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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?

#141

Post by subsubzero »

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…

If this achieves widespread in the US I could see regional libertarian and green candidates picking up spots in certain areas in US.

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

#142

Post by wyre »

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…

Statistically, in the US a 3rd party has a 0% chance of winning because a third party has never won.

Maybe within the first 100 years; history isn’t my strongest subject.

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

#143

Post by klodolph »

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…

Two reasons: Arrow’s impossibility theorem and the fact that people are not perfect logicians.

I honestly thought that after learning Arrow’s impossibility theorem that Condorcet is not especially important. Since we can’t have a perfect voting system, we have to pick an imperfect one, and among the alternatives, it’s important to capture information from voters. Instant runoff captures a lot of information.

Approval voting I think is much too tactical and, strictly speaking, worse than IRV. No contest.

IRV lets people express their preferences in a fairly understandable way. The strategy I see people talking about is “rank all the front-runners, and use the leftover spots to rank the people you want to win, even if they’re not likely to win.”

So if A B C and D are front-runners, and E and F are the two other candidates you like, you come up with a ranking for those six and put the top five on your ballot.

The idea that people who like this system are “dangerously misinformed” or “dishonest” is needlessly inflammatory.

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

#144

Post by godelski »

guicho271828 wrote: post #137
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).

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...

I have a strong preference of cardinal over ordinal systems, but I won't say all ordinal systems are flawed. I rather like condorcet methods but I think their complexity is too much of a barrier. I've started to come around to Election Science's similar decision of pushing for Approval over STAR because of this and I will gladly argue how STAR is far less complex than IRV (STAR has a max of 2 rounds and IRV will almost always have significantly more. The only time it has two rounds is if there are strictly 3 candidates).

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

#145

Post by gadi1993 »

ant6n wrote: post #128
gadi1993 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

Russia isn’t a western democracy. 1975 is almost 50 years ago.

Of course Russia isn't democracy, the entire point was to prove to you who is rigging undemocratic elections.

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

#146

Post by xdennis »

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…

The USA is a two-party state because of the voting system. If people could confidently vote for another party there wouldn't be just two parties.

It's even reflected in the language, like how people task about being "bi-partizan" instead of "non-partizan".

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

#147

Post by coryrc »

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).

Why would the two parties allow something which would disrupt their duopoly?

That's why it's IRV.

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

#148

Post by hackeraccount »

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.

You're last name doesn't have to be Arrow to know that there's a potential for a non-compromise candidate to win, indeed for the candidate that a majority don't want in office to win.

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

#149

Post by throw5away »

nine_k wrote: post #6
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.

Since voting data are anonymized by construction, it should even be fine to publish as is.

Nope! This is a problem with high-cardinality ordinal voting methods. Since factorial is a very fast growing function, you can easily encode a pattern in down-ballot candidates and buy and verify a specific ballot.

Commonly what's done is that we truncate the ballot and only allow people to express, say, 5 preferences.

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

#150

Post by koolba »

wyre wrote: post #142
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Statistically, in the US a 3rd party has a 0% chance of winning because a third party has never won. Maybe within the first 100 years; history isn’t my strongest subject.

> Statistically, in the US a 3rd party has a 0% chance of winning because a third party has never won.

Not recently for President, but third parties have won at every other level of government including Governors, Representatives, and Senators.

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