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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?

#371

Post by omegabravo »

tomjen3 wrote: post #354
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…

>We can vote for the Greens without "throwing our left-of-centre" vote away and still preferring Labor to Liberal. Do the greens get elected, then?

Federally yes, primarily in the senate however there is one currently sitting house of reps

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Greens#Current_Fede...

There are also 16 state based elected members both in the upper house and lower house

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Australian_Greens_parl...

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

#372

Post by asteroidbelt »

soberpeach wrote: post #319
asteroidbelt wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 "C…

Regarding your comment about approval, isn't that the intended outcome? You elect the candidate that the most people approve of, regardless of whether or not there are other "stronger" candidates. The population would be better served than if one of the "strong" left or right candidates were elected. You could also just not vote for any other candidates if you don't think they'd do a good job. In your example, the le…

> You elect the candidate that the most people approve of, regardless of whether or not there are other "stronger" candidates.

It may be a strategic voting: I approve anyone who is not democrat (or republican).

> The population would be better served than if one of the "strong" left or right candidates were elected.

Not necessarily. Perhaps it is better when left/right candidates alternate (driving important changes in their area of interests), than weak candidates elected every time.

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

#373

Post by bootlooped »

gene91 wrote: post #318
mabbo wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> RCV is non-monotonic, which means it's possible that ranking someone first might actually cause them to lose. I'm intrigued. Can you explain how that works? I'm not saying I don't believe you- I'll bet it is possible, but I cannot see how, and I want to!

https://www.fairvote.org/rcv_faq#monotonicity Read "22. Does RCV satisfy the monotonicity criterion?" Say, there's 3 candidates. You want A to win. You think A will lose to B in a 1-on-1 match, but would win C. So you vote C-A-B (or C-B-A, doesn't matter) to increase the likeliness that B got eliminated in the 1st round. Of course, you're now saying that you prefer C over A in a 1-on-1 race. But that's fine because o…

It just doesn't feel likely that this could be successfully coordinated or occur in a decentralized way organically in a sufficiently large election.

Consider how little trust a lot of people have in polling. You would need a very high amount of trust in it if you were going to dishonesty rank your choices based on it. And if strategic voting is going to be based on polling, wouldn't we expect people then start strategically lying to pollsters?

The system has too much chaos.

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

#374

Post by godelski »

e1g wrote: post #339
asteroidbelt wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And lower than 90% turnout is better, right? Because when people are forced to vote, they are on average more likely to vote for a random name they heard on TV than for a candidate with a program they read and the background they studied.

A democratic society, where all votes are equal, benefits when everyone votes, even without a testing how well-informed they are. It encourages personal ownership of collective problems. For every apathetic member who is voting based on ignorance, there is a zealous member voting based on dogma. The more votes we collect, the more accurate is the representation of the whole.

> The more votes we collect, the more accurate is the representation of the whole.

This isn't true. If voters are voting randomly (or effectively randomly) then that's just noise in the system. Worse, if voting is based on candidate exposure (i.e. voting on who had more TV ads rather than policy) then the votes are explicitly not representative of voter preference (unless the candidate that advertises the most also happens to be the true preference of voters, but we should not assume this to be true). Your statement is only true given a large amount of assumptions which typically do not hold true in practice. It holds true if voters are both informed, vote purely honestly (no strategy or no manipulation which includes through ads), and candidates are fairly representative of public opinions. I don't think anyone would argue that these three assumptions hold true in most elections. Real world doesn't have idealistic conditions.

So no, more voters does not result in better representation.

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

#375

Post by godelski »

klodolph wrote: post #205
jeff_tyrrill wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

Except IRV doesn't. Not only are cardinal systems easier but IRV doesn't achieve the most desired feature that people are looking for: no spoilers (or alternatively put, allowing votes for 3rd parties without "wasting" your vote). In fact IRV increases spoilage while cardinal systems (which is alternatively proposed) decreases[0]. Meaning we're doing the opposite of what we're trying to accomplish.

As for simpler, I'll refer you to this[1]. The short story is just rate candidates. And if you end up ranking, no worries. It's more difficult to mess up.

[0] https://www.rangevoting.org/SPRates.html

[1] https://medium.com/election-science/star-voting-is-simpler-t...

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

#376

Post by hnick »

e1g wrote: post #285
hnick wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes but enforcement is lax and fines are low.

Still ~90-95% voter turnout (vs ~60% in the USA)

Yes, was just saying if you really object it's not a big deal legally. Although most people don't as you say. Having elections on Saturdays definitely helps.

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

#377

Post by godelski »

abecedarius wrote: post #355
klodolph wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm always baffled by this claim that simple explanations favor instant runoff. Here's approval voting: "Upvote the candidates you like. The candidate with the most total votes wins." It's not just mathematically simpler, it's simpler in informal terms, a smaller change from current plurality voting, and it seems less messy in the strategic dynamics insofar as we've tested these different systems for real.

Even score voting is easier than IRV. You can rank if you want to. But you can better specify preference because you're not ranking with the same preferential distance between candidates and people. We use score all over the place (we could call Hacker News score voting with a small range: -1/0/+1).

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

#378

Post by godelski »

asdfaoeu wrote: post #343
ClayShentrup wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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. If you look at the graph with the honest strategy you get better results with IRV which is basically his point.

We shouldn't assume 100% honest strategy in reality. It is an idealistic metric. It's not practical since people aren't 100% informed. Nor should we only consider optimal strategy. We need to consider the max, min, and median to determine robustness and better estimate real world results. Both the max and min for Approval is better than the max and min of IRV (in other words, the range is smaller and the expected result is more representative).

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

#379

Post by godelski »

wslack wrote: post #323
throw5away wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly IRV is _even worse than plurality_. It doesn't solve the problems it sets out to solve (it entrenches two-party domination [1]), it has ridiculous monotonicity violations [2], all for a lot more complication in counting the votes (you can't distribute the counting well without transmitting the contents of all of the ballots) and possibly wrecking the secret ballot (you can encode and buy specific down-ballot…

> you can't distribute the counting well without transmitting the contents of all of the ballots There are only so many combinations of rankings that are possible. It shouldn't be hard to encode each of those possible orders and transmit them as a whole.

> There are only so many combinations of rankings that are possible.

O(n^2) isn't great though...

The algorithm to count is rough and requires many rounds (since you count, knock out the lowest candidate, recount, and repeat until a >50% favor is achieved by one candidate). Cardinal systems on the other hand just require summing the columns and taking argmax. This is far simpler (in fact we can do most of this in parallel making a far better runtime).

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

#380

Post by ab737 »

asteroidbelt wrote: post #306
e1g wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still ~90-95% voter turnout (vs ~60% in the USA)

And lower than 90% turnout is better, right? Because when people are forced to vote, they are on average more likely to vote for a random name they heard on TV than for a candidate with a program they read and the background they studied.

The argument is if you're compelled to vote you're compelled to take interest. You have to register to vote anyhow, those who wish to remain apolitical are free to do so.
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