11–20 of 128 posts
Not knowing on the same day who won the NYC primary is much more annoying than I thought it would be. I wonder if there is a psychological effect in play here, like lag in a game controller. Makes you feel less like you’re actually in control.
Looking at the results, it's a wonder that IRV (aka "ranked-choice voting") gets more lip service than STAR and approval voting. These latter two seem obviously and measurably superior. My guess is that it all comes down to a lack of education. Maybe civics ought to be a required course in high school and/or college?
The main proponent of approval voting seems to be the Center for Election Science, which is a pretty small organization, though I think they've gotten a little bigger over the last few years. There's also some STAR voting groups. None of these groups have huge piles of money to spend.
Then there's news organizations (including the NPR story posted here on HN today) promoting RCV/IRV.
On its face, IRV seems pretty straightforward and reasonable. It's problems are complicated and hard to describe. The examples of non-monotonic results where voters can cause their preferred candidate to lose by ranking them too highly are counterintuitive and hard to follow, and I wouldn't blame anyone for thinking: "What? that doesn't make sense. You must have made a mistake somewhere..."
There's also the common sentiments of "this is an emergency we need to fix right now" and "everyone's already on the RCV bandwagon" and "replacing a broken system with a half-broken system is usually politically more feasible than replacing a broken system with a not-broken system" and "don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good" and so on.
There are also criticisms of the other voting systems. Some people are bothered by approval voting's lack of ordered preferences, for instance, and score voting is susceptible to strategic voting where the most extreme rankings have the most influence. STAR voting mitigates that to some extent, but it's not perfect.
I worry that we'll replace FPTP with IRV, find out later that it didn't live up to expectations, and then when voting reform advocates start pushing for something better like approval voting or STAR, the voters will say, "why should we believe you when a bunch of voting reform advocates promised unicorns and rainbows and we got a system that doesn't work any better than FPTP?" And then they'll either say to heck with all this voting theory nonsense and go back to FPTP or just live with IRV. And that's optimistically assuming that our future selves don't just abandon democracy itself as an unworkable idea (and though I reject that premise I have to concede that there's no lack of evidence pointing in that direction).
Looking at the results, it's a wonder that IRV (aka "ranked-choice voting") gets more lip service than STAR and approval voting. These latter two seem obviously and measurably superior. My guess is that it all comes down to a lack of education. Maybe civics ought to be a required course in high school and/or college?
I think it’s because most often advocates are not promoting a specific methodology but a broad set of possible electoral reforms. Even people who study this in depth (like the article author) get substantially different results based on what they value and measure, and by methodology. That’s not something a civics class is going to address for people who want more fair choice at the ballot box but can’t possibly know…
If all of the new things states are trying were concentrated in just one state the churn would destabilize it too much. By spreading out the chaos we collectively get to try many new things at once, but avoid being overwhelmed since each locality is dealing with fewer new things.
Looking at the results, it's a wonder that IRV (aka "ranked-choice voting") gets more lip service than STAR and approval voting. These latter two seem obviously and measurably superior. My guess is that it all comes down to a lack of education. Maybe civics ought to be a required course in high school and/or college?
> Looking at the results, it's a wonder that IRV (aka "ranked-choice voting") gets more lip service than STAR and approval voting. These latter two seem obviously and measurably superior. They are obviously and measurably superior when you construct a measure designed around their shared features while ignoring the cultural variation in honest ballot marking for these methods resulting from the fact that the ballots…
Asset Voting seems to be almost unheard of, even among voting reform enthusiasts, despite being over 100 years old and one of the simplest systems out there. Basically it works the same way as a FPTP election, except that after the votes are counted, the losing candidates one by one get to reassign their votes to a remaining candidate.
It doesn't guarantee proportional representation, but it does solve the spoiler problem and doesn't force voters to decide whether to "approve" of a weakly-disliked candidate, or how to rank multiple candidates. The ballot papers wouldn't even have to change their instructions, and it can be easily counted by hand, allowing the votes for each candidate to be placed in their own stack, which makes the process more transparent.
It may be hard to model, but I would have liked to see how Asset Voting compared to the other voting systems. Asset Voting seems to be almost unheard of, even among voting reform enthusiasts, despite being over 100 years old and one of the simplest systems out there. Basically it works the same way as a FPTP election, except that after the votes are counted, the losing candidates one by one get to reassign their vote…
Are there real works examples of how such systems operate in practice?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it’s because most often advocates are not promoting a specific methodology but a broad set of possible electoral reforms. Even people who study this in depth (like the article author) get substantially different results based on what they value and measure, and by methodology. That’s not something a civics class is going to address for people who want more fair choice at the ballot box but can’t possibly know…
This is one of the great aspects of states (localities in general) mostly governing themselves even in important things like voting. Some state tries something new, and everyone observes and can learn from the results. If all of the new things states are trying were concentrated in just one state the churn would destabilize it too much. By spreading out the chaos we collectively get to try many new things at once, bu…
Not knowing on the same day who won the NYC primary is much more annoying than I thought it would be. I wonder if there is a psychological effect in play here, like lag in a game controller. Makes you feel less like you’re actually in control.
Do you know what the source of the lag is? There's a concept of "rounds" in IRV, but if you have access to computers, a "round" should resolve in less than a second, if election data is digitized. Is the lag digitizing the votes in the first place?
Not knowing on the same day who won the NYC primary is much more annoying than I thought it would be. I wonder if there is a psychological effect in play here, like lag in a game controller. Makes you feel less like you’re actually in control.
Do you know what the source of the lag is? There's a concept of "rounds" in IRV, but if you have access to computers, a "round" should resolve in less than a second, if election data is digitized. Is the lag digitizing the votes in the first place?