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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?

#241

Post by pie420 »

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.

You're 100% wrong because the third party has won many times and both democrats and republicans started out as third parties.

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

#242

Post by godelski »

magila wrote: post #238
godelski wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 run…

Fine, go STAR or Score/Range. Honestly I prefer those systems (in that order and I'd argue most people that are pro cardinal systems have that same preference[0]). Nice benefit is that people can bullet vote and we collapse to Approval which is a "good enough" system.

> but would still strongly prefer over one-or-more other candidates?

In fact, this is why I argue for STAR or score. It encodes information for better than a ranked (ordinal) system. In any ranked system you encode your preference with equidistant from one another. Where as when you score you can indicate a much stronger preference.

Here's an example. Let's say I REALLY like candidate A, moderately like candidate B, and strongly dislike candidate C.

Ranked:

A > B > C (with my encoding I'm saying that my preference of A over B is the same as my preference of B over C)

Scoring

A: 10, B: 7, C:0 (with this encoding I can indicate that my preference of A over B is not as large as my preference of B over C. Obviously we are capturing more information here)

Let's just encode information better, I agree. But also let's consider other factors like how easy it is to count the votes (which every cardinal system is going to beat ranked systems).

[0] That same preference where the distance between STAR, Score, and Approval is smaller than the distance between preference of Approval over IRV (e.g. STAR: 10, Score: 8, Approval: 7, IRV: 3, Plurality: 0).

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

#243

Post by godelski »

coryrc wrote: post #147
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).

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 celebrity that is advocating for cardinal style voting. 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).

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

#244

Post by dane-pgp »

slownews45 wrote: post #11
google234123 wrote: post #8

Will this make New York more or less left wing? I'm actually curious.

If it's also tied to open primary system it tends to make right wing places more left and left wing places more moderate. Otherwise you get a pyramid of control that drives towards extremes. Historically, let's say dems = 51% of voters, everyone votes party line. Dems have a primary, and someone (usually pretty far left) motivates base and gets 30% of primary vote and wins primary with most votes. Let's assume a 10%…

This "pyramid of control" observation is extremely under-appreciated. We are living in a time of extreme polarization and division, not just between parties but within them, as societies try to deal with an increasingly complex world where shifting battlefronts no longer align with traditional ideological boundaries, all while we're being mesmerized by the novel psychological environment that social media creates.

Even if the "pyramid of control" doesn't drive parties towards extremes, it perhaps drives them towards memes; that is, simplistic but clear ideas that stand out among the noise. Unfortunately, while that might be enough to create a coherent identity for a party, it doesn't do anything to guarantee that the party has any sort of broad support from the population, which further alienates people from politics.

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

#245

Post by sumedh »

tjscott wrote: post #22

An Australian comic author has written an easy to understand comic about exactly this. Let Dennis the election koala explain it, with a worked example: https://www.chickennation.com/voting/

What if the the 4th guy was second most preferred candidate of all voters?

https://electionscience.org/library/the-center-squeeze-effec...

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

#246

Post by [deleted] »

godelski wrote: post #232
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 syste…

[deleted]

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

#247

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#248

Post by elihu »

_AzMoo wrote: post #57
dragonwriter wrote: post #36

I really hate that Instant Runoff Voting, which is almost literally the worst possible voting method with ranked choice ballots, has somehow gotten the name “Ranked Choice Voting” stuck to it. It’s like if “Democratic Elections” became a specific name for Plurality voting.

Why is Instant Runoff Voting the worst possible voting method?

One of it's big downsides is that you can, in some cases, cause a candidate to lose by ranking them too highly. In voting-theory terminology, it fails the monotonicity criterion. In at least that one respect it's worse than first-past-the-post. (I mean, imagine if people could say "Gore would have won in 2000 if only a few less people had voted for him". That sounds nonsensical, but that's how IRV works sometimes.)

Wikipedia has an example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monotonicity_criterion#Instant...

I think first-past-the-post and IRV are both bad voting systems that are unsuitable for real-world use in elections with more than 2 candidates. Approval voting is simpler than IRV and (as far as I know) it isn't worse than FPTP in any way, so I think we should push for that.

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

#249

Post by ant6n »

Taniwha wrote: post #229
erentz wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I think that RCV is at best a hack, a compromise for people who don't want to get too far from FPP. IMHO if you are electing individual people (a mayor, a US president, a city council, a US Senator) then STV is more equitable (it is pretty close to RCV if you are electing a single person). But if you are electing parties (like the US House) then MMP is a fairer solution

Ranked ballots in single member districts are really a hack on electoral reform movements. It creates the appearance of improving the system while only solving one of many problems.

The hack worked in Canada and GB, where it was used to divide, confuse and ultimately scuttle the electoral reform process.

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

#250

Post by godelski »

ClayShentrup wrote: post #218
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…

> We've had this in Australia since day 1 of Federation. Australia adopted the preferential system in 1918. > It's completely normal to put a third party as your first preference, while still indicating that you'd prefer Kodos to Kang. The evidence shows most voters don't, which is why Australia's IRV elections still maintain a duopoly. In spite of the fact that the senate, which uses (proportional) STV, has escaped…

> which uses _proportional_ STV

I've always seen the proportional nature as being key to other countries lack of a two party system (though they have two major coalitions). I'm curious why you think many look to Australia's IRV as the reason for it being a multi-party system when many parliamentary systems that don't use IRV have even more parties. How do you combat this common misconception? Also it seems dishonest to not consider coalitions when US parties aren't as uniform as most other country's parties. If we look at coalitions it does not appear that Australia (or most others) have escaped duopoly.

And as always, good to see you in the comments and thanks for all the information.

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