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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?

#431

Post by tialaramex »

nine_k wrote: post #344
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…

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 ei…

More over, a way this can actually play is that there's a third candidate Z who has policies many people strongly agree with, but, since they aren't a member of the big parties and don't attract mainstream news focus, few believe they'll win. Under RCV and several other systems, many R and D voters will put Z first, because it can't hurt. They expect Z will be eliminated, since they "know" R or D must win, and their R or D second choice is what they expect to matter but at least they made their preference clear.

And then Z wins with 55% of the vote. Even though this is a surprise to Z's voters, it's a pleasant surprise. They wanted Z they just didn't expect it to be possible.

Under FPTP this can be made to happen, but you have to persuade people Z can actually win, because they're worried they are "throwing away" their vote until it really happens. Consider Brighton Pavilion in the UK. In 2005, Brighton was held by a Labour Co-Op incumbent, and the Green candidate came a close third. The Greens had to really sell the message that when Lucas stood in 2010 they genuinely had a chance to elect her, if only people who supported Green policies looked past the Red/Blue split and gave Caroline their vote.

They made it happen, but it was close, turnout was up considerably, and much of that new turnout voted for Lucas. If you voted for Lucas despite vague Tory leanings, and she hadn't won, you've have been devastated because right behind her was the new Labour candidate whereas even a modest fraction of Lucas' votes going to the Tory would have won them the election.

Once she'd shown it was possible Caroline Lucas never looked back, and she now routinely secures a clear majority in elections not the mere plurality required to win.

But this has been hard for her party to replicate elsewhere, and while Lucas is an especially personable candidate that can't explain the entire phenomenon. There are likely other constituencies in the UK where Greens could secure a majority if the voters believed the Green candidate has a chance and didn't vote their second or third choice to prevent their least preferred from winning.

I'm actually not bullish for RCV, but this sort of problem is exactly why it makes sense.

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

#432

Post by x86_64Ubuntu »

malandrew wrote: post #273
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…

> There are almost always only 2 choices - the Democratic candidate and the Republican candidate. We really need to get rid of the canonization of the party. If there are only going to be two candidates, let it be two individuals. The party shouldn't even be listed on the ballot. If you haven't done enough research to know which individual belongs to the party you support, then you haven't done enough research to vot…

>...If I ruled the world, I'd go further and require a short 5 question pop quiz about the policies of the candidate you chose and you need 3 out of 5 questions correct for your vote to count.

Yeah, we know how that goes when we try to keep the "wrong" people from voting in the US.

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

#433

Post by zentiggr »

username90 wrote: post #203
ineedasername wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you say is true if general elections in the US, but often not the primary elections where a party determines who its candidate will be. At that stage it's pretty common to have a wider field of candidates. Also, ranking could change the US dynamic of only have 2 choices. Being able to vote 3rd party and then then choose someone from one of the two main parties might drive a lot more people to vote 3rd party beca…

With that argument China is also a democracy, since you can vote who will get to run the party. I'd argue that a proper democracy requires new parties to be easily formed and quickly gain momentum and power if they have support from a fraction of the population. I don't think that ranked choices allows for that, as even if the third party "Greens" in this case got 25% of the votes they'd get thrown away in favour of…

I think once people see that their 'other party' preferences are at least being represented in the early rounds, they will gain confidence in their ability to express their actual desires in the ranking. The understanding that third parties actually have a real chance if they get enough voters' first choices will wake up the Ds and Rs that they can't just coast and hand wave anymore or they'll get tossed out.

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

#434

Post by scoopertrooper »

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

That’s not exactly an academic source.

Anyone moderately awake during the election cycle is keenly aware we have a preferential voting system (and the basic mechanics) as preference deals between parties are keenly covered by the media.

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

#435

Post by rswail »

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…

Australia has a bi-cameral system structured very much like the US, with the lower house being geographic regions of roughly equal population, while the upper house is State based, with equal representation of each State.

In terms of voting, our lower house is ranked choice, our upper house is party-list based ("vote 1 above the line") with the option of individual selections instead ("number the candidates of your choice from 1").

Australia ends up with a two-sided lower house, but the conservative side is actually a coalition of business and rural parties. So it is actually multi-party, in fact, there's a spat going on right now between the urban "Liberal" (right wing conservative fiscally "liberal") and "National" (rural agrarian socialists, privatizing gains, socializing losses, internally split between being pro-resource-extraction industries and agricultural industries).

So we have that same multi-party representation, just our coalitions are more rigid.

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

#436

Post by creata »

ClayShentrup wrote: post #321
adjkant wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. What about if it was Sanders, Clinton, Kasich, and Trump? As a far left voter, do I have to approve Kasich if I really don't want Trump to win? In RCV, it's simple: Sanders, Clinton, maybe Kasich to ensure Trump doesn't win. There are 100% problems in IRV that Clinton or Kasich may be the first elimination there, meaning moderates can get screwed even with preference, but it's still way better than Approval…

Approval voting is superior to IRV in every way we can measure. https://electionscience.org/library/approval-voting-versus-i... Particularly noteworthy is their relative performance in computer simulations of accuracy against tactical voting. https://www.rangevoting.org/BayRegFig

I won't comment on the first link, but I don't buy that second link at all. Assuming that it's referring to the C code from elsewhere on their site[0] (boldly claimed to be 'the world's first "reality based" statistics') then isn't it weird to model honest range voting by just adding some Gaussian noise to the true utility and then scaling the results back into [0, 1]? At that point your computer simulation just measures how closely the voting system agrees with range voting.

[0]: https://www.rangevoting.org/BayRegExec.html

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

#437

Post by rswail »

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…

The difference is that RCV results in the "least worst" candidate winning. They receive the most #1 votes, but unless they achieve an outright majority, if they only have a plurality then they only win by being the most preferred alternative vote by the voters.

So the situation is that the leading parties have to spread their ideological base to incorporate more of the electorate.

In addition, Australia has compulsory registration at 18 and compulsory voting (well, actually compulsory attendance at a voting location, the ballots are all secret).

So the candidates have to appeal most to a plurality of their electorate, and they have to appeal least worse alternative to a majority.

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

#438

Post by rswail »

adamjb wrote: post #336
godelski wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Correction, MMP is sort of used in Tasmania's lower house with the Hare-Clark thing.

And they've got an even more convoluted mechanism for their upper house :)

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

#439

Post by rswail »

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.

There is a problem with what is called the "donkey vote" where the person at the top of the ballot is more likely to get a "1" vote than the person at the bottom.

However, in practice, people accept voting guides from parties that direct their preferences and they vote the way their choice of party decides.

That's why there is horse trading between parties before the election on "preference deals" where they agree to different ordering on the guides.

Smaller parties use this to engage larger parties by demanding some of their policy requests in return.

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

#440

Post by NegativeLatency »

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…

Local elections usually have more interesting options for candidates.

For example the recent mayoral election in Portland, where the incumbent was pretty much a Democrat and was challenged by a couple of more progressive candidates. The incumbent ended up winning with less than 50% of the vote

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