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?

#341

Post by godelski » Wed, Jun 23, 2021, 2:57 AM UTC

logicchop wrote: post #303

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…

> 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.

> I thought Gibbard-Satterthwaite (or maybe just Gibbard's version) applied to cardinal systems as well.

Correct, but it is also a weaker version of Arrow's (also as Clay points out, Arrow's isn't really about voting[0]...)

> 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.

Okay, but this just adds complexity. Cardinal is already simpler than ordinal systems (both for voters _and_ for those counting the votes). There's absolutely nothing wrong ranking candidates in a cardinal system (it's actually pretty unlikely that you'll have the same preference for multiple candidates so this is going to naturally happen). The difference? In cardinal you can better express your preference of one candidate over another (I give an example here[1]). So now we've added "encoding efficiency" to the added benefit of cardinal systems.

Cardinal systems are better than ordinal systems in almost every single way (the only thing I can think of ordinal systems doing better at is that RP and Schulze perform better on maximal VSE, but as I discuss here[2] that is pretty limited as well as unlikely considering strategic voting and the ability to manipulate people exists).

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27598975

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27599324

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27600248

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

#342

Post by koolba » Wed, Jun 23, 2021, 3:01 AM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #329

CameronNemo wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Further evidence for this exists in the demise of ticket splitting: if you vote R at the top of the ticket, you're very likely to vote R the rest of the way down the ticket, regardless of who the downballot R's are. It wasn't always this way, but has been for some time.

Some States even have a single box you can check to vote entirely for that party’s candidates, “straight ticket voting”.

Texas removed it a few years back and it’s removal was challenged (and lost) by Democrats: https://www.texastribune.org/2020/09/30/texas-2020-election-...

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

#343

Post by asdfaoeu » Wed, Jun 23, 2021, 3:05 AM UTC

ClayShentrup wrote: post #213

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…

> Approval voting I think is much too tactical and, strictly speaking, worse than IRV. On the contrary, approval voting gets better results than IRV with any measure of strategic or honest voters. See extensive computer simulation results by Harvard stats PhD and voting methods expert Jameson Quinn. Brown (50/50) is probably the most realistic setting. https://rpubs.com/Jameson-Quinn/VSE5key A simple example of IRV s…

> On the contrary, approval voting gets better results than IRV with any measure of strategic or honest voters. See extensive computer simulation results by Harvard stats PhD and voting methods expert Jameson Quinn. Brown (50/50) is probably the most realistic setting.

If you look at the graph with the honest strategy you get better results with IRV which is basically his point.

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

#344

Post by nine_k » Wed, Jun 23, 2021, 3:08 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…

Imagine there are two major party candidates, D and R, and also a third candidate X who is well-kmown and well-loved, but few believe X can win.

Now voters go to the election and mostly put R or D on top place, but consistently put X on the second place. X has a really fair chance to win.

This is how the two-party system can be cracked. This is how an already well-known person can be elected without having to join either major party.

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

#345

Post by vb42 » Wed, Jun 23, 2021, 3:09 AM UTC

I recently built a visual exploration of ranked-choice voting that might be of interest: https://vinaybhaip.com/ranked-choice. At the end of the the visual explanation, it allows you to simulate different elections

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

#346

Post by nine_k » Wed, Jun 23, 2021, 3:10 AM UTC

barsonme wrote: post #294

anonporridge wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While multimember districts would be a huge improvement, I wonder if we also should start having the conversation if geography based representation is the right approach for the internet age. I for one, have more in common with a minority identity widely dispersed across the country but connected through the internet than I do my next door neighbors. My niche identity never gets proportionately represented in governm…

No. Government and politics are primarily local because most problems are local. For instance, I have zero clue about life in NYC. Letting me directly influence decisions in NYC is wholly unfair. I have no skin in the game! How good or bad their transportation is doesn’t affect me. Whether their local tax rate is high or low doesn’t affect me. But it most definitely does affect them. Likewise, nobody in NYC is affect…

Ironically, a lot of people who decide how to develop NYC subway sit in Albany, NY.

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

#347

Post by elihu » Wed, Jun 23, 2021, 3:10 AM UTC

karmelapple wrote: post #296

elihu wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Both are miles beyond first past the post, Actually, that's debatable. There was an interesting simulation done awhile back [1] that compared voting systems, and they found that if people voted honestly then IRV is better, but if people vote strategically the result isn't any more democratically optimal than FPTP. Which is what we should probably expect to happen when voters figure out that it's only safe to put yo…

Sure, opinions are debatable. But minor candidates being spoilers have come up at all levels of elections many times for decades. Splitting the vote happens frequently, again at all levels of elections (at least nationally in terms of the primaries for US Presidents). If you vote for your favorite candidate, and your candidate is not the last-ranked candidate, you cannot cause your candidate to lose by putting them f…

I do agree that FPTP needs to go. I'm worried though that replacing it with RCV substitutes problems we know and understand with another set of problems that we don't know to be worried about because we haven't experienced them yet.

> If you vote for your favorite candidate, and your candidate is not the last-ranked candidate, you cannot cause your candidate to lose by putting them first.

Wikipedia has an example. (Technically it's two voters difference, since a change of one voter's vote would, I think, change the result at most from a win to a tie.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monotonicity_criterion#Instant...

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

#348

Post by JumpCrisscross » Wed, Jun 23, 2021, 3:15 AM UTC

nine_k wrote: post #346

barsonme wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. Government and politics are primarily local because most problems are local. For instance, I have zero clue about life in NYC. Letting me directly influence decisions in NYC is wholly unfair. I have no skin in the game! How good or bad their transportation is doesn’t affect me. Whether their local tax rate is high or low doesn’t affect me. But it most definitely does affect them. Likewise, nobody in NYC is affect…

Ironically, a lot of people who decide how to develop NYC subway sit in Albany, NY.

> a lot of people who decide how to develop NYC subway sit in Albany, NY

Albany bailed us out, so it retains oversight. But the vast majority of the MTA’s decisions are made by people with boots on the ground.

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

#349

Post by Tagbert » Wed, Jun 23, 2021, 3:20 AM UTC

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…

that may be the case, but we might have better politics if our other elections were done with ranked choice. If it can reduce the power of the parties, that is a net win.

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

#350

Post by elihu » Wed, Jun 23, 2021, 3:21 AM UTC

asteroidbelt wrote: post #324

elihu wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of it's big downsides is that you can, in some cases, cause a candidate to lose by ranking them too highly. In voting-theory terminology, it fails the monotonicity criterion. In at least that one respect it's worse than first-past-the-post. (I mean, imagine if people could say "Gore would have won in 2000 if only a few less people had voted for him". That sounds nonsensical, but that's how IRV works sometimes.) W…

> Approval voting is simpler than IRV and (as far as I know) it isn't worse than FPTP in any way FPTP might be better than approval voting, because approval voting favors weak moderate candidates with no agenda. With FPTP the people alternate lefts and rights and the system develops. With moderate candidates the system may stop progressing: no reforms, no bugfixes.

If the voting public prefers a weak moderate candidate with no agenda, then that's the candidate that should win. I think weak moderates usually flop, though, if there's no particularly compelling reason for people to want that person to be president.

The way I look at is that it's a kind of relief valve. If both major parties (assuming there are two, maybe there'll be more...) nominate not-so-great candidates, then the voters have an option to elect someone like Tom Hanks. I mean, I would have voted for Tom Hank in 2016 if I had an approval voting ballot and he was one of the options.