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

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

npr.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 476 posts

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

#201

Post by dragonwriter »

dane-pgp wrote: post #196
throw_away wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Worst possible ranked choice alternative, not worst possible voting method (i.e., still better than FPTP, but not without its weaknesses). Frustrating as there are more straightforward, and objectively better mechanisms which are ignored in favor of IRV. It's hard not to feel conspiratorial that maybe the Powers That Be want worse voting mechanisms. This page is a good explainer of IRV's weaknesses and shows some of…

> not worst possible voting method Since you mention it, let me offer a candidate for "worst possible voting method (that has actually been used in a democracy)", namely "plurality-At-Large".[0] It basically takes the worst properties of FPTP and extends them to an entire governing body, allowing a party with less than 50% support to win 100% of the seats (by design). Fortunately it has been mostly abandoned in the U…

> Fortunately it has been mostly abandoned in the US thanks to the Voting Rights Act and subsequent SCOTUS decisions.

A close variant (vote for up to N, top N win, at large) is used in a lot of local elections still; all multimember district methods are banned in House elections specifically to prevent plurality at large from being used there. (Though the Senate uses temporally-segregated two-seat plurality at large in every state.)

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

#202

Post by erentz »

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".

> If people could confidently vote for another party there wouldn't be just two parties.

If multimember districts are used with RCV yes. If not it tends to maintain a duopoly. Australia’s Senate uses RCV like voting with multimember districts and has more diversity than its House which uses single member districts.

That said there is some benefit to using RCV even with single member districts as in theory it tends to moderate the candidates a bit as they want to appeal to more people. That said I think it’s a serious missed opportunity to press RCV without multimember districts.

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

#203

Post by username90 »

ineedasername wrote: post #158
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…

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 peoples secondary choice.

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

#204

Post by Ericson2314 »

lr4444lr wrote: post #64
kyleblarson wrote: post #46

Possibly naive question here but in my limited exposure to articles about RCV it seems to be popular in more historically liberal areas. Is that true and why might that be the case?

The progenitor Kenneth Arrow was pretty wonkish even among economists. RCV appeals to technocrats, who like the provability of its assertions. It's also a change from tradition. People with these tendencies tend to skew left.

real technocrats know instant runoff is quite lousy. It's very unclear why this is the alternative that becomes so popular.

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

#205

Post by klodolph »

jeff_tyrrill wrote: post #199
klodolph wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two reasons: Arrow’s impossibility theorem and the fact that people are not perfect logicians. I honestly thought that after learning Arrow’s impossibility theorem that Condorcet is not especially important. Since we can’t have a perfect voting system, we have to pick an imperfect one, and among the alternatives, it’s important to capture information from voters. Instant runoff captures a lot of information. Approval…

I wouldn't choose to use the word "dishonest" but I sympathize - in nearly all news media explanations of "ranked choice voting", the description solely explains instant runoff, and makes no mention whatsoever that there is a choice of algorithm that comes with the choice to use ranked ballots, such as Condorcet. The words "instant runoff" are almost never mentioned. Choice of language matters, and "ranked choice vot…

I’d say that part of the cost of switching voting systems is educating voters how the new system works. Many voters simply don’t care about the finer details and just have a couple desiderata—we want to have our vote count, and we want to be able to vote for our favorite candidate.

Instant runoff is super easy to explain and achieves those desiderata, at least to some extent.

It’s hard to quantify the differences in mathematical terms against soft concerns like “we can educate voters and explain how this system works”. For that reason, I would like to see a non-mathematical argument against IRV, one that accounts for the other half of the voting problem.

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

#206

Post by [deleted] »

jasonhansel wrote: post #162
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…

Also: for better or for worse, IRV tends to harm moderate candidates (who might be everyone's second choice, but nobody's first choice). Approval voting, on the other hand, tends to favor moderates (since they get one vote from a large percentage of the population, even if they're not on the top of anyone's list).

[deleted]

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

#207

Post by throwaway0a5e »

Call my cynical but there's no way this is happening in NYC unless the establishment has crunched the numbers and decided it benefits them. Vermont state elections, Cleveland, etc. I could see those switching as a genuine experiment. But NY is too tightly under the control of the entrenched establishment to be doing this unless the establishment benefits.

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

#208

Post by lostdog »

obelos wrote: post #178
lostdog wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

People voting for the only candidate they want just doesn’t strike me as a failure. The failure comes when someone has to vote for someone who is not their preferred. That said, the 2016 Dem primary doesn’t seem like a useful example for testing the constraints of any voting system since there were really only two viable candidates. All methods work equally well under those conditions. Why would someone approve both…

I was talking about the general election not the primary. (If we used a decent voting system, then all popular candidates could go to the general).

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

#209

Post by zestyping »

tadmilbourn wrote: post #116
godelski wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you push IRV rather than simpler methods with higher VSE like Approval or STAR? Shouldn't we be highly advocating for a system that does not fail the favorite betrayer criterion? And I think Arizona is the perfect example why transparency and low complexity is essential (higher VSE is an added bonus given these).

Simple...because it's being used in a significant (and growing) number of places. Approval and STAR are great methods as well. But they're not what's in use in Maine. Or NYC. Or will be in use in Alaska. So, in the spirit of focusing where I can have the most impact, I've chosen to most directly support RCV. First past the post is the enemy here. Not RCV, STAR, or Approval.

IRV is only better than FPTP in a limited set of circumstances, and can often be worse at selecting the winner.

Most importantly, IRV will not break us out of the two-party system, which is the root of many problems in American politics.

Are you aware that IRV significantly increases spoiled ballot rates, and disproportionately in low-income areas? It's actively harmful, roughly equivalent to knocking a couple percent off of the Black vote.

https://rangevoting.org/SPRates.html

https://www.yes2repeal.org/spoiled-ballots

Please reconsider your support for it. I am sure you have good intentions; my guess is that most IRV supporters probably aren't aware of the harm they're doing. I also thought IRV was an okay system (not perfect but better than plurality etc.) until I learned this information relatively recently.

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

#210

Post by caf »

xvedejas wrote: post #100
tadmilbourn wrote: post #17

Great to see this on Hacker News! I'm a former YC Founder who's been working with NYC on voter education for this year's elections through RankedVote ( https://www.rankedvote.co ). You can get a sense for what it's like to vote in a ranked-choice election here: https://app.rankedvote.co/elections/7568/Best-NYC-Pizza-Topp... And you can see the results visualized here (over 20K people voted in this one!): https://app.…

What would you say to someone like me who feels that IRV is perhaps the worst possible alternative voting system to advocate for? It feels like someone at some stage must be very dishonest, or otherwise dangerously uninformed, to think that IRV is worth advocating for over alternatives like approval voting, range voting, or any Condorcet voting system. I'm very worried that most places will have the political will to…

The non-monotonicity tactical voting possibility is overblown: it only really works in the toy "which is the favourite pizza of these 30 students" examples.

In real world elections, the conditions where it is even theoretically possible arise only rarely (A > B > C with three choices, but B > A and A > C with two choices, and A's lead over B significantly greater than B's lead over C in the three choice scenario, and A's lead over C in the two choice scenario more than twice B's lead over C in the three choice scenario) and more importantly, they're not predictable enough beforehand. Advocating this kind of tactical vote stands at least as much chance of hurting your candidate as helping them, so nobody does it.

When you analyse real-world large scale IRV elections, you find that cases where the IRV winner isn't the Condorcet winner are rare, and this balances against the very real benefit of having a counting method that is easy to explain and understand.

Post reply on HN