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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?

#171

Post by munk-a »

koolba wrote: post #150
wyre wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I would mention that everyone's favorite example in this category (Bernie Sanders) does secure the democratic primary nomination for senate each election - he just refuses to leverage it in the general election. But failing to do that would lead to a much harder general election since the Dems would likely put up a competing candidate and split the vote three ways.

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

#172

Post by godelski »

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…

> As an aside: It's a pet peeve when people call instant runoff voting (IRV) "ranked choice voting (RCV)."

Honestly I've just shifted to referring to ranked systems as "ordinal," which is also the proper term, though doesn't use layman language. I honestly believe that Fair Vote has pushed this terminology to create confusion. Their site has historically had many misleading errors, especially w.r.t. spoiler effects (ignoring the favorite betrayer criterion).

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

#173

Post by dllthomas »

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…

I think approval voting is both simpler and better at finding compromise, though it does have other weaknesses. There will always be tradeoffs, and perfect ... good ... etc, as you say. I just worry that IRV in particular might not actually be good.

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

#174

Post by coryrc »

ortusdux wrote: post #4

King County is exploring using RCV. https://www.king5.com/article/news/politics/king-county-to-c...

Without MMP it's not going to change who gets in. The 49.9% of people opposed to Kshama Sawant get no voice (yes, that's city of Seattle, but easier example for non-locals) in IRV(RCV) nor FPTP.

Tacoma did this a few years ago and nothing came of it.

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

#175

Post by marc_abonce »

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.…

I think that it would be interesting to see this pizza example for comparing ranked voting against acceptance voting.

After all, in this example the plurality vote winner is still the clear, uncontested winner in ranked choice, so this example makes it look like ranked voting is just a way of complicating a process that "just works". I know this is not actually true, but this is how some people see alternative voting methods.

On the other hand, with acceptance voting you would probably get a different result as most meat eaters are indifferent towards mushrooms while many vegetarians would be passionately against pepperoni. So, I suspect that with acceptance voting the results could be switched, for better or for worse.

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

#176

Post by thought_alarm »

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…

It's not fool-proof.

In Canada in 1952, the province of British Columbia switched to a ranked ballot and it nearly ended in disaster.

The ranked ballot was an attempt by the traditional Liberal and Conservative parties to keep a rising socialist party from gaining power, as they assumed no Liberal or Conservative voter would choose the socialists as their second choice.

But there was so much animosity between the parties that most voters chose a fringe right-wing party as their second choice, as a protest vote.

The two traditional parties were wiped out and the fringe right-wing party narrowly won, despite having no leader and little governing experience.

Fortunately, saner heads took over the fringe party and quickly steered it to the political center as a sort of big tent party for former Liberal and Conservative voters. But it could have gone very differently.

The ranked ballot idea was quickly dropped, but the event shaped British Columbia politics for the next 60+ years. That fringe party elected by accident became the province's natural governing party.

I suppose the moral of the story is that no voting system can prevent irrational voters from shooting themselves in the foot.

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

#177

Post by dane-pgp »

throw5away wrote: post #132
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.

If we're comparing Approval and FPTP in terms of easily distributed counting, it's worth noting that a ballot paper with N candidates can be marked in N different ways with FPTP and 2^N ways with Approval.

That may not be a problem for computers, but if you want to avoid the potential failure modes of (and conspiracy theories related to) electronic voting machines, there is a big difference between an election official trying to place a ballot on one of 10 piles versus trying to find the correct one out of 1024 piles.

A system like MMP can avoid this problem by using FPTP counting of ballots and then topping up the number of seats for each party to make the distribution of winners match the distribution of total votes.

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

#178

Post by obelos »

lostdog wrote: post #127
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…

So many plugs for approval voting in these threads, but it just seems so terrible for what people really want to express. For example, in 2016, plenty of people wanted Sanders more than Clinton. Who are they supposed to "approve?" Many of them would note their preference by just approving Sanders and not Clinton, which is the opposite of what a voting system is supposed to help achieve.

People voting for the only candidate they want just doesn’t strike me as a failure. The failure comes when someone has to vote for someone who is not their preferred. That said, the 2016 Dem primary doesn’t seem like a useful example for testing the constraints of any voting system since there were really only two viable candidates. All methods work equally well under those conditions. Why would someone approve both of the only two candidates when only one of them could win?

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

#179

Post by dllthomas »

coryrc wrote: post #161
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.

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

I don't believe I conflated the two. The title says RCV, but the algorithm described in the article is specifically IRV and I thought I was clear what I was talking about?

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

#180

Post by dragonwriter »

koolba wrote: post #150
wyre wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Not recently for President,

Not ever. The Federalists collapsed before we got a Whig, and the Whigs before we got a Republican, and those and the Democratic (ex-Democratic-Republican) parties are the only four that have won the Presidency.

> but third parties have won at every other level of government including Governors, Representatives, and Senators.

Sure, but its easy to overcount them; state two-party systems (where they haven't been effectively one-party systems) haven't historically always aligned with the national two-party system (e.g., Missouri’s [ed: or, in the real world, Minnesota’s] Farmer-Labor Party was the second (and later first) party in the state for years, alongside the Republicans, before it merged with a local third party—and thereby joined the national Democrats—as the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party.

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