How about everyone gets 100 votes and can give any number to each candidate. Wouldn't this be better?
What is ranked-choice voting and why is New York using it?
311–320 of 476 posts
Re: What is ranked-choice voting and why is New York using it?
#312Earlier 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…
> Ranking requires far less brain power than a rating system would.
Rating is simpler than ranking in every way we can measure, from rates of ballot spoilage, to average time taken to complete a ballot.
https://medium.com/election-science/star-voting-is-simpler-t...
https://www.rangevoting.org/Complexity
Most obviously, ranking is effectively a bubble sort, О(n^2), whereas rating is just two passes: 1. Get the max and min. 2. Normalize, thus O(n).
And Approval Voting, technically rating on a 0-1 binary scale, is arguably even simpler than the status quo.
Re: What is ranked-choice voting and why is New York using it?
#313This 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 some people change their vote from A-B-C to B-A-C, that can cause A to be eliminated instead of B in the first round, and B in the second (if C beats B but C doesn't beat A). Changing the winner from B to C.
Re: What is ranked-choice voting and why is New York using it?
#314Great 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.…
Nice work! But clearly the best slice is just a slice, no toppings necessary.
Re: What is ranked-choice voting and why is New York using it?
#315Earlier 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.
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.
STAR voting comes the closest to eliminating strategic voting of any deterministic voting method being seriously proposed for government elections.
https://clayshentrup.medium.com/strategy-with-star-voting-an...
> 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.
Obviously not true. If you did that, and left and center make it to the runoff, your vote has zero power. And also flawed for other reasons I discuss in that blog link.
Re: What is ranked-choice voting and why is New York using it?
#316This 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 agree with what /u/zestyping says in the other comment, so I won't repeat it. But here's a video explaining the strategic voting issue: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtKAScORevQ
Also, wikipedia has an example of a non-monotonic result here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monotonicity_criterion#Instant...
Re: What is ranked-choice voting and why is New York using it?
#317A 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…
New York is a fusion voting state with all sorts of parties. Most, like the “Rent is Too Damn High” party fade, but there is a bunch of third parties of varying degrees of relevance.
Re: What is ranked-choice voting and why is New York using it?
#318This 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!
https://www.fairvote.org/rcv_faq#monotonicity
Read "22. Does RCV satisfy the monotonicity criterion?"
Say, there's 3 candidates. You want A to win. You think A will lose to B in a 1-on-1 match, but would win C. So you vote C-A-B (or C-B-A, doesn't matter) to increase the likeliness that B got eliminated in the 1st round. Of course, you're now saying that you prefer C over A in a 1-on-1 race. But that's fine because other people will vote for A.
Concretely, let's say this is people's actual choice.
31 B-A-C; 39 A-B-C; 30 C-B-A
B wins.
Now, if 2 people preferring A (voted A-B-C) strategically change their vote to C-B-A.
31 B-A-C; 37 A-B-C; 32 C-B-A
Now, A wins.
Re: What is ranked-choice voting and why is New York using it?
#319This 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…
Approval voting may lead to election of weak candidates, no? Like there's a strong right candidate, disapproved by left, there's strong left, disapproved by right, and there's meh candidate approved by both. Either strong right or strong left might be better for both left and right. Thank you for pointing to the flaws of RCV though. It has flaws, but still looks like an improvement. In London mayor they were using "C…
Regarding your comment about approval, isn't that the intended outcome? You elect the candidate that the most people approve of, regardless of whether or not there are other "stronger" candidates. The population would be better served than if one of the "strong" left or right candidates were elected.
You could also just not vote for any other candidates if you don't think they'd do a good job. In your example, the left or the right could just not vote for the "meh" candidate if they truly don't believe they would be a good person to lead, and if they do vote for them, then they should be happy at the outcome regardless.
Re: What is ranked-choice voting and why is New York using it?
#320Here'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.
> it just seems so terrible for what people really want to express.
Intuition would say so, but intuition is wrong.
https://electionscience.org/library/expressiveness-in-approv...
> Who are they supposed to "approve?"
Everyone they prefer to the expected utility of the winner. https://www.rangevoting.org/RVstrat6
And indeed, Sanders (and Warren) did quite well in multiple approval voting polls like this one.
https://electionscience.org/press-releases/new-poll-74-of-de...