81–90 of 476 posts
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. :)
All these methods are vulnerable to Arrow's paradox, but many of them would produce better results in practice than IRV or especially the antiquated first-past-the-post method normally used in the US.
In general, though, you can't expect democratic elections to produce results of higher quality than the voters, and the last year and a half of covid response has made it clear that the voters are of very low quality—not just in New York, but worldwide. As long as your healthcare, retirement, and policing are run by people who believe in astrology, creationism, witchcraft, Holocaust denial, vaccine-caused autism, and global-warming denial, they aren't going to be run well. Democracy is much less bad than the alternatives, but even democratic governments are spectacularly incompetent. Putting them in charge of anything important is like giving a machete to a chimpanzee.
https://www.pewresearch.org/2010/09/30/why-should-we-care-wh... (25% of USAns believed in astrology, 68% in creationism)
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-birther-myth-stuck-... (34% of USAns think Obama was born in Kenya)
https://news.gallup.com/poll/276929/fewer-continue-vaccines-... (10% of USAns think vaccines cause autism)
https://slate.com/human-interest/2020/10/millennials-holocau... (63% of USAns couldn't place the Holocaust's Jewish death toll to within a factor of 3)
https://spot.colorado.edu/~huemer/papers/passivity.htm Michael Huemer's classic paper covering a lot of such figures, and their implications for public policy; quoting Delli Karpini and Keeter:
> The most commonly known fact about George [H.W.] Bush’s opinions while he was president was that he hated broccoli. During the 1992 presidential campaign 89 percent of the public knew that Vice President Quayle was feuding with the television character Murphy Brown, but only 19 percent could characterize Bill Clinton’s record on the environment. Also during that campaign, 86 percent of the public knew that the Bushes’ dog was named Millie, yet only 15 percent knew that both presidential candidates supported the death penalty. Judge Wapner (host of the television series “The People’s Court”) was identified by more people than were Chief Justices Burger or Rehnquist.
It might sound like I'm picking on the US in particular here, but the US is just where we have the most data. The situation is nearly as bad, or even worse, everywhere else.
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† Perhaps they are aware but assume their public is too dumb to understand the difference.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, sorry, "horrible" was a bit strong and I edited that out of my comment immediately after posting it, heh... I do appreciate the progress, but I worry that people will regard this incarnation of ranked choice voting as "more complicated" when the entire point is that it's less complicated for the individual voter...
Could you elaborate how RCV is less complicated? Just by eliminating tactical voting? In traditional voting you often limit yourself to the incumbents, isn't that a lot fewer choices?
RCV is, at a maximum, equally as complicated as FPTP style voting since you have the option to elect only a single choice on your ballot (unless they're doing something weird). The form of the ballot may be visually more overwhelming but that's just from unfamiliarity.
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…
Do you have any data around how many people in practice rank candidates between 2 and 4 (assuming a 1-5 scale)? Given how polarizing politics tends to be, especially in a two party system such as America, I’d wager that most people put all 5’s for candidates of their party and all 1’s for candidates of the other party.
There is a clear intensive not to do that as it seriously hurts your overall preference. And Star Voting makes this even stronger compared to normal score voting because of the run-off.
Even if you assume that everybody is a 100% total party zealot it still only breaks down to approval voting and that is still a pretty good system.
> Given how polarizing politics tends to be,
Politics is polarized because of the voting system, if you look at actual data of preferences then you would see that there is far more agreement then can be expressed.
> I’d wager that most people put all 5’s for candidates of their party and all 1’s for candidates of the other party.
You would lose that wager. Most people are not party activists.
The really unfortunate thing about NYC's ranked choice voting is that you're limited to ranking only 5 candidates. This means you still need to engage in tactical voting. You can't just rank the candidates you like, in the order you like them, because your genuine top 5 choices might not include the people who are most likely to win. You'll be "throwing your vote away" unless you include the most-likely-to-win candid…
The really unfortunate thing about NYC's ranked choice voting is that you're limited to ranking only 5 candidates. This means you still need to engage in tactical voting. You can't just rank the candidates you like, in the order you like them, because your genuine top 5 choices might not include the people who are most likely to win. You'll be "throwing your vote away" unless you include the most-likely-to-win candid…
> More moderate candidates.
RCV doesn't encourage this at all. Australia is a clear example of this. In the house Liberal and Labor (the two major parties) control 85% of seats. The next major party (National) is part of a coalition with the Liberals and this sums to 95%. Things are only slightly better in the senate. Look at any country that uses IRC/RCV and you'll see a similar pattern. The system didn't encourage more parties and more moderates, Australia still has divided politics like America.
As to the more parties, I have an alternative explanation. They use a parliament, which uses proportionate representation. Don't buy it? Go look at countries with parliaments and don't have IRV and you'll find similar distributions. We also need to recognize that in America our parties are closer to coalitions in other countries out of the necessity. I'm not sure how anyone can look at someone like AOC or Sanders and think they are the same "party" (by other country norms) as Biden or Pelosi (similarly on the Republican side, though Trump caused a consolidation).
> ranked-choice voting can drastically reduce the possibility of spoilers.
Yes, but no. It reduces spoilers when a candidate is not going to win anyways (e.g. Jo Jorgensen spoiling Trump). But this does not prevent spoiling when candidates are similar (e.g. Bernie spoiling Biden), which is the specific type of spoiling that we are concerned about![0] This is known as the Favorite Betrayer[1] and is of grave concern if we want more parties (IRV/RCV fails this)
> More cost-effective __than other runoff elections__
The reason for the qualifier is because cardinal systems are extremely cost-effective. They have higher VSE than RCV (maximal VSE is from Condorcet methods, but not significantly higher than any cardinal system[2][3]), they scale better (you give candidates independent values instead of comparing, although you can rank if that's easier for you and you don't mess anything up), and you don't have to do any run-offs/mini-elections/rounds (STAR requires 2 rounds of voting max), which it isn't uncommon for IRV to cause many rounds of voting. This greatly increases complexity and reduces transparency (cardinal systems are trivial to calculate).
Why is transparency important? Just look at Arizona. Now imagine if the system was more complicated (no matter what side of the argument you're on there should be an argument for a clear and easy to calculate system for the winner. Multiple rounds of vote counting greatly increases complexity and chance for mistakes, which compound).
> Less negative campaigning.
There's no evidence for this. Australia's ads don't look that different from American ones. So I'm not sure what they are getting on about. There's plenty of attack ads.
I also want to plug Election Science[4] (I'm not affiliated), another non-partisan voting group (they previously advocated for STAR but have shifted to Approval with the explanation being that Approval is "good enough" and lower complexity/higher transparency)
[0] https://electionscience.org/library/the-spoiler-effect/ (see video for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtKAScORevQ)
[1] https://electowiki.org/wiki/Favorite_betrayal_criterion (A voter can never get a worse result by expressing the maximum support for their favorite candidate)
[2] Voting methods animated (author is a HN user): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4FXLQoLDBA
[3] VSE (which isn't the only metric btw. Especially compare bounds due to strategy): https://electionscience.github.io/vse-sim/VSE/
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?
This page is a good explainer of IRV's weaknesses and shows some of the alternatives: https://ncase.me/ballot/
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,…