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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?

#161

Post by coryrc »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #90
dllthomas wrote: post #80

I don't like instant runoff. It seems like it systematically rejects compromise, and I think finding the proper compromise is an important goal of a voting system. For instance, imagine a sectarian society split roughly equally between 3 religions, with 4 candidates running. The first three push theocracy favoring their respective religion, while the fourth favors tolerance and secular government. If, statistically,…

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

Certain groups have made RCV==IRV in an Orwellian fashion. It's now how it is used.

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

#162

Post by jasonhansel »

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…

Also: for better or for worse, IRV tends to harm moderate candidates (who might be everyone's second choice, but nobody's first choice). Approval voting, on the other hand, tends to favor moderates (since they get one vote from a large percentage of the population, even if they're not on the top of anyone's list).

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

#163

Post by JumpCrisscross »

hackeraccount wrote: post #148
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> there's a potential for a non-compromise candidate to win

Agree IRV isn't the perfect system. But we have the downsides of being broadly explicable (Condorcet method's weakness), continuous with existing civic culture (approval voting's weakness), squeezing the centre (RCV/IRV's weakness) and being better than autocracy (plurality's weakness).

With some irony, the game of reforming voting systems is itself a plurality mechanism. IRV, re-branded as RCV, has taken off. It has precedence. The distance between each of RCV's competitors and it is dwarfed by the distance between each of them and FPTP. Given that, unifying around the winning "candidate" makes sense.

Put another way, bringing up approval voting in an IRV vs. FPTP discussion favors FPTP. If one wants a world in which approval voting reigns, I think it would be easier to get there with IRV as an in-between.

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

#164

Post by godelski »

klodolph wrote: post #143
xvedejas wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Arrow’s impossibility theorem

First off, Arrow's doesn't apply to all systems. You'll need to look into both Gibbard's and Gibbard-Satterthwaite's theorems.

Second off, just because you can't find a global optimization in a highly dimensional space doesn't mean there aren't local optimizations along criteria we care more about. Appealing to Arrow's is a cop-out.

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

You're going to have to back this up with some strong evidence. Approval has higher VSE, is simpler, is more resistant to spoilers and tactical voting.

> IRV lets people express their preferences in a fairly understandable way.

Actually your argument holds true for any ordinal or cardinal system. Cardinal even having more flexibility since you can give two candidates the same score. And in cardinal if you want to rank your candidates, no problem. Better yet, you have better encoding opportunities because you can specify the distance between your ranking instead of the uniform spacing that ordinal systems force upon you. (BTW, given what the person above you wrote, I would assume that they know how ranked voting works and explaining how it is going to come off as you calling them dumb).

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

#165

Post by karmelapple »

djbebs wrote: post #42

Personally I don't see much benefit for this system, opposed to approval voting.

Both are miles beyond first past the post, and both scare many people just because it's something new and different.

Hopefully you can support any change locally that gets us off of first past the post. Once we get some voting changes, hopefully that makes future changes even easier to make... though I know that's wishful thinking.

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

#166

Post by Rebelgecko »

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…

Does this vary in different parts of the US? Where I live many municipal elections are nonpartisan (no D or R next to someone's name). In some cases (e.g. jungle primary) there may be multiple viable candidates from the same party

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

#167

Post by [deleted] »

throw5away wrote: post #114
xvedejas wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

[deleted]

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

#168

Post by munk-a »

kmkemp wrote: post #140
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…

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.

Primaries mostly exist due to the FPTP voting system - dropping that would remove a pretty big reason to have them at all which could lead to cheaper elections... campaign fundraising was ever reigned in - rather, the elections will probably be cheaper but it's unlikely you'd notice due to the insane campaign budgets that are common.

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

#169

Post by asoneth »

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.

Giving 5s to your preferred candidates and 1s to your disliked candidates is not necessarily a problem, as others have pointed out, that's just approval voting and a good technique in its own right.

If you want to avoid that, the runoff at the end of a STAR (Score Then Automatic Runoff) is explicitly designed to incentivize voters to provide more differentiation between candidates.

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

#170

Post by NickM »

wslack wrote: post #97
dllthomas wrote: post #80

I don't like instant runoff. It seems like it systematically rejects compromise, and I think finding the proper compromise is an important goal of a voting system. For instance, imagine a sectarian society split roughly equally between 3 religions, with 4 candidates running. The first three push theocracy favoring their respective religion, while the fourth favors tolerance and secular government. If, statistically,…

That's true - but approaches that identify those best compromises get mathematically more and more complex as the system gains fidelity. We shouldn't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. If a place wants to implement another voting system, I'd be interested to see how it plays out, and if the voters see the winner with legitimacy. IRV is relatively simple and candidates in NY are still attacking it because of th…

Approval voting is much simpler than IRV, and is also better at electing good compromise candidates.
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