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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?

#181

Post by Ericson2314 »

AussieWog93 wrote: post #26

We've had this in Australia since day 1 of Federation. One important factor the article didn't quite emphasise is how this voting system can break up the two party duopoly without creating 1920s-Reichstag-esque anarchy. It's completely normal to put a third party as your first preference, while still indicating that you'd prefer Kodos to Kang. In practical terms, it means the Dems would actually have to do some work…

Ranked choice does avoid vote-split issues, but is insufficient for breaking a two party system because the races are still single-winner. That we still have primaries makes it worse.

Proportional representation is what is desperately needed to break the two party system.

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

#182

Post by godelski »

AussieWog93 wrote: post #26

We've had this in Australia since day 1 of Federation. One important factor the article didn't quite emphasise is how this voting system can break up the two party duopoly without creating 1920s-Reichstag-esque anarchy. It's completely normal to put a third party as your first preference, while still indicating that you'd prefer Kodos to Kang. In practical terms, it means the Dems would actually have to do some work…

> One important factor the article didn't quite emphasise is how this voting system can break up the two party duopoly

I'm not convinced this is true. 2 parties control 80%. 2 coalitions control 95%. I'm also not sure how you can look at America and not recognize that our parties are more similar to coalitions (come on, AOC/Bernie are not the same party as Pelosi/Biden).

A better explanation is that Australia uses a parliament which has proportionate representation. My evidence of this is that other parliaments without IRV have similar party structures as Australia. So we have examples where you remove one aspect and things don't change, I don't think that makes for strong evidence that the thing removed is causing the effect (how can it cause an effect somewhere that it doesn't exist!).

So don't compare Australia vs America to prove IRV creates more parties. Compare Australia/France/UK vs America to prove parliament causes the desired outcome.

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

#183

Post by coryrc »

s0ss wrote: post #121
blazespin wrote: post #73

Downside with RCV is it really doesn't do anything it purports to do, but major upside is it encourages voter education. Which, IMHO, is by far the biggest problem with American politics.

Care to elaborate? I fail to see how it "doesn't do anything it purports to do". It allows people to pick/rank multiple candidates, which neuters the whole "least of two evils" problem traditional elections have. It would also destroy the two party duopoly, If it were used more widely. That'd be great.

IRV has nearly the same effect as FPTP on the two-party system.

Sorry, I don't know if this is a good link: https://electionscience.org/library/irv-degrades-to-pluralit...

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

#184

Post by adjkant »

lostdog wrote: post #127
6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #109

Here's my obligatory plug for approval voting. Approval is the "checkboxes instead of radio buttons" voting method. Select any, instead of select one. Vote for whoever you want and the candidate with the most votes wins. It gets rid of a lot of the drawbacks of FPTP while retaining its simplicity, unlike IRV. I've always wanted to get people to vote on voting systems with a variety of voting methods and see what wins…

So many plugs for approval voting in these threads, but it just seems so terrible for what people really want to express. For example, in 2016, plenty of people wanted Sanders more than Clinton. Who are they supposed to "approve?" Many of them would note their preference by just approving Sanders and not Clinton, which is the opposite of what a voting system is supposed to help achieve.

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 IMO. The answer is a better RCV system than IVF, but let's start by getting rid of FPTP. I'd love to see some nuanced RCV methods that combine IRV, Ranked Pairs, Condorcet Winners, etc to basically improve IRV eliminations and take "shortcuts" like steps that consider what % of ballots you're on. Basically, approval voting has its place, but it should be within RCV.

Does it make understanding the tally harder for the layman? Yes. But if designed right, it simplifies the voting end so that people can essentially approval and rank vote together. Rank everyone you approve/would accept, and rank in your true preference order. That's what we should be solving for IMO.

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

#185

Post by munk-a »

wyre wrote: post #142
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…

Statistically, in the US a 3rd party has a 0% chance of winning because a third party has never won. Maybe within the first 100 years; history isn’t my strongest subject.

A third party candidate gave America one of the worst presidents ever - Woodrow Wilson was essentially elected on a fluke because Teddy split the vote with Taft - the two together had a strong majority of the overall vote while Wilson only took home 41%.

FPTP systems strongly encourage bipartisan politics but it's silly to say third parties have never won and it's also incorrect. Early American politics were much more diverse before things coalesced around the slavery question leading up to the civil war - after the war there was a brief re-emergence of multi-party politics but it quickly collapsed back down to two as campaigning became less policy driven and new media opened up the door for a lot more fear-based advertising.

I would agree that it's highly unlikely that a third party candidate would ever win in the current political atmosphere - though if the GOP continues to move toward Trump and the Dems shift way to the left we might see a third party fiscal conservative have a real shot at it.

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

#186

Post by throw5away »

dane-pgp wrote: post #177
throw5away wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd go as far as to say Approval > FPTP > IRV. FPTP has good properties like monotonicity (for a good example see http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/ ), easily distributed counting, and preservation of the secret ballot that IRV does _not_ have. You really don't get much bang for your buck by switching to IRV; I'd say it's a negative deal overall.

If we're comparing Approval and FPTP in terms of easily distributed counting, it's worth noting that a ballot paper with N candidates can be marked in N different ways with FPTP and 2^N ways with Approval. That may not be a problem for computers, but if you want to avoid the potential failure modes of (and conspiracy theories related to) electronic voting machines, there is a big difference between an election offici…

You don't need the n bits of information from each ballot. You can just transmit the aggregate counts. A human can easily put tally marks in each of n buckets. In fact, a computer would likely do the same instead of creating an exponential number of buckets...

If you insist on a degenerate formulation, just split the ballots into n different elections and transmit the results of each one of those elections. We can use the same equipment we have today.

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

#187

Post by Ericson2314 »

dane-pgp wrote: post #125
twelvechairs wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Worth noting Australia is still generally a 2-party system in the lower house (1 representative each area) but less so in the senate (where each state elects the top 12 senators). Australians still look at envy at the New Zealand and German systems of Mixed Member Proportional representation (MMP) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed-member_proportional_re...

MMP is a fantastic system, but it can face resistance if it relies on Closed Party Lists[0], which allow a party to put a potentially controversial candidate at the top of the list, almost guaranteeing them a seat and forcing party supporters to accept that as the cost of choosing the party. Open lists are better, but I believe they still have the problem that they make it unclear where representatives' mandates come…

I don't see a practical party with closed list, as long as the minimum threshold isn't too low. Don't like the people at the top? Vote for a small party which will join the coalition.

Even more fundamentally, politics is a "team sport". The vetting of individuals when power boils down to alliances and other relations with the politicians is stupid waste of voter's time.

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

#188

Post by smitty1e »

xdennis wrote: post #146
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…

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. It's even reflected in the language, like how people task about being "bi-partizan" instead of "non-partizan".

> 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 parties never do better than, say Ross Perot (who got no electoral votes, but sunk Bush41 in 1992): scale.

It takes a whale of a party to carry a pond the size of the US.

And really, the remaining two nominal parties seem wings of a deeper, stateful organization putting on a show every couple of years.

If there is interest in altering the equation, I would suggest https://conventionofstates.com/

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

#189

Post by munk-a »

dragonwriter wrote: post #180
koolba wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Statistically, in the US a 3rd party has a 0% chance of winning because a third party has never won. Not recently for President, but third parties have won at every other level of government including Governors, Representatives, and Senators.

> Not recently for President, Not ever. The Federalists collapsed before we got a Whig, and the Whigs before we got a Republican, and those and the Democratic (ex-Democratic-Republican) parties are the only four that have won the Presidency. > but third parties have won at every other level of government including Governors, Representatives, and Senators. Sure, but its easy to overcount them; state two-party systems…

I would consider Sanders to be a pretty legitimate third party candidate - VT democrats have coalesced around him recently but his initial bid for Senate was pretty spectacular. He managed to ride an extremely popular mayoral career into a state that is extremely dominated by Burlington population-wise. Burlington metro is roughly as large a proportion of the VT voting block as NYC metro is for NY.

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

#190

Post by glangdale »

endgame wrote: post #129
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…

"Roo poo" Ricky Muir was better than many of the regulars, IMHO. IIRC he seemed to actually think about the bills in front of him.

He wasn't awful.

OTOH while he seemed principled, he often just seemed to vote along with the Coalition then publicly regret it afterwards - helping them get what they wanted on refugees and then being surprised at how inhumane it all was and the extent that the government reneged or slow-played a lot of the concessions he obtained.

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