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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?

#41

Post by ant6n »

The system allows ppl to vote a third party without „wasting“ their vote. It favors consensus candidates — that’s great when a single representative is needed (like a major).

For parliaments, however, the system favors the two main parties, since a candidate needs those 50% support. This means parliament, which _should_ reflect the pluralism of society, will not actually reflect that pluralism.

In effect, this ranked ballot business is a way to appear to engage in voting reform without actually wanting to change anything about the outdated 2-party system.

In Canada, the liberals promised election reform. Until it turned out that ranked ballot was not going to be recommended by the electoral reform commission. Since that was the system the Liberals wanted in order to improve their chances in future elections, and they had little interest in actually representative voting systems, they scuttled the process and reneged on their promise that this would be the last election using the first past the post system.

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

#43

Post by catern »

adjkant wrote: post #32
catern wrote: post #25

The really unfortunate thing about NYC's ranked choice voting is that you're limited to ranking only 5 candidates. This means you still need to engage in tactical voting. You can't just rank the candidates you like, in the order you like them, because your genuine top 5 choices might not include the people who are most likely to win. You'll be "throwing your vote away" unless you include the most-likely-to-win candid…

I don't disagree it's not ideal if you have more than 5 choices you like, but let's not over criticize a small flaw without appreciating the massive progress here. I read "horrible and unfortunate" and can see how people would take that to mean "back to FPTP". I voted today and put 3 small candidates and two who "have a chance". I'm really excited to see how those 3 candidates shake out in the rounds, and that alone…

Yes, sorry, "horrible" was a bit strong and I edited that out of my comment immediately after posting it, heh...

I do appreciate the progress, but I worry that people will regard this incarnation of ranked choice voting as "more complicated" when the entire point is that it's less complicated for the individual voter...

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

#44

Post by zozbot234 »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #28
mc32 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t like rank choice voting because it can result in someone with fewer first place votes than the first or second candidate to win if the conditions are right. We’ve seen surprise results where an obscure candidate has won when too many top choices split the first choice votes and someone relegated to the floor vacuums up all the throwaway votes (people think they have to “spend” all their votes)

> an obscure candidate has won when too many top vs fixates split the first choice votes and someone relegated to the floor vacuums up all the throwaway votes That’s the point. The compromise candidate won. If the top candidates had spent less time mud slinging they may have remained in others’ top two or three.

Yes, approval voting is a simpler system that also tends to reward moderate or "compromise" candidates.

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

#45

Post by r3trohack3r »

google234123 wrote: post #8

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

I think the answer is: it depends.

A weird take on the U.S. constitution: it actually established 4 "branches" of government. Citizen oversight was one of 4 powers designed to keep government in check. It's hard to look at today's America and feel like citizens have much oversight of government. Our "branch" has been systematically eroded. The current first-past-the-post system has been gamed heavily by two parties to reduce the impact citizens have on the outcome of elections.

RCV helps restore civilian oversight (many forms of voter suppression, i.e. gerrymandering, are less effective under RCV). My current thinking: feeling this will result in more "left" or "right" leaning governing bodies is a reflection of how citizen's want their government run. If the "silent majority" is right leaning, this will result in right leaning politics; left would yield left. But the "leaning" of the politics is less important to me as an outcome. The most important outcome is that citizens are restored to their rightful role in government: acting as a proper "check and balance" to the other 3 branches.

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

#47

Post by adjkant »

dragonwriter wrote: post #36

I really hate that Instant Runoff Voting, which is almost literally the worst possible voting method with ranked choice ballots, has somehow gotten the name “Ranked Choice Voting” stuck to it. It’s like if “Democratic Elections” became a specific name for Plurality voting.

Hey, we do live in a Democracy* after all!

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

#48

Post by tunesmith »

dragonwriter wrote: post #36

I really hate that Instant Runoff Voting, which is almost literally the worst possible voting method with ranked choice ballots, has somehow gotten the name “Ranked Choice Voting” stuck to it. It’s like if “Democratic Elections” became a specific name for Plurality voting.

Yeah, when you name the spec after one particular implementation, you're gonna cause confusion. Anyway, I handle it by just using RCV to refer to how the ballot is filled out. The vote counting method is IRV.

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

#50

Post by jez »

taywrobel wrote: post #29
nickik wrote: post #12

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. htt…

Do you have any data around how many people in practice rank candidates between 2 and 4 (assuming a 1-5 scale)? Given how polarizing politics tends to be, especially in a two party system such as America, I’d wager that most people put all 5’s for candidates of their party and all 1’s for candidates of the other party.

But the thing is that's beside the point. Even if they do that, it still allows them to express approval of multiple candidates, instead of just one in plurality voting. And the fact that there's no weird elimination rounds means that:

- it's easier to teach people ("most votes wins")

- it's easy to double check the results ("most votes wins")

- it's incentive compatible (you never put someone you hope loses above someone you hope wins)

Even if you never use 2 – 4 on a 1 – 5 scale, it's still better because you're making the same decision for multiple candidates.

Only using the max and min scores in score voting / range voting has a name: approval voting. For each candidate, you're answering the question: "Would I be ok with this person being elected?"

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