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

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

#401

Post by elihu »

bootlooped wrote: post #373
gene91 wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

It just doesn't feel likely that this could be successfully coordinated or occur in a decentralized way organically in a sufficiently large election. Consider how little trust a lot of people have in polling. You would need a very high amount of trust in it if you were going to dishonesty rank your choices based on it. And if strategic voting is going to be based on polling, wouldn't we expect people then start strat…

An individual person might not be able to coordinate such a thing, but you can bet that campaign strategists are going to be very interested in crafting their messages to get the results they want. I mean, right now we have campaigns and PACs that sometimes promote a minor candidate they're ideologically opposed to because they'll siphon votes away from their major-party opponent.

What strategies will they employ in RCV elections? I don't know, but given the way campaigns already operate with continuous polling, elaborate voter databases, and modern ad-tech that can target exactly the right message to exactly the right people to influence their behavior slightly, I see election systems with wonky outcomes as an attack surface against democracy.

> The system has too much chaos.

There's too much fog-of-war for individual voters to make optimal strategic voting choices, but the Cambridge Analyticas of the world can use that to their advantage. I don't like that information asymmetry, and it seems the best way to defend against it is to have voting systems that are as close to the ideal (which is that candidates win by having the most public support) as possible.

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

#402

Post by jjeaff »

adventured wrote: post #335
crazygringo wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Anyone can join that party and run in the primary.

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

#403

Post by smitty1e »

cryptgno wrote: post #264
smitty1e wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The USA is a two-party state because of the voting system. If people could confidently vote for another party there wouldn't be just two parties. There are plenty of other parties, for example: Libertarian, Green, and Constitution. In practice, these minor parties (could be) funded by the opposite end of the spectrum to weaken the other side (just a hunch). But that gets at one possibility of why these minor partie…

Plurality voting systems lacking runoff elections lead to two-party states. Maurice Duverger pointed this out in 1964. The Convention of States is a campaign by the Tea Party movement to form an Article V convention, but they are more likely to present a balanced budget amendment, not electoral reform. Key people involved like Jim DeMint have also advocated for a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage—a pretty silly…

The 16th and 17th Amendments, plus the Federal Reserve Act, all in 1913, along with the capping of the House of Representatives at 435 members in 1910, have driven the growth of the Administrative State. And the debt.

So now there is a quasi-aristocracy running plays and putting on these electoral shows every couple of years.

Calls for substantial reform.

Technical people understand the need for clean architecture and political systems.

Humans are not code, but our political- and tax systems are a Byzantine train wreck. On a good day.

But go ahead and worry about DeMint's opinions, boss.

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

#404

Post by laurencerowe »

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…

> There are almost always only 2 choices - the Democratic candidate and the Republican candidate.

I’m an immigrant so some of this may be wrong, but the party system in the US seems to operate very differently to that in most other countries.

Primaries make races far more focussed on the individual representative so there is less incentive for serious third parties to emerge as their potential candidates can instead challenge an incumbent in a primary within the same party affiliation.

With voters registering with an affiliation rather than joining a party as a member and being subject to that party’s rules, so far as I can tell there is no way for a party to prevent someone from running under their banner so long as they win the primary.

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

#405

Post by sofixa »

croisillon wrote: post #397
sofixa wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's interesting you gave France as an example, because they have a nice workflow/system to avoid this. There are presidential elections every 5 years, which are "standard", if no candidate gets over 50% of the votes, there's a second round between the first two candidates from the first round. A month later, there are legislative elections, the concept being that people will send the new president a parliament he ca…

That’s not correct, Chirac won the parliament in 2002, the first time the presidential election was for 5 years. The former system (7 years president) allowed more diversity and that’s how he got to work with a left prime minister, 10 years after having been himself the prime minister of a left president.

Hm, i remembered my history wrongly, i've now removed that stuff, thanks!

> The former system (7 years president) allowed more diversity

Yeah, but 7 years is a lot and it's a remnant of when France wad supposed to be a monarchy, so i completely understand why they changed it.

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

#406

Post by elihu »

asteroidbelt wrote: post #391
elihu wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> If the voting public prefers a weak moderate candidate with no agenda No voting public prefers other candidates, and moderate candidate as backup. I give you an example I posted in another thread: * 60% want a dem candidate to win * 40% want a rep candidate to win * 70% are willing to join strategic voting to avoid allowing other party to win In this case, the dem candidate looks like a correct winner. With ranked…

I don't think 70% are likely to vote for anyone unless they're exceptional in some way an almost universally liked. Candidates like Michael Bloomberg or Lincoln Chafee or John Kasich or Jon Huntsman or anyone else trying to go after the moderate vote just wouldn't get those kinds of margins. But anyways, that's beside the point.

In approval voting, strategic voting for moderate/novelty candidates is like this (assuming you have a favorite and least favorite major party candidate and the novelty candidate is somewhere in the middle): you can vote for the novelty candidate if you want. Doing so might cause your favorite major-party candidate to lose if you happen to be the tie-breaking vote. Or it might cause your least-favorite major party candidate to lose to the novelty candidate. You can decide whether the prospect of having your favorite candidate lose to the novelty candidate is worse than the prospect of having your least favorite major party candidate lose to the novelty candidate and vote accordingly. In all cases, if you vote for your favorite candidate you're always helping them win, and if you vote for the novelty candidate you're always helping them win.

How strategic voting works for RCV is that you can put your favorite major party candidate first, the novelty candidate second, and the least favorite candidate last. You know that putting the novelty candidate in the middle won't harm your favorite candidate's chances of winning, since that's a property of RCV (later no harm). However, what you don't know is whether putting your favorite candidate first will help or harm your favorite candidate, and you don't know whether putting the novelty candidate second will help or harm the novelty candidate. Maybe putting your first choice second or third will cause them to win. Maybe putting the novelty candidate first will cause your favorite candidate to win against your least favorite candidate.

This is complicated and hard to reason about, unless you have detailed information about how other people are going to vote. Which seems to imply that such a system would tend to disempower individual voters and empower whoever has access to detailed information about the intentions of the voting public: campaigns that can afford internal polling, Facebook, Google, etc..

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

#407

Post by dwd »

weswpg wrote: post #390
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…

This video [0] argues that most Australians fail to understand how the system works and that the mainstream political parties actively mislead voters into thinking that their voice is "wasted" if they vote for a 3rd party [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bleyX4oMCgM

Most don't understand the upper house (Senate) system as it applies weighting on the redistribution of votes and there is a choice between above the line (party preference) and below the line (tick every box): but the lower house system is fairly straight forward.

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

#409

Post by Gustomaximus »

hnick wrote: post #376
e1g wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yes, was just saying if you really object it's not a big deal legally. Although most people don't as you say. Having elections on Saturdays definitely helps.

Also loads of locations and little queuing. Also increasingly you get sausage sizzles that seems to becoming a tradition to go get your sausage sandwich.

I find it amazing hearing about people in USA queuing for hours year after year. It doesn't have to be that way.

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

#410

Post by hollowcelery »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #304
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…

> 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.

It is observable in the aggregate statistics. x% of people voted for so-and-so candidate.
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