72

Post by mkoubaa » Thu, Oct 06, 2022, 5:40 PM UTC

charlesetc wrote: post #33

mkoubaa wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Don't they? Isn't that axis just "how much they like the candidate"?

The point being made about extremism hinges on the axis being "ideological left/right" rather than "how much I like the candidate"

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

#73

Post by godelski » Thu, Oct 06, 2022, 5:41 PM UTC

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…

> 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.

Do you remember what was on it? I'll just drop a few links

https://electionscience.github.io/vse-sim/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4FXLQoLDBA

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

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

#74

Post by cphoover » Thu, Oct 06, 2022, 5:42 PM UTC

I feel like drag and drop sorting would be more user-friendly

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

#75

Post by RyanCavanaugh » Thu, Oct 06, 2022, 5:42 PM UTC

fasthands9 wrote: post #59

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…

RCV-IRV doesn't encourage moderate candidates because, in a polarized environment, moderate candidates are much more likely to be no one's first choice and get eliminated as a result.

This isn't hypothetical -- you can look at the results in Seattle's City Attorney race, which strangely ended up electing a Republican to a citywide office for the first time in 20 years, and where the outcome under RCV would have been the same because the moderate candidate (the reasonably well-liked incumbent) didn't secure enough first-place votes, either in FPTP or in RCV-IRV.

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

#76

Post by godelski » Thu, Oct 06, 2022, 5:48 PM UTC

ajmurmann wrote: post #61

theptip wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 g…

IRV is hard to evaluate though. How long would it take to teach a member of the general public to evaluate IRV results? You also cannot have meaningful estimates until all results from every district are in. How long it took in New York to get any results might leave people disillusioned and opposed to anything but FPTP. Using Borda and Condorcet is also clearly a straw man, as AFAIK nobody is actually pushing for th…

> IRV is hard to evaluate though. How long would it take to teach a member of the general public to evaluate IRV results?

This is always an interesting point to me. I often hear arguments that STAR and Approval are too difficult for the voters and far more complex (there's plenty of comments here suggesting that). While I disagree, that's a matter of opinion (I think both are trivial fwiw). But on the other hand, how votes are tallied is much harder to argue. Ordinal systems use a while loop where you pop an element each iteration and reallocate votes. Cardinal methods are sum then argmax. It is a joke to think that voters would understand Ordinal methods better than Cardinal methods with respect to how votes are tallied.

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

#77

Post by theptip » Thu, Oct 06, 2022, 5:48 PM UTC

ajmurmann wrote: post #61

theptip wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 g…

IRV is hard to evaluate though. How long would it take to teach a member of the general public to evaluate IRV results? You also cannot have meaningful estimates until all results from every district are in. How long it took in New York to get any results might leave people disillusioned and opposed to anything but FPTP. Using Borda and Condorcet is also clearly a straw man, as AFAIK nobody is actually pushing for th…

> How long would it take to teach a member of the general public to evaluate IRV results?

I'm puzzled by this. You can do it with pencil and paper in a few minutes? It's simple addition. You can easily build a website that visualizes each step if you think addition is difficult for people. It's trivial to compute in a spreadsheet.

> might leave people disillusioned

This is speculative; if it is true, you can find evidence by talking to, e.g. Alaskan voters. (IOW, Citation Needed.)

> clearly a straw man

I'm simply painting a picture by recounting my experience of what happened in the last thread on HN where voting systems came up, not making a strong claim about these specific systems being the runners up. My point still stands if you substitute any other systems, in this thread for example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33111242. The point I was making had nothing to do about the merits of those specific systems; the point was that a big technical can of worms gets opened, and the average voter has no interest in digging in to compare N solutions on M technical axes, Arrow's theorem, etc. This is what people mean when they say "alternate voting systems are complicated".

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

#78

Post by mkoubaa » Thu, Oct 06, 2022, 5:48 PM UTC

mnomitch wrote: post #38

mkoubaa wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I am generally an RCV fan, but I think you're writing off this critique a bit too quickly. Even with multiple axes the critique is still correct right? And I think (far from an expert) that there's decent evidence to support hotelling's law and median voter theorem.

I dont put critiques of voters in the same category as critiques of election systems.

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

#79

Post by godelski » Thu, Oct 06, 2022, 5:51 PM UTC

bombcar wrote: post #63

godelski wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They can do that - but the game theory around "don't rate the candidate you don't want ..." stuff is way too complicated. And if it is not as simple as "Bob got the most votes, Bob won" it's going to get harder and harder to explain exactly what is going on, which is going to get people annoyed and angry. As long as the result is the same as would have come from first past the post, nobody will care.

> They can do that - but the game theory around "don't rate the candidate you don't want ..." stuff is way too complicated.

I'm not understanding your point. In cardinal systems a non rating is equivalent to a rating of zero. Just like in ordinal systems a non ranking is equivalent to ranking last place.

> And if it is not as simple as "Bob got the most votes, Bob won" it's going to get harder and harder to explain exactly what is going on

This makes it seem like you're in favor of cardinal methods actually. Tallying their votes is pretty trivial. You sum the scores of all candidates and then argmax the totals. I don't think people have a hard time understanding this. It is essentially the same as what happens with FPTP! I mean this is objectively a simpler algorithm than those used by even the simplest ordinal methods.

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

#80

Post by godelski » Thu, Oct 06, 2022, 5:56 PM UTC

theptip wrote: post #77

ajmurmann wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IRV is hard to evaluate though. How long would it take to teach a member of the general public to evaluate IRV results? You also cannot have meaningful estimates until all results from every district are in. How long it took in New York to get any results might leave people disillusioned and opposed to anything but FPTP. Using Borda and Condorcet is also clearly a straw man, as AFAIK nobody is actually pushing for th…

> How long would it take to teach a member of the general public to evaluate IRV results? I'm puzzled by this. You can do it with pencil and paper in a few minutes? It's simple addition. You can easily build a website that visualizes each step if you think addition is difficult for people. It's trivial to compute in a spreadsheet. > might leave people disillusioned This is speculative; if it is true, you can find evi…

> It's simple addition.

Not quite. The tallying algorithm is `while (no candidate > 50% of votes): pop min(candidates), reallocate_votes(min(candidates))`. On the other hand cardinal methods are `argmax(sum(candidates))`. For comparison, FPTP is `argmax(sum(candidates))` too. The only difference is that FPTP is a one-hot vector. I'd argue that the average person intuitively understands cardinal methods without any training.