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Maine Ranked Choice Voting Initiative Approved

• kevlar1818 10y ago
  I'm very proud of my state. We also voted to legalize marijuana. RCV was especially relevant to Maine because our Republican governor, Paul LePage, won his seat -- twice -- with around 35%-45% of the vote, primarily due to votes being split between the Democratic and Independent candidates (a.k.a The Spoiler Effect). To me, LePage and his path to election and re-election closely mirrors Trump and his campaign. He ran on "telling it like it is", "being a businessman, not a politician", and "draining the swamp". He has said some really horrible things about minorities and his fellow politicians, he's vetoed a record number of bills, and he's held very controversial policy stances. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/30/us/controversial-gov-paul-lepage-maine-list.html http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/30/us/controversial-gov-paul-... http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2016/10/06/samantha_bee_compares_maine_governor_paul_lepage_to_trump_video.html http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2016/10/06/samantha_bee_... Edit: I never meant to imply blame of any candidate in creating the Spoiler Effect, and as such I modified my comment to reflect this.
  • tanderson92 10y ago
    The Democratic candidate came in 3rd place with only 19%. I believe that makes the Democrats the "spoiler" in that election. To not recognize it as such is to prop up the 2-party system.
    • kevlar1818 10y ago
      Fair enough, but I think you're kind of splitting hairs. You're referring to the 2010 election, I think. The 2014 election has the Democratic candidate take ~43% if I'm correct.
      • kevlar1818 10y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maine_gubernatorial_election,_2010 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maine_gubernatorial_election,_... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maine_gubernatorial_election,_2014 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maine_gubernatorial_election,_...
      • tanderson92 10y ago
        How is it splitting hairs to correct the (implicit, through use of the phrase "The Spoiler Effect") blaming of third party candidates when it wasn't a third party candidate who was at fault whatsoever? In fact that's the central point of this ballot proposition: so that we can vote for better candidates than the Democrats are willing to put up without fear of your blame if we don't reach enough to defeat the other side. Even worse, your post is just factually wrong. By placing the fact that a 3rd party candidate split the vote once in a sentence where you mentioned the governor failed to reach a majority twice, you conflated the two in a manner that almost looks willful. And yes, I was referring to the 2010 election because the plurality for LePage was much less convincing then.
        • kevlar1818 10y ago
          Look, I agree with you. I am thrilled that RCV was voted-for by the people of Maine. It's a step away from the two-party system, and that's great. The Spoiler Effect happened one way or another. I was not intentionally trying to bash any of the candidates who were involved in the Spoiler Effect, and I think it's petty and inflammatory to assign blame either way. I'll update my post to be more clear in this regard.
        • ClayShentrup 10y ago
          I'm a co-founder of the Center for Election Science. This was the spoiler effect. It doesn't really matter which candidate was the spoiler. It matters that the wrong candidate won. We did some analysis on this election here. http://scorevoting.net/Maine2014Exit.html http://scorevoting.net/Maine2014Exit.html
          • tanderson92 10y ago
            Of course it was the spoiler effect! I never claimed otherwise! I only said that if you are going to use that language then in 2010 it is clear that the Democrats were the spoilers and the independent deserves none of the blame assigned by kevlar1818 in the original wording of the post.
          • RobAtticus 10y ago
    • veidr 10y ago
      Sure, the Democrat was the spoiler there. But your characterization of kevlar1818's comment doesn't make sense. Advocating RCV is the exact opposite of propping up the two party system. And the terminology itself is neutral -- it's only because the American democracy has suffered under (or, as some would now say, outright failed due to) the two party system that you associate "the spoiler effect" with a third party candidate.
      • tanderson92 10y ago
        No, my characterization did make sense because at the time I commented (kevlar1818 has since edited -- read the whole thread), kevlar1818 explicitly blamed an independent candidate for splitting the Democrats' votes, as if they owned them.
        • kevlar1818 10y ago
          Once again, any blame was not intentional. I don't know why you are insisting that I'm an opponent of third parties in elections.
    • chapium 10y ago
      Just an observation here, I dont think there was an implication that the independants were a spoiler. Parent implied that democrat and independent candidates were similar in ideology and therefore a spoiler effect was present.
    • odonnellryan 10y ago
      Good news for Maine: preferential voting will really help with the two party system.
      • pessimizer 10y ago
        The two-party system doesn't need any help. Preferential voting will give people the opportunity to vote for the candidates they prefer in the order they prefer them, rather than participating in the (media-driven) Keynesian beauty contest that the institutional parties force us into.
    • Ph0X 10y ago
      While that may be true, either of the two could've been the actual winner if real ranked voting was used. People usually flock to the candidate who has the best mix of "likely to win" and "shares my values". Preferably, only the latter should count. It's also important to note that First-Past-The-Vote forces candidates to try to differentiate themselves as much as possible from each other, and that also includes popular 3rd parties. They will say more extreme things that they often don't really believe in. So that too would skew the results. All in all, ranked voting will completely change how the whole process happens.
      • _samihasan_ 10y ago
        I'm wondering why doesn't the US implement a system like "Two-round system" as a part of electoral reforms because as I see it the current system in place is not fair for the electorate or even the candidates themselves.
        • koenigdavidmj 10y ago
          Washington kind of has this for federal offices (other than president) and state offices. The top two winners of the primary make it to the final election, regardless of party affiliation. We had one state race between a Democrat and a Libertarian, and my congressional district had a choice between two Democrats (though one was 'normal' and the other was a self-proclaimed socialist).
        • sidlls 10y ago
          For basically all offices but POTUS that's what California effectively has. Except it is implemented badly as a "top-two primary" system. This virtually guarantees that most partisan elections will exclude anyone outside the two biggest parties. It is not very healthy.
          • labster 10y ago
            Or outside the one biggest party. Jerry Brown recently vetoed an STV elections bill, calling it "too confusing for voters". Having met some actual voters, I'm growing more inclined to agree with him, but STV has worked very well in my university's elections for more than a decade.
    • r00fus 10y ago
      Fine. Whatever. Spoiler effect is much less of an issue with ranked voting, so good to know that Maine will be going IND (likely) next cycle unless GOP steps up their game and caters to the middle. A win for lefties in either way.
    • dcosson 10y ago
      We can debate all day about whether voting 3rd party under simple majority voting is taking a stand or being irresponsible (by causing a split vote and letting the worst candidate win). I think there are legitimate arguments on both sides. The only real way to stop propping up a 2-party system is to switch to something like ranked choice voting, so good on them for doing it.
  • aRationalMoose 10y ago
    Didn't the democrat get less votes than the third party candidate and was losing in polls running up to the election as well?
  • mtgx 10y ago
    People complain about the electoral college, that it gave the win to Trump, even though he had fewer votes. They're right, they should complain about it. However, they should also realize that in most state elections, governors across the country win elections with less than majority support, just like you mentioned. So this is not just a one time catastrophe. Far from it. It's time to get rid of the FPTP voting system. It only serves to elect people with minority support. Heck, if the Republican party didn't use FPTP in its primary, it's likely Trump wouldn't have been the nominee. But they used it precisely because they wanted to make the primary less democratic, and they thought their main guy, Jeb Bush, would be the one winning with 40% of the Republicans' votes, while all the other candidates would split the vote. I bet they will reconsider that strategy now. Even Clinton, which won the popular vote, only had support from 48% of the voters - less than the majority. So even if she won, in my book, it would still not be democratic, because perhaps in a two-round voting system or in an RCV system, Clinton would preserve the 48%, and Trump would get 52% if the Jill Stein, Gary Johnson, and write-in voters would've all gone to Trump. We just don't know, and the only way to know that a candidate is indeed liked by at least 50%+1 of the voters, is to have a system that shows that. The FPTP voting system doesn't.
    • SamBam 10y ago
      > I bet they will reconsider that strategy now. That will be hard, given that it won them the White House, and produced the victory for the now-defacto leader of the Republican Party. Party rules to amend it would be a slap in the face of Trump, much like if the Democrats tried to change things so that "an Obama" couldn't win while Obama was in office.
      • serge2k 10y ago
        > Party rules to amend it would be a slap in the face of Trump It's always going to be a slap in the face. Start the campaign now and try to get it in with the next term.
    • hackuser 10y ago
      Trump won with fewer votes than his opponent; governors always win with more votes than their opponents. Whether the governor's vote total is a majority or plurality is a separate question. Also of interest: Democrats have won the popular vote in 6 of the last 7 presidential elections, going back a quarter century.
  • Frondo 10y ago
    Hey, thanks so much for passing this, Maine! I'd love to start a group (or get involved with one if there is one) to bring this to my adopted state of Washington. Though I often groan at the "laboratories of democracy" turn of phrase, it is kinda cool to see this stuff implemented somewhere. It means there's a model we can use to bring it to where we live.
    • ncallaway 10y ago
      As another Washingtonian who donated to and followed the Maine initiative closely, let me know if you find an organization to work with (or if you start one). I'd be happy to volunteer, donate, etc.
    • pnathan 10y ago
      I'd sign & vote for that initiative.
    • wang_li 10y ago
      Washington uses what they call Top Two. Only the top two in the primaries will be on the ballot in the general election for the congressional, state legislative and state executive offices. They can be from the same party, e.g. the two candidates for state treasurer in 2016 were both republicans. (California does this as well and it has had interesting effects. California's 31st district voter registration favors the democratic party, but they ended up with only the choice between two republicans in the general election because there were four democratic candidates dividing up the vote in the primary.[1]) 1. https://ballotpedia.org/California's_31st_Congressional_District_elections,_2012 https://ballotpedia.org/California's_31st_Congressional_Dist...
      • tunesmith 10y ago
        A starker thing happened in WA already. In the primary, there were five candidates for Treasurer. Three Democrats, two Republicans. No one knew much about any of them, and the vote was roughly split between all five. So the two Republicans advanced, even though almost 60% of the votes went to Democrats. (One of the Republicans won - the Democrats were prohibited from participating as write-ins due to a "Sore Loser" rule.) Regardless of your political leanings, this is a case where the vote was distorted, and where the winner was decided more by the voting system than the preferences of the electorate.
  • k_lander 10y ago
    While may not agree on how an alternate voting system should work, I am glad that we can finally acknowledge the system we have in place desperately needs fixing.
    • ClayShentrup 10y ago
      http://scorevoting.net/UniqBest.html http://scorevoting.net/UniqBest.html
  • r_smart 10y ago
    Hey, I'm also from Maine! There's at least two of us here! I voted against the initiative, mostly because as I understand it, it still doesn't necessarily create majority candidates and because there's a good chance it's in violation of the state constitution. I don't mind that it passed though.
    • citizenkeen 10y ago
      > it still doesn't necessarily create majority candidates How could it not? Genuinely asking.
      • SamBam 10y ago
        Ranked voting could still produce a simple plurality, not a majority, if no candidate is ranked by more than 50% of the population. E.g. in the extreme case, with three candidates, suppose everyone hated the other two options so much that they refused to even write in a #2 choice. Of course, this seems like a completely silly argument, because it's much more likely to generate majorities than the single-choice system.
        • r_smart 10y ago
          People just frequently complain when a candidate didn't get 50% of the popular vote in an election. I think it's silly, but it's common. Many people's argument in favor of this initiative is seeing that 50% number. If it doesn't actually produce that reliably, then it's not solving the problem people want solved. Personally, I don't mind if someone wins with 43% of the popular vote. I don't even mind FPTP much, and yes, I mostly vote third party. But from other people in the state, that 50% number was a concern, and I don't think this addressed that adequately.
          • vishvananda 10y ago
            If you tend to vote third party, You should consider being against FPTP voting, because it almost always leads to a two-party system[1]. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law
  • mjhoy 10y ago
    I'm also very proud of Maine. We had record high turnout this year, when much of the country had low turnout. Perhaps because of the important ballot items such as this one. I also think Maine's splitting up our electoral votes helps, too. I say this as someone from the 2nd district who hates that Trump got our vote!
  • douche 10y ago
    Thankfully, the ridiculous, unenforceable gun control initiative that was funded by out-of-state interests was also rejected. I'm very proud of my home state.
  • SmellTheGlove 10y ago
    Good post. I'm proud of our state.
  • daodedickinson 10y ago
    >very controversial policy stances That applies to all of us.
  • daodedickinson 10y ago
    >very controversial policy stances That applies to all of us.
• syphilis2 10y ago
  Would someone explain the counterpoint that this will, "further disenfranchise voters by using the recounted ballots of the loser to determine the winner"? I can't understand how counting voter's second and third choices until a majority agree on a candidate could be seen as disenfranchisement.
  • stanleydrew 10y ago
    I'm not sure it can be explained. To borrow a phrase from economics, moving to instant runoff has always seemed Pareto efficient to me. Which would mean that there are no possible counterpoints.
    • zeroer 10y ago
      It's definitely not Pareto efficient. If you're a member of the party establishment in one of the big two parties of a system, you stand to lose a lot by moving to an instant runoff and nothing to gain. Unfortunately, most of the power to change the voting system is in the hands of these kinds of people, so it's going to be pretty hard to change it. Kind of a Catch-22.
      • stanleydrew 10y ago
        Why are we considering the preferences of the parties? We're talking about the most efficient way to allow the electorate to express its representational preferences. I understand that things get a bit muddled because the individual representatives are also members of the electorate, and thus they may have warped incentives relative to the vast majority. But they are such a small fraction of the overall electorate that we should be able to ignore them in any kind of efficiency discussion.
        • cbr 10y ago
          "Pareto efficiency" is a very strong claim, and it's invalidated by any single individual doing worse.
• davexunit 10y ago
  Nice to hear some good political news out of Maine, home to one of the worst governors in the country. Maine is a great place that deserves better.
  • tanderson92 10y ago
    Maine's governor's "winning" coalition may have something to do with this ballot proposition having passed, since he never won a majority of the vote (an impossibility with ranked choice voting). The 2010 election where he won with 38% was particularly egregious.
  • josefresco 10y ago
    I refer to this as the "LePage Law".
    • davexunit 10y ago
      Ha! I wasn't aware of the context because I don't closely follow Maine politics, but some of the other comments here cleared it up for me.
  • douche 10y ago
    On the other hand, there are a lot of people in Maine that love LePage. They deserved a lot better than eight years under Baldacci before him.
• jonathanstrange 10y ago
  Kudos to them, from my (cursory) knowledge of Social Choice that's a fairly good voting method.
• Heliosmaster 10y ago
  I found this video of CGP Grey to be a nice explanation of the Ranked Choice / Instant Runoff: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Y3jE3B8HsE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Y3jE3B8HsE
  • tantalor 10y ago
    Also, this video by Exploratorium has great examples of paradoxes in Ranked Choice / Instant Runoff voting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJag3vuG834 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJag3vuG834
    • Tiktaalik 10y ago
      Canada is currently consulting on alternatives to FPTP and videos like this really make me weary of Ranked Ballots/IRV over some Proportional Representation method. It seems to me that in situations like Canada, where you have multiple parties, IRV ramps up the complexity, and encourages voters to do strategic actions which may actually hurt their favoured candidate.
    • astrocat 10y ago
      I found this extremely insightful, specifically Arrow's impossibility theorem [1] It really seems like this should get more attention: Every voting system is flawed. You cannot design a voting system that will, in every possible case, be "fair." [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theore...
      • nerfhammer 10y ago
        But that doesn't at all mean that every possible voting system is equally not fair.
      • AngrySkillzz 10y ago
        You have to look very closely at what the definition of "flawed" is. The dictator rule in Arrow's thm is not what it is commonly portrayed to be. All it says is that there should be no voter whose preferences are the same as those produced by the choice function. That doesn't really sound all that objectionable. Often people word the dictator rule as "one person decides the outcome" but that is not what it is at all. And like the other response said, the fact that no scheme is "perfect" doesn't mean all schemes are equally flawed.
• mrfusion 10y ago
  This is amazing news. I'm now wondering how voter training will work? I feel like a lot of people might get it backwards and mark the third party as their second or third choice. Also the mainstream candidates with the most money would have an incentive to spread misinformation.
  • kylestlb 10y ago
    As long as there's an example on the ballot, it should avoid confusion. Ex: "Rank candidates in order of preference. E.g., #1 - most preferred, #2 - second-most preferred..." The counting system (to me) is more complicated than the voting process.
    • lambertsimnel 10y ago
      The counting system is as for a multi-round system that keeps eliminating the candidate with fewest votes until one candidate has more votes than the others combined, with the added benefit that the voters only have to go to the polls once.
  • retsibsi 10y ago
    Here in Australia, volunteers for the political parties hand out 'how to vote cards' at polling places: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How-to-vote_card https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How-to-vote_card . It's not a perfect system,[1] but it should be enough to prevent most people from completely messing up their vote. (Especially in the US, where voluntary voting presumably means that those who turn up are motivated to make their vote count.) [1] The most obvious risk is misinformation -- e.g. someone claiming to be from Party A, handing out Party A branded leaflets that actually direct people to vote for Party B -- but in practice that doesn't seem to be a significant problem. I'm sure it happens at small scales online, but in person it's hard to get away with, so at least the information seen immediately before voting is accurate. (Though admittedly I have heard of one or two borderline cases, e.g. cards with colour themes chosen to misleadingly hint that they're associated with a particular party.) What is prevalent is 'preference trading' between political parties, as a significant number of voters do seem to more or less blindly follow their party's suggested ordering. This is arguably a problem, but it doesn't usually get too crazy, as preference deals between ideological enemies both look bad and can easily backfire.
• michaelbuckbee 10y ago
  Wikipedia has a really comprehensive article [1] on this type of voting, but for most purposes of discussion this is the relevant paragraph: "Proponents of IRV note that by reducing the spoiler effect, IRV makes it safe to vote honestly for marginal parties, and so discourages tactical voting: under a plurality system, voters who sympathize most strongly with a marginal candidate are strongly encouraged to instead vote for a more popular candidate who shares some of the same principles, since that candidate has a much greater chance of being elected and a vote for the marginal candidate will not result the marginal candidate's election." It's generally viewed as a means of gradually stepping away from some of the problems of a two party system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting
  • ClayShentrup 10y ago
    http://scorevoting.net/AustralianPol.html http://scorevoting.net/AustralianPol.html
• mozumder 10y ago
  If I were to change the system, I would have ballots ask 10 or 20 or so questions based on issues, and each party gives their own response to each question. The voters then choose their answers they favor for each question, and they can choose multiple answers they agree with, and a point goes to the party for each answer. The party that gets the most total points among all voters wins, they then decide the people to run that position. We really have to focus on issues politics, instead of people politics.
  • stanleydrew 10y ago
    I think this is a mistake, but probably not for the reason you think. We need to stop thinking about politics so statically. Positions on issues can and should change as new information becomes available. Your current preferred position on an issue is really just a rather poor proxy for your preferred method of problem-solving or thought process that reached the conclusion of your preferred position. You want to elect the person that "thinks and learns in your preferred manner", so that when they are asked to reach a conclusion on a totally unexpected issue, they reach the "correct" conclusion. I'd almost rather just have all candidates take an IQ test or something and then elect the top scorers.
    • hx87 10y ago
      Then instead of asking questions about positions directly, take a page from the Elder Scrolls games and ask questions whose answer imply a certain thinking process.
  • mikeash 10y ago
    That seems like it would reward strategic dishonesty and be ripe for abuse. For example, right now if a candidate says they're in favor of passing Generic Placeholder Policy, but I believe they're lying about it, I can vote against them. But if that's part of their official platform and "Do you approve of GPP?" is an official question on the ballot, how do I respond?
    • mozumder 10y ago
• tehwalrus 10y ago
  It will be very interesting to see what effect this has on the two party system. AV (as it was called in the UK's 2011 referendum) allows voters much greater freedom in expressing their first preference, and I will be interested to see how first preference votes differ the first time people are given this additional choice.
• marcoperaza 10y ago
  Plurality voting is the best system. You can't view the actual casting of the ballots as the only part of the process. The campaigns and surrounding public discourse are the opportunity for the coalitions of our society to decide on two broad-appeal candidates. The "runoff" happens in conversations between citizens, and in primaries within established coalitions, not inside a ballot counting machine.
  • stanleydrew 10y ago
    Wouldn't someone with zero first-preference votes be eliminated as the loser in the first round?
    • marcoperaza 10y ago
      I believe it depends on exactly which ranked voting system you use. I'm removing that bit though because it's not the focus of my argument.
      • stanleydrew 10y ago
        I do think your larger point is interesting, but by editing your comment to take out the part that's driving these responses you've broken the continuity of the discussion a bit.
  • harpastum 10y ago
    It's not possible for a candidate with zero first preference votes to win [1]. If they have zero first preference votes, they will be eliminated in the first round. Ranked choice doesn't always get the correct result, but it's a lot closer than a simple vote. "If no candidate receives a majority, the candidate with the fewest first choices is eliminated and voters who liked that candidate the best have their ballots instantly counted for their second choice." - http://www.rcvmaine.com/how_does_ranked_choice_voting_work http://www.rcvmaine.com/how_does_ranked_choice_voting_work
    • baddox 10y ago
• mtgx 10y ago
  I wish they also enacted multi-winner ranked choice voting (also called Single Transferable Vote) for legislature. Fair representation beats winner-takes-all systems every time, because it guarantees more than just two parties get to be in charge, much like in parliamentary systems (which also use some kind of fair/proportional representation voting system). But it's still a good start, and maybe other states will take a look at both, and choose a better system next time. By the way, this is exactly the sort of thing Sam Altman should be fighting for, along with joining Wolf-Pac, Represent.Us, and others to get money out of politics. Not try to use GOTV tactics to get people to vote for his preferred candidate. That is, if Altman still cares about this, and the "improve democracy thing" he pushed for earlier wasn't just a one time ruse to get people to vote for Clinton. If Altman is serious about improving democracy, these right here are by far the best ways to do it - way better than just trying to "increase turnout" in an election. Because for one, fair representation voting systems increase turnouts by default, because people feel better represented and have more reasons to go out and vote, and second, STV also eliminates gerrymandering, which would also greatly improve democracy by making seats less safe. http://www.wolf-pac.com/ http://www.wolf-pac.com/ https://represent.us/ https://represent.us/ STV by CGP Grey: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8XOZJkozfI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8XOZJkozfI Droop method for STV is probably preferable: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRc630BSTIg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRc630BSTIg Also preferred by FairVote: http://www.fairvote.org/fair_representation#what_is_fair_voting http://www.fairvote.org/fair_representation#what_is_fair_vot...
  • herge 10y ago
    Ireland currently uses a PR-STV system, and if you ask any Irish person about their politicians, you will probably get an ear-full. STV pushes majors parties to sit on the political middle, where they might not collect as many '1's', but will collect a lot of 2s,3s,4s, etc, as more divisive parties/candidates will be ranked highly by a segment of the population but very lowly by the rest.
    • arrosenberg 10y ago
      Are you saying that's a bad thing? The system should be designed to push the major parties to the middle - that's where they belong.
• naasking 10y ago
  Lots of problems with IRV: * Realities Mar Instant Runoff Voting 18 Flaws and 4 Benefits, http://electionmathematics.org/ucvAnalysis/US/RCV-IRV/InstantRunoffVotingFlaws.pdf http://electionmathematics.org/ucvAnalysis/US/RCV-IRV/Instan... * Instant Runoff Voting: A Cure That is Likely Worse Than the Disease, https://www.uvm.edu/~dguber/POLS125/articles/langan.htm https://www.uvm.edu/~dguber/POLS125/articles/langan.htm * Instant Runoff Voting: Looks Good--But Look Again, http://www1.cs.columbia.edu/~unger/articles/irv.html http://www1.cs.columbia.edu/~unger/articles/irv.html
  • dilap 10y ago
    how likely are these situations to arise in practice?
    • naasking 10y ago
      What situations specifically? The first link I provided describes a number of issues, like increased susceptibility to fraud. Another link describes how IRV is probably illegal in the US.
      • dilap 10y ago
        ah, sorry, I was referring to the second link, where it describes a scenario where even though more people would have preferred B over C, C won.
  • unethical_ban 10y ago
    Lots of problems with FPTP as well. I'll look at your links, but I'm skeptical of one's motives when you just this out links. We needed to eliminate the two party oligarchy.
    • naasking 10y ago
      > I'll look at your links, but I'm skeptical of one's motives when you just this out links. Are you similarly skeptical of the motives of every poster who posts a story on HN? They're just links too after all. That just seems like a bizarre statement. Either my links contain valid criticisms by recognized authority figures, or they do not. I don't see how adding more verbiage of my own makes the information I presented more or less trustworthy.
• nxzero 10y ago
  Has anyone seen analysis of elections nullified by vote? For example, voters would be allowed to put the status of any and all candidates as null and/or a top vote as null. If the majority of votes cast as were null, another election would be run with all candidates from the prior election removed.
  • herge 10y ago
    In the mean time between the next election (with all the time it would take to find/vet brand new candidates!), would the incumbent keep his/her spot?
    • nxzero 10y ago
      That would be the most obvious resolution in the case that another election was required, though might be exploited as a means to get around term limits. Another option might be the delegation of responsibility to the voting population to force a timely resolution of the election, greater understanding of the issues at hand, etc.
• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• c1505 10y ago
  Is this for Presidential contests or only ones up to the state level?
  • kevlar1818 10y ago
    This initiated bill provides ranked-choice voting for the offices of United States Senator, United States Representative to Congress, Governor, State Senator and State Representative for elections held on or after January 1, 2018. https://votesmart.org/elections/ballot-measure/2128/an-act-to-establish-ranked-choice-voting https://votesmart.org/elections/ballot-measure/2128/an-act-t...
  • BurningFrog 10y ago
    From the initiative text: "This initiated bill provides ranked-choice voting for the offices of United States Senator, United States Representative to Congress, Governor, State Senator and State Representative for elections held on or after January 1, 2018"
• stevesearer 10y ago
  RCV seems like an okay idea, but the root of many complaints about elections seems to be with voters not feeling represented as opposed to the actual election mechanics. My proposal is to increase the number of representatives in the House so that there is a much more reasonable chance for voters to be represented. Something like 1 rep per 50k or 100k seems like it would be a better system. Any thoughts on this from HN?
  • chillydawg 10y ago
    The original intent of the US political representative system was pretty much in line with what you suggest. Over time, the costs of running such a system with a hugely increasing population and senators/etc who enjoy wielding more and more power stopped any serious moves to keep the ratio constant. Also, those who buy influence in congress would of course prefer there to be fewer people to bribe(lobby, whatever) for their laws, so they'll always be anti any suggestion like this.
  • StormChaser_5 10y ago
    Ireland has at least one representative per 30K people [0] and that works reasonably well. At least you can usually meet and speak in person with your representative in the run up to an election. Of course the flip side is you probably get a lot more 'parish-pump politics'. Candidates looking after their one tiny constituency to the detriment of the country as a whole. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%A1il_%C3%89ireann#Number_of_members https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%A1il_%C3%89ireann#Number_...
    • bzbarsky 10y ago
      Ireland has a population of ~6.5 million. At 30k/representative, that gives ~216 representatives. In practice, not all the people in Ireland vote (e.g. some are children), so you get 150-160 representatives per your citation. The US has ~200 million registered voters [1] and the number actually eligible to vote is somewhat higher than that. But if we go with the 200 million number, at 100k/representative you get 2000 representatives. That's a lot more unwieldy than 150-160 in terms of actually getting anything done. Yes, you can meet with your representative and all, but that representative may have no effect on pretty much anything in practice. I'm not saying "435" is some sort of magic number that is obviously the right number of representatives, of course. But it's not obvious to me that 2000 is better. [1] http://www.politico.com/story/2016/10/how-many-registered-voters-are-in-america-2016-229993 http://www.politico.com/story/2016/10/how-many-registered-vo...
• anonymoushn 10y ago
  One desirable property of FPTP is that if you want to maximize the chances of your candidate being elected, you should vote for your candidate first before all other candidates. In IRV, sometimes you should not vote for your candidate first before all other candidates. Is that okay? Here are some interesting diagrams of the results of applying various voting algorithms including IRV: http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/ http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/
  • tormeh 10y ago
    Really cool. The link only looks at single-candidate elections, though. It's unclear to me that this is superior to party-based systems. Particularly Congress could use some proportional representation. EDIT: Wow, would never have guessed that IRV gave such strange results...
    • sgeisenh 10y ago
      Any voting system that doesn't satisfy the Condorcet criterion gives what appear to be strange results.
  • deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  • r00fus 10y ago
    Those diagrams aren't very intuitive to me. Do the different shaded regions represent turnout? What is the coordinate of the candidate, position on a 2-axis political scale?
    • anonymoushn 10y ago
      A point on the 2d plane represents a preference (if we imagine that there are only 2 real-valued issues in the world). The regions shaded in a particular color are the regions where a normal distribution of popular preferences centered there will elect the corresponding candidate. I assume that individual simulated voters just rank candidates from least to greatest by cartesian distance, or do that and then use a random cutoff for approval voting.
• Wildgoose 10y ago
  Approval Voting makes the most sense, seeing as this concerns the election of a single individual. Basically, vote for ALL of the candidates of whom you approve. Whoever gets the most approval (votes) wins. Simple. With a paper system such as we have in the UK, then if you don't like any of the candidates you can use a blank ballot paper to record your DISapproval, with the option that if the disapproval ballots exceed the winning total of approval votes then a new election should be called with a new slate. Mathematically, for a single candidate election, it gets extremely close to the optimum Condorcet result.
  • chimeracoder 10y ago
    > Approval Voting makes the most sense, seeing as this concerns the election of a single individual. Approval voting is probably the only system that's worse than FPTP. Under approval voting, the candidate who is the least-objectionable wins, regardless of whether voters actually prefer them to other candidates. So, you could very easily end up with a single-issue candidate being "approved" by the vast majority and winning, even though absolutely nobody would choose them over any of the other candidates. > Mathematically, for a single candidate election, it gets extremely close to the optimum Condorcet result. It's misleading to refer to a Condorcet winner as the "optimum" result - the Condorcet criterion is one criterion that an election method can satisfy, but it does not guarantee the "optimum" result by any other criterion. It's also doubly-misleading to refer to the Condorcet winner right after advocating approval voting, which does the exact opposite.
    • wnoise 10y ago
      > So, you could very easily end up with a single-issue candidate being "approved" by the vast majority and winning, even though absolutely nobody would choose them over any of the other candidates. This is true, but not necessarily a bad thing at all. Democracy is a proxy for violence to prevent violence. Someone that everyone thinks is merely okay sounds better to me than one that is liked by a third and hated and despised by a third.
      • ScottBurson 10y ago
• cardiffspaceman 10y ago
  Arrow's impossibility theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theore... is often trotted out in the discussion of RCV and similar systems. It seems to me that the problem with mentioning that theorem is that if you admit that every system for judging among more than 3 choices has some flaw, and that flaw makes the system anti-democratic because it allows tactical voting, then why not admit that the status quo is worse, under the same framework, and therefore admit that something else other than plurality voting should be used?
  • mseebach 10y ago
    I can't completely follow the argument, but I think Arrow's is mostly used to counter the "utopians" (roughly; people who argue that one system is Inherently Unfair(tm) and the alternative is Inherently Fair(tm)). You're replacing one flawed system with another flawed system, so you should not argue in terms of the presence or absence of flaws, but rather argue why one is better than the other. RCV can still have outcomes that a majority will disagree with, but it should be less common than FPTP, and also make third parties competitive in practise. That may be better than the old system (and it also may not be), but it's not going to resolve the fundamental tensions of representative democracy.
    • tehwalrus 10y ago
      Instant runoff matches four of the postulates, including all three that FPTP matches. It is a superset of the fairness of the other, they are not "equally unfair in different ways" or anything like that.
      • tehwalrus 10y ago
        Edit time threshold passed so I'll have to reply to myself. I've just read up on Arrow, and this theory only has four postulates not five: I'm pretty sure I've either misremembered or am talking about a different theory. Apologies, anyway.
  • dota 10y ago
• BurningFrog 10y ago
  San Francisco, Oakland and 1-2 other Bay Area cities have had this for a while. I think it works well, and the electorate and politicians are getting used to it. The implementation, at least here in Oakland, is a bit clunky. When there are only two candidates, they still let you pick your first, second and third choice... Having it at state level opens things up to a whole different level. Now a popular and/or centrist third party candidate can realistically get elected as US senator, and that's real power.
  • spqr0a1 10y ago
    That implementation is a feature, not a bug! Write-in candidates are an important part (as documented up-thread) of our electoral process.
    • BurningFrog 10y ago
      I haven't seen a way to write in candidates on these ballots. They're scanned by a machine that detects where you drew a line, so I that would have to be detected manually. TBH, I haven't looked hard for a way to write in people, and it's possible it exists.
    • flukus 10y ago
      Are they? How many write in candidates have been elected?
• sfifs 10y ago
  It will be interesting to see how an electronic voting UI is built for this that is simple enough for non techy people to use. Almost all examples of this on Wikipedia appear to be paper ballot based. I was part of counting a Ranked Choice ballot in my college but it was again paper voting - not online
• carrigan 10y ago
  If anyone is interested in using Single Transferable Vote for unofficial uses, I recently wrote an implementation in Elixir and wrapped it in a small JSON API. It is a toy in its current state (it uses cookies to see if people have voted and the link to close an election can be somewhat easily found even if you are not the creator of the election) but we use it around or office for a few things and I would be interested in continuing work on it if anybody would like to jump in. I have an instance of this running on my site; ping me if you'd like to try it. STV Algorithm: https://github.com/carrigan/elixir-stv https://github.com/carrigan/elixir-stv Phoenix API: https://github.com/carrigan/vote-service https://github.com/carrigan/vote-service
• k_lander 10y ago
  This gives me a lot of hope. Its time we looked at alternate voting systems seriously.
• z1mm32m4n 10y ago
  It's actually quite concerning to see the media attention that IRV has received as a result of Maine passing the RCV measure. A much better voting system (across many different metrics for what a "better" voting system means) is range voting. For a comparison of the differences between the two, see here[1]. [1]: http://rangevoting.org/IrvExec.html http://rangevoting.org/IrvExec.html
  • lambertsimnel 10y ago
    Why is it concerning? As I understand it, Range Voting supporters object that IRV performs poorly (in terms of Bayesian regret) because voters don't understand how it works. Maybe the attention will help to educate voters and improve its performance. Also, isn't it enough to improve on the status quo?
• pklausler 10y ago
  Here's an idea: give each voter a positive vote for their most preferred candidate and another negative vote against their least acceptable candidate. Award the race to the candidate with the greatest net sum. EDIT: If no candidate has a positive sum, throw them all out and do it over.
• ccvannorman 10y ago
  California would do well to follow this lead.
• spynxic 10y ago
  Why does it cost nearly a million dollars to print new ballots and update the firmware in existing ballot machines? Specifically regarding the ballot machine update, if the installers are charging ridiculous prices when I'd bet others would be willing to start an open source project that met security needs
• hota_mazi 10y ago
  I'm really not sure people realize how chaotic and unpredictable ranked choice voting can be, and how easily it can be gamed. For example, there are scenarios where it's better to put your favorite candidate in #3. You pick #1 to help an undervoted candidate and therefore, causing one candidate to drop off. Same for #2. By the time the choice comes to #3, your minority candidate has suddenly managed to eliminate stronger opposition just by playing numbers. We've seen this scenario happen repeatedly in all countries and counties that have tried this approach. There's a reason ranked choice voting is hardly ever used anywhere: it's really not such a good idea.
  • orthecreedence 10y ago
    As opposed to FPTP, which is almost always demonstrably worse and forces gaming the system by its nature. You can very seldom vote for who you actually want. So maybe STV/IRV are bad, but they can't be worse than what we have now...unless you favor predictability over representation.
  • mcbits 10y ago
    I don't follow your scenario. Can you give a real example? If you put your favorite candidate in the #3 spot, it would make them more likely to be the one that drops in round 1 or 2, no?
    • hota_mazi 10y ago
      Here is a real world situation that happened in 2010 in Oakland: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/12/us/politics/12bcvoting.html http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/12/us/politics/12bcvoting.htm...
      • lambertsimnel 10y ago
        Surely to vote based on that is to bet on other like-minded voters not doing the same, while tactical voting under FPTP/plurality voting involves betting that like-minded people will do the same.
      • 10y ago
• dangjc 10y ago
  This is really exciting electoral reform. I don't think our current system captures the diversity of political opinion now, and we could really use a couple more parties. Like a democratic party that is anti establishment or a republican party which is not particularly religious but more libertarian. And maybe if we had more parties, voters wouldn't be so tribal. There's a deep sense of "us vs them" now in America. It's good guys vs bad guys, and whatever their side says, our side cannot believe. It leads to complete nonsense like climate change denial. But if there were many parties, your 25% couldn't be against the other 75%. You'd have to recognize your perspective is just one of several and you have to look for common ground.
• wang_li 10y ago
  The US Presidential Election Campaign Fund provides monies for parties that reach 5% of the vote. How will votes in Maine be handled going forward? Does it mean that candidates who are eliminated in the first pass of counting officially receive zero votes? Seems like it should be something like that.
  • lambertsimnel 10y ago
    I don't know, but I think it would make more sense for candidates that receive 5% of first preferences to receive those monies.
• sandGorgon 10y ago
  Does anyone know how the votes are actually counted ? Because it seems to me that you need to count all the votes together (in one location) rather than counting them on each district,etc.
  • lambertsimnel 10y ago
    You don't need to count them all in the same place. You could conduct each round of counting at the district level. Then, when the round finishes, you add the district counts together to see whether there is a candidate with a majority. If not, you eliminate the last placed candidate from all districts (i.e. the same candidate from each district), redistributing votes for him/her where possible, count the redistributed votes and add them to the last sum.
    • sandGorgon 10y ago
      It's the redistributing part that I'm not clear on. How do you count PAPER votes in a manner that allows you to redistribute them. Or do you actually have to count AGAIN?
      • lambertsimnel 10y ago
        You have a pile for each candidate. The pile for the eliminated candidate is redistributed to the other existing piles in the following way. Each redistributed ballot paper is directed to the highest preference marked on it that is still in the race, if any. Only the redistributed votes need counting at this stage. You don't combine the redistributed votes with the existing piles until you have counted them.
        • sandGorgon 10y ago
          I understand this. Which means that there needs to be these many actual physical recounting. I believe an explanation is in order - in India we have up to 20 candidates in constituencies. We don't have a 2 party system. It's unfeasible if paper has to be counted 10-15 times. Which is why I wanted to figure out if there was a one time counting system that lets us reassign votes without the need to physically recount again.
• wscott 10y ago
  A very nice video that explains the various voting paradoxes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJag3vuG834 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJag3vuG834 Yeah ranked voting has issues, but it is still way better than the spoiler effect.
• a_imho 10y ago
  Why not sortition based election? They seem like the most reasonable way to implement democracy as the name implies.
• Houshalter 10y ago
  A number of places in the US have tried this over the last century. It's never caught on, and in most places it's been reversed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting_in_the_U... IRV is not really a good voting system. It's better than plurality, but it still doesn't really allow viable third parties. If a third party ever catches on, they could steal first votes away from a major party, and cost both of them the election. Demonstration here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Q7rzqJ0YS8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Q7rzqJ0YS8 I would recommend a condorcet method, or approval voting. Condorcet methods in particular have a lot of nice mathematical properties and are close to optimal with honest voters. I think it's the most likely to allow third parties to actually get elected. You can see some results of simulated elections with different voting systems here: http://rangevoting.org/BR52002bw.png http://rangevoting.org/BR52002bw.png http://rangevoting.org/BayRegsFig.html http://rangevoting.org/BayRegsFig.html They claim that just approval voting is the same level of improvement from plurality voting, as plurality voting is from monarchy. Based on the massive voter satisfaction index improvement. It really is crazy that we still use plurality voting.
  • dragonwriter 10y ago
    If you want viable third parties, you want multimember legislative districts with some kind of proportional representation, even if it's just STV in small (3-5 member) multimember districts, and not something drastic like Party List Proportional or MMP. Playing around with single winner election methods may be useful for some purposes, but it's not how you really get additional viable parties.
    • Houshalter 10y ago
      I approve of proportional representation. But I think a good single winner method should be sufficient to elect good representatives. That is, representatives that are the best possible compromise of all the different views of voters. Which should give roughly the same results as a proportional system. And most positions are required to be single winner, like mayors, judges, sheriffs, governors, or the president. So it makes sense to focus on single winner systems first.
• mlinksva 10y ago
  I'd approve of some other systems even more, but this is better than the usual. Maine has also had voluntary public campaign financing since 1996, strengthened a bit in 2015 http://www.maine.gov/ethics/mcea/ http://www.maine.gov/ethics/mcea/ ... I'd be really curious to read an up-to-date analysis of its impact, and prospects in combination with RCV.
• hackuser 10y ago
  Something to consider: Democrats have won the popular vote in 6 of the last 7 presidential elections. Another way of saying it: They lost a nationwide vote once in the last quarter century. Generally I support the electoral college, but those are undemocratic results. Also: In the 2014 House of Representatives elections, Republicans won 51.2% of the vote (per Wikipedia) yet held the largest majority in the House since WWII (IIRC). EDIT: In the 2012 House of Representatives elections, Democrats won more votes (48.8 - 47.6%) but fewer seats (201-234).
  • flukus 10y ago
    You're making the mistake of assuming that voting patterns would remain the same without the electoral college. I'm sure there are large numbers of republicans in blue states that don't bother voting currently.
    • hackuser 10y ago
      An interesting hypothesis regarding presidential elections but ... 1) It doesn't affect House elections 2) Any such second-order effects could also favor Democrats 3) There is no evidence; we're just wildly speculating
• hatsunearu 10y ago
  This is a huge step in democracy. I'm hoping that we can get fully digital, cryptographically verifiable elections before I die.
• shmerl 10y ago
  What about reforming electoral college to full popular vote?
• 3531591548 10y ago
  qq
• nitrogen 10y ago
  There's a simulated comparison of the practical perfomance of several different voting systems at http://zesty.ca/voting/sim http://zesty.ca/voting/sim. It looks like approval and ranked voting fare the best, with approval being more likely to get voters to express their true preferences (IIRC).