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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?

#231

Post by dragonwriter »

mzs wrote: post #224
dragonwriter wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

It was MN not MO: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_Farmer%E2%80%93Labor...

> It was MN not MO:

It was, and I am embarrassed that i managed to do that.

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

#232

Post by godelski »

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…

> but the Australian experience is instructive.

No? It is instructive of how parliaments work. IRV doesn't explain the multi-party house and senate given that every other country with a parliament also has a similar distribution. If you're only looking at Australia vs America you're doing the wrong analysis (it is far too limited). Australia vs France just outright disproves your supposition (they use a 2 round system). Or we can look at Germany who has a similar distribution and who also uses MMP (like Australia). In fact, both France and Germany have more parties represented than Australia.

I do not understand why Australia is the instructive example and why this is frequently propositioned.

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

#233

Post by cosmojg »

ClayShentrup wrote: post #213
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…

> Approval voting I think is much too tactical and, strictly speaking, worse than IRV. On the contrary, approval voting gets better results than IRV with any measure of strategic or honest voters. See extensive computer simulation results by Harvard stats PhD and voting methods expert Jameson Quinn. Brown (50/50) is probably the most realistic setting. https://rpubs.com/Jameson-Quinn/VSE5key A simple example of IRV s…

For those who want to better understand VSE simulations and those who want to compare even more voting methods, see: http://electionscience.github.io/vse-sim/VSE/

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

#234

Post by crazygringo »

dllthomas wrote: post #80

I don't like instant runoff. It seems like it systematically rejects compromise, and I think finding the proper compromise is an important goal of a voting system. For instance, imagine a sectarian society split roughly equally between 3 religions, with 4 candidates running. The first three push theocracy favoring their respective religion, while the fourth favors tolerance and secular government. If, statistically,…

I agree that's the greatest weakness in theory.

But in practice that's extremely unlikely -- because there's always a significant proportion of the population that isn't tribalistic (or religious, in your case) the fourth candidate will tend to receive a decent proportion of first-place votes.

Alternatives have their own problems as well, where approval voting doesn't let you specify intensity of preference, or systems that let you granularly specify intensity of preference are not only too complicated for voters to understand, but also fairly arbitrary in how they compare intensities.

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

#235

Post by renewiltord »

lowbloodsugar wrote: post #193

I like how we're all debating how we should best choose our masters, rather than how we can vote on the issue directly, like in a democracy.

There was a candidate like that in California (for the state senate?). Anyway, his whole pitch was “If you elect me, I will allow you to vote through me as a proxy. Every bill will have you able to vote and then I’ll vote the way people have told me to vote”

I am somewhat sure this dude existed and he may be the same guy who ran as a name full of 1s and 0s that decoded as ASCII to some nonsense.

But if it didn’t happen, I dreamed it.

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

#236

Post by tunesmith »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #163
hackeraccount wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're last name doesn't have to be Arrow to know that there's a potential for a non-compromise candidate to win, indeed for the candidate that a majority don't want in office to win.

> there's a potential for a non-compromise candidate to win Agree IRV isn't the perfect system. But we have the downsides of being broadly explicable (Condorcet method's weakness), continuous with existing civic culture (approval voting's weakness), squeezing the centre (RCV/IRV's weakness) and being better than autocracy (plurality's weakness). With some irony, the game of reforming voting systems is itself a plural…

I've never really understood the criticism of Condorcet's method being hard to understand. If one candidate would beat all other candidates head-to-head, that candidate should be the winner. That's really it. People get hung up on the loop-breaking algorithms when they're not really the point.

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

#237

Post by jrockway »

throwaway0a5e wrote: post #207

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.

I think it's more complicated than that. Ranked choice voting was put on the ballot and 75% voted in favor, so if it's some scam from the powers that be, they did get a lot of people to agree with them.

I believe the underlying problem was that in 2009 an expensive runoff election was needed, and that was the catalyst to start thinking about IRV. Saving tax dollars is about all you can find for the underlying motive.

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

#238

Post by magila »

godelski wrote: post #164
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…

> Arrow’s impossibility theorem First off, Arrow's doesn't apply to all systems. You'll need to look into both Gibbard's and Gibbard-Satterthwaite's theorems. Second off, just because you can't find a global optimization in a highly dimensional space doesn't mean there aren't local optimizations along criteria we care more about. Appealing to Arrow's is a cop-out. > Approval voting I think is much too tactical and, s…

One big problem with approval voting is that it presents voters with a difficult conundrum: what do you do with candidates you don't particularly like but would still strongly prefer over one-or-more other candidates? If people are too lenient with their approval it increases the risk of someone no one really likes getting elected over someone a majority would have preferred. If people are too stringent you start running into the same problems as FTTP.

Approval voting has some nice mathematical properties, but I think in practice trying to pidgeon hole people's preferences into a binary decision would be a major source of voter frustration and lead to tactical voting.

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

#239

Post by godelski »

zestyping wrote: post #209
tadmilbourn wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 percen…

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

I want to expand on why this claim is true, since IRV is frequently propositioned as a way to solve spoilers. Most importantly IRV does not pass the Favorite Betrayer Criterion[0] which states

> voters should have no incentive to vote someone else over their favorite

IRV only handles weak spoilers (e.g. Jo Jorgensen spoiling Trump) and not strong spoilers (e.g. Sanders spoiling Biden).[1] We're not actually concerned about Jorgensen spoiling Trump or Stein spoiling Biden. We're concerned with Sanders spoiling Biden (or vise versa). This is where the favorite betrayer criterion comes in.

IRV isn't even the best ordinal (i.e. ranking candidates) system because it fails the monotonicity criterion[2], which states

> A ranked voting system is monotonic if it is neither possible to prevent the election of a candidate by ranking them higher on some of the ballots, nor possible to elect an otherwise unelected candidate by ranking them lower on some of the ballots (while nothing else is altered on any ballot).

This is an extremely undesirable property and will continue to promote tactical voting. I can go into it more but maybe just check out Clay's works or ask him yourself since he's here in the thread. He's far more informed on this stuff than I am since he's an actual expert.

[0] https://electowiki.org/wiki/Favorite_betrayal_criterion

[1] https://electionscience.org/library/the-spoiler-effect/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monotonicity_criterion

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

#240

Post by spbaar »

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…

I can't quite grasp this. Candidates A B C i prefer in that order. I look at the polls and see A and B are close, but i much prefer them to C, so I approve of A and B. But the results come in and B won over A by 1 vote. Lets say me and 5 other people thought and acted that way. We're disappointed because we were not able to express our preference.

Lets say we 5 people do the opposite and only approve of A because we want to avoid the above, but it turns out C wins by 1 vote over B. We're disappointed we took a gamble to avoid the first situation and ended up with the second.

I understand RCV 1 2 3 may lead to weird situations downballot and horse trading, I know those examples but they seem infinitely harder to game out and vote defensively on compared to approval.

The explanations of approval all seem to rely on the falsehood that the voter approves of their choices equally.

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