What is ranked-choice voting and why is New York using it? • Hacker News Board

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

#301

Post by hash872 » Wed, Jun 23, 2021, 1:59 AM UTC

joshuamorton wrote: post #281

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.

Sorry, I left a key part out- the issue is combining ranked choice voting AND a multiple party system. If you only had 2-3 parties, I agree with you. However I think what the RCV people are hoping for is a multiparty system, yes? So once you get above 4 parties, the odds of multiple states all having picked a different candidate increases, so that no one gets a majority.

Extremely simplified example- the South all chooses the Republican candidate, the West Coast all chooses the Democratic candidate, the Midwest all chooses the Populist candidate, the Northeast mostly chooses the Whig candidate. Alaska chooses the Alaska Independence Party candidate. Vermont and New Mexico chooses the Green Party candidate. See the problem now?

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

#302

Post by ehmmmmmmmm » Wed, Jun 23, 2021, 2:00 AM UTC

thepete2 wrote: post #81

ehmmmmmmmm wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It also gets rid of people who are too dumb to understand RCV. Hee hee. Intellectual filter on the voting population. :)

I very much want dumb people to have representation.

No, you don't want dumb people to have representation, because idiots will spread misinformation (everything from climate change being fake to masks being unnecessary) and adopt corrupt practices to garner their votes. Smart people are less vulnerable to misinformation.

You want people who believe science, have a sense of foresight for several years, understand international politics, and how resources and economics work to decide the future of the country.

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

#303

Post by logicchop » Wed, Jun 23, 2021, 2:04 AM UTC

godelski wrote: post #164

klodolph wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, s…

> Cardinal even having more flexibility

I thought Gibbard-Satterthwaite (or maybe just Gibbard's version) applied to cardinal systems as well. This seemed likely to me for some reason, as if an ordinal method could approximate any particular cardinal discretization by just including "ghost" candidates that can be packed (ordinally) between your actual candidates.

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

#304

Post by thaumasiotes » Wed, Jun 23, 2021, 2:04 AM UTC

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…

> 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.

Interesting to apply the term "signaling" to a behavior which other people cannot observe.

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

#305

Post by jrochkind1 » Wed, Jun 23, 2021, 2:04 AM UTC

username90 wrote: post #203

ineedasername wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you say is true if general elections in the US, but often not the primary elections where a party determines who its candidate will be. At that stage it's pretty common to have a wider field of candidates. Also, ranking could change the US dynamic of only have 2 choices. Being able to vote 3rd party and then then choose someone from one of the two main parties might drive a lot more people to vote 3rd party beca…

With that argument China is also a democracy, since you can vote who will get to run the party. I'd argue that a proper democracy requires new parties to be easily formed and quickly gain momentum and power if they have support from a fraction of the population. I don't think that ranked choices allows for that, as even if the third party "Greens" in this case got 25% of the votes they'd get thrown away in favour of…

I mean... are you suggesting that some system where someone could get elected with only 25% of the vote would somehow be more democratic? If a party or candidate can only get 25% of the vote in an election for a single position, like mayor, they aren't going to get elected, that's just democracy, right?

RCV makes it more likely a third party could get 50% of the vote though, since people can vote for it without worrying about "throwing their vote away", or throwing the election to a right-wing party when they want to vote for the lesser left-wing party.

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

#306

Post by asteroidbelt » Wed, Jun 23, 2021, 2:06 AM UTC

e1g wrote: post #285

hnick wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes but enforcement is lax and fines are low.

Still ~90-95% voter turnout (vs ~60% in the USA)

And lower than 90% turnout is better, right?

Because when people are forced to vote, they are on average more likely to vote for a random name they heard on TV than for a candidate with a program they read and the background they studied.

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

#307

Post by vitus » Wed, Jun 23, 2021, 2:08 AM UTC

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…

One important distinction to make is that RCV isn't the same as Instant Runoff Voting (IRV); rather, IRV is a specific (the most commonly championed, as far as I can tell) implementation of RCV, likely because it's the easiest to explain.

Note that all RCV implementations have limitations, per the oft-cited https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theore... which outlines a number of ostensibly desirable attributes then demonstrates that no RCV implementation can satisfy all of them.

But that's not to say that approval voting methods are flawless, either. One often cited desirable property is the Condorcet criterion, namely, if one candidate beats all others in head-to-head matchups, that candidate should be the winner. (There's a related Condorcet Loser criterion which is the inverse: if one candidate loses to all others in head-to-head matchups, that candidate should not be elected.)

Suppose we applied approval voting to a simplified view of the 2016 election. (Y to indicate approval, N to indicate disapproval)

- 48%: Partisan R. Trump (Y) > Stein (N) > Clinton (N)

- 48%: Partisan D. Clinton (Y) > Stein (N) > Trump (N)

- 3%: 3rd-party, very slight D lean. Stein (Y) > Clinton (Y) > Trump (N)

- 1%: 3rd-party, very slight R lean. Stein (Y) > Trump (Y) > Clinton (N)

Stein beats both Clinton and Trump in head-to-head matchups, 52% to 48%. But with an approval voting system (selecting Clinton with 51% approval), this fails the Condorcet criterion! (IRV is no better here, to be clear. And Condorcet methods have their own pathologies.)

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

#308

Post by goatse-4-u » Wed, Jun 23, 2021, 2:10 AM UTC

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…

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

#309

Post by zestyping » Wed, Jun 23, 2021, 2:10 AM UTC

mabbo wrote: post #287

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!

If you're a visual thinker, you might enjoy these:

http://zesty.ca/voting/voteline

http://zesty.ca/voting/sim

Or, if you prefer logic:

The intuition for "something strange could happen" is that IRV only uses some of the information on the ballots. Initially it uses just the top ranking on each ballot, and then at other points in the process, it might flip to using the second ranking on some of the ballots, and so on. There are these sudden trigger thresholds that cause big discontinuities in what gets counted—and that should feel weird. We have this pile of ballots that could all count for A or B; why should that decision depend on some unrelated other ballots?

That's the mechanism by which ranking someone higher can cause them to lose. Only some of the second ranks on the ballots will get to count, and depending which ones get counted, we could get a totally different outcome. Suppose A, B, and C are all competitive in an election, with no one having an outright majority, but A has a little more support than B, who has a little more support than C. It could be the case that A is in a winning position because C supporters mostly like A as their second choice; when C gets eliminated first, those ballots count for A and A wins. But let's say B supporters all like C as their second choice, and you persuade some B supporters to switch to A. If enough of them switch away from B that B is eliminated first, then all those B supporters' ballots will count for C, and that can cause C to win. So by campaigning for A, you made A lose!

The general idea is that if B and C are close, which way it tips can have a sweeping effect on whose second choices get counted, which can affect A. It should feel intuitively scary that a small shift in one part of the election can have a magnified effect on a different part. It's not good for systems to be unstable like that.

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

#310

Post by asteroidbelt » Wed, Jun 23, 2021, 2:11 AM UTC

ajmurmann wrote: post #220

lostdog wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

STAR voting does not eliminate strategic voting.

Suppose you are left, and there are three candidate, left, center, right.

Honestly you would rank then as 5, 3, 1. But center candidate is better for you than right. So you are going to vote 5, 5, 1. So STAR voting is effectively an approval voting.