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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?

#71

Post by tunesmith »

spoonjim wrote: post #59
tunesmith wrote: post #2

What's great about RCV (not IRV specifically) is that if the ballot data sets are retained, you can write software to recount them using other RCV algorithms. I'm curious when we'll next have a Condorcet Winner that isn't the IRV winner.

Would that be meaningful when the method is known to the voters ahead of time? It’s like the team with fewer total yards winning the Super Bowl... wouldn’t be that surprising since both teams know that it’s points that decide the game.

I suppose some meaning could be lost if people are voting tactically from the awareness that they're in an IRV election. But on the other hand, if a voting system's implementation incentivizes voters to vote against their true preferences, then that by itself should be an indication that the voting system is flawed. (It's not true that every voting method incentivizes tactical voting; this is a common misreading of Arrow's Theorem.)

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

#72

Post by JumpCrisscross »

zozbot234 wrote: post #44
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> an obscure candidate has won when too many top vs fixates split the first choice votes and someone relegated to the floor vacuums up all the throwaway votes That’s the point. The compromise candidate won. If the top candidates had spent less time mud slinging they may have remained in others’ top two or three.

Yes, approval voting is a simpler system that also tends to reward moderate or "compromise" candidates.

> approval voting is a simpler system that also tends to reward moderate or "compromise" candidates

I don't have a strong preference between approval and RCV. But I think people closer to politics would. Being able to "be behind" one candidate is a meaningful promoter of civic engagement; forcing that decision is deeply entrenched in our politics.

That makes approval voting a tougher sell for implementation than RCV. Given how much better RCV and approval voting are than FPTP, it seems sensible to go with RCV.

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

#74

Post by NickM »

echelon wrote: post #31
nickik wrote: post #12

Ranked 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…

Democracy is an experiment. Trying out RCV may open the avenue for new systems to be tried.

Well, maybe. Or disillusionment with IRV might spoil the waters for other attempts at reform, when people start to realize all the claims about ranked-choice eliminating the spoiler effect are actually false.

Certainly that's what happened in Burlington, VT where a spoiler candidate swung the 2009 mayoral election, and IRV was subsequently repealed. They didn't say "oh oops, well this experiment failed, let's try approval voting instead"; they just went back to plurality voting and that was that.

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

#75

Post by antognini »

_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?

"Worst possible" might be a bit strong, but an important property that a voting system should have is that it finds the Condorcet winner if one exists. The Condorcet winner is the candidate who beats every other candidate in a head-to-head election. IRV is not guaranteed to find a Condorcet winner.

The problem with IRV is that you can have a candidate who is everyone's second choice, but then loses out on the first ballot because too few people ranked them first.

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

#76

Post by fourseventy »

ehmmmmmmmm wrote: post #51
thepete2 wrote: post #20

It gets rid of "I wanna vote for X, but they don't have a chance" and thus leads to more honest votes. IMO the major downside is complexity.

It also gets rid of people who are too dumb to understand RCV. Hee hee. Intellectual filter on the voting population. :)

dude

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

#77

Post by thepete2 »

twelvechairs wrote: post #53
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…

Worth noting Australia is still generally a 2-party system in the lower house (1 representative each area) but less so in the senate (where each state elects the top 12 senators). Australians still look at envy at the New Zealand and German systems of Mixed Member Proportional representation (MMP) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed-member_proportional_re...

Oh no, voting for representatives really is like a kind of "winner-take-all" filter.

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

#78

Post by tadmilbourn »

kyleblarson wrote: post #46

Possibly 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?

New York City is the one driving the news cycle right now (and rightfully so as 8 million people have the potential to use RCV for the first time). And people view NYC as pretty liberal.

But a great thing about RCV is that it's not inherently partisan or favoring of left or right. As a result, in addition to being used in places like New York City, San Francisco, and Maine...it recently passed for use in Alaska and nearly two dozen cities in Utah. That's a pretty diverse set of locales across the U.S.

Article on Alaska: https://www.vox.com/2020/11/19/21537126/alaska-measure-2-ran...

Article on Utah: https://www.sltrib.com/news/politics/2021/05/11/many-utahns-...

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

#79

Post by lobe »

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…

It looks like the article got the Australian implementation somewhat wrong.

Under cons, it says that voters have to rank all candidates on the ballot paper.

In reality you have a choice. You can either rank all, or if you are lazier you can just select your favourite candidate and then your first choice candidate's preferences will be used instead.

Also for some larger ballots (usually the senate with nearly 100 options) there is now a requirement to only rank say the top 10 or so for the ballot to count, so you don't need to number all 100.

This is one of the best features of the Australian system. If you want to do the basic effort you can just tick one box, but if you care about the ordering you can also make your preferences count if you so choose.

As an outsider looking in to American politics, I feel changing to preferential voting is the best bang for buck change to move away from extreme politics. Hopefully this catches on elsewhere.

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

#80

Post by dllthomas »

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, most of the citizens favor their flavor of theocracy, are happy to put up with secular tolerance, and are vehemently (maybe violently) opposed to living under another religions theocracy, it seems that clearly the best choice is that fourth candidate.

If everyone votes their honest preferences, the first thing IRV does is throw away that fourth candidate.

The vote might not go that way if enough people recognize the situation and vote strategically, ranking what they see as the proper compromise artificially high. But that's true of any voting system and undermines major selling points of RCV.

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