441–450 of 476 posts
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Vote Sanders and Clinton. Or Sanders, Clinton, and Kasich. Or just Sanders. Vote for as many as you approve of. Simple.
What's not simple is where to draw the approve/disapprove line.
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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…
Americans may not know that most countries don't have public primaries the way that the US does - here in NZ it varies from party to party - at one extreme the Greens hold a very public transparent democratic process, at the other the National party use closed 'smoke filled' rooms
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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…
What I don't understand is why you think 3rd parties should rapidly gain power if they only have support from a fraction of the population. Why should their power be disproportionately larger than the # of people supporting them? I don't think it's very democratic to have a candidate with only 25% of the vote win the election.
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Let’s be honest, it’s hard enough getting Americans to the ballot on Election Day, we don’t need to introduce more complexity. Ranking requires far less brain power than a rating system would. Maybe the energy expenditure between the two is small for the HN group but for the general public, the aversion to doing the mental work would be enough to dramatically reduce turnout. This goes for all countries, not just Amer…
> Ranking requires far less brain power than a rating system would. Rating is simpler than ranking in every way we can measure, from rates of ballot spoilage, to average time taken to complete a ballot. https://medium.com/election-science/star-voting-is-simpler-t... https://www.rangevoting.org/Complexity Most obviously, ranking is effectively a bubble sort, О(n^2), whereas rating is just two passes: 1. Get the max an…
> Most obviously, ranking is effectively a bubble sort, О(n^2), whereas rating is just two passes: 1. Get the max and min. 2. Normalize, thus O(n).
is meaningless to me: rating is impossible, because it's asking me for numbers that I just don't have.
back when I was a postdoc my group had a journal club and some joker decided to include a paper comparing different alternative voting schemes (US seems to be mostly "majority vote and full runoffs with ties). We made it through instant runoff, and a few other approaches, and then Of course, the Joker decided to lay a landmine at the last minute ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theore... ) at w…
Did the Joker admit that Arrow's impossibility theorem doesn't apply to score-based voting systems, or to single-winner elections at all? Some people just want to watch the world learn.
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Honestly IRV is _even worse than plurality_. It doesn't solve the problems it sets out to solve (it entrenches two-party domination [1]), it has ridiculous monotonicity violations [2], all for a lot more complication in counting the votes (you can't distribute the counting well without transmitting the contents of all of the ballots) and possibly wrecking the secret ballot (you can encode and buy specific down-ballot…
> you can't distribute the counting well without transmitting the contents of all of the ballots There are only so many combinations of rankings that are possible. It shouldn't be hard to encode each of those possible orders and transmit them as a whole.
With 20 candidates in an election, that's over 2 billion billion possibilities. It's not practical.
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> The more votes we collect, the more accurate is the representation of the whole. This isn't true. If voters are voting randomly (or effectively randomly) then that's just noise in the system. Worse, if voting is based on candidate exposure (i.e. voting on who had more TV ads rather than policy) then the votes are explicitly not representative of voter preference (unless the candidate that advertises the most also h…
Very odd argument indeed, particularly because it equally applies to non-mandatory voting. The deisre to vote could be based on randomness and candidate exposure. Thus whatever underlying assumptions one makes, more people voting gives better representation for any meaningful definition of representation.
Yes, this is because voting is often non-intuitive. There's a reason we haven't found an amazing system in thousands of years. The problem is that people are trying to apply "common sense" rules and not testing them to check if their assumptions hold true. It follows the typical rule of "if people think the solution to a long standing problem can be solved with common sense it probably cant." Which should be obvious since the problem is long standing... But here's the thing, we've done a lot of testing and aren't going in blind. Unfortunately when solutions are "common sense" we end up not looking at data because why would we? We already know the answer ;)
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> Canada is FPTP Yes? I said those 4 examples use different election styles, not that Canada doesn't use FPTP... > Australian lower house seats are single member aka winner takes all. >> The lower house, the House of Representatives, currently consists of 151 members, each elected using full-preference instant-runoff voting from single-member constituencies known as electoral divisions (and commonly referred to as "e…
>Yes? I said those 4 examples use different election styles, not that Canada doesn't use FPTP... FPTP is a winner takes all electoral system. You said Canada had "a parliament where seats are assigned proportionately to votes (there's no winner take all)". >Winner-take-all refers to >>> a legislative body is elected by dividing the jurisdiction into geographic constituencies, each electing exactly one representative.…
I think the issue we're having here is that you're focusing on a very narrow part of my argument which I'm saying isn't actually that important. The majority of my argument hasn't actually been addressed. I've historically learned not to argue with those that greatly narrow your argument (as opposed to focusing on one part).
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Very nice work! Do you think there is a need to educate voters on how to tactically vote in ranked choice voting? Every voting system has strategies to use it effectively and most voters are not used to the tactics necessary for ranked choice voting. We see a lot of education in how to use the ballot simply, but very little education on "advanced tactics". In particular, a lot of NYC voters aren't ranking either Wile…
> Every voting system has strategies to use it effectively and most voters are not used to the tactics necessary for ranked choice voting. Just to respond to this one small point, but I think the most common mathematical definition of "fairness" in market designs (including voting mechanisms) is that your utility-maximizing action should be identical to your true ranked preferences (this is called "strategy-proof").…
The very comment you are replying to pointed out that "a lot of NYC voters aren't ranking either Wiley or Adams" which is a failure to apply strategy where it manifestly exists. "There are front runners" doesn't seem to be a rare circumstance.
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Here’s a sample ballot from today’s primary in Brooklyn. Voting was for 7 offices, 5 of which were RCV. https://nyc-static.electionhub.com/sampleballots/384760/12/2...
Yeah :/ that does seem excessive. Delegates to the Judicial Convention in particular don't look to me to have a role that justifies expecting citizens to choose eleven of them each cycle.
We elect some form of party-apparatus delegates here in California too, though the Democratic Party here holds those elections separately and privately.
The only one I've ever been actively aware was happening was because I was dating someone working for a prominent state politician, and got dragged along to vote for people I'd never heard of in some park.