I feel like approval voting gets overlooked too much in discussions of voting systems. It's so much simpler than instant runoff, and so much less prone to spoilers than first-past-the-post.
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?
#62Great 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.…
Very nice work! Do you think there is a need to educate voters on how to tactically vote in ranked choice voting? Every voting system has strategies to use it effectively and most voters are not used to the tactics necessary for ranked choice voting. We see a lot of education in how to use the ballot simply, but very little education on "advanced tactics". In particular, a lot of NYC voters aren't ranking either Wile…
Thanks! The idea is to use software to promote this reform (as well as Final-Five Voting...which is Open Primaries + RCV)
As for advanced tactics, if you're really into it, Rob Richie, the CEO of FairVote (leading national advocacy org) put this in the New York Times over the weekend. It spells out a bunch of scenarios (e.g. "I want Garcia to win and Stringer to lose.") and how to tactically vote for each.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/18/opinion/nyc-mayoral-elect...
BUT the point I'd want to drive home is that ranked-choice allows you to be FAR more able to "vote for who you believe is best" than in the more common most votes wins approach (where you have to be strategic the moment a 3rd candidate enters).
Re: What is ranked-choice voting and why is New York using it?
#63King County is exploring using RCV. https://www.king5.com/article/news/politics/king-county-to-c...
Explanatory note: King County is the county in which Seattle is located.
Thank you, I was really confused by this because the NYC borough of Brooklyn is actually synonymous with Kings County, and I assumed that OP had merely forgotten the s.
Re: What is ranked-choice voting and why is New York using it?
#64Possibly 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.
Re: What is ranked-choice voting and why is New York using it?
#65Ranked Choice Voting is not really a good idea. It has very strange unintuitive behavior. Doing Score based voting is just much better and arguably simpler and less work. I specially like the Star-Voting, where they do a runoff at the end to cover some extra cases. They also have a few variants for multi-winner and representational voting. Its also much more familiar for people from real live, like online review. htt…
> where they do a runoff at the end to cover some extra cases
One major motivation for the runoff at the end in techniques like STAR (Score Then Automatic Runoff) is to encourage voters to give different scores to candidates (assuming they actually feel differently about them) rather than strategically voting all 5s and 1s and basically making it the same as approval voting.
Re: What is ranked-choice voting and why is New York using it?
#66We'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…
Your last paragraph shows a lack of depth in understanding American history and politics. -- an Australian/American living in the US.
Would you mind elaborating a bit on that point? From what I've seen RCV does tend to have a really strong moderating pull on elections that something like MMP manages to dodge, but it does mean that big tent parties will often experience strong pull off and, honestly, the African American community is often under served by a lot of Dem economic policies - though I'm really speaking in demographic generalities here.
Re: What is ranked-choice voting and why is New York using it?
#67back when I was a postdoc my group had a journal club and some joker decided to include a paper comparing different alternative voting schemes (US seems to be mostly "majority vote and full runoffs with ties).
We made it through instant runoff, and a few other approaches, and then Of course, the Joker decided to lay a landmine at the last minute (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theore...) at which point the hardcore quantative biologists all started paying attention. "Wait... there are interesting math problems relevant to politics? Math... solves a real world problem? Why am I working in biology?"
Re: What is ranked-choice voting and why is New York using it?
#68Possibly 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?
Because liberal (progressive) areas are full of people who are advocating for change. What that change should actually be varies greatly between individuals, so there is lots of fragmentation and in-fighting. The idea that you could vote for your specific niche but fall back to your preferred monolith is desirable because you don't feel like you're wasting your vote by voting for a minor party who will likely never win a seat. Conservative areas are full of people who want to maintain the status quo. They have varying ideas about how things should be but are unified by the fundamental idea that things shouldn't change. Since there is far less fragmentation, there is far less need to give your voice to a niche so they're happy to have their vote go directly to a monolith.
Re: What is ranked-choice voting and why is New York using it?
#69Great 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.…
Very nice work! Do you think there is a need to educate voters on how to tactically vote in ranked choice voting? Every voting system has strategies to use it effectively and most voters are not used to the tactics necessary for ranked choice voting. We see a lot of education in how to use the ballot simply, but very little education on "advanced tactics". In particular, a lot of NYC voters aren't ranking either Wile…
Huh... yeah, so this pizza ballot (which I'm just going to have to assume is similar to the real ballot, as otherwise I'm not sure why they are doing this ;P) definitely isn't at all what I was expecting, as I was at least expecting to get to rank all the candidates; I can definitely see some weird effects happening with a ballot like this if people have to decide to use up ranking slots on people they dislike just so they can provide comparative rankings between them as maybe they'd end up in the final round. I mean, wasn't the entire point of this that I'm supposed to get to just vote for the people I like in the order I like them, rather than having to second guess stuff like "well, I hate both of these people, but since I hate this one less than that one and I bet a lot of people like both of them I'd better rank at least one of them above a candidate I prefer"? (And yes: I appreciate the trilemma that says that no voting system is perfect, but truncating the rank mechanism is seeming to leave some of the goal sitting on the table.)
Re: What is ranked-choice voting and why is New York using it?
#70Worth considering the argument against ranked-choice voting: https://www.wsj.com/articles/ranked-choice-voting-is-second-...
Can you summarize or provide a non-paywall link? It’s frustrating that they claim RCV is second best but (presumably) put what they argue is best below the fold.