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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?

#291

Post by asteroidbelt »

elihu wrote: post #276

This isn't very good reporting by NPR. The downsides they list are just straw men easily dismissed by RCV proponents, and they give an appearance of fair-and-balanced coverage while making opponents of RCV sound like Luddites. (It also seems like they got all their information from, say, chatting with people from FairVote and not by actually reading online discussions like this one here.) RCV does have some serious p…

Approval voting may lead to election of weak candidates, no? Like there's a strong right candidate, disapproved by left, there's strong left, disapproved by right, and there's meh candidate approved by both. Either strong right or strong left might be better for both left and right.

Thank you for pointing to the flaws of RCV though. It has flaws, but still looks like an improvement.

In London mayor they were using "Contingent vote" system, which is AFAIU RCV with only two options, which is weaker than RCV. And in the next elections they switched it to FPTP, which is unfortunate.

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

#292

Post by zestyping »

aplummer wrote: post #284
elihu wrote: post #276

This isn't very good reporting by NPR. The downsides they list are just straw men easily dismissed by RCV proponents, and they give an appearance of fair-and-balanced coverage while making opponents of RCV sound like Luddites. (It also seems like they got all their information from, say, chatting with people from FairVote and not by actually reading online discussions like this one here.) RCV does have some serious p…

> RCV does have some serious problems. Eliminating the candidate with the least first-place votes at each round means a high probability of rejecting compromise candidates that may be a lot of voters' second choice. Also, placing your first-choice candidate first isn't always a safe choice. RCV is non-monotonic, which means it's possible that ranking someone first might actually cause them to lose. That's weird, and…

With IRV, you can put a compromise or third-party candidate first _only if they have no chance_. In other words, it's purely symbolic.

As soon as the third-party candidate starts to become competitive, the spoiler effect returns. It becomes risky to vote for your true favourite, and voters are forced to vote strategically as they do now. So IRV will not help us escape from polarized two-party politics; it will continue to entrench the duopoly.

IRV has other serious problems with fairness (a much higher spoiled ballot rate, disproportionately in low-income areas), practical implementation (requiring a redesign of ballots and counting software), and security (it isn't summable, which makes it harder to conduct a risk-limiting audit).

Approval is also imperfect, but it is simple, cheap, effective, and has none of these problems.

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

#293

Post by [deleted] »

dllthomas wrote: post #268
crazygringo wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 syste…

> But in practice that's extremely unlikely I don't think that's true at all. I agree that I picked a particularly extreme example to make the issue clear, but fundamentally IRV is a statement that the compromise we choose must be the first choice of a large portion of the population. I think that is a bad strategy, and situations where it picks poorly won't be uncommon.

[deleted]

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

#294

Post by barsonme »

anonporridge wrote: post #272
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…

While multimember districts would be a huge improvement, I wonder if we also should start having the conversation if geography based representation is the right approach for the internet age. I for one, have more in common with a minority identity widely dispersed across the country but connected through the internet than I do my next door neighbors. My niche identity never gets proportionately represented in governm…

No. Government and politics are primarily local because most problems are local.

For instance, I have zero clue about life in NYC. Letting me directly influence decisions in NYC is wholly unfair. I have no skin in the game! How good or bad their transportation is doesn’t affect me. Whether their local tax rate is high or low doesn’t affect me. But it most definitely does affect them.

Likewise, nobody in NYC is affected by the repeat wildfires we’ve had recently on the west coast. Letting them directly say, “Nah, it’s no big deal” is also unfair.

I definitely empathize, though. Lots of my beliefs aren’t represented where I live, either.

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

#295

Post by logicchop »

klodolph wrote: post #143
xvedejas wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

> IRV lets people express their preferences in a fairly understandable way. The strategy I see...

That's the concern though. You likely don't want to just "express your preferences." You need to strategically rank candidates. But then what are you being asked to do exactly when you go to vote? I don't think it would fly if the instructions on the ballot gave you guidance on how to "strategize" your rankings. But if it doesn't give that guidance, it's misleading.

And I understand that all voting mechanisms have their own unique pitfalls; so we have to fall back to pragmatic questions. And one major pragmatic question is: What's the status-quo/What is everyone already accustomed to? Asking a large voting body to switch methods is not easy and I think it's being motivated largely by a misleading "grass-is-greener" claim about rank voting.

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

#296

Post by karmelapple »

elihu wrote: post #253
karmelapple wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both are miles beyond first past the post, and both scare many people just because it's something new and different. Hopefully you can support any change locally that gets us off of first past the post. Once we get some voting changes, hopefully that makes future changes even easier to make... though I know that's wishful thinking.

> Both are miles beyond first past the post, Actually, that's debatable. There was an interesting simulation done awhile back [1] that compared voting systems, and they found that if people voted honestly then IRV is better, but if people vote strategically the result isn't any more democratically optimal than FPTP. Which is what we should probably expect to happen when voters figure out that it's only safe to put yo…

Sure, opinions are debatable.

But minor candidates being spoilers have come up at all levels of elections many times for decades.

Splitting the vote happens frequently, again at all levels of elections (at least nationally in terms of the primaries for US Presidents).

If you vote for your favorite candidate, and your candidate is not the last-ranked candidate, you cannot cause your candidate to lose by putting them first.

But it sounds like you’d agree that FPTP needs to go. Great, me too. That’s the real focus for me: let’s start using different methods that eliminate, even to small degrees, the problems of FPTP.

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

#297

Post by alexitorg »

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

I'm Australian so I might be biased, but I don't like MMP. It seems to be optimising for democratic outcome (well at least a parliament that looks like the distribution of first party votes) while ignoring all other factors. Many countries that use it seem to have weak governments that can't get much done. There is parties that won't work together because one is secessionists (Catalans), right wing (national rally in France, AfD in Germany), different ethnic group (Arabs in Israel, Flemish vs French speakers in Belgium). Some parties seem to get more popular if they refuse to compromise. This can end up in endless elections (e.g. Israel), inability to form government for years (e.g. Belgium) or parties that aren't acceptable for mainstream parties to form coalitions with becoming the only opposition (e.g. National Rally). Even well run countries like the Netherlands and Sweden can seem to take forever to form a government. RCV mostly allows one party to form a majority government and get things done. There is clear accountability. While at the same time there is still the incentive to appeal to a broad base. And over time new parties can break into the system if they are appealing enough.

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

#298

Post by justinpombrio »

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…

For anyone like me who hadn't heard of Gibbard's theorem, it's actually even simpler (and more depressing) than Arrow's theorem. To quote Wikipedia:

For any deterministic process of collective decision, at least one of the following three properties must hold:

1. The process is dictatorial, i.e. there exists a distinguished agent who can impose the outcome;

2. The process limits the possible outcomes to two options only;

3. The process is open to strategic voting: once an agent has identified their preferences, it is possible that they have no action at their disposal that best defends these preferences irrespective of the other agents' actions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibbard%27s_theorem

----

So basically, it's impossible to completely eliminate strategic voting. No matter the method: ranked vs. cardinal vs. anything else you dream up can't help.

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

#299

Post by jrochkind1 »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #123
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…

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…

> 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.

In NY, what's being discussed in the OP, the ranked choice system is being used only for the primaries. Whoever wins the Democratic party will certainly win the mayoral general election -- but ranked choice voting isn't being used there anyway.

So what you're describing isn't actually the context of ranked choice voting in this election.

In Chicago, another city where the Democrats always win, they actually have, since 1999, non-partisan primaries. Just one primary, for all parties, top two candidates go on to the general election -- so the general election can be between two generals. It would be interesting to see instead a single ranked-choice election, no primary at all.

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

#300

Post by asteroidbelt »

munk-a wrote: post #168
kmkemp wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would mostly be for primaries, where the field is wider, but don't discount how ranked choice voting could lead to more than 2 viable parties.

Primaries mostly exist due to the FPTP voting system - dropping that would remove a pretty big reason to have them at all which could lead to cheaper elections... campaign fundraising was ever reigned in - rather, the elections will probably be cheaper but it's unlikely you'd notice due to the insane campaign budgets that are common.

Cost of elections is not an issue, but replacing FPTP with ranked choice makes candidate less dependent on the party.

Remember Trump 2016 elections, when Trump disagreed with the way debates were conducted. Trump had to bend because there could be only one Republican candidate.

Not saying Trump was right, but making candidate less dependent on the party (i. e. redistribute the power from the party committee to the candidates) would be good thing.

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