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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?

#281

Post by joshuamorton »

hash872 wrote: post #275

I'm a bit skeptical of ranked choice voting- one of the key issues for the US that rarely gets discussed is that we can't use it to elect our President, due to the 12th Amendment, unless you're OK with the states selecting him/her instead. The 12th Amendment states that the Presidential winner has to have a majority of the Electoral College votes on the first round of voting- no multiple rounds- otherwise each state…

Well that's easy: you're mistaken. The 12th amendment manager the election by the electors, these are representatives. So someone needs a simple majority of the 538 electoral votes when those are tallied in January. How the states determine which electors to send is up to each state. New York could select it's electors based on a ranked choice ballot.

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

#282

Post by munk-a »

godelski wrote: post #232
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…

> but the Australian experience is instructive. No? It is instructive of how parliaments work. IRV doesn't explain the multi-party house and senate given that every other country with a parliament also has a similar distribution. If you're only looking at Australia vs America you're doing the wrong analysis (it is far too limited). Australia vs France just outright disproves your supposition (they use a 2 round syste…

I disagree about the consistent distribution in parliaments. I do think that parliamentary governance is, overall, just a better way to elect heads of state - but up here in Canada we have a parliament and, while the NDP certainly does hold some sway, we're drifting toward a two party system. Surprisingly, it seems most likely that the CPC might collapse and get absorbed into the LPC which then provides conservative opposition to the NDP - but time will tell whether the CPC can recover now that Harper is gone.

(I purposefully avoided the common party names since they have connotations how Americans view politics that are extremely inaccurate).

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

#283

Post by CameronNemo »

gwright wrote: post #265
Taniwha wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that RCV is at best a hack, a compromise for people who don't want to get too far from FPP. IMHO if you are electing individual people (a mayor, a US president, a city council, a US Senator) then STV is more equitable (it is pretty close to RCV if you are electing a single person). But if you are electing parties (like the US House) then MMP is a fairer solution

> But if you are electing parties (like the US House) I'm not sure why you are phrasing it this way. Voters don't pick a party for their House representative, they pick a candidate. Each House district election is independent of all the others.

Voters pick a candidate knowing that the candidate will have to play within a two party legislature.

Third party legislators are shunned. Their bills get no traction, and they get no committee assignments. If they are seriously divergent, the House could easily have them removed.

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

#284

Post by aplummer »

elihu wrote: post #276

This isn't very good reporting by NPR. The downsides they list are just straw men easily dismissed by RCV proponents, and they give an appearance of fair-and-balanced coverage while making opponents of RCV sound like Luddites. (It also seems like they got all their information from, say, chatting with people from FairVote and not by actually reading online discussions like this one here.) RCV does have some serious p…

> RCV does have some serious problems. Eliminating the candidate with the least first-place votes at each round means a high probability of rejecting compromise candidates that may be a lot of voters' second choice. Also, placing your first-choice candidate first isn't always a safe choice. RCV is non-monotonic, which means it's possible that ranking someone first might actually cause them to lose. That's weird, and I think it's a good enough reason to investigate other options.

This is actually not true and the opposite of what happens. With RCV, people feel comfortable putting compromise or 3rd party candidates first because they know they aren't throwing away a vote. It creates a system where there is more middle ground and less black and white 2 party systems.

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

#286

Post by kyleblarson »

tadmilbourn wrote: post #78
kyleblarson wrote: post #46

Possibly naive question here but in my limited exposure to articles about RCV it seems to be popular in more historically liberal areas. Is that true and why might that be the case?

New York City is the one driving the news cycle right now (and rightfully so as 8 million people have the potential to use RCV for the first time). And people view NYC as pretty liberal. But a great thing about RCV is that it's not inherently partisan or favoring of left or right. As a result, in addition to being used in places like New York City, San Francisco, and Maine...it recently passed for use in Alaska and n…

Thank you!

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

#287

Post by mabbo »

elihu wrote: post #276

This isn't very good reporting by NPR. The downsides they list are just straw men easily dismissed by RCV proponents, and they give an appearance of fair-and-balanced coverage while making opponents of RCV sound like Luddites. (It also seems like they got all their information from, say, chatting with people from FairVote and not by actually reading online discussions like this one here.) RCV does have some serious p…

> RCV is non-monotonic, which means it's possible that ranking someone first might actually cause them to lose.

I'm intrigued. Can you explain how that works? I'm not saying I don't believe you- I'll bet it is possible, but I cannot see how, and I want to!

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

#288

Post by sjfidsfkds »

elihu wrote: post #276

This isn't very good reporting by NPR. The downsides they list are just straw men easily dismissed by RCV proponents, and they give an appearance of fair-and-balanced coverage while making opponents of RCV sound like Luddites. (It also seems like they got all their information from, say, chatting with people from FairVote and not by actually reading online discussions like this one here.) RCV does have some serious p…

If I approve of two candidates, but I like one more than the other, approval voting doesn’t seem to allow me to express that preference. Do I vote for both candidates, or only the one I like the most? As a naive voter who isn’t going to research that question, will I make the right choice?

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

#289

Post by paretoman »

paretoman wrote: post #260

Here's an interactive explainer for Ranked Choice voting and more: https://www.smartvotesim.com/irv Yesterday, I was pleasantly surprised to see another great interactive explainer by Harry Stevens in the Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/interactive/2021/ran...

Okay, one more from Justin because it is a video: https://youtu.be/yhO6jfHPFQU

Of course, everyone already knows CGP Grey's videos, right? .. wait.. nobody's posted it yet? OK, here's his whole video set: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7tWHJfhiyo&index=1&list=PLk...

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

#290

Post by ajmurmann »

MichaelApproved wrote: post #266
ajmurmann wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's where something like STAR voting is even better. Just score people 0 to 5 on how much you like them. Gets rid of strategic voting, spoiler effect and works super well for large sets of choices as well. It's in essence like we score movies or restaurant reviews which makes it familiar as well.

Let’s be honest, it’s hard enough getting Americans to the ballot on Election Day, we don’t need to introduce more complexity. Ranking requires far less brain power than a rating system would. Maybe the energy expenditure between the two is small for the HN group but for the general public, the aversion to doing the mental work would be enough to dramatically reduce turnout. This goes for all countries, not just Amer…

I'm not sure why you claim that ranking requires less brain power. Ranking becomes especially burdensome as you have more candidates/options. On top of that ranked voting seems much simpler on the surface than it actually is. The actual calculation is quite opaque in comparison.
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