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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?

#131

Post by JumpCrisscross »

zozbot234 wrote: post #105
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> Implementation is actually a lot simpler

That's not the phase of implementation that's difficult with any of these systems. It's getting the rules changed. Approval voting changes civic engagement in a fundamental way. (It also has much less real-world data behind it.)

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

#132

Post by throw5away »

6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #109

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…

I'd go as far as to say Approval > FPTP > IRV. FPTP has good properties like monotonicity (for a good example see http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/), easily distributed counting, and preservation of the secret ballot that IRV does _not_ have.

You really don't get much bang for your buck by switching to IRV; I'd say it's a negative deal overall.

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

#133

Post by NickM »

cheriot wrote: post #102
NickM wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Suppose you have three candidates, A, B, and C, and the votes look like this:

45% of voters rank A 1st, B 2nd, C 3rd

25% of voters rank B 1st, A 2nd, C 3rd

30% of voters rank C 1st, B 2nd, A 3rd

Nobody has the majority, so B is eliminated, and A wins round 2 with 70%. But 30% of voters preferred B over A, and if they had ranked B first, then B would've won in the first round with 55%. By voting honestly, the C voters threw away their votes. None of their later rankings mattered, because C was not eliminated before a victor was declared.

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

#134

Post by dragonwriter »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #39
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)

> I don’t like tank [sic] 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. Why do you consider that the "wrong" outcome?

The rest of the comment seems to explain that the problem is that poorly considered candidates win because people don't give as much care below the top spot in a wide pool of candidates:

> 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 think its an understandable concern under any single round ranked-ballots method where you arr likely to have a large pool of cnadidates. But it can be simply remedied with a two-round system using the same method iterated to select a manageable pool of candidates (possibly gating in the top couple first-place vote getters even if they otherwise wouldn’t be in the top) for the runoff round, which still uses the same ranked-ballots method with more confidence that all the candidates have been vetted because there is a narrower field.

This keeps the integrity of whatever ranked-ballots method is chosen while avoiding the (small, but not nonexistent) risk of winning by flying under the radar.

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

#135

Post by koolba »

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.…

> You can get a sense for what it's like to vote in a ranked-choice election here:

That’s a neat visualization. The step where mushroom pulls ahead of sausage really shows the flow.

Though I do question the integrity of a pizza topping poll that manages to exclude pineapple-ham, not individually, but as a joint entry. Did it miss the filing deadline?

> And you can see Mayor Bill de Blasio eating a pepperoni pizza as a result of this here:

Worst mayor ever eating one of the worst pizza toppings ever.

(Seriously even Google dedicates multiple pages of results to De Blasio: https://www.google.com/search?q=worst+mayor+ever)

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

#136

Post by JumpCrisscross »

thepete2 wrote: post #27
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #16

It frankly forced me to research more candidates than I would have. The amount of familiarity I have for every e.g. City Council candidate (which were RCV) versus DA candidate (who were standard voted) is night and day.

IIRC in some applications of ranked choice voting it's possible to rank an arbitrary number of choices. So even voting the old-fashioned way would be fine.

> in some applications of ranked choice voting it's possible to rank an arbitrary number of choices

In New York City, it was arbitrary and up to five. So yes, perfectly backwards compatible.

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

#137

Post by guicho271828 »

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).

Thanks for mentioning this. I am no expert in voting systems, but reading these, it seems rank-based ones are not theoretically nice. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_system#Recent_develo... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_electoral_system... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theore...

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

#138

Post by yboris »

As an excellent alternative: Approval Voting

An amazing in-depth interview podcast from 80,000 Hours on the subject:

"Politics is so much worse because we use an atrocious 18th century voting system"

https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/aaron-hamlin-voting-...

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

#139

Post by godelski »

tadmilbourn wrote: post #116
godelski wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> because it's being used in a significant (and growing) number of places.

Which is because of advocation over the last (mostly) 2-3 years. We're only two states in, that's not significant momentum. FYI, we have approval in Fargo and Lane County/Eugene are close to passing STAR (I'd argue RCV hinders that effort due to confusion).

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

I'd disagree actually. The enemy is non-representative voting.

Why I'll actually fight IRV is because history. We've gone down this path before and had states/cities/counties use IRV and then revert back because it didn't solve the problems they set out to solve. So, what is different this time around? There's a "good enough" bar that needs to be met. IRV doesn't meet that.

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

#140

Post by kmkemp »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #123
glangdale wrote: post #112

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 candidat…

In this US, you would rarely need to do any additional research. There are almost always only 2 choices - the Democratic candidate and the Republican candidate. Anyone voting for another candidate is simply saying that's who they /REALLY/ wish would win, but most people aren't willing to throw their vote in the garbage to virtue signal. That 3rd party candidate almost never has a chance at winning. Neither does the a…

It would mostly be for primaries, where the field is wider, but don't discount how ranked choice voting could lead to more than 2 viable parties.
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