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?

#331

Post by elihu » Wed, Jun 23, 2021, 2:35 AM UTC

sjfidsfkds wrote: post #288

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?

It's a hard question. I think it comes down to: are you more afraid of your top choice losing, or your least-favorite choice winning? If the former, then just vote for your first choice. If the latter, vote for everyone but your first choice. (This is an improvement over FPTP because you at least have the option to support multiple candidates if you want to.)

Some people don't like this aspect of approval voting, and really want to give an ordering or a score.

Score voting is like approval voting, but you give a score. All the scores are totaled up, and the winner has the highest total. This is a pretty good system, but it has a problem: honest voters who aren't enthusiastic about a candidate might rate their candidate 6/10, whereas a very opinionated partisan voter might rate their candidate 10/10. So, the people with the most extreme opinions have more influence: 6 partisans gives a score of 60, whereas ten unenthusiastic voters also gives an equal score of 60.

Under score voting, strategic voting means always maximizing your positions: always 10/10 or 0/10, nothing in-between. Basically this is the same as approval voting. So, I'd suggest that approval voting is usually better because it puts strategic voters and honest voters on an equal playing field.

There's another voting system called STAR (score then automatic runoff), in which you use score voting to select the top two candidates, and then you do an instant runoff by maximizing all the votes for the top two candidates. For instance, if our top two candidates are A and B and if someone marked candidate A as 7 and candidate B as 4, then that turns into A:10 and B:0. If another person has A as 6 and B as 6, then they don't have a preference and that ballot is dropped.

STAR isn't perfect (what if an extreme party runs two ideologically-similar candidates and they both make it to the runoff?) but it's a pretty reasonable compromise system that allows voters to score candidates rather than just making a yes/no choice.

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

#332

Post by adamjb » Wed, Jun 23, 2021, 2:37 AM UTC

godelski wrote: post #330

munk-a wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> but up here in Canada we have a parliament and we're drifting toward a two party system Actually this is kinda my point: Canada: Liberal + Conservative = 81.1% (90.5% with Bloc, 97.6% w/ NDP, ) Australia: Liberal + Labor = 84.8% (95.4% with National) Germany: CDU + SPD = 56% (68% w/ AfD, 79.7% w/FDP, 89.4% w/ Left) France: REM + LR = 71.8% (79.9% w/ MoDem, 85.4% w/ UAI, 90.8% w/SOC) I can continue if needed... Thes…

>These 4 countries have 4 different voting systems but what they have in common is a parliament where seats are assigned proportionately to votes (there's no winner take all).

That is wrong. Australian lower house seats are single member aka winner takes all.

edit: and Canada is FPTP

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

#333

Post by elihu » Wed, Jun 23, 2021, 2:42 AM UTC

soberpeach wrote: post #319

asteroidbelt wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 le…

Yeah, it's literally "elect the candidate with the highest approval rating" which seems like a fair and reasonable outcome.

(That's assuming that people vote honestly, but according to at least one analysis [1], the outcome isn't very much less democratically optimal if people vote strategically in approval voting rather than honestly.)

[1] https://electionscience.org/library/tactical-voting-basics/

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

#334

Post by gizmo385 » Wed, Jun 23, 2021, 2:42 AM UTC

hash872 wrote: post #301

joshuamorton wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ch…

Couldn't states just develop complex rules for sending their delegations that knock losing candidates off the list and redistribute local votes based on national electoral gridlock? That sounds somewhat similar to the way the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact is supposed to work.

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

#335

Post by adventured » Wed, Jun 23, 2021, 2:47 AM UTC

crazygringo wrote: post #225

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…

Incorrect. I voted in today's NYC mayoral primary. There are 13 candidates on the Democratic primary ballot. Perhaps 3 are considered "front-runners" but everyone's aware it's entirely possible at least a couple of the others could wind up winning. The race is entirely up in the air. Because NYC is overwhelmingly Democratic, this election almost certainly determines who will be mayor. And not only do you need to do y…

> Welcome to actual democracy

Fake democracy where you get to choose viable candidates exclusively from one party, and only one party.

Aka a party dictatorship, the same as they have in most authoritarian states, and ideologically enforced in a similarly regressive manner. If you're not of the party, you will be an outcast and blockaded from any chance at winning. The opposite of democracy, and very clearly so.

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

#336

Post by adamjb » Wed, Jun 23, 2021, 2:48 AM UTC

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…

>who also uses MMP (like Australia)

Australian federal lower house elections are single member IRV, upper house are multiple member STV. MMP isn't used anywhere in Australia.

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

#337

Post by godelski » Wed, Jun 23, 2021, 2:49 AM UTC

justinpombrio wrote: post #298

godelski wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

For anyone like me who hadn't heard of Gibbard's theorem, it's actually even simpler (and more depressing) than Arrow's theorem. To quote Wikipedia: For any deterministic process of collective decision, at least one of the following three properties must hold: 1. The process is dictatorial, i.e. there exists a distinguished agent who can impose the outcome; 2. The process limits the possible outcomes to two options o…

> it's impossible to completely eliminate strategic voting. No matter the method: ranked vs. cardinal vs. anything else you dream up can't help.

I think this comment is a defeatist at best and deceitful at worst. Just because there is no global optimization does not mean that all optima are equal. We can in fact have optima that are better than one another (including all optima we know about!). This is a common feature of highly dimensional solution spaces.

The big issue here is that not all criteria are weighted equally, by desire of effectiveness. So we find an optima where we optimize features that have a large weights and care less about optimizing features with small weights. By doing this we can compare systems in their desirability and select the best ones. This is not cause for throwing up your hands and giving up.

As an example: cardinal systems, when compared to ordinal (ranked) systems, are more resilient to strategic voting and simpler (both for the voter and for the people tallying the votes, aka transparency). The cost? Slight decrease in maximal VSE. BUT if we look at the min, mean, median, or modes of VSE given different strategies cardinal system outperform ordinal (aka, desirable). You can see this by comparing with this chart[0]. For example with STAR0-10 we have maximal VSE of .983 and minimal of .912 (actually this makes it strictly better than plurality!). But if we look at our best ordian, RP, we see RP has a maximal VSE of .988 and minimal of .870. So on terms of maximal there's a 0.005 difference but on minimal there's a difference of 0.042! We can easily tell here that STAR is much more resistant to strategic voting than RP (Shulze is even worse!). Doing the same for IRV we see .07/.115 (max/min comparison of STAR0-10 vs IRV on VSE).

So we can compare. We can select better methods. But is there a ''perfect,, solution? No. But don't let the lack of the ability to create a perfect system detract from the ability to compare systems. Not all is lost.

[0] https://electionscience.github.io/vse-sim/vse.html

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

#338

Post by dane-pgp » Wed, Jun 23, 2021, 2:53 AM UTC

MichaelApproved wrote: post #257

thought_alarm wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 par…

Why are people presenting examples from parliamentary systems for an American voting process? The two systems are so dramatically different that no cautionary tale would ever be meaningful.

What aspects of parliamentary systems make it difficult to apply lessons from their voting systems to the voting systems used to elect representatives to the US Congress?

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

#339

Post by e1g » Wed, Jun 23, 2021, 2:54 AM UTC

asteroidbelt wrote: post #306

e1g wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A democratic society, where all votes are equal, benefits when everyone votes, even without a testing how well-informed they are. It encourages personal ownership of collective problems.

For every apathetic member who is voting based on ignorance, there is a zealous member voting based on dogma. The more votes we collect, the more accurate is the representation of the whole.

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

#340

Post by elihu » Wed, Jun 23, 2021, 2:54 AM UTC

vitus wrote: post #307

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…

As far as I know, the label RCV as it's commonly used in the United States (and advocated most prominently by FairVote) usually means the same thing as IRV. Perhaps there are some minor differences in terms of specifying exactly what happens if a ballot doesn't rank all the candidates, or ranks two candidates equally. Perhaps using RCV to mean an exact system rather than a whole category of voting systems is imprecise, but I think that ship has already sailed.

It's also sometimes called alternative vote, and the Australians call it preferential voting.

I've wondered if IRV couldn't be substantially improved by using Borda count for the elimination step rather than eliminating the candidate with the least first-choice options. (I think there's an actual name for that system, but I don't remember what it is.)