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What is ranked-choice voting and why is New York using it?

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Re: What is ranked-choice voting and why is New York using it?

#11

Post by slownews45 »

google234123 wrote: post #8

Will this make New York more or less left wing? I'm actually curious.

If it's also tied to open primary system it tends to make right wing places more left and left wing places more moderate.

Otherwise you get a pyramid of control that drives towards extremes.

Historically, let's say dems = 51% of voters, everyone votes party line.

Dems have a primary, and someone (usually pretty far left) motivates base and gets 30% of primary vote and wins primary with most votes.

Let's assume a 10% of dem's vote in primaries.

So you have 10% * 50% * 30% = 1.5% of voters voting for the primary winner.

They then go onto a matchup in general, but because it's a dem district, they win there as well (republicans usually also pick someone further right).

So 1.5% of more extreme / activist voters end up really deciding, because by the time you get to general there is no more competition.

Re: What is ranked-choice voting and why is New York using it?

#12

Post by nickik »

Ranked Choice Voting is not really a good idea. It has very strange unintuitive behavior.

Doing Score based voting is just much better and arguably simpler and less work.

I specially like the Star-Voting, where they do a runoff at the end to cover some extra cases. They also have a few variants for multi-winner and representational voting.

Its also much more familiar for people from real live, like online review.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STAR_voting

P.S: Wow a lot of down-votes. RCV is just the alternative that got the most marketing, but once you start looking into the different systems I really don't understand people can stick with RCV just because its slightly better then the system before. If you are gone invest all this effort in improving the system, why not go to something easier and objectively better.

This video shows the issue very well (one of the people involved in Star voting made it):

https://youtu.be/-4FXLQoLDBA

Re: What is ranked-choice voting and why is New York using it?

#17

Post by tadmilbourn »

Great to see this on Hacker News! I'm a former YC Founder who's been working with NYC on voter education for this year's elections through RankedVote (https://www.rankedvote.co).

You can get a sense for what it's like to vote in a ranked-choice election here: https://app.rankedvote.co/elections/7568/Best-NYC-Pizza-Topp...

And you can see the results visualized here (over 20K people voted in this one!): https://app.rankedvote.co/elections/7568/Best-NYC-Pizza-Topp...

And you can see Mayor Bill de Blasio eating a pepperoni pizza as a result of this here: https://twitter.com/therecount/status/1404809865235767315

Re: What is ranked-choice voting and why is New York using it?

#18

Post by nickik »

slownews45 wrote: post #9

I love RCV where we are. * You can vote for the random third party candidate without worrying about throwing away your vote. * You seem to get a bit more moderation where we are if you also have an open primary / no primary type voting which gets really nice. California does top two past the pole of any party inf the general which means even republican votes can matter in a dem on dem election (common out here) or de…

In RCV your first point is not actually true. Its better then First Pass the Post (like literally anything else). Score based voting actually does have the effect you want.
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