Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

My vote on voting systems

blog.danielh.cc

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 52 posts

Re: My vote on voting systems

#11

Post by theluketaylor »

The mathematical challenges of voting systems is one of the reasons I've come to support multi-member districts. When only a single person can represent a jurisdiction you're always going to have people disappointed in the choice and we have have plenty of proofs that perfect voting isn't possible, so we need to aim for best reasonable compromise.

Voting is even more about identifying who didn't win than who did win. In a multi-member district a much smaller slice of the electorate 'loses', making it much easier to build broad consensus around results.

Some of the sharper edges of many ranked choice or scoring voting systems are blunted by multi-member districts. They are not winner-take-all, so small changes in expressed preference that would have changed the winner in a single member district just re-orders the winners. Specific candidates could still find themselves losing when another system would have elected them, but the electorate as a whole still ends up with representation they can tolerate.

Re: My vote on voting systems

#12

Post by dang »

We replaced the linkbait "you" in the title with a nicely first-person phrase from the end of the article. If there's a better* title, we can change it again.

* better = more accurate and neutral, preferably using representative language from the article

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: My vote on voting systems

#13

Post by bongodongobob »

yellowapple wrote: post #6

It's weird to me how little score/approval voting has caught on (at least here in the US) amid the push to replace FPTP. It's a lot simpler to explain than RCV, and has a lot fewer downsides overall than both RCV and FPTP.

I think fundamentally it's because you have to convince the elected to pass laws that potentially undermine the way they got there, essentially asking them to kick out the ladder from underneath them. Couple that with the average person thinking that FPTP is the most fair because explaining why it isn't is counterintuitive, nothing is ever going to change.

Re: My vote on voting systems

#14

Post by jfengel »

theluketaylor wrote: post #11

The mathematical challenges of voting systems is one of the reasons I've come to support multi-member districts. When only a single person can represent a jurisdiction you're always going to have people disappointed in the choice and we have have plenty of proofs that perfect voting isn't possible, so we need to aim for best reasonable compromise. Voting is even more about identifying who didn't win than who did win.…

Multi member districts does circumvent one of the assumptions of Duverger's Law, which predicts a two-party system.

But you still need to work around collusions between candidates. Candidates will be pushed to run on a slate of N candidates for N seats, and promise to support each other. Voters who want any of their positions will avoid somebody who would interfere with their own top priority. The result acts the same as a two party system, where all N candidates support the same party.

You can get some benefit by combining it with List Voting, where you go ahead and reify the party system. The party gets to send whoever it wants, proportional to the votes.That makes it harder to run multiple candidates that take all of the spots. (Not impossible: they can break into multiple virtual parties. But that's risky and coordinating votes is difficult.)

Even at that I'm not sure it really helps. Lawmaking is still fundamentally a "single member" operation: a bill either passes or it doesn't. You still get pushed to be in either the majority or minority coalition.

Re: My vote on voting systems

#16

Post by boxed »

I think there's also a different and deeper question: what does the voting system do to the society it is running on. This is a very different kind of discussion than "does it map preferences well", but arguably more important.

Re: My vote on voting systems

#17

Post by tromp »

> However, they might decide to vote strategically to amplify their vote — giving Desert a score of 10 while giving everything else a score of 1 would effectively make their vote stronger.

It makes more sense for the voter to give their favorite candidate a 10, their least favorite a 0, and grade every other candidate on the spectrum between their two extreme picks. So that still seems to be as informative as you could hope for.

Re: My vote on voting systems

#18

Post by throwaway_1224 »

I think the state of democracy in the "factory bamboozling" era is such that we need a system that reflects direct voter preferences less, not more.

The trick is coming up with a system that diverges towards the interest of the masses, rather than the elites or the corrupt or the foreign. Basically, the system must get the voters' preferences wrong, but get them wrong right.

This is really akin to the nature of representative democracy. Elected leaders manage the voters' interest rather than always doing what is polling better on that day. It's obviously a tricky task, but it's the hallmark of the best-functioning democracies.

Right now we're about as far from the goal as we've ever been. Our systems have been hacked and we don't have an effective counter.

Re: My vote on voting systems

#19

Post by mindslight »

jszymborski wrote: post #5
nearting wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ranked pairs does not have a quadratic ballot length, since all of the preference information can be computed from a single ranking of the candidates.

How did I never realize this. Thank you. EDIT: I was also swapped "later-no-harm" with "independence of irrelevant alternatives". I should stop writing comments before my morning coffee.

I've been going around saying we need to push in the direction of a Condorcet voting system while handwaving away the possibility of a Condorcet tie, because all systems can result in ties. I hadn't realized there was a straightforward method that drastically reduced the amount of ties neatly called "Ranked Pairs". And that's with plenty of coffee.

Now if only we can change the political zeitgeist from "Ranked Choice Voting" implying Instant Runoff Voting, to RCV implying Ranked Pairs. IRV is merely what victims of the two party duopoly think they want to express their current frustration, but it would fall apart the more we actually got away from the one dimensional spectrum.

Re: My vote on voting systems

#20

Post by int_19h »

throwaway_1224 wrote: post #18

I think the state of democracy in the "factory bamboozling" era is such that we need a system that reflects direct voter preferences less , not more. The trick is coming up with a system that diverges towards the interest of the masses, rather than the elites or the corrupt or the foreign. Basically, the system must get the voters' preferences wrong, but get them wrong right . This is really akin to the nature of rep…

This is a very long-winded way to say that democracy is a bad idea if it's not just for show.
Post reply on HN