Approval Voting versus Instant Runoff Voting • Hacker News Board

Re: Approval Voting versus Instant Runoff Voting

#51

Post by notahacker » Thu, Apr 04, 2019, 2:41 PM UTC

jadell wrote: post #38

shawabawa3 wrote: post #4

Does Approval Voting really pass the "favourite betrayal criterion"? There are scenarios where if you don't vote for both Good and Ideal, bad will win, and scenarios where if you do vote for both Good and Ideal, Good will win (over Ideal) You obviously don't know which scenario you're in when you vote, so you don't know whether you should vote for both good+ideal or just ideal - both options can cause a worse result…

Good winning over Ideal is a desired outcome when Ideal doesn't have the votes to win. That's one of the main attractions of non-plurality voting. The point of approval voting is not to rank candidates as Ideal > Good > Bad, that's what IRV is. Approval voting says, "These candidates are equally acceptable to me, so I'll be happy if any of them win over the candidates I didn't vote for."

Sure, but what the OP is saying is that in practice there's a massive tactical decision over whether to vote for "good" or not in a tight race, because "these candidates are equally acceptable to me" is a relatively rare situation

Re: Approval Voting versus Instant Runoff Voting

#52

Post by alistairSH » Thu, Apr 04, 2019, 2:45 PM UTC

foobarchu wrote: post #42

kbutler wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, approval voting leaves the door open for some tactical voting. So if candidate #1 would win a simple majority (50.01% of voters), but is absolutely hated by everyone else, but #2 is "acceptable" or second best to 100% of the voters, should #1 win? We are used to the binary "simple majority takes all" in elections, but maybe the compromise "everybody is pretty OK with this one" _should_ win. If it were a group of…

I'm not totally convinced that particular compromise should win. The issue I have with it is whether political candidates should have to please everyone. Using that strategy would likely lead to a lot of charismatic but ineffective people getting elected. None of big issues would get any sort of resolution, because the candidates that the most people are ok with are the ones with the fewest controversial stances.

But, the alternative is the dysfunctional partisan mess we have in the US. If parties split government, nothing gets done (save a lot of finger-pointing and chest-thumping). If a single party controls government, "progress" is made, but that progress is likely to be extreme and to the displeasure of a massive portion of the electorate.

Re: Approval Voting versus Instant Runoff Voting

#53

Post by notahacker » Thu, Apr 04, 2019, 2:51 PM UTC

barry-cotter wrote: post #27

lupire wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main benefit of FPTP, for third parties, is that they can hijack elections by acting as "anti-tiebreaker" (Threatening to turn their nearest ally into a lose by joining the election, unless that nearest ally adopts their platform). This is why third parties generally (and openly) advocate for FPTP. Of course, the simple and well-tested solution is to reduce the power of the Executive, move power to Parliament, an…

> The main benefit of FPTP, for third parties, is that they can hijack elections by acting as "anti-tiebreaker" (Threatening to turn their nearest ally into a lose by joining the election, unless that nearest ally adopts their platform). This is why third parties generally (and openly) advocate for FPTP. This isn’t true in the U.K., the only country where a third party recently tried electoral reform in a country wit…

True, but then the Lib Dems were succeeded by UKIP as the third party and the electoral threat they posed to the Conservative Party was a significant factor in putting moves to leave the EU onto the Conservative Party's agenda despite its leadership's reluctance.

Of course, without skewed vote shares due to FPTP and with a limited choice of realistic coalition partners for a future government, that third party can achieve exactly the same thing through coalition bargaining anyway.

Re: Approval Voting versus Instant Runoff Voting

#54

Post by specialist » Thu, Apr 04, 2019, 2:53 PM UTC

Approval Voting is the best balance between fairness and simplicity.

I switched from IRV (RCV) to Approval Voting once I better understood the challenges of election administration.

That said, FPTP is just about the worst. For election administration, it's the most brittle, where the margin of error too often exceeds the margin for winning. So I'd happily support IRV, RCV, score voting, approval voting as a replacement.

Re: Approval Voting versus Instant Runoff Voting

#55

Post by magduf » Thu, Apr 04, 2019, 2:57 PM UTC

hadrien01 wrote: post #15

tromp wrote: post #11

It's a bit silly to argue that candidates take up too much space on a IRV ballot when it would suffice to duplicate only the box and not their name, as in 1st 2nd 3rd choice John Adams [ ] [ ] [ ] Ben Franklin [ ] [ ] [ ] Tom Jefferson [ ] [ ] [ ] Betsy Ross [ ] [ ] [ ]

Or just put in a number in a single column boxes like in Australia or Ireland.

>Or just put in a number in a single column boxes like in Australia or Ireland.

What do you do when some moron voter can't count and reuses the same number, or skips a number? This kind of voting scheme seems like it would much too complicated and confusing to the average American voter.

Re: Approval Voting versus Instant Runoff Voting

#56

Post by magduf » Thu, Apr 04, 2019, 3:01 PM UTC

tnicks wrote: post #50

brianolson wrote: post #39

What the article misses is that there are alternatives better than BOTH approval or IRV. I will always find "Approval" to be unsatisfying because I want to say I like A more than I like B. I will always find IRV to be dumb because it has bad outcomes and for no additional cost or complexity those ranked ballots could have been counted by a Condorcet method that results in better democracy. https://bolson.org/irv/

"I want to say I like A more than I like B" You can convey this by only submitting a single choice on your ballot (a powerful tactic in AV). Conversely, you can vote everyone BUT the one you wish to harm. And by default you can vote NOTA. While it may be that Approval Voting is not the "perfect" answer, it is far better than most and comes with the added benefit of easy adoption/implementation and simple explanation.

>You can convey this by only submitting a single choice on your ballot (a powerful tactic in AV)

Yeah, but then you run the risk of a Trump getting elected in an election between Trump, Hillary, and Bernie, where you really want Bernie, and you really don't like Hillary at all, but you'll still take her any day over the utter disaster that is Trump.

This is why AV isn't that great: all they have to do is put up a truly revolting candidate to scare voters into voting for the not-as-revolting candidate, and she gets elected because there's no way for voters to express a clear preference.

Re: Approval Voting versus Instant Runoff Voting

#57

Post by mcphage » Thu, Apr 04, 2019, 3:08 PM UTC

notahacker wrote: post #46

EarthMephit wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The argument for "Ballot Simplicity" is misleading too They seem to have tried to intentionally tried to create a much more complicated ballot paper for IRV Here's a sample of an Australian IRV voting form: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/48/20...

It's also misleading because the simplicity of the appearance ballot paper disguises the complexity of the actual choice of how many boxes to tick in front of you. (Am I better picking my favourite candidate only or both the candidates I don't find entirely unacceptable in a tight three way race?)

> the actual choice of how many boxes to tick in front of you

With approval voting, you should consider each candidate independently: "Am I okay with this person winning the election?" The number of circles you fill in doesn't matter.

Re: Approval Voting versus Instant Runoff Voting

#58

Post by Frondo » Thu, Apr 04, 2019, 3:15 PM UTC

magduf wrote: post #55

hadrien01 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or just put in a number in a single column boxes like in Australia or Ireland.

>Or just put in a number in a single column boxes like in Australia or Ireland. What do you do when some moron voter can't count and reuses the same number, or skips a number? This kind of voting scheme seems like it would much too complicated and confusing to the average American voter.

Throw the ballot out. People mis-fill ballots now. People will always mis-fill ballots. The column of numbers thing seems extremely intuitive and wouldn't baffle a significant number of American voters; certainly it wouldn't lead to hanging-chad type situations.

Re: Approval Voting versus Instant Runoff Voting

#59

Post by jnty » Thu, Apr 04, 2019, 3:15 PM UTC

duxup wrote: post #26

jnty wrote: post #25

Surely this disenfranchises those most willing to compromise, who are probably going to end up being those who support small parties? Let's say you a Right and Left party, and breakout Far Left which is actually very popular but has previously lacked electoral support due to its 'outsider' status. People's favourites might look like this: Right: 30% Left: 30% Far left: 40% However, 75% of Far Left favourites actually…

I don't know what you mean by "'establishment' mediocrity". Nothing in your example means that the "Left" has to be "establishment" or "mediocrity".

I mean that we are left with a choice that has been traditionally dominant rather than a less prevalent but otherwise popular party.

Re: Approval Voting versus Instant Runoff Voting

#60

Post by comnetxr » Thu, Apr 04, 2019, 3:17 PM UTC

brianolson wrote: post #39

What the article misses is that there are alternatives better than BOTH approval or IRV. I will always find "Approval" to be unsatisfying because I want to say I like A more than I like B. I will always find IRV to be dumb because it has bad outcomes and for no additional cost or complexity those ranked ballots could have been counted by a Condorcet method that results in better democracy. https://bolson.org/irv/

While I would certainly be more happy in a world with either IRV or Condorcet method than FPTP, I think this argument against IRV is too simplistic. The situation is candidates D, R with the largest numbers of voters who prefer them first, and consensus candidate I with smaller first preference than D, R but lots of 2nd preference. Under any Condorcet method, the D and R voters can hurt their candidate by ranking I as second (later-no-harm criterion). This leads to a negative partisanship spiral, say, as D/R voters feel like they must only rank 1 candidate in order to counter the threat from the other party doing the same, and thus the consensus candidate I, which would be the Condorcet winner under voter's true preferences, does not become the winner under the actual votes. IRV does a better job of inducing everyone to rank choices.