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Approval Voting versus Instant Runoff Voting

electionscience.org

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Re: Approval Voting versus Instant Runoff Voting

#71

Post by specialist »

dj-wonk wrote: post #67
specialist wrote: post #54

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 replaceme…

I appreciate your opinion, but I want to point out that our definitions of fairness and simplicity may vary. Much of scholarly work around elections systems strives to ground itself on particular formal criteria.

"opinion"

Comparative fairness is well documented. This graph is a good appromixation:

https://www.electionscience.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/c...

https://www.electionscience.org/library/approval-voting-vers...

Simplicity also accounts for election integrity concerns (ease of tabulation and auditing).

Re: Approval Voting versus Instant Runoff Voting

#72

Post by ClayShentrup »

comnetxr wrote: post #60
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 a…

The Later-no-harm criterion is basically a nonsensical idea invented to make IRV look better than it is. See a Princeton math PhD dissect it here. http://scorevoting.net/LNH

tl;dr for non-experts (I co-founded the Center for Election Science and have studied voting methods since 2006).

The idea behind LNH is that if I vote for the Green in 1st place, it's "safe" to then rank the Democrat 2nd, because that can't cause the Democrat to defeat the Green. See this explained visually in this video by Andy Jennings, another CES co-founder who did his math PhD thesis on voting methods.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtKAScORevQ

The Later-no-harm criterion is highly misleading, because "safe" here means safe for the CANDIDATE. But tactical voting is about what's good for the VOTER, not the candidate. With IRV, the Green voter's best strategy is to actually rank the Democrat in 1st place. So the whole notion that he can safely rank the Democrat #2 after he's ranked the Green #1 starts with a false premise. If he's rational, he WILL NOT rank the Green #1. It's the same reasoning that Democratic primary voters have about far left candidates. Even if you win the nomination and advance to the general, you're so far left that you'll probably lose against the Republican, by not capturing enough of the center of the electorate.

Approval Voting actually makes it safe to ALWAYS vote your favorite. And, in general, to vote for everyone you prefer to your favorite of the frontrunners.

Re: Approval Voting versus Instant Runoff Voting

#73

Post by fsargent »

It can't be mentioned enough that Approval Voting works with existing voting machines. One of the unfortunate difficulties with IRV is that it often requires a wholesale replacement of the voting infrastructure. The Center for Election Science is a big supporter of IRV as a better system than our current "Choose One" voting method, but we've found that Approval Voting is both more descriptive and less prone to strategy, as well as being significantly easier to implement and use.

NB: I'm the Chair of the Board for The Center for Election Science. AMA.

Re: Approval Voting versus Instant Runoff Voting

#74

Post by PaulHoule »

dj-wonk wrote: post #66
PaulHoule wrote: post #33

Yep, IRV sends you right into the jaws of Arrow's Theorem which is not a nice place to be.

Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem, as I understand it, applies quite broadly to voting systems. To put it simply, you can’t avoid it. You just decide what trade offs you want to live with.

Looking at it closely I think it gets particularly gruesome when you try to do a "perfect" job of determining people's preferences.

Re: Approval Voting versus Instant Runoff Voting

#75

Post by pwinnski »

EarthMephit wrote: post #13
schuyler2d wrote: post #5

Article makes some good arguments for approval voting, but the "Ballot Spoilage" argument is a bit disingenuous. Ballots can't be spoiled in approval voting because any set of circles can be filled in. However it's a lot easier to corrupt a ballot undetected. Just fill in more bubbles for your candidate.

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...

This is definitely a better way to support IRV, except that it depends heavily on people writing numbers that are recognizable by either computers or people when scoring.

Re: Approval Voting versus Instant Runoff Voting

#76

Post by notahacker »

jadell wrote: post #69
notahacker wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I don't think that's a rare situation at all. There's a large population out there that doesn't identify with R/D (in US politics), but does identify more closely with a 3rd party. But they never vote for them because "tactics". That doesn't mean those people wouldn't find R or D acceptable, it just means the're ideologically closer to a 3rd party. What AV is trying to get at is the situation where the most people ar…

But assuming most of these people consider R and D acceptable but actively prefer the third party (if they consider them equally acceptable FPTP isn't really depriving them of their ideal electoral choice), AV is inferior to most other non FPTP votes like IRV, which accurately represent their preference for the third party first, and the Rs and Ds only if that party can't win.

AV has a pretty significant "if I tick the good candidate box, am I impairing my ideal candidate's chances of winning?" problem.

Re: Approval Voting versus Instant Runoff Voting

#77

Post by brianolson »

hackinthebochs wrote: post #40
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/

>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. Can you show how the differences in outcomes is better using the Condorcet method?

Yes, there was a real world election run using IRV that got the wrong answer. Fortunately the full (anonymized) vote set was released and we can see how it would have gone using other election methods. https://bolson.org/irv/ I've also done simulations of millions of elections with various election algorithms and there are trends about what works and what doesn't: https://bolson.org/voting/twographs.html

Re: Approval Voting versus Instant Runoff Voting

#78

Post by brianolson »

ClayShentrup wrote: post #70
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 will always find "Approval" to be unsatisfying because I want to say I like A more than I like B. This is the "expressiveness fallacy". https://www.electionscience.org/library/expressiveness-in-ap... tl;dr Total information throughput for a voting system is a function of THREE things: 1. Amount of information you can express on a ballot. 2. Accuracy of that information (which is distorted if the system gives you…

"Approval Voting does surprisingly well" and I agree that it's a mathematically valid and efficient solution that does _surprisingly_ well, but other systems do better (Cordorcet, etc).

Also in the messy human emotional sense, it's still _unsatisfying_ that I might Approval vote for Bernie and Hillary but I still want to say I like one better, and I still think that difference matters.

Re: Approval Voting versus Instant Runoff Voting

#79

Post by jamesonquinn »

schuyler2d wrote: post #5

Article makes some good arguments for approval voting, but the "Ballot Spoilage" argument is a bit disingenuous. Ballots can't be spoiled in approval voting because any set of circles can be filled in. However it's a lot easier to corrupt a ballot undetected. Just fill in more bubbles for your candidate.

Unintentional spoilage and intentional tampering are two different things. There's nothing disingenuous about mentioning one of them but not the other.

It's true that, depending on the implementation, approval voting can be subject to tampering. But the key point there is "depending on the implementation". There are any number of anti-tampering measures that are compatible with approval. Other comments here have suggested some of them (such as using "0" vs "+" as marks). Others might rely on technological fixes (such as immediate ballot scans by multiple independent non-networked devices) or social ones (multiple witnesses during all stages of ballot collection and counting).

It may not be possible to be 100% certain of preventing every possibility of ballot-counting fraud, but it seems that >99.9% is possible, and that's basically good enough. In well-administered elections, spoilage is a much bigger problem. Thus, it's reasonable to focus on spoilage.

Re: Approval Voting versus Instant Runoff Voting

#80

Post by jamesonquinn »

brianolson wrote: post #78
ClayShentrup wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I will always find "Approval" to be unsatisfying because I want to say I like A more than I like B. This is the "expressiveness fallacy". https://www.electionscience.org/library/expressiveness-in-ap... tl;dr Total information throughput for a voting system is a function of THREE things: 1. Amount of information you can express on a ballot. 2. Accuracy of that information (which is distorted if the system gives you…

"Approval Voting does surprisingly well" and I agree that it's a mathematically valid and efficient solution that does _surprisingly_ well, but other systems do better (Cordorcet, etc). Also in the messy human emotional sense, it's still _unsatisfying_ that I might Approval vote for Bernie and Hillary but I still want to say I like one better, and I still think that difference matters.

The article focuses on approval versus IRV, and the advantages it gives for approval are valid.

As you know, there are various other methods (Condorcet, STAR, 3-2-1, etc.) that keep most of approval's advantages, but sacrifice simplicity for better expressiveness. It would be as unreasonable for the advocates of such methods to try to undermine real-world campaigns for approval, as it would be for approval advocates to undermine those other methods.

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