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?
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://ww…
Yeah, that article is exactly what I was thinking about, but I think it would be better if it mentioned more general tactics (such as the inherent advantage of making sure to rank front runners since they will last longer).
Once this NYC election is over we should look at the voting records and see how many votes were lost due to poor tactics (forgetting to rank front runners).
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.
NYC is an interesting example to use here because city and state politics are almost wholly dominated by one party. Instead of general elections being a Republican vs Democrat contest, you (in general) see elections around here being decided in Democratic primaries, along a spectrum that is generally far-left to center-right.
The presumed next mayor of NYC is going to be decided within the democratic party primaries today (or over the coming weeks as rounds of RCV progress), not in the general election later in the year. There's still a major spread of ideologies involved, but they're clustered within one party - which seems to have a lot of people thinking tactically about their votes, instead of just going straight-up party line.
Great 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.…
Why do you push IRV rather than simpler methods with higher VSE like Approval or STAR? Shouldn't we be highly advocating for a system that does not fail the favorite betrayer criterion? And I think Arizona is the perfect example why transparency and low complexity is essential (higher VSE is an added bonus given these).
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.
Yeah, I'm a big fan of approval voting, the amount of tactical voting is much less compared to most other voting systems (including Plurality and Ranked Choice). In particular a big flaw of Ranked Choice Voting is the center squeeze effect. This site has a good overview of it: https://electionscience.org/library/the-center-squeeze-effec...
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?
Limiting yourself to the likely candidates requires a level of awareness around polling - that information is practically forced down our throats since voting in America pretty much requires it, but polling information (what other people think of the candidate) isn't an important piece of information for the voter - it's their opinion the system ideally wants them to express. RCV is, at a maximum, equally as complica…
Right, but you can argue ranking N items takes more thought thank picking 1. I like the "interoperable" way, just making choices 2 and onward optional.
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,…
That's true - but approaches that identify those best compromises get mathematically more and more complex as the system gains fidelity.
We shouldn't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. If a place wants to implement another voting system, I'd be interested to see how it plays out, and if the voters see the winner with legitimacy.
IRV is relatively simple and candidates in NY are still attacking it because of the complexity it has over FPTP.
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 b…
I've been voting RCV and I've yet to see this actually occur in practice. The candidates who are marketing themselves so well that they are second on almost everyone's ballot (in a 13 person race!) are generally FIRST on a fair number (relative to all 13 folks).
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,…
Ranked choice voting does not throw away the fourth candidate, assuming people are voting for the secular person as 2nd in your example.
His point is that if few rank the fourth candidate first, they will be the first eliminated in the runoff process.
Great 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.…
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 improve the voting system only once in a century and we'll have wasted it on a system that's unusually ill-behaved. I'm particularly concerned about IRV's non-monotonicity, whereby it's possible to hurt a candidate by ranking them higher, and likewise it's possible to help a candidate by ranking them lower. How can anyone feel they're voting honestly in an honest election when this is the case?