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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?

#101

Post by gipp »

slownews45 wrote: post #11
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%…

NY primaries are closed, but themselves now use RCV, and have much higher turnout than that, since they are usually the de facto general election.

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

#102

Post by cheriot »

NickM wrote: post #87
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…

Even if they didn't limit it to 5, you still need to engage in tactical voting in IRV if you don't want to risk throwing your vote away. The spoiler effect is actually still there, it's just harder to understand. The problem is that your second choice only counts if your first choice is eliminated, so it's very possible that none of your rankings matter and have no influence on the outcome if you don't pick one of th…

> it's very possible that none of your rankings matter and have no influence on the outcome if you don't pick one of the top two candidates as your first choice.

I'm not sure what you're describing. As long as one of the top two candidates appear on your ballot (at any rank) then you have influenced the last round of voting.

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

#103

Post by catern »

thepete2 wrote: post #60
catern wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Could you elaborate how RCV is less complicated? Just by eliminating tactical voting? In traditional voting you often limit yourself to the incumbents, isn't that a lot fewer choices?

>you often limit yourself to the incumbents

A voting system where you're limited to only voting for the incumbent is indeed very simple (although not very democractic)... I assume you meant "limit yourself to the frontrunners". :)

In an election where there's exactly two candidates, RCV (or most other alternative voting systems) is the same as simple majority. You're right that with exactly two candidates, tactical voting isn't a concern, and simple majority voting is the simplest and best system. But many elections do not have exactly two candidates - primaries being the most salient example.

With RCV/alternative voting systems, you don't need to know who's popular or "electable" or any of that. You can just go with your most naive, direct take on the candidates.

Say you like two candidates A and B, but most of all you want to make sure candidate Z loses. Just rank A and B first, then everyone else equally, then candidate Z. You don't have to think about who is most likely to beat Z - you don't even have to follow the election at all.

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

#105

Post by zozbot234 »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #72
zozbot234 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> approval voting is a simpler system that also tends to reward moderate or "compromise" candidates I don't have a strong preference between approval and RCV. But I think people closer to politics would. Being able to "be behind" one candidate is a meaningful promoter of civic engagement; forcing that decision is deeply entrenched in our politics. That makes approval voting a tougher sell for implementation than RCV.…

Implementation is actually a lot simpler. With approval voting, there is no change to the physical paper ballot; you just allow the voter to punch multiple holes on a single ballot, to represent the candidates she "approves" of.

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

#106

Post by gadi1993 »

ant6n wrote: post #55
gadi1993 wrote: post #33

I'm Israeli and I was recently shocked to learn the rest of the world trusts electronic voting and vote by mail. We have a very simple and strict voting process here - the key feature which builds the trust in voting is that every 4 poll workers are responsible for the integrity of only up to 800 votes. We don't have fraud allegations because you would have to blame over 150 different people simultaneously (and often…

Most western democracies don’t have a problem with fraud allegations in voting. It’s really only the US. And even there, the allegations are mostly a political ploy to push for policies that disenfranchis voters of other parties. Which again doesn’t exist in other Western democracies.

French had massive mail voting fraud in 1975, after which they banned it.

The entire point of elections is proving your government is trustable, you can't trust your government with it because then it's like a self signed certificate, circular trust problem.

Who rigs elections in Russia? The government. Who is most likely to rig elections? The government.

You can't trust government with elections, and just because the government shows you documents doesn't mean anything. Governments fabricate documents all the time. If all you require from corrupt politicians to remain in control is a bunch of mailed documents, you can be sure they'll get those documents mailed. I'm just completely dumbfounded people living within countries with these elections think they are democracies.

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

#107

Post by lotsofpulp »

wslack wrote: post #99
lotsofpulp wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ranked choice voting does not throw away the fourth candidate, assuming people are voting for the secular person as 2nd in your example.

His point is that if few rank the fourth candidate first, they will be the first eliminated in the runoff process.

Oh, yes, instant runoff is not the way to count, I agree.

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

#108

Post by catern »

0xffff2 wrote: post #85
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…

How much time must people be putting into politics that they have such nuanced views that make it impossible to express a clear opinion on 4 top candidates and stick a major party candidate in spot 5? I guess New York politics must be vastly different from the West coast, because it's pretty uncommon to see a single race with more than 5 candidates in the first place, and truly unheard of for there to be 5 candidates…

People on the West coast never strongly dislike a particular candidate and want to make sure they don't win?

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

#109

Post by 6gvONxR4sf7o »

Here's my obligatory plug for approval voting. Approval is the "checkboxes instead of radio buttons" voting method. Select any, instead of select one. Vote for whoever you want and the candidate with the most votes wins. It gets rid of a lot of the drawbacks of FPTP while retaining its simplicity, unlike IRV.

I've always wanted to get people to vote on voting systems with a variety of voting methods and see what wins by what method. I'd vote this:

[ ] FPTP

[x] Approval

[x] IRV

Approval > IRV > FPTP

As an aside: It's a pet peeve when people call instant runoff voting (IRV) "ranked choice voting (RCV)." There are many kinds of RCV, and IRV is just one, and it has some pretty undesirable properties (a condorcet winner doesn't always win, so there can be a losing candidate that the majority prefers over the winner).

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

#110

Post by singhrac »

lalaland1125 wrote: post #52
tadmilbourn wrote: post #17

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.…

Very nice work! Do you think there is a need to educate voters on how to tactically vote in ranked choice voting? Every voting system has strategies to use it effectively and most voters are not used to the tactics necessary for ranked choice voting. We see a lot of education in how to use the ballot simply, but very little education on "advanced tactics". In particular, a lot of NYC voters aren't ranking either Wile…

> Every voting system has strategies to use it effectively and most voters are not used to the tactics necessary for ranked choice voting.

Just to respond to this one small point, but I think the most common mathematical definition of "fairness" in market designs (including voting mechanisms) is that your utility-maximizing action should be identical to your true ranked preferences (this is called "strategy-proof"). In the case of voting, Gibbard-Satterthwaite says that there's no strictly strategy-proof mechanism (under a few restrictions) but I think the instant-runoff voting which NYC is using is mostly strategy proof (i.e. strategies only exist in rare circumstances).

Fwiw the burden of learning about all these candidates seems high to me, but apparently New Yorkers don't ind.

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