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

81–90 of 326 posts

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

#81

Post by gamegoblin »

godelski wrote: post #71
gamegoblin wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 curre…

To be clear, I personally prefer approval to IRV. But raw approval gives undue advantage to moderates. Approval-to-runoff being clearly superior than raw approval, for this reason. And STAR being a little bit better than that.

The RCV people's main criticism of Approval is that it doesn't allow you to express different levels of support, and they aren't totally wrong (even though their preferred mechanism of IRV doesn't get them there, either).

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,

e.g. for gun control and abortion most people are in the orbit of a "mostly ban" or "mostly allow" group, with very few people falling into some nuanced middle ground.

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

#82

Post by elihu »

godelski wrote: post #57
bombcar wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 around how your vote will impact the race in these situations -- I think in the long run voters tend to learn that voting for third parties isn't safe, so two parties continue to dominate.

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

#84

Post by malnourish »

yellowapple wrote: post #64
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…

It would be an even greater shame to be stuck with first-past-the-post while we squabble over its replacement. I vastly prefer score or approval voting over ranked-choice, but I also vastly prefer even ranked-choice over FPTP and will be voting accordingly here in Nevada. We can always adopt score or approval voting later.

Same. "Perfect is the enemy of good" as they say.

I used to be vehemently opposed to RCV; I'm still against it. It's leagues better than FPTP and my hope is that it opens the door for improvements like STAR or anything that can satisfy the Condorcet criterion.

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

#85

Post by godelski »

mnomitch wrote: post #34
skybrian wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you ever try star voting?

No, but only because I have been too lazy to update the code. If I had more free time, I would probably add Star and Approval and then try to use Star with my group of friends. Maybe OP can save me the trouble by adding to his site ! :)

Honestly, for things like "where should we eat" Approval is the method I do with my friends. It's quick and easy. No need to write anything down. Just thumbs up if you like the suggestion and then we take the place with the most thumbs up.

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

#86

Post by godelski »

gamegoblin wrote: post #60

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 N…

You might want to look into cardinal methods (I have a longer post above). They are not vulnerable to the strong spoiler effect (when you like two candidates a lot they can end up splitting the vote in RCV). The most popular ones are STAR and Approval. They're both trivial to implement, infinitely scalable, and trivial to understand the tallying process (all while providing high VSE).

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

#87

Post by elihu »

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.

It might have been "To Build a Better Ballot":

https://ncase.me/ballot/

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

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

#88

Post by crazygringo »

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 are better than ranked. (In my opinion, ranked comes out ahead, and I talk about why in another comment here.)

But most of all, ranked choice is what has the growing momentum, as a lot of reform organizations have concluded it's the best practical solution. But what's most important is that we adopt one of them, and it would be a shame to spend our effort squabbling over which alternative, than giving support to the one that has the most momentum and chance of succeeding now. We're really only even having this conversation now because of the success reform groups have had in promoting ranked voting.

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

#89

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#90

Post by godelski »

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.

> people don't measure their difference from a candidate on a single axis and vote for the person with the smallest distance.

Good news, that's not how it works. You are minimizing the distance in a hyperspace, not a single axis. People draw a singular axis (or two) to simplify and explain the concept. But still, the distance is measured in a hyperspace.

Post reply on HN