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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?

#451

Post by justinpombrio »

godelski wrote: post #337
justinpombrio wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For anyone like me who hadn't heard of Gibbard's theorem, it's actually even simpler (and more depressing) than Arrow's theorem. To quote Wikipedia: For any deterministic process of collective decision, at least one of the following three properties must hold: 1. The process is dictatorial, i.e. there exists a distinguished agent who can impose the outcome; 2. The process limits the possible outcomes to two options o…

> it's impossible to completely eliminate strategic voting. No matter the method: ranked vs. cardinal vs. anything else you dream up can't help. I think this comment is a defeatist at best and deceitful at worst. Just because there is no global optimization does not mean that all optima are equal. We can in fact have optima that are better than one another (including all optima we know about!). This is a common featu…

> I think this comment is a defeatist at best and deceitful at worst.

Wow, very HN! I don't actually mind very much, but seriously, consider applying the principle of charity?

I agree with you, and did before you wrote this comment too! Hence my use of the word "completely". I was just surprised that strategic voting couldn't be completely eliminated; before yesterday I expected that you could, in exchange for losing other nice properties. Of course being impossible to eliminate completely doesn't mean it shouldn't be minimized.

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

#452

Post by cheriot »

NickM wrote: post #133
cheriot wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's very possible that none of your rankings matter and have no influence on the outcome if you don't pick one of the top two candidates as your first choice. I'm not sure what you're describing. As long as one of the top two candidates appear on your ballot (at any rank) then you have influenced the last round of voting.

Suppose you have three candidates, A, B, and C, and the votes look like this: 45% of voters rank A 1st, B 2nd, C 3rd 25% of voters rank B 1st, A 2nd, C 3rd 30% of voters rank C 1st, B 2nd, A 3rd Nobody has the majority, so B is eliminated, and A wins round 2 with 70%. But 30% of voters preferred B over A, and if they had ranked B first, then B would've won in the first round with 55%. By voting honestly, the C voters…

All of the strategic situations with instant runoff seem to require more detail on the outcome than anyone can predict in practice. So I’m not sure this will ever actually be a thing for voters think about.

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

#453

Post by ClayShentrup »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #72
zozbot234 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, approval voting is a simpler system that also tends to reward moderate or "compromise" candidates.

> approval voting is a simpler system that also tends to reward moderate or "compromise" candidates I don't have a strong preference between approval and RCV. But I think people closer to politics would. Being able to "be behind" one candidate is a meaningful promoter of civic engagement; forcing that decision is deeply entrenched in our politics. That makes approval voting a tougher sell for implementation than RCV.…

> That makes approval voting a tougher sell for implementation than RCV.

Approval voting was passed by a 2-1 landslide majority in both Fargo and St Louis. Public opinion research by the Center for Election Science shows random American voters are much more supportive of approval voting than IRV, relative to the status quo. By a huge margin.

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

#454

Post by 0xffff2 »

catern wrote: post #108
0xffff2 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much time must people be putting into politics that they have such nuanced views that make it impossible to express a clear opinion on 4 top candidates and stick a major party candidate in spot 5? I guess New York politics must be vastly different from the West coast, because it's pretty uncommon to see a single race with more than 5 candidates in the first place, and truly unheard of for there to be 5 candidates…

People on the West coast never strongly dislike a particular candidate and want to make sure they don't win?

What does that have to do with anything? You just don't vote for that candidate in either system.

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

#455

Post by slownews45 »

obelos wrote: post #111
slownews45 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been voting RCV and I've yet to see this actually occur in practice. The candidates who are marketing themselves so well that they are second on almost everyone's ballot (in a 13 person race!) are generally FIRST on a fair number (relative to all 13 folks).

This is what happened in Burlington, VT that prompted them to repeal IRV/RCV: https://electionscience.org/library/irv-and-core-support/

Fantastic. Thanks for link.

Would screening for a condorcet winner (beats all winner) FIRST then proceeding to RCV address this concern sufficiently?

Ballot completion would remain unchanged.

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

#456

Post by creata »

godelski wrote: post #243
coryrc wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would the two parties allow something which would disrupt their duopoly? That's why it's IRV.

I joke about a conspiracy theory of this being the reason that IRV is propositioned instead of a more representative and better system like cardinal voting but honestly I believe that the reason is just because it gained more momentum early on. There's been CGP Grey videos on IRV (which proposes the exact misunderstandings I'm discussing in these threads), Hasan Minhaj (ditto), and others. There's been no major celeb…

> And at the end of the day understanding why cardinal is better than ordinal is not trivial to understand, unless you understand information encoding but that's not common knowledge (though it should be here and I'm surprised it isn't).

Alright, mind sharing your explanation?

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

#457

Post by cryptgno »

smitty1e wrote: post #403
cryptgno wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 an…

I agree that our political system is a train wreck, but I don't see why the political positions of the people you're suggesting amend the Constitution wouldn't be relevant.

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

#458

Post by specialist »

godelski wrote: post #88

RCV doesn't solve what is claimed in the article. It is interesting since countries that they give as examples are clear evidence of this. (Yes, I'm going to advocate cardinal systems like Approval, Range/Score, and STAR) > More moderate candidates. RCV doesn't encourage this at all. Australia is a clear example of this. In the house Liberal and Labor (the two major parties) control 85% of seats. The next major party…

re less negative campaigning.

Thanks for the contrary evidence. It's an oft-cited benefit of public financing of campaigns. I now can't remember where I got the notion that RCV helps too.

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

#459

Post by elihu »

openandshut wrote: post #416
zestyping wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With IRV, you can put a compromise or third-party candidate first _only if they have no chance_. In other words, it's purely symbolic. As soon as the third-party candidate starts to become competitive, the spoiler effect returns. It becomes risky to vote for your true favourite, and voters are forced to vote strategically as they do now. So IRV will not help us escape from polarized two-party politics; it will contin…

help me out here, I don't understand how the spoiler effect returns if the third party candidate becomes competitive. Wouldn't that just mean they have a chance of winning? Suppose Dave Chappelle ran in 2020 and 40% of people voted for him and they all had Biden ranked at #2. 15% rank Biden #1, and 45% rank Trump #1 with no #2 marked. Biden wins, no? edit: found your explainer elsewhere, currently reading. edit edit:…

That's a pretty good example, because it illustrates a disconnect between how people expect IRV/RCV to work and how it actually works.

Biden would be eliminated first, because he had the fewest 1st choice votes in the first round.

The Dave Chappelle voters' 2nd choices for Biden don't matter: they're thrown out because Biden was eliminated.

So, it comes down to Chappelle with 40% and Trump with 45%. If none of the Biden voters listed Chappelle as their second choice, then Trump wins. If enough voters had Chappelle as their second choice, then Chappelle wins.

The lesson from this example is: it's quite possible that your second choices don't matter, because they're eliminated too early. We could come up with other examples that show that it isn't always safe to put your first choice first, either. IRV/RCV is non-monotonic, which means in some cases you can cause a candidate to lose by ranking them higher.

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

#460

Post by elihu »

vitus wrote: post #415
elihu wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right that Borda count on its own isn't a great system. Though an RCV-style system that eliminates candidates on the basis of least-Borda count would be something else. It might be better than either normal IRV or plain Borda count on their own. (Though I still think I'd rather go with approval voting or STAR.)

It sounds like you're referring to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanson%27s_method and the related Baldwin's method, which, while being Condorcet methods, both fail monotonicity.

I looks like what I was thinking of is Baldwin's method, actually. Failing monotonicity is still a problem, but it's actually pretty cool that it satisfies the Condorcet criterion. That seems like a pretty big step up from plain IRV.
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