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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?

#111

Post by obelos »

slownews45 wrote: post #98
antognini wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Worst possible" might be a bit strong, but an important property that a voting system should have is that it finds the Condorcet winner if one exists. The Condorcet winner is the candidate who beats every other candidate in a head-to-head election. IRV is not guaranteed to find a Condorcet winner. The problem with IRV is that you can have a candidate who is everyone's second choice, but then loses out on the first b…

I've been voting RCV and I've yet to see this actually occur in practice. The candidates who are marketing themselves so well that they are second on almost everyone's ballot (in a 13 person race!) are generally FIRST on a fair number (relative to all 13 folks).

This is what happened in Burlington, VT that prompted them to repeal IRV/RCV: https://electionscience.org/library/irv-and-core-support/

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

#112

Post by glangdale »

A lot of nitpicking here, as is typical on HN, but the Australian experience is instructive. We can vote for the Greens without "throwing our left-of-centre" vote away and still preferring Labor to Liberal. Ranking only up to 5 is reasonable - if you want the simplicity of the old system, and don't want to research beyond 3 candidates, don't!

I can't see the weird complaining about having to learn more about candidates - there's usually only a few viable well-known candidates. You don't have to go research the Natural Law Party or Animal Justice or whoever.

The only cautionary tale is the whole horse-trading element of preferences does lead to some weird candidates making it in at the margins. We had someone who was semi-famous for engaging in a Kangaroo poo fight get in this way:

https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/it-was-people-play-w...

But this "preference whispering" is more of a big deal when preferences were allocated by parties - we had an option where you could vote a single '1' for a given party and it was their preferences that wound up being automatically applied (if you didn't go through hand-numbering all the preferences). So minor party deals became a huge deal. It's not going to be so big if you only have to number 5 and don't even have to keep numbering.

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

#113

Post by InvertedRhodium »

twelvechairs wrote: post #53
AussieWog93 wrote: post #26

We've had this in Australia since day 1 of Federation. One important factor the article didn't quite emphasise is how this voting system can break up the two party duopoly without creating 1920s-Reichstag-esque anarchy. It's completely normal to put a third party as your first preference, while still indicating that you'd prefer Kodos to Kang. In practical terms, it means the Dems would actually have to do some work…

Worth noting Australia is still generally a 2-party system in the lower house (1 representative each area) but less so in the senate (where each state elects the top 12 senators). Australians still look at envy at the New Zealand and German systems of Mixed Member Proportional representation (MMP) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed-member_proportional_re...

We here in NZ would also like some kind of ranked choice in conjunction with MMP - as it stands, people are still reluctant to vote for smaller parties that may not reach the 5% vote threshold required.

Edit: I may have confused RCV with STV. Regardless, it would be nice to know that if my first option didn't make it into Parliament that I could prefer a second party, and so on.

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

#114

Post by throw5away »

xvedejas wrote: post #100
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.…

What would you say to someone like me who feels that IRV is perhaps the worst possible alternative voting system to advocate for? It feels like someone at some stage must be very dishonest, or otherwise dangerously uninformed, to think that IRV is worth advocating for over alternatives like approval voting, range voting, or any Condorcet voting system. I'm very worried that most places will have the political will to…

Honestly IRV is _even worse than plurality_. It doesn't solve the problems it sets out to solve (it entrenches two-party domination [1]), it has ridiculous monotonicity violations [2], all for a lot more complication in counting the votes (you can't distribute the counting well without transmitting the contents of all of the ballots) and possibly wrecking the secret ballot (you can encode and buy specific down-ballot rankings).

Seriously, it's all of the disadvantages and very limited upside.

[1] https://rangevoting.org/TarrIrvSumm.html [2] http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/

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

#115

Post by caf »

Actual results from the last Australian Federal Election showing how the count proceeded in each electorate/division:

https://results.aec.gov.au/24310/Website/Downloads/HouseDopB...

(The count continues even after a candidate gets over 50% just in order to get a notional "two candidate preferred" count between the last two remaining).

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

#116

Post by tadmilbourn »

godelski wrote: post #94
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.…

Why do you push IRV rather than simpler methods with higher VSE like Approval or STAR? Shouldn't we be highly advocating for a system that does not fail the favorite betrayer criterion? And I think Arizona is the perfect example why transparency and low complexity is essential (higher VSE is an added bonus given these).

Simple...because it's being used in a significant (and growing) number of places. Approval and STAR are great methods as well. But they're not what's in use in Maine. Or NYC. Or will be in use in Alaska.

So, in the spirit of focusing where I can have the most impact, I've chosen to most directly support RCV.

First past the post is the enemy here. Not RCV, STAR, or Approval.

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

#117

Post by thepete2 »

catern wrote: post #103
thepete2 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 v…

*frontrunners, yes

I wasn't aware you could rank candidates equally, that makes it simpler indeed.

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

#118

Post by nemo44x »

google234123 wrote: post #8

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

I imagine less. In primaries you attract voters that are more fanatical and extreme so they have a better chance of pushing through a candidate they see as ideologically pure. When the opposition party has no chance of winning it becomes the de facto election and you have a better chance of ending up with polarizing candidate.

NYC isn’t as super progressive as people think but there is certainly a progressive streak and they are louder than their numbers. They organize and they vote in primaries and that has been their strategy the last decade to assume outsized power. Because many moderate liberals won’t likely vote for a Republican in today’s climate it works. Hence BDB as mayor whom is despised by moderate liberals.

So this should redirect power to the Democratic machine in NYC and make it more difficult for far left progressives who really been hijacking the Democratic Party by virtue of the primary system.

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

#119

Post by dragonwriter »

mc32 wrote: post #10
tunesmith wrote: post #2

What's great about RCV (not IRV specifically) is that if the ballot data sets are retained, you can write software to recount them using other RCV algorithms. I'm curious when we'll next have a Condorcet Winner that isn't the IRV winner.

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)

> I don’t like tank 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.

Any system other than plurality allows a candidate with more first place votes to beat one with fewer. Any system other than plurality or majority/runoff allows a candidate with fewer first place votes than the second place.

But, much as I dislike IRV, I’m rather skeptical of the “winner should always be one of the top two by first-place vote count” criteria suggested.

OTOH, using any ranked ballots method, I can see an argument to do a wide open “primary” using the method and then if the winner is not also the majority first-place winner doing a separate “runoff” election using the same system of, say, 5 runoff candidates, determined as:

(1) the candidate that won using the ranked-ballots voting method selected

(2) any of the top two by first place votes not selected by (1)

(3) the first candidate elected by the selected ranked ballots method when the candidates admitted to the runoff by (1) and (2) are disregarded, plus enough candidates elected by the same method disregarding all previously-admitted candidates to complete the pool of 5 candidates.

The idea being to deal with the risk of “candidate was elected due to insufficient exposure and vetting” risk, without fundamentally compromising the desirable behavior of the selected ranked-ballots method.

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

#120

Post by yonran »

“Lots of people don't fill out all the choices” is an important downside. We’ve had Instant Runoff Voting in San Francisco since 2004, and people still don’t fill out all the choices, so their votes are discarded whereas the voters probably would have voted among the final two choices had there been a runoff election. For example, in June 2018 London Breed won the mayoral election against two candidates who were closer aligned politically (Jane Kim and Mark Leno, who were further left) https://dbaron.org/sf-elections-rcv/#%7B%22election%22%3A%22... and in Nov 2019 Chesa Boudin won the District Attorney race against 3 candidates who were more moderate https://dbaron.org/sf-elections-rcv/#%7B%22election%22%3A%22... . In both cases, the margin of victory was far more narrow than the number of votes that were exhausted in the final round of voting, so due to insufficient voter education I would consider vote splitting still a significant problem even with IRV. (Another possibility is that the ballots are exhausted by the 3 candidate limit in San Francisco.)
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