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Instant runoff voting is the system we need

• bryanlarsen 8y ago
  If you really wanted to encourage 3rd party candidates, then Proportional Representation would work even better. Both are better than first past the post, but agreeing on an alternative is HARD. The situation in Canada is instructive: the governing left-central Liberals promised to replace first past the post, but reneged on their promise when they realized that the committees studying the issue were going to come back with a Mixed Member Proportional recommendation which would hurt them and help the left-wing New Democratic Party, rather than the ranked ballot mechanism that would help them. (That's speculation, of course. They gave some other BS reason for breaking the promise)
  • olliej 8y ago
    Proportional voting is a vastly superior system for arranging many-people blocks (senate and congress in the US), and also completely breaks gerrymandering. It doesn’t work for individual candidate positions like president, because you can’t have a non whole number percentage of a single candidate
    • incompatible 8y ago
      Electing the president separately, when the president is a position of power and not just ceremonial, doesn't make sense anyway. With a multiparty system, you are better off waiting for a coalition to form in parliament and letting that select the president. Otherwise, either the president or the parliament can act as a roadblock. Compare with how the system of the Netherlands works: a single country-wide electorate, and no threshold except for the number of votes needed for a seat. The outcome is numerous parties in parliament (i.e., far more democratic than the US) and coalition governments which must be formed or at least supported by parties that got a majority of the votes between them.
      • singingboyo 8y ago
        I'd argue that if the president is intended to be a position of power, then a separate election is good - otherwise, one party (presumably the largest) in the ruling coalition has power far beyond what their vote count would justify, and the person gets power without real input from the electorate. Especially with many parties, if parties A and B are reasonably similar, it's quite plausible to like party A's platform while preferring party B's presidential candidate. A separate presidential election accounts for that, allowing you to elect A for the house, and B for president. Note that parties A and B are similar - I'd argue that they'd have to be, and that it's extraordinarily unlikely to get a president the ruling coalition is incapable of compromising with. This works out because overall, the vote for president should be ideologically similar to the votes for congress/parliament. (That working, of course, is contingent on some form of ranked voting for the president, rather than the FPTP system the US has now.) All that said, I'm from Canada, and I don't really agree with the idea of a single person with large amounts of power, but that's my take if there must be one.
        • incompatible 8y ago
          Well, in Canada you have a Prime Minister who is elected by the House of Commons? Would it be so much better if the Prime Minister was elected separately? How would a Prime Minister run a government if his/her party was in opposition?
      • olliej 8y ago
        The US constitution and founding documents make it very clear that the president is meant to be a separate entity - the fact that it’s devolved to the point that one party will rubber stamp pretty much anything the president tells them to is a failing of that party. Specifically the president represents the executive branch, then you have the two houses, one that represents the people approximately proportionally, and one that gives 20x multipliers to the voting power of people from mostly empty states.
  • scj 8y ago
    Wouldn't MMP at the Federal level require Provincial consent (1982 Constitution Act, sections 41a & 44) using the 7/10 & 50%+1 amendment formula?
    • winstonewert 8y ago
      The proposals I've seen do MMP separately in each province, (so the overall results is roughly proportional) to avoid this.
      • scj 8y ago
        Do they change seat count? If not, do they compensate PEI for the senatorial clause?
        • winstonewert 8y ago
          No they don't change the seat count. PEI would still be over-represented in these schemes.
• juancampa 8y ago
  This makes a lot of sense as a system, but who came up with "instant runoff"? should be called "ranked voting"
  • xvedejas 8y ago
    There are many kinds of voting which involve the voters ranking their choices. The difference is in how those choices are resolved. You can get very different election results depending on whether you do instant runoff voting, or use a condorcet method, or use borda count. They're all ranked voting, but they have very different properties.
    • juancampa 8y ago
      Interesting, thanks for the clarification. I didn't realize how nuanced it can be. For example, when using the Condorcet method there's a chance of not having a winner. From wikipedia[1]: > This is sometimes called a Condorcet cycle or just cycle and can be thought of as Candidate Rock beating Candidate Scissors, Candidate Scissors beating Candidate Paper, and Candidate Paper beating Candidate Rock. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet_method https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet_method
  • chuckgreenman 8y ago
    The first time I heard about it was called ranked voting, but instant run off is the more popular term. There are multiple rounds, where the least voted candidate is removed, so it makes sense.
  • pmyteh 8y ago
    It's a kind of optimised variant of the 'runoff voting', where the election is rerun with one fewer candidate if noone gets a majority. That's where the name comes from. In these parts (the UK) the same system is known as the Alternative Vote (AV) which is just as meaningless a name. But in defence of my fellow political scientists, there are a lot of different voting systems, many of which have alternatives, rankings, and runoffs, so unambiguous and useful names are hard to find.
  • 8y ago
• elicash 8y ago
  While IRV weakens the major parties, you still end up with a two party system. If you want more parties, then support a parliamentary system.
  • craftyguy 8y ago
    > you still end up with a two party system Can you explain why you think that is the case?
    • elicash 8y ago
      When I look at the UK for instance, which has real variety of parties, you see a parliamentary system with first-past-the-post voting.
      • craftyguy 8y ago
        That doesn't explain why the instant runoff system will result in a two party system..
        • elicash 8y ago
          Places with IRV generally still have two major parties, even if weaker, like I said in the original comment. I'm just saying that how this normally plays out is you still end up with 2 major parties (though weaker).
      • Sean1708 8y ago
        > which has real variety of parties We really don't, historically (for the last century or so) it's been pretty cut and dry between either Labour or Conservatives with the occasional coalition (always involving one of those two parties).
        • elicash 8y ago
          Hm, I must be mistaken then. Thanks!
• daze42 8y ago
  Just the other day, I discovered a group that is pushing for this very thing. If you're interested in making this system the norm, start pushing for a change in your local area. https://www.fairvote.org/ https://www.fairvote.org/
  • quadrangle 8y ago
    Or you could learn more about other options and critiques of IRV in order to realize that our effort at reform would be better spent on STAR voting (or maybe approval voting), even though IRV is better than the status quo. IRV has the fundamental flaw in that it counts some voters' preferences and ignores others. It's an overly-complex and mediocre unequal system. Check out https://www.equal.vote https://www.equal.vote to understand what it means to have voting equality and how we can pursue systems that honor that.
• vertline3 8y ago
  Seems like it pushes everything to a lukewarm center, change already difficult to enact would be even harder, it goes to "who sorta kinda appeals to the most". I imagine turnout would decline.
  • Klathmon 8y ago
    I don't see that. I know I've "voted defensively" before, and I really don't like having to do it. I want to vote for those that I agree with, I don't want to vote against those who I disagree with. It may seem like a small distinction, but if someone loves candidate A, but they are extremely unlikely to win, most will end up voting for B because they REALLY don't like C. That leads to A never getting in office until they become more like B. But with instant runoff, I'm free to know that I can vote for A first, and B second, and not worry that my support for A is implicit support for C. It not a perfect system, but IMO it's a lot better than what we have now in the US. Edit: another piece that I forgot to mention is that instant runoff can give more signals beyond the winners or losers. Currently you have no way outside of polling to understand what voters want, it leads to a vocal minority being able to control the narrative. With instant runoff, the runners can easily see that even though candidate A didn't win, they did get a sizeable number of votes, and maybe next time B runs, they will incorporate some of A's ideas into their campaign.
  • empath75 8y ago
    You end up with the candidate who most voters at least like while offering more choices. Seems like it would wipe out the ‘rile up the base’ strategy in favor of trying not to offend anyone.
    • vertline3 8y ago
      Right, I'm saying it's a stable but stale form where candidates optimize being tepid. May seem fine but I see how it would lead to further entrenchment of a ruling class
• StavrosK 8y ago
  I must be misunderstanding something, because it seems to me that this basically gives the top candidate their votes, and the second top candidate every other vote. What am I missing? EDIT: Oh, on one of the rounds the top candidate might become the bottom candidate, I see.
  • daze42 8y ago
    Let's say Clinton, Trump, and Sanders on on the ballot. Some voters could rank their choice, from most to least preferable, Sanders -> Clinton -> Trump, while others could rank Sanders -> Trump -> Clinton. If Sanders received the least amount of votes, voters with the first ranking would have their vote transferred to Clinton while the voters with the second ranking would have their votes transferred to Trump. It wouldn't necessarily reallocate votes to third and lower ranking candidates to the second ranking candidate.
    • StavrosK 8y ago
      Ahh, I see, okay, I got it completely wrong then. I thought you voted for a single person and those votes were reassigned, I didn't realize you gave a strict ranking. What happens if the candidate that gets removed is in the middle? I'm guessing nothing, since it "stops" at your first preference that's still in the race, ie your vote goes to the first person?
      • daze42 8y ago
        The way I understand it, you're correct. If a candidate that you ranked higher is still in the running, your vote goes to them. Only when your highest ranked choice is eliminated does your vote get transferred.
    • qubax 8y ago
      That seems managable when you have 3 candidates. What happens when there are 10 or 20 candidates? Would voters have to list their top 10 or 20 choices?
      • 8y ago
• xvedejas 8y ago
  I'm continually upset and confused by Instant runoff voting's popularity. IRV is, by my reckoning, a much inferior (and more complicated) system than other systems, like range voting or ranked pairs. And it has some bizarre properties that make me wonder if it is even worse than the traditional first-past-the-post. One property of IRV that makes it so questionable is its non-monotonicity. This means that you can help a candidate by ranking them lower, and hurt a candidate by ranking them higher. It is extremely easy to visualize how ill-behaved IRV is in the charts on this website: http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/ http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/ Meanwhile, ranked pairs (a "condorcet" method) has the property that, if candidate A is more popular than all other candidates pairwise, then candidate A will always win. This is _not_ true in IRV. If you're interested in falling down the rabbit hole of electoral systems, I recommend looking at this chart that compares their properties: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_electoral_systems#Comparisons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_electoral_system...
  • clarkevans 8y ago
    To me it also seems IRV is complicated. That said, doesn't the non-monotonicity property of IRV support outcomes where a compromise candidate might win when they otherwise would lose? That doesn't seem to be a bad thing. If people vote strategically to make a centrist their 1st vote to avoid what they consider an extreme, that seems like the essence of political compromise and an improvement over 1st past post. Perhaps the most important important property of a voting system is that it is easy to grok, so that people trust it. In particular, aggregates at the local level should combine simply with other districts to tally overall winners.You can tally IRV incrementally, it's just that ranking permutations are the units of aggregation. That's non-trivial. For this reason, I prefer approval voting.
    • xvedejas 8y ago
      Voting systems like range voting seem to me, based on simulation, to have this property but much more well-behaved. Range voting is also much simpler than IRV. Approval voting is just a special case of range voting. I'm afraid people want to take one step forward, three steps back with IRV.
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• eftpotrm 8y ago
  Straight IRV is an improvement in that it removes the third-party candidate spoiler effect and the incentive for negative campaigning, yes, but it can actually make results less proportional than FPTP. What's needed isn't just IRV but STV - think IRV but districts grouped together and multiple winners. That way, you can actually get results that are proportional to the votes cast because the difference between a narrow win and a landslide changes who gets elected down the ticket.
  • xvedejas 8y ago
    The multi-winner system that appeals the most to me is either range (score) or approval voting, with seats allocated proportionally. Unlike STV, it would be possible to support or oppose as many candidates/parties as the voter wants simultaneously. And so it avoids some of the nasty properties of IRV and STV.
    • eftpotrm 8y ago
      There's no problem with opposing candidates in IRV / STV - you just rank them at the back of the list. I can't claim to be an expert on all the finer points of STV versus range or approval voting, but it's significant to me that the Electoral Reform Society (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_Reform_Society https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_Reform_Society) continue to back STV.
      • xvedejas 8y ago
        It's not obvious to me that all the information about your ranking gets percolated up to the final decision, especially since your middle rankings can disappear without warning during intermediate stages. If you can't do anything to prevent your #2 from getting eliminated, might as well rank them last as far as the system matters.
        • singingboyo 8y ago
          One very important part of getting STV to work well is the quota - if a candidate has enough votes to guarantee that they would be elected (so, for a 3-seat district, 25%+1 of votes) then additional votes should be transferred BEFORE eliminating any candidates. Some systems do this randomly (randomly choose ballots and take the next preference), and some do this fractionally (e.g. transferred votes are worth whatever fraction wasn't needed to elect their previous choices). Overall, though, the point is that if your middle choice is eliminated, then either your vote wasn't enough, or a previous choice needed your support already. That said, most systems 'skip' over previously elected candidates as well. Strictly speaking, doing that can mean ballots with a losing first candidate are more powerful than ballots where the first candidate is elected by a narrow margin[1]. That said, as per the wiki link, there's a solution (recalculate all instead of skipping previously elected) and tactical voting around that issue isn't seen in practice anyway. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Issues_affecting_the_single_transferable_vote#Tactical_voting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Issues_affecting_the_single_tr...
• eli 8y ago
  There's a big unaddressed obstacle to IRV which is that it's a little confusing and complicated to explain. This is a much bigger problem than it might first sound like. It is an absolute requirement of any voting system that voters understand how it works and feel confident in it.
  • 0xffff2 8y ago
    This is deeply unfortunate if it's really true, because the prime factor in favor of IRV is that it is the second-easiest system to explain after FPTP.
    • ArchTypical 8y ago
      But it's harder to understand consequences, which change over time. So the explanation is deceptively simple. Like the game of life. Random Ballot is simple to explain and is a lottery pool. Simpler than IRV.
      • 0xffff2 8y ago
        Random ballot only works for races like the house though. It doesn't work at all for Presidential or Senate elections.
        • dragonwriter 8y ago
          Random ballot works just as well for Senate elections, and votes for Presidential electors (or even votes by Presidential electors) as it does for House votes. Which is, to be sure, not very well, but there's nothing special about the House that makes it work there better.
    • quadrangle 8y ago
      IRV is nowhere near the second easiest to explain. Approval voting: you can vote for any of the candidates you like, not just one. Way simpler than IRV. Score voting: give any or all candidates scores. Easy explanation. STAR: score the candidates, there's an auto-runoff where the two highest-score candidates get checked to see which is preferred by more voters. At least as easy to explain as IRV, and much easier to actually understand overall, particularly in making sense of the results and following what happened.
• nestorD 8y ago
  Here is a very good simulator to get a feel for the different voting systems : https://ncase.me/ballot/ https://ncase.me/ballot/
  • rstuart4133 8y ago
    ncase.me is very good, but it neglects what I consider to be the elephant in the room - dictatorship of the majority. If you have a country with 60% A, 30% B and 10% C, then you might like to a parliament roughly representative of that. (A, B, and C could be anything - attitudes to same sex marriage, daylight saving - there are always many ABC sets.) If parliament consists people elected in geographic regions, and A, B and C are uniformly distributed over the regions than all voting systems here will give you a parliament consisting only of A's. People here seem to enjoy pointing out some perverse outcomes for IRV, but the Arrow's impossibility theorem proves (and ncase.me beautifully demonstrates) all voting systems have perverse outcomes. Yet none are as bad as electing all A's to represent a diverse country and every one of them will do that if used the wrong way, which also happens to be the most common way they are used. Back to the topic - IRV does have its downsides, but it's not perverse outcomes. Australia tries to use IRV everywhere. The Australia Federal Senate has a voting system that does fix the dictatorship of the majority and naturally they try to use IRV there too. If you ever have the unfortunate experience of voting in an Australian Senate election you'll see why IRV isn't so good in that situation. In fact it's so bad not even the Australian's can use it in its pure form. If you are wondering why, it leads asking the public to number 100 odd boxes in strictly consecutive order, on a 1m wide ballot paper that can't lie flat in the ballot box with writing so small they had to issue magnifying glasses so you could read the candidate names. https://www.abc.net.au/news/6870332 https://www.abc.net.au/news/6870332
• ergothus 8y ago
  Sadly, voting terminology is nasty. I've long advocated for a better voting system than first-past-the-post (or "pick one", as I call it for non-voting-system nerds). IRV has issues and is not my first choice, but it is better than FPTP. That said, the major objection I get from people is "anything else is too hard". So I say "can you list your choices in order of preference?" They almost always say that's acceptable. You can run IRV from that, but you can also run most any Condorcet variant. The only remaining part is to show the results in a fashion people understand, which is non-trivial but is also not what the "anything else is too hard" group was complaining about. So don't say "ranked pair" or "STV"...say "order of preference", and you'll find people more willing to consider ideas. It's not EASY, but it's definitely EASIER.
  • gaius 8y ago
    it is better than FPTP. We use FPTP in the UK because it directly correlates an MP with a constituency. Even if the candidate you didn't prefer wins, they are still your MP and have a duty to represent you. We had a referendum on PR a few years ago (which was rejected) and its proponents kept banging on about it, then went very very quiet when UKIP got 4 million votes (more than the SNP and the Greens combined).
    • wffurr 8y ago
      You're conflating voting systems with geographic representation.
    • ergothus 8y ago
      FPTP is not the only system to do that - if the vote is to decide who represents _you_, any system can do that. If the vote is instead to give the party a certain amount of power, it won't do as you want regardless of the voting system.
      • gaius 8y ago
        The people vote for their representatives directly, and the party with the most has the opportunity but not the obligation to form the government. The alternative, PR, breaks the link between constituency and representative. That's why very few wanted it - generally those who thought it would favour their party (Lib Dems) who are unable to muster much support at the local level.
• aidenn0 8y ago
  Many people talk about proportional representation; my favorite PR system is the "Random Ballot." It is a very simple voting system and is the only voting system I know of that never suggests strategic voting (when voting in a way different from your preferences is required to get your preferred outcome). Basically if you have e.g. 100 seats in your house, you choose 100 ballots at random and whomever is voted for on those ballots are the representatives. It averages out to proportional representation, while still allowing geographically distributed candidates. It also satisfies all of Arrow's criteria[1], which no deterministic system can. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theore...
  • jhauris 8y ago
    Isn't detecting fraud harder in a non-deterministic system? Theoretically in any deterministic system you can recount if there's a question.
    • DennisP 8y ago
      You would definitely need a random source that everyone can verify.
  • tzs 8y ago
    > It also satisfies all of Arrow's criteria, which no deterministic system can. Approval voting is deterministic and satisfies all of Arrow's criteria. Arrow's theorem doesn't apply to voting systems, such as approval voting, that are not ranked choice systems.
  • 3pt14159 8y ago
    I used to be in favour of this one, and talk about it all the time, but I've kinda changed my view. The core problem with most voting systems could be solved with more representatives and just straight proportional representation. In the range of 1 to 10k–100k. Then you do a parliamentary system with one primary chamber that does most of the law making and one secondary chamber that does some checks but is ultimately toothless. A supreme court that can make law, but tends to refer legislation back to the parliament. A clause to allow the primary legislator to override all but the most basic freedoms required for democracy to work like voting and a free press. Essentially Canada, but with proportional representation and maybe double the number of MPs. The problem with random ballots is that unserious people will will or vote for themselves and they're harder to do securely with straight paper ballots that is understandable to laypersons.
• eli 8y ago
  This is an aside, but: > Some publications even blame third party voters for Hillary Clinton's loss in 2016. I don't think there is any plausible reason to believe Clinton would have won in 2016 if not for third-party candidates running. The math just doesn't add up.
  • tzs 8y ago
    The raw numbers are there for third party candidate to make a difference. It would only have taken Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin going to Clinton instead of Trump to have changed the result. In Michigan, Trump won by around 11k votes, and there were around 223k third party votes (172k Johnson, 51k Stein). In Wisconsin, Trump won by 22k votes. Johnson got 107k there and Stein got 31k. In Pennsylvania, Trump won by 46k. 147k went to Johnson and 50k to Stein. I'd guess that almost all Stein voters would pick Clinton over Trump, so take Stein out of the race and in all three of those states Clinton wins that statewide vote unless the Stein voters decide to stay home. I'd guess that those who would vote for Stein would be sufficiently "anyone but Trump" to not stay home. Those states are all winner-takes-all for the Electoral College, so that would do it. (Maine and Nebraska are the only states that split their electoral votes). What would have happened without Johnson is a harder call. Trump and Clinton are both terrible from a Libertarian point of view. I'd expect Libertarian voters to be more likely to go Republican than Democrat if there is no Libertarian on the ballot most years, but Trump is so different from what had been mainstream Republicans before that I have no idea who the majority of Libertarians would have picked. Also, I suspect that many of the Johnson voters were "never Trump" Republicans rather than Libertarians, who would agree with conservative writer and research fellow at the Cato Institute P.J. O'Rourke who said that Clinton lies about everything and is wrong on every issue, but he was endorsing her over Trump because she was wrong "within normal parameters".
    • eli 8y ago
      "I'd guess that almost all Stein voters would pick Clinton over Trump..." I see absolutely no reason to believe that.
      • 8y ago
• legohead 8y ago
  CGP Grey video on IRV / Alternative Vote: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Y3jE3B8HsE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Y3jE3B8HsE
• scythe 8y ago
  Back in the day, the Georgia Tech Linux Users' Group had a very simple two-round system. The first round was approval voting; the second round was a run-off between the top two candidates. We voted like this every week to decide where to eat dinner. This extremely simple system satisfies participation, monotonicity and a weak form of Condorcet, where the winner always won pairwise against other candidates in terms of expressed preferences (but not all preferences are expressed). The participation criterion and Condorcet criterion are incompatible in the full sense, so this is as close as you can get. The run-off acts as a correction to AV's tendency to select underqualified moderates. However, it is a two-round election. A run-off is always necessary. But it can be made one-round via what I call rank-and-star: voters rank candidates by preference, and put a star next to the top N that they like. The two candidates with the most stars are then compared on rankings. It's pretty easy to prove this is mathematically equivalent to the two-round system, but it's not a ranked-choice method because the ballots (1-2-3) and (1-2-3) are different. Interestingly, it might still be possible to satisfy both participation and monotonicity if you expand the run-off to three candidates and use minimax Condorcet for the final round. For three candidates, minimax = Schulze = ranked-pairs and they satisfy participation; for four or more candidates, no Condorcet method satisfies participation. However, doing this costs you the attractive simplicity of the method (but minimax Condorcet is simple to understand, relative to IRV or ranked-pairs). Anyway, this puts me in the odd position of advocating a voting system nobody has ever heard of =p
• peacetreefrog 8y ago
  Maine voted on using this system for some elections in 2016. It passed, but -- perhaps not surprisingly -- many current, established politicians weren't happy. Maine's governor called it "the most horrific thing in the world" and the state legislature refused to fund implementation and voted to delay it until 2022. So this year the the citizens of Maine voted again to confirm instant runoff voting, overruling the state legislature and vetoing their delay. It passed by an even bigger margin this time. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/06/maine-lepage-ranked-choice-voting/562871/ https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/06/maine-l...
  • acjohnson55 8y ago
    Maine's governor is also a bigot, in my eyes, so the fact that he doesn't like something is hardly a bad signal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_LePage#Drug-dealing_comments_and_leaked_voicemail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_LePage#Drug-dealing_comme...
  • auntienomen 8y ago
    Maine's gov, Paul le page, was elected when 2 vanity candidates split the moderate & left vote. He wouldn't have been elected under an IRV system. No wonder he doesn't like it. In any case, he's leaving office and leaving Maine, so who cares what he thinks?
  • dbbk 8y ago
    When will it come into effect? Article doesn't seem to say.
    • peacetreefrog 8y ago
      They used it in June for a statewide race and they're using it today for the federal congressional races.
• gumby 8y ago
  I don't know why people thing IRV is complicated. Australia has been using this approach for more than a century with no problems.
  • quadrangle 8y ago
    If you want to see how it is complicated, review https://www.rangevoting.org/Burlington.html https://www.rangevoting.org/Burlington.html and (A) see if you even understand (I've seen people literally deny the basic facts or miss the point if they happen to feel politically happy with the outcome in that one example), (B) see if you can understand the situation enough to explain to someone else what happened and why people see it as a problem. Simply running IRV is easy enough. Understanding it and its ramifications is complex enough that even the majority of IRV advocates don't understand it.
    • gumby 8y ago
      Well of course, Arrow's theorem shows that you can have pathologies in every system. This is also true of every apportionment system as well. As we live in the real world, the point is to choose voting systems that have the best outcome. What are the criteria? - people need to believe it is fair. - it should avoid lop sided results (one party always wins regardless of vote) yet should avoid excessive diffusion (i.e. you don't want to have only fragile coalitions of many small parties). - others, all with the aim of clarity. As there is no magic bullet people use combinations of different systems: - Australian ballot (secret ballot) which most systems use these days; hard to enforce in USA because of first amendment. - quasi-independent apportionment processes/committees (as used in CA, AZ et al) - party lists (not used in USA) or party-plus-candidate (e.g. Germany) - non-party systems (e.g. CA) - multi-candidate districts (not used in the US) - proportional representation (most democracies) or first-past-the-post (most dependents of Westminster). I'm a fan of the latter BTW. - IRV Mix, match, iterate until an overwhelming majority of people are satisfied.
      • deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
• excalibur 8y ago
  Having voters rank all the candidates from most to least desirable is a great idea. The IRV method of tabulating their choices is pretty questionable. There has to be a better way.
  • 0xffff2 8y ago
    There are better ways, but they are generally more complicated and thus harder to explain to voters. IRV already gets a lot of flack for being too hard to understand, but it's the second-easiest system to explain after FPTP.
• arikr 8y ago
  See also: https://represent.us/ https://represent.us/
• chrisco255 8y ago
  I think this should be implemented at the Party primary level. It's too hard to change the Constitution and all 50 states to some kind of run off system. But at the party level, I think it makes sense and would be much easier to roll out and implement.
  • dlbucci 8y ago
    The purpose of the change is to move away from a two-party system, where people are forced to vote red or blue, because green and grey are too small to have a real chance. Only making the change within parties wouldn't fix that at all.
    • chrisco255 8y ago
      I understand that, but from a pragmatic point of view, you have little chance of achieving that. As long as Congressional districts are winner-take-all. And Senate seats are winner-take-all (there's only one seat up for each state at a time, usually). Nothing will change at the Federal level. And as for the Presidency, each state gets to decide how they allocate their electoral votes. Game theory currently suggests it's in a state's best interests to allocate all of their votes to the winner of the popular vote in that state. And in the meantime, you're going to hit roadblock upon roadblock in trying to get a major disruptive system installed at the Federal election level. You would have a much easier time getting the system to change from within the Democrat and Republican parties for the primary system, since those rules are set by the parties themselves and not by the states. So long as the parties are open and accessible to anyone, I don't see a big problem. The parties themselves are composed of many smaller factions (greens, libertarians, evangelicals, etc, etc).
      • the_watcher 8y ago
        There are already Congressional districts that use runoff elections (MS-special, for one that's being voted on today). States can choose the way they elect their representatives so long as it isn't contra the Constitution, which only requires direct election at the moment.
      • 8y ago
• gmiller123456 8y ago
  While I think IRV is a better system than we have, I think it concentrates on the wrong problem. In practice it only really works on high profile elections where all of the candidates get plenty of public scrutiny. The lower houses like the Senate and House, especially at the state level, usually receive very little scrutiny compared to governors and presidents. But the real power lies more in these lower houses than with the heads of state. They really only have power because their political party already has a significant control in the lower houses. The lower houses usually have the power to override anything the head of state does, and the vast majority of the power the head of state has are just things the lower houses has designated to him/her, which they can just as easily take away. So I think the real issue is to open up the lower chambers to third parties, and that's best done through the use of Proportional Representation. IRV will not work at that level, because very few races are scrutinized by the public very much. Proportional Representation also eliminates Gerrymandering (or significantly reduces it depending on how it's implemented). Once you've got a significant number of third parties in the lower chambers, whoever is head of state really doesn't matter that much. Since they'll have to work with pretty much everyone in the lower chambers to get anything done.
  • specialist 8y ago
    Approval voting for executive positions, proportional representation for assemblies. The upper house (eg Senate) in bicameral systems is a special case. I'm undecided if they should be abolished (7 states have more Senators than Representatives) or our state boundaries redrawn.
    • philwelch 8y ago
      The Senate, and the changes to Senate balance caused by granting statehood, already was a contributing factor to one civil war. It also disenfranchises many Americans: DC has large populated areas that aren't part of any state, but Democrats insist on turning DC into a state in its own right (which would give them 2 extra Senators) while Republicans don't want the Democrats to have 2 extra senators, so the most they would agree to is retrocession to Maryland (similar to how Alexandria was retroceded to Virginia), which the Democrats won't accept because then they get 0 extra senators. (Most DC residents would prefer statehood, but then, most DC residents would also vote Democrat, and it's hard to tease out the conflicting motivations of "we want to have representation" and "we want our side to be more powerful in Congress".) Puerto Rico also seems to want statehood, but there's no progress on getting it for them for various reasons I don't fully understand. Redrawing state boundaries would either be politically impossible, or could only happen with a large enough national one-party supermajority that it would basically amount to gerrymandering anyway.
• dlbucci 8y ago
  Why not approval voting? It's much easier to explain to people and is way more compatible with the current system. You simply approve of any number of candidates, and the candidate with the highest number of approvals wins. Maybe in practice people would only ever approve one candidate and the situation wouldn't change, but I think it's a least a good small step forward.
  • specialist 8y ago
    #1 - I switched from advocating IRV to approval voting once I better understood the election integrity aspects. Tabulating IRV is much harder, necessitating more software, which obfuscates the process. #2 - Election administrators hate IRV. They'll oppose, sabotage it at every turn. We had a local trial run. As an observer, it'd be hard to argue the admins made an honest effort to make it succeed. #3 - IRV is confusing to voters. Try explaining it to your parents. Any changes to our voting systems should be incremental, deliberate. First with local races and then progressively up ballot. Give people time to adapt.
    • __d 8y ago
      I'll suggest Australia as a counter-example to all three numbered points, albeit on a relatively small scale (population ~25m). But I agree 100% with your final point: people need time to adapt, and be willing to do so. Changing the system to something people trust even less would be bad.
    • jacques_chester 8y ago
      > Tabulating IRV is much harder, necessitating more software, which obfuscates the process. This is a feature, not a bug. The count should be done by hand. The multiple rounds increase the probability that shennanigans will be detected, whether by sheer weight of watching eyes or by numerical irregularities between rounds. > Election administrators hate IRV. They'll oppose, sabotage it at every turn. I don't see how to predict which one they will like. > IRV is confusing to voters. Try explaining it to your parents. My parents are in their 70s and have voted this way since before I was born. My paternal grandparents were voting this way before my parents were born. My maternal grandparents voted this way when they moved to Australia. Tens of millions of Australians vote this way and have done so for about a century. It does not seem statistically likely that somehow Australia has had an uninterrupted run of particular genius at a multi-decadal/multi-million-person scale that nobody else in the world can replicate ever again.
• quadrangle 8y ago
  What we need is STAR voting or 3-2-1 voting. https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-best-single-winner-voting-method-for-electing-presidents-mayors-or-other-executives https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-best-single-winner-voting-... lays it out clearly. STAR is on the ballot in Lane County, OR. We just might find out tonight or tomorrow that we'll see the first ever implementation of a more equal voting system. IRV is not an equal system, it counts some people's preferences and discards others. https://www.equal.vote/star-vs-irv https://www.equal.vote/star-vs-irv
• rustcharm 8y ago
  The only people who want to change voting systems are the ones whose preferred candidates don't win.
  • quadrangle 8y ago
    Except for people who actually want a healthy society and see the bigger picture. If my candidate wins with a plurality and is stymied and sabotaged by a divided population with many people feeling totally unrepresented, that does not create a world I prefer. I want a society where as many people as possible feel included and trust the system. I don't want a situation where losers feel disenfranchised and interested in undermining democracy. If my views are actually democratically popular, I will be okay with a fairer voting system. If I like that the current system is unfairly weighted in my favor, then it's still very short-sighted for me to defend that system. Incidentally, I don't advocate for IRV, it's a flawed system. Much better options are STAR, 3-2-1, or approval voting.
• jonbronson 8y ago
  Ranked voting is sorely needed in the US. Plurality vote, the predominant US vote tallying system in the US, actually maximizes voter dissatisfaction. That is, if your candidate loses you are most likely to end up with a winning candidate that is polar opposite of your values.
• fabianhjr 8y ago
  STAR (Score Then Automatic Runoff) is the system we need. (Or V321 in case there can't be a runoff) https://www.equal.vote/ https://www.equal.vote/ or RRV (Reweighted Range Voting) for proportional representation. https://rangevoting.org/RRV.html https://rangevoting.org/RRV.html
• TangoTrotFox 8y ago
  IRV doesn't solve the right problem. The biggest benefit of IRV is that it helps to reduce the spoiler effect, but not much else. But I don't think when people talk about election change that they are talking about the spoiler effect. Rather I think the thing people see is this weird trend in society today. Fewer people than ever identify as republican or democrat, yet very nearly 100% of all seats in office at all levels of government are filled by republicans or democrats. Let's imagine a state had 100 representatives (to keep the numbers nice). And in this state 35% of the population most strongly identified as republican. 34% most strongly identified as democrat. 16% most strongly identified as green, and 15% most strongly identified as libertarian. And this state had a really good geographic mix of people, so everybody was completely evenly distributed. As a nice aside there you don't even need to worry about things like gerrymandering - any sample of any area will have an identical mix of people as any other area. That's good... right? What would be the most reasonable result for the makeup of their representatives? What would we actually get? I think most of everybody would say the same thing for the most reasonable result. 35 republicans, 34 democrats, 16 greens, and 15 libertarians. Few would correctly answer what we'd actually get - 100 republicans. And in a nutshell, this is the real problem. District based plurality elections, be it first past the post or IRV will trend towards domination of two major parties. The only solution is proportional representation. You get 10% of the votes and if there's at least 10 seats then you're guaranteed to get at least one. Proportional stands next to no chance of being implemented since it would require the current political establishment to sign their own [political] death warrants, but if we're going to change the electoral system I think we should at least look at solutions that would actually solve the problem.
• Sniffnoy 8y ago
  This piece seems to have been written by someone with no knowledge of voting methods other than first-past-the-post and IRV. Looking outside these two options there are clearly better ones, such as approval voting, which is even simpler. IRV isn't even monotonic! I don't know why IRV seems to be such an attractive nuisance. Please, skip IRV, just use approval voting.
• gwbas1c 8y ago
  I used to support instant runoff voting, (and I still do.) Based on my state's politics, we keep getting candidates who "play the game" with the small group of people who enjoy politics as a hobby, but then fail in a general election because they have no general appeal to the wider group of people who vote. But, there is a much more nuanced flaw. It's very hard to be an informed voter. A few nights ago, my wife and I spent a lot of time researching most of the candidates on our ballot. If every race had many candidates, than instant runoff would make being an informed voter much harder. (Granted, my ballot had many unopposed candidates, and in some cases where information wasn't easy to find, I just voted by party.) IMO, a much simpler thing to start with is just making it easier to be an informed voter. When I lived in CA, I got a pamphlet with statements from all candidates. It was very easy to choose who to vote for in local elections. Where I live now, I just don't get this kind of information.
  • specialist 8y ago
    No voter's guide? Not even online? That's really, really bad. Following declared party, endorsements are a good signal. Some friends created https://www.readysetvote.org https://www.readysetvote.org that serves that purpose. Type in your address, see all the candidates and their endorsements. Alas, thus far it's just for King County WA.
    • gwbas1c 8y ago
      We got a pamphlet for the ballot initiatives.
• infimum 8y ago
  One of the most eye-opening moments of my CS studies was, when we discussed the Gibbard-Satterthwaite Theorem [1] in a class about Algorithmic Game Theory. I always like to bring it up in discussions about voting. In brief it states that every voting system is either 1. dictatorial (only 1 vote really counts) 2. limiting the number of outcomes to 2 3. is not strategy-proof (you have to vote tactically, for example ranking your favourite lower to achieve a better result)basically people have to 'game' the system to get what they want) It would be interesting to know how different proposed system tackle this. [Iirc one of the more reasonable approaches seemed to be relaxing No. 3 to make strategic voting computationally hard]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibbard%E2%80%93Satterthwaite_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibbard%E2%80%93Satterthwaite_...
• dragonwriter 8y ago
  > Instant runoff voting is the system we need No, it's not. It's better than FPTP, but then if you threw a dart at a list of single-winner voting methods, you are nearly guaranteed to hit something better than FPTP. Not only are there better single-winner methods, what we really need need is multiseat candidate-centered (i.e., not party list) proportional methods. STV, IRVs multiwinner cousin, isn't a bad choice here, though arguably not the best. (Degree of effective legislative proportionality is strongly linked to popular satisfaction with the resulting government across modern democracies, and single winner systems inherently produce poor proportionality and, thereby, poor satisfaction—the government fails to represent the electorate, and he electorate tends to dislike the goverment for that reason.) Single winner systems maximize the distortion of representation due to districting (which is bad even when it isn't corruptly bad in single-member legislative district systems), and maximize the number of people that lack effective representation through voting.
• anotheryou 8y ago
  good video series on voting algos: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7679C7ACE93A5638 https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7679C7ACE93A5638
• skrap 8y ago
  I wish we could just try something. Ok, so maybe IRV is worse than some other things, or maybe it's better. Let's try it. Or let's try range voting. Or approval. Or Condorcet IRV. Or whatever. We have lots of choices of voting systems. If we only had a way to decide! I hope the irony is not lost on all you bikeshedders out there. Quit bikeshedding. Start advocating for change. Start at the local level. Get your city or town to switch to the system of your choice. Don't just post on the internet about it.
  • xvedejas 8y ago
    My city is already IRV. If I had any clue how to change that, I would.
• gojomo 8y ago
  I like IRV, but it leads to longer ballots and more-complicated voter ranking decisions, and hard-to-predict results in corner cases. I'd prefer a variant I've not seen discussed elsewhere, but I'll call "Candidate-Delegated Instant Runoff Voting". Rather than allowing each voter to supply a unique 2nd, 3rd, etc choice, each candidate may select another candidate that's considered the "next choice" of 'their' voters, if the selecting candidate is eliminated. They'd have to irrevocably declare this "backup choice" before voting started. That is: each voter still only selects a single candidate. But in the event that candidate is eliminated, there's a predictable, known-before-hand other candidate to whom their votes get re-assigned in the instant-runoff. There's greater predictability as to who will be helped by a certain vote, and the full result is calculable from the 1st tally of direct votes (or somewhat forecastable from an accurate pre-election poll of voters' top choices).
  • lotyrin 8y ago
    Not sure why this wouldn't devolve into the same two party game theory you get with FPTP -- Vote for Greater Evil with a runoff to Actual Satan vs Lesser Evil with runoff to Milquetoast Sockpuppet.
    • gojomo 8y ago
      Like IRV, it’d help address the ‘spoiler’ issue where an emerging constituency is essentially penalized for growing strength, by sabotaging the major party closest to them. This, and IRV, instead gives them positive influence in proportion to their growing strength. As such, also like IRV, it doesn’t totally end tendencies towards two major parties. Even fully proportionate representation systems often trend that way, and such coalitions aren’t all bad: they help sinplify choices, making the outsones of elections more gradual and predictable, and make it more likely some stable coalition that together represents a plausible majority can form a working government. But it still creates new competitiveness around the edges, that single-member plurality suppresses.
  • jacques_chester 8y ago
    Australian Senate elections allow voters to vote "above the line" or "below the line". When voting above the line they mark one box for a political party, their vote will thereafter be distributed according to preferences registered at the electoral commission. If they vote below the line, they fill out what exact preference they prefer. This is a pragmatic compromise. The Senate elected on a proportional system, each party nominates up to 6 candidates and so their will frequently be hundreds of candidates to be numbered (the ballots are sometimes nicknamed "the tablecloths"). Voting in the House of Representatives does not have above the line voting, as it isn't a practical necessity.
• aurizon 8y ago
  The USA has created a political currency - each vote in Congress, (both houses) is a visible and countable action. This means it can be monetized, and it has been by bags of cash, trips to foreign shores and by many other ways thought up by creative lobbyists - such as wire transfers to Swiss banks. This is the unforeseen consequence of allowing the voter to hold his representative accountable to him/her. Sadly, it has brought the USA the worst of all abuse. Why not allow the vote to be private? Just give each representative a button and this goes to a simple counter that accumulates the total votes cast. It will be unhackable - a self contained system without connection to any network, and includes a 'vote once' latch to stop voting twice. We need to remove the representatives from all forms of bribery by this simple demonetization.
  • somebodythere 8y ago
    How can constituents hold their representatives to account in this case?
    • aurizon 8y ago
      The only other way is a vote by party, as in the UK, Canada etc. In those cases the entire party is held to account.
  • maxxxxx 8y ago
    Seems this opens the path to a lot of hidden bribery. I think it would make things much worse.
    • aurizon 8y ago
      Well, we now have hidden as well as open bribery!!!
• manicdee 8y ago
  Hare-Clarke or bust. Also: multi-member electorates, otherwise the system trends towards two parties exclusively.
• mjevans 8y ago
  A re-evaluation of voting systems with ideas from Bruster's Millions would be nice too. * None of the Above (NotA) / No Confidence **Note * Requiring a fully ranked ballot (at least until after NotA) If NotA then all of the candidates who've run for the current vacancy in "this election cycle" are banned, and a special election is held from scratch. About 1 month to get signatures/on the ballot and then directly to a special election no greater than 3 months from the date of the failed election. I still prefer weakest looser elimination ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schulze_method https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schulze_method ) and feel that the above tweaks would greatly improve many of corner cases. The Wikipedia articles are sufficient to avoid watching the film. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088850/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088850/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brewster%27s_Millions_(1985_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brewster%27s_Millions_(1985_fi... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/None_of_the_above https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/None_of_the_above
• WillPostForFood 8y ago
  Trying to fix politics by modifying the voting system is like trying to fix dysfunctional corporate culture by implementing some new task tracking system. It actually might have some small benefits, but it ignores tackling the real problem.
• cr4zy 8y ago
  Maybe this is the wrong place to ask, but are there any voting systems that allow arbitrary representation? A special case of this is the pure democracy, but most people would likely let someone else vote on most issues for them. Then, on certain issues, you could choose to vote yourself or even change representatives. Also since your representative could be changed at any time, the waste that goes into campaign seasons and partisanship would be replaced with a more realtime focus on issues. Perhaps this is too big a change for the U.S., but it seems like we could try this out, i.e. on StackOverflow, Reddit, or Wikipedia before implementing new governments on Mars and beyond.
• jeffdavis 8y ago
  I am more and more convinced that democracy just needs to be one input to the political process, not the only one and maybe not even the primary one. The United States was never intended to be a strongly democratic place, at least at the national level. Presidents are elected by electors, who are divided among the states according to population, and directed by the state legislatures. Senators were originally chosen by state legislatures, and there are two per state. All federal judges are appointed. That basically leaves the House of Representatives, who are selected by the people. And they have the most power over spending, which makes sense as a check on entrenched powers. Over time, we've become more democratic either through amendments or convention. I'm not entirely convinced that's a good thing. IRV is trying to help choose from the options on the democratic menu, but it doesn't solve the problem of what to put on the menu in the first place. In California, right now voters are considering a proposition about dialysis treatment centers and what they can charge. If I vote yes (like the insurance companies would prefer) then I am apparently damning dialysis patients to the grave. If I vote no (like the private equity firms that own the centers would prefer) then I am allowing poor patients to be overcharged and subjected to unsanitary conditions. At least that's what the TV tells me. It just seems like a bad idea to put every technical issue out for a vote. I think that's the logical conclusion of democracy and I don't think it's a good place to go. But it seems like all the new voting systems assume that it is what we all want.
• fallingfrog 8y ago
  I’m happy with rcv as we have for the federal races in Maine. There was none of the predicted chaos and confusion and the results were well accepted by the voting public.
• ClayShentrup 8y ago
  https://results.sos.nd.gov/resultsSW.aspx?text=BQ&type=CIALL&map=CTY&area=Fargo&name=Fargo https://results.sos.nd.gov/resultsSW.aspx?text=BQ&type=CIALL...
• eggestad 8y ago
  It never ceases to amaze me that people fail to see what is the real cause of dysfunction in your election system. It's the single member constituency. Also known as single member districts. This is what really ails your election system. You can toy around with IRV, STV, AV, two round voting, etc etc etc but you will never really fix it. It seem that people think a "real fix" is a three party system. I call BS, you really need 6 to 8. That means multi member constituencies. Once you go multi member you're very quickly arrive at party list proportional representation as your election system.