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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 syst

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.
  - chongli 8y ago
    With the amount of polarization these days I think range voting would just be treated as approval voting by the public.
    - bhauer 8y ago
      And that's fine. Approval as a worst-case scenario is tremendously good.
    - marcosdumay 8y ago
      How much of the polarization is there because of the voting system?
  - nostrademons 8y ago
    Range voting is challenging because people often have difficulty putting an exact number on how much they want something, and also scales differ between different people. On a 0-10 scale, some people will be putting every candidate as either 0 or 10; others will always put in 3 and 7; and this depends a lot more on the voter than the candidate. Approval voting is simple enough, but is vulnerable to bullet voting: approving an additional candidate can make your first choice lose. This makes it unsuitable if your goal is to make third-party voting more viable, which seems to be the premise of the article.
    - dragonwriter 8y ago
      > Range voting is challenging because people often have difficulty putting an exact number on how much they want something, and also scales differ between different people. On a 0-10 scale, some people will be putting every candidate as either 0 or 10; others will always put in 3 and 7; and this depends a lot more on the voter than the candidate. And, particularly, there is very notable cultural variation, which means (ab initio at least; over time, one expects behavior modification efforts would be deployed around this), support from different cultural groups in a diverse polity will have different electoral value even when turnout is the same. > Approval voting is simple enough, But also has the same problem: concretely what “approval” means is unclear and will be subject to voter-to-voter variation even when the actual preferences are identical.
- dnautics 8y ago
  > a compromise candidate might win when they otherwise would lose? That doesn't seem to be a bad thing. Only if you assume that compromising is fundamentally good. Do you believe the propensity is to compromise to get the best of the both worlds or the worst of the both worlds? I would point out, for example, that during the bush (II) administration, the only truly bipartisan, compromise initiatives were war in Iraq, No Child Left Behind, and Corporate Bailouts.
danielrhodes 8y ago
They have IRV in San Francisco for the mayoral race. What ends up happening is that a candidate who would not otherwise be in the majority can end up as mayor because he/she was everybody’s second choice. Additionally, candidates who think they might lose team up and start promoting each other. It’s bizarre and very difficult for voters to understand the implications of their actions.
- clarkevans 8y ago
  "What ends up happening is that a candidate who would not otherwise be in the majority can end up as mayor because he/she was everybody’s second choice." But, isn't that the whole point? ... that a compromise, perhaps centrist, candidate can emerge victorious?
  - aidenn0 8y ago
    But the question is, is this a good thing? If 51% of the population want an extremist candidate, but also like a centrist candidate, then IRV incentivizes them to lie on their ballot and promote a candidate they don't like over the candidate they do like.
    - corysama 8y ago
      Compared to the common “first past the post” voting, yes it is a good thing. This is because the common voting system encourages a “two extremist parties” system where everyone is effectively voting “greater horrible evil vs lesser horrible evil”. https://youtu.be/s7tWHJfhiyo https://youtu.be/s7tWHJfhiyo
      - xvedejas 8y ago
        Here's the problem though; IRV doesn't really do the thing you want it to. It can actually make an extreme candidate win even when voter opinion is centered around a moderate candidate. It's very obvious in this visualization (from the site linked a few comments ago): http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/54,47_77,64_13,10_irv.png http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/54,47_77,64_13,10_irv.png
esturk 8y ago
Ah yes, people complaining why we can't have X++ when we can't even have X. We should take what we can get and move the goal post from there. Any progress is good.
- abecedarius 8y ago
  Look at the results linked at zesty.ca: it’s not clear that IRV is progress. Meanwhile, approval voting is simple, easy to understand and to switch to, and a clearer improvement on the status quo. This is why the frustration.
- lifeformed 8y ago
  I mean, if we're going to finally be able to switch it, why not switch to the best option instead of starting with the second worst and switching again later?
  - chimeracoder 8y ago
    > I mean, if we're going to finally be able to switch it, why not switch to the best option instead of starting with the second worst and switching again later? Because that kind of lesser-of-two-evils incrementalist attitude is inherent to the first-past-the-post system we have now.
  - posterboy 8y ago
    Because I am not sure what's best. I'd have a vote to find out whether there is a best, but I'm not sure what's the best voting system.
    - moate 8y ago
      But these things aren't degrees of one another, they're totally different. Saying "we only ever eat meat, let's try eating an orange and see if we like it before we eat any of this lettuce" doesn't follow any actual logic. You might hate lettuce, you might hate oranges, but there's no specific factor that binds them together. Also what sort of things would you factor into what you prefer? How important is each of them?
perennialmind 8y ago
I've gone down that rabbit hole, repeatedly. It's just too fascinating. Likewise, I feel obligated to bring up the Voter Satisfaction Efficiency (or index) metric that seems to be favored by the approval/range voting crowd: basically estimating how utilitarian a given voting system can be. There's a fascinating write-up of their modeling results on github, with code (python). http://electology.github.io/vse-sim/VSE/ http://electology.github.io/vse-sim/VSE/ https://rangevoting.org/vsi.html https://rangevoting.org/vsi.html When it comes up in conversation (or I can work it into conversation), I push people to this - it has some great interactive visualizations https://ncase.me/ballot/ https://ncase.me/ballot/
mjevans 8y ago
I still personally like the Schulze method https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schulze_method https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schulze_method (AKA Schwartz Sequential dropping (SSD), cloneproof Schwartz sequential dropping (CSSD), the beatpath method, beatpath winner, path voting, and path winner) The part that is most appealing to me is how this method eliminates the least performing options first, then proceeds to better pairs. The only modifications necessary to "fix" it are to add in a "None of the Above" / "No Confidence" slot AND to require fully filled out rank lists. If NotA wins then the entire election is re-run with all prior candidates eliminated as possibilities.
- WorldMaker 8y ago
  I like pointing people to https://modernballots.com/ https://modernballots.com/ for all those "where should we eat lunch?" type questions. People usually seem quite surprised how well the Schulze method generally works. I implemented the Schulze method in a hobby project once, and the math is a rather simple digraph algorithm, which also gave me a lot of confidence that it's a well thought out voting method.
cwmma 8y ago
Runoffs are something people understand, IRV is conceptually similar and makes intuitive sense to people, it's very easy to explain to people, 'if nobody gets a majority, eliminate last place and redistribute their votes, repeat'. Compare that to to some of the other systems which often have complex mathematical descriptions which are hard for people to wrap their heads around. Another thing is how big a deal is 'non-monotonicity' is it actually going to be something that will affect elections all the time, or is it something that's more minor than say turnout which honestly has no solution and on one side you have USA where turnout is low so the game is all about making sure your base turns out, or on the other side you have Australia where voting is mandatory so making sure people who don't care, don't vote at random is a big part of the game.
- quadrangle 8y ago
  IRV is more complex in every way than STAR voting. STAR is just score with a single automatic runoff. It gets everything you are talking about in terms of intuition, explanation… everything you like about IRV is present in STAR and basically everything wrong with IRV is fixed by STAR.
  - cwmma 8y ago
    I think the idea of rating candidates vs voting for them could be less intuitive and feels more complex, though there isn't any reason you couldn't just change it to 'rank candidates in order of preference 1-5, candidates may tie' or something. What it's missing compared to IRV is that you can't go, it's just like what people already do (runoffs), just in a single round.
    - quadrangle 8y ago
      It's true that ratings can feel a little harder to grasp, but just any concrete experience with the system, it's easy to get. Check out http://star.vote/ http://star.vote/ and try for yourself. In STAR, 5 points is simply "most points" i.e. most support. It doesn't mean something semantically. You can give up to 5 points, like if there's a race, you can push each candidate forward as much as 5 steps. The only thing it means is that you pushed them forward more than another candidate. That's not that hard to get intuitively. IRV is not what people already do but in a single round, it's much more complex than that. And whoever's 1st choice in IRV loses in the final round, they (and that could be as much as 49% of the voters!) never get any of their other preferences counted at all, unlike either STAR or our current two-round system.
Wowfunhappy 8y ago
> 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. Could anyone take a stab at explaining how this could happen? I looked at the linked site but it's over my head. The visualizations aren't doing anything for me.
- enitihas 8y ago
  Here is a wikipedia link which explains this with an example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monotonicity_criterion#Instant-runoff_voting_and_the_two-round_system_are_not_monotonic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monotonicity_criterion#Instant...
- Wowfunhappy 8y ago
  Semi-answering my own question, I found this useful: https://www.equal.vote/Burlington https://www.equal.vote/Burlington
- dragonwriter 8y ago
  The simple explanation (I hope) is that by ranking a candidate lower, you can promote a second candidate so that they survive elimination instead eliminating a third candidate, which would otherwise have defeated your first candidate in a later round where the second candidate will not. It is a consequence of the loser-elimination step. You can avoid it by eliminating loser elimination, which gives the (unlimited ranks variant of) Bucklin (with ties and truncated ballots allowed, essentially Majority Judgement) voting system, which has its own pros and cons. I kind of lean towards unlimited ranks, ties-allowed Bucklin—count first-place votes, if you have a candidate with a majority of ballots cast, they win, if not add all candidates second place votes and see if you have a majority (of ballots, not counted votes which will now exceed ballots), etc., with a tie-breaking procedure if you get two majorities in the same round (bigger majority, either in current or subsequent rounds, random selection of the tie persists when ballot preferences are exhausted)—is my preferred simple ranked-choice system. Condorcet methods arguably choose a better winner in the case where they disagree, but are less simple.
enitihas 8y ago
The charts on this website are eye opening. Even in 4 candidates we can see very strange behaviour from IRV. I initially didn't understand why IRV would be non monotonic, but reading some examples it can be seen that the results of IRV can drastically change depending on who got the lowest votes. The graphs show several weird behaviors for IRV and I would recommend anyone interested in voting systems to have a look.
- andrewla 8y ago
  Agreed. For me it seemed like IRV would be fairly stable, and I was surprised by how strange it was. My updated intuition now says that IRV means that as long as your top candidate is in first place, your other preferences are disregarded by the system. "My #2 was eliminated too early -- if I had known that my #1 would be eliminated in the end I would have ranked #2 higher".
Sniffnoy 8y ago
Agreed. That said, if you're interested in pushing something that is better than IRV and that people will actually use, I'd suggest approval voting (or possibly range voting or STAR). I don't really expect the Scholze method to ever see wide adoption. Basically, I suggest pushing approval voting over other methods for realistic cases.
- xvedejas 8y ago
  My favorite for single winner elections is range voting with top-2 runoff, actually. But I at least find all of these to be acceptable. Whether or not the trade-offs of range / approval voting vs condorcet methods are better seems to depend on whether you think of utility as an ordinal or a cardinal thing.
alan-crowe 8y ago
Your zesty link detracts from the conversation. The zesty link makes a simplifying assumption, that under first past the post (called Plurality) voters vote for the nearest candidate according to some distance. For example, if 40% believe in A and 60% believe in B, and there one candidate, X, standing on platform A, and two candidates, Y and Z, standing on minor variants of platform B, the votes split 30% for Y, 30% for Z, and X gets elected with 40%. It is easy to see how the 2016 presidential election would have worked out if this assumption was realistic. Hillary 52%, Donald(Republican) 24%, Never-Trump(Republican) 24%. Hillary wins by a landslide, despite playing a sub-optimal electoral college game. The assumption is very far from realistic. I next turn to whether the lack of realism matters. Imagine a three way race, with two old established parties, A and B, and a new third party, C. Under first past the post voters who prefer C > B > A, vote B, to avoid letting A in. Meanwhile voters who prefer C > A > B vote A to avoid letting B in. Under first past the post (FPTP) it is very hard to start a new party. We might frame the issue this way: who decides the fate of the third party candidate? Under FPTP the third party candidate loses and this decision was taken long ago, by men now dead, when they opted for FPTP. Under IRV the fate of the third party depends on today's voters. If they are voting C > B > A and C > A > B then the third party candidate stages an upset victory. If they are voting B > A > C and A > B > C then the third party candidate is humiliated and doesn't bother running again. The argument for IRV over FPTP is that we prefer that the fate of the third party candidate be in the hands of the voters, rather than seeing the third party candidate lose automatically, by the game theory of FPTP. The zesty link simplifies away the problem that IRV is intended to solve. But it doesn't argue that the problem is small; it cannot do that because every-one can see that the spoiler effect under FPTP is a big issue. Instead it refuses to mention the problem, simplifies it away, and hopes that nobody notices. That is derailing, not contributing.
dublin 8y ago
I don't have time to jump down that rabbit-hole, but it seems to me, the best way would be for each voter to have two votes available to use for each candidate - one positive, as normal, the other negative, meaning, basically, "anyone but this idiot"... Voters could use one, both, or neither.
- abecedarius 8y ago
  It's funny we're using this exact voting method to rank the comments in this conversation. Imagine promoting IRV for this: "Everyone just sort all of the comments into your preferred order, and then we'll do these rounds of selection based on that data to pick the top comment. Simple." Sorry, I'm being very unfair -- politics has different tradeoffs -- but the idea amuses me.
- xvedejas 8y ago
  Restricting the number of votes each voter can cast causes the same problems as FPTP, the so called "spoiler effect". Ideally a voting system tries to get information from each voter about their opinion of each candidate. Why prematurely throw away most of that information? However, a system similar enough to your example has been used for years by the Quakers, where each voter gives a score of +1, 0, or -1 to each option/candidate. The difference here is that you can give +1 to multiple candidates, and -1 to multiple candidates. Giving your opinion on one candidate in no way limits your ability to give opinion on other candidates.
mabbo 8y ago
You know, reading about Ranked Pair voting you have just made a convert of me. This is a fantastic method. You'll never be able to sell it to the general public, of course, but if you could do it for just one election I think you'd have everyone on board just from the results of it.
nostrademons 8y ago
I wish that the simulator worked in reverse, i.e. instead of showing for which center-of-opinions a given candidate would win, it would show given a distribution-of-opinion, how should a candidate position themselves to win? This is a much more interesting question to me, first because the candidates' positions are more mutable than the voters' opinions and second because as someone whose political opinions are often non-aligned with major parties, I really wish that there was an incentive for viable 3rd-party candidates to give a voice to my views. The ncase.me simulator linked elsewhere on this thread seems more useful: https://ncase.me/ballot/ https://ncase.me/ballot/
- baq 8y ago
  this post cites OP's http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/ http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/ directly as an inspiration. both are well worth the time.
neuronexmachina 8y ago
Probably-dumb question: Does ranked-pairs use the same type of ballot as IRV, and just tabulate the results differently? Or is it a different ballot?
- dragonwriter 8y ago
  Almost all ranked methods use the same kind of ranked ballots with differences in tabulation, differing occasionally in whether ties or truncated ballots are allowed. Range/Score (and STAR, which is a variation) use numeric score rankings on a preset range, and some methods use a limited set of ranks rather than (allowing voters to use up to) as many as candidates (Approval can be viewed as two-rank system.)
iainmerrick 8y ago
Condorcet is definitely an important property to have. But you also need a solution when there isn’t an outright Condorcet winner, and there is no good solution to that. The tie-breaking mechanism of every Condorcet method is basically impossible to explain in simple terms, ranked pairs included. I often wonder if we should just use Condorcet and if there isn’t a clear winner, declare the result a tie. (That would likely be vulnerable to a kind of DoS attack, though.)
- microcolonel 8y ago
  Not to mention IRV/RCV usually produces a condorcet winner AFAIK.
- dragonwriter 8y ago
  > But you also need a solution when there isn’t an outright Condorcet winner, and there is no good solution to that. The tie-breaking mechanism of every Condorcet method is basically impossible to explain in simple terms, ranked pairs included. The Smith set is as easy to explain as the Condorcet winner, and random selection is trivial, so random selection from the Smith set seems to be a simple Condorcet tiebreaker.
  - iainmerrick 8y ago
    So the tie-breaker is essentially to toss a coin? Hmm, there might be something in that...
    - dragonwriter 8y ago
      Limited to the Smith set, but sure. Same as lots of places do with FPTP and a tie; no Condorcet winner is effectively a “Condorcet tie” between the members of the Smith set, each of whom beats every candidate outside the set, but where victory within the set is undeterminable.
      - iainmerrick 8y ago
        Yes, UK elections use coin tosses on ties. It’s pretty rare to get an exact tie when thousands of people are voting, though, and it’s also hard to argue against the coin toss when literally nothing separates the two candidates. The Smith set tie would occur more often, and in complex scenarios where it really isn’t clear that it actually is a dead heat.
r00fus 8y ago
Pretty much everything out there is stellar In comparison to what we have (FPTP) which sucks rocks. IRV has its flaws but they are minor in comparison to the voting system we have.
- xvedejas 8y ago
  It's really all the mistakes that even proponents of IRV are making about how it behaves that really keeps me up at night. I'm not convinced voters understand the system well enough to vote optimally. This effect and how it results in bizarre strategic voting is enough for me to consider IRV to be worse than FPTP.
oh_sigh 8y ago
Yes, that is a property of IRV, but in a real life situation involving hundreds of millions of voters, does this situation have an even slight chance of happening?
- xvedejas 8y ago
  Yes, other posters have linked to an example of it happening in Burlington, VT. I recall reading it happens around 20% of the time.
  - oh_sigh 8y ago
    That only has a population of 40k so that means there are fewer than 10k voters
    - xvedejas 8y ago
      More voters voting in the same way (proportionally) doesn't affect the results of IRV.
philwelch 8y ago
IMO the biggest problem with IRV is that it bypasses the root problem, which is that we assume we are electing a single person at all. It's entirely possible (even within the confines of the US Constitution!) to virtually never do this. Elect the House of Representatives by statewide party list. Senate is hard because each state has two senators elected non-simultaneously; otherwise statewide STV would work. Since the President is already elected by the Electoral Congress, skip the popular Presidential election and select the Electoral Congress by sortition among all eligible registered voters in a state (similar to jury selection except without being able to arbitrarily send people home) and have them personally interview the candidates before voting their personal consciences.
domador 8y ago
Maybe IRV got an early start as a poster child of alternative voting systems, thus it's popularity. In any case, I would argue along with other commenters that IRV's run-offs would probably be far easier to understand for the general electorate than other, more complex vote-processing systems. I would very much disagree with your (xvedejas's) characterization of ranked pairs as being simpler than IRV, though range voting would indeed seem easier to explain and implement than IRV. A math major (or at least a minor) seems like a requirement for someone to understand the ranked pair system. I was unfamiliar with the ranked pairs system, and will study it more to understand it better. It looks promising as far as technical excellence, though I'm afraid it'd still be too hard to understand for the general populace in most (or all) countries. One thing I suspect about range voting is that it seems to require strategic voting. A voter would still need to give a very favorable score to a majority party that's kind of aligned with their views, as opposed to giving them a lower score than a minority/third party he or she would prefer. One of the strongest appeals to me from IRV is the opportunity it provides for a minority party to unseat majority parties, which is appealing given the political stagnation experienced by many countries. I had also thought that it allowed voters to avoid strategic voting and express their true, individual voting preferences. After reading IRV's description in http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/ http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/ , I realized that I had misunderstood one important detail. I had thought that the least popular candidates were eliminated first until only the top two candidates remained, and the one with most votes among them remained. I dislike that the "real" IRV (not the one that was in my head) first checks for a 50%-plus-one majority before eliminating the bottom candidates. That feels too much like the first-past-the-post system for my liking. I wonder if having successive rounds where the least-favorite first place candidate is eliminated would make most people's favorite candidates "bubble up" to the top, producing a final match between two highly-favored candidates. I wonder if such a system is closer to a Condorcet method than the real IRV...
- DominikPeters 8y ago
  > I dislike that the "real" IRV first checks for a 50%-plus-one majority before eliminating the bottom candidates. Suppose that a candidate has a majority at the beginning. Then this continues to be the case as other candidates are eliminated. Thus, this majority candidate will be elected at the end. So this extra "if-clause" only speeds up computation, it does not change the voting rule.
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abalone 8y ago
I think this post is really just arguing for some kind of ranked choice voting system to better support third party candidates. You’re criticizing a specific implementation of ranked choice, but I think the author was just using IRV to represent the general concept. It’s possible they are not aware of the technical differences. Could you elaborate on why you think plurality is better than IRV?
sneak 8y ago
Every time I see something along these lines, I think of a discussion between people debating which base OS to use to build a platform to power billions of mobile phones: Plan 9, or BeOS? It doesn’t matter. It ain’t gonna happen. Not because IRV or condorcet is or isn’t better, but simply because of the installed base. Getting literally everyone to a) understand the subtle differences and then b) agree to switch and c) agree to switch to the same system is impossible because literally every step of the process is itself impossible. This is not me being pessimistic, this is me being realistic. Humorously, a top down dictatorial approach would be the only way to “improve” (by some estimations) the current democratic implementation. You’d have to not care about democracy to upgrade democracy.
- Mbioguy 8y ago
  Yes, it's impossible to convince a large number of people to switch, which perfectly explains why Maine is still using FPtP despite the large push for RCV a few years ago. /s Proof by contradiction, mate. It's not impossible, just hard. There's plenty of things that once we're said to be impossible, and the data agreed... until they happened. Everything had to have had a first time.
ClayShentrup 8y ago
Well I'm sure you'll be happy that Fargo North Dakota adopted approval voting last night by a massive majority.
JoshuaDavid 8y ago
BTW if you want to play with the model of IRV voting shown on that website (so you can get an idea of when the non-monotonic results hit, etc), I threw together a jsfiddle: http://jsfiddle.net/p4L6do1m/1/ http://jsfiddle.net/p4L6do1m/1/

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.
- chongli 8y ago
  With the amount of polarization these days I think range voting would just be treated as approval voting by the public.
  - bhauer 8y ago
    And that's fine. Approval as a worst-case scenario is tremendously good.
  - marcosdumay 8y ago
    How much of the polarization is there because of the voting system?
- nostrademons 8y ago
  Range voting is challenging because people often have difficulty putting an exact number on how much they want something, and also scales differ between different people. On a 0-10 scale, some people will be putting every candidate as either 0 or 10; others will always put in 3 and 7; and this depends a lot more on the voter than the candidate. Approval voting is simple enough, but is vulnerable to bullet voting: approving an additional candidate can make your first choice lose. This makes it unsuitable if your goal is to make third-party voting more viable, which seems to be the premise of the article.
  - dragonwriter 8y ago
    > Range voting is challenging because people often have difficulty putting an exact number on how much they want something, and also scales differ between different people. On a 0-10 scale, some people will be putting every candidate as either 0 or 10; others will always put in 3 and 7; and this depends a lot more on the voter than the candidate. And, particularly, there is very notable cultural variation, which means (ab initio at least; over time, one expects behavior modification efforts would be deployed around this), support from different cultural groups in a diverse polity will have different electoral value even when turnout is the same. > Approval voting is simple enough, But also has the same problem: concretely what “approval” means is unclear and will be subject to voter-to-voter variation even when the actual preferences are identical.
dnautics 8y ago
> a compromise candidate might win when they otherwise would lose? That doesn't seem to be a bad thing. Only if you assume that compromising is fundamentally good. Do you believe the propensity is to compromise to get the best of the both worlds or the worst of the both worlds? I would point out, for example, that during the bush (II) administration, the only truly bipartisan, compromise initiatives were war in Iraq, No Child Left Behind, and Corporate Bailouts.

danielrhodes 8y ago

They have IRV in San Francisco for the mayoral race. What ends up happening is that a candidate who would not otherwise be in the majority can end up as mayor because he/she was everybody’s second choice. Additionally, candidates who think they might lose team up and start promoting each other. It’s bizarre and very difficult for voters to understand the implications of their actions.

clarkevans 8y ago
"What ends up happening is that a candidate who would not otherwise be in the majority can end up as mayor because he/she was everybody’s second choice." But, isn't that the whole point? ... that a compromise, perhaps centrist, candidate can emerge victorious?
- aidenn0 8y ago
  But the question is, is this a good thing? If 51% of the population want an extremist candidate, but also like a centrist candidate, then IRV incentivizes them to lie on their ballot and promote a candidate they don't like over the candidate they do like.
  - corysama 8y ago
    Compared to the common “first past the post” voting, yes it is a good thing. This is because the common voting system encourages a “two extremist parties” system where everyone is effectively voting “greater horrible evil vs lesser horrible evil”. https://youtu.be/s7tWHJfhiyo https://youtu.be/s7tWHJfhiyo
    - xvedejas 8y ago
      Here's the problem though; IRV doesn't really do the thing you want it to. It can actually make an extreme candidate win even when voter opinion is centered around a moderate candidate. It's very obvious in this visualization (from the site linked a few comments ago): http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/54,47_77,64_13,10_irv.png http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/54,47_77,64_13,10_irv.png

esturk 8y ago

Ah yes, people complaining why we can't have X++ when we can't even have X. We should take what we can get and move the goal post from there. Any progress is good.

abecedarius 8y ago
Look at the results linked at zesty.ca: it’s not clear that IRV is progress. Meanwhile, approval voting is simple, easy to understand and to switch to, and a clearer improvement on the status quo. This is why the frustration.
lifeformed 8y ago
I mean, if we're going to finally be able to switch it, why not switch to the best option instead of starting with the second worst and switching again later?
- chimeracoder 8y ago
  > I mean, if we're going to finally be able to switch it, why not switch to the best option instead of starting with the second worst and switching again later? Because that kind of lesser-of-two-evils incrementalist attitude is inherent to the first-past-the-post system we have now.
- posterboy 8y ago
  Because I am not sure what's best. I'd have a vote to find out whether there is a best, but I'm not sure what's the best voting system.
  - moate 8y ago
    But these things aren't degrees of one another, they're totally different. Saying "we only ever eat meat, let's try eating an orange and see if we like it before we eat any of this lettuce" doesn't follow any actual logic. You might hate lettuce, you might hate oranges, but there's no specific factor that binds them together. Also what sort of things would you factor into what you prefer? How important is each of them?

perennialmind 8y ago

I've gone down that rabbit hole, repeatedly. It's just too fascinating. Likewise, I feel obligated to bring up the Voter Satisfaction Efficiency (or index) metric that seems to be favored by the approval/range voting crowd: basically estimating how utilitarian a given voting system can be. There's a fascinating write-up of their modeling results on github, with code (python). http://electology.github.io/vse-sim/VSE/ http://electology.github.io/vse-sim/VSE/ https://rangevoting.org/vsi.html https://rangevoting.org/vsi.html When it comes up in conversation (or I can work it into conversation), I push people to this - it has some great interactive visualizations https://ncase.me/ballot/ https://ncase.me/ballot/

mjevans 8y ago

I still personally like the Schulze method https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schulze_method https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schulze_method (AKA Schwartz Sequential dropping (SSD), cloneproof Schwartz sequential dropping (CSSD), the beatpath method, beatpath winner, path voting, and path winner) The part that is most appealing to me is how this method eliminates the least performing options first, then proceeds to better pairs. The only modifications necessary to "fix" it are to add in a "None of the Above" / "No Confidence" slot AND to require fully filled out rank lists. If NotA wins then the entire election is re-run with all prior candidates eliminated as possibilities.

WorldMaker 8y ago
I like pointing people to https://modernballots.com/ https://modernballots.com/ for all those "where should we eat lunch?" type questions. People usually seem quite surprised how well the Schulze method generally works. I implemented the Schulze method in a hobby project once, and the math is a rather simple digraph algorithm, which also gave me a lot of confidence that it's a well thought out voting method.

cwmma 8y ago

Runoffs are something people understand, IRV is conceptually similar and makes intuitive sense to people, it's very easy to explain to people, 'if nobody gets a majority, eliminate last place and redistribute their votes, repeat'. Compare that to to some of the other systems which often have complex mathematical descriptions which are hard for people to wrap their heads around. Another thing is how big a deal is 'non-monotonicity' is it actually going to be something that will affect elections all the time, or is it something that's more minor than say turnout which honestly has no solution and on one side you have USA where turnout is low so the game is all about making sure your base turns out, or on the other side you have Australia where voting is mandatory so making sure people who don't care, don't vote at random is a big part of the game.

quadrangle 8y ago
IRV is more complex in every way than STAR voting. STAR is just score with a single automatic runoff. It gets everything you are talking about in terms of intuition, explanation… everything you like about IRV is present in STAR and basically everything wrong with IRV is fixed by STAR.
- cwmma 8y ago
  I think the idea of rating candidates vs voting for them could be less intuitive and feels more complex, though there isn't any reason you couldn't just change it to 'rank candidates in order of preference 1-5, candidates may tie' or something. What it's missing compared to IRV is that you can't go, it's just like what people already do (runoffs), just in a single round.
  - quadrangle 8y ago
    It's true that ratings can feel a little harder to grasp, but just any concrete experience with the system, it's easy to get. Check out http://star.vote/ http://star.vote/ and try for yourself. In STAR, 5 points is simply "most points" i.e. most support. It doesn't mean something semantically. You can give up to 5 points, like if there's a race, you can push each candidate forward as much as 5 steps. The only thing it means is that you pushed them forward more than another candidate. That's not that hard to get intuitively. IRV is not what people already do but in a single round, it's much more complex than that. And whoever's 1st choice in IRV loses in the final round, they (and that could be as much as 49% of the voters!) never get any of their other preferences counted at all, unlike either STAR or our current two-round system.

Wowfunhappy 8y ago

> 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. Could anyone take a stab at explaining how this could happen? I looked at the linked site but it's over my head. The visualizations aren't doing anything for me.

enitihas 8y ago
Here is a wikipedia link which explains this with an example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monotonicity_criterion#Instant-runoff_voting_and_the_two-round_system_are_not_monotonic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monotonicity_criterion#Instant...
Wowfunhappy 8y ago
Semi-answering my own question, I found this useful: https://www.equal.vote/Burlington https://www.equal.vote/Burlington
dragonwriter 8y ago
The simple explanation (I hope) is that by ranking a candidate lower, you can promote a second candidate so that they survive elimination instead eliminating a third candidate, which would otherwise have defeated your first candidate in a later round where the second candidate will not. It is a consequence of the loser-elimination step. You can avoid it by eliminating loser elimination, which gives the (unlimited ranks variant of) Bucklin (with ties and truncated ballots allowed, essentially Majority Judgement) voting system, which has its own pros and cons. I kind of lean towards unlimited ranks, ties-allowed Bucklin—count first-place votes, if you have a candidate with a majority of ballots cast, they win, if not add all candidates second place votes and see if you have a majority (of ballots, not counted votes which will now exceed ballots), etc., with a tie-breaking procedure if you get two majorities in the same round (bigger majority, either in current or subsequent rounds, random selection of the tie persists when ballot preferences are exhausted)—is my preferred simple ranked-choice system. Condorcet methods arguably choose a better winner in the case where they disagree, but are less simple.

enitihas 8y ago

The charts on this website are eye opening. Even in 4 candidates we can see very strange behaviour from IRV. I initially didn't understand why IRV would be non monotonic, but reading some examples it can be seen that the results of IRV can drastically change depending on who got the lowest votes. The graphs show several weird behaviors for IRV and I would recommend anyone interested in voting systems to have a look.

andrewla 8y ago
Agreed. For me it seemed like IRV would be fairly stable, and I was surprised by how strange it was. My updated intuition now says that IRV means that as long as your top candidate is in first place, your other preferences are disregarded by the system. "My #2 was eliminated too early -- if I had known that my #1 would be eliminated in the end I would have ranked #2 higher".

Sniffnoy 8y ago

Agreed. That said, if you're interested in pushing something that is better than IRV and that people will actually use, I'd suggest approval voting (or possibly range voting or STAR). I don't really expect the Scholze method to ever see wide adoption. Basically, I suggest pushing approval voting over other methods for realistic cases.

xvedejas 8y ago
My favorite for single winner elections is range voting with top-2 runoff, actually. But I at least find all of these to be acceptable. Whether or not the trade-offs of range / approval voting vs condorcet methods are better seems to depend on whether you think of utility as an ordinal or a cardinal thing.

alan-crowe 8y ago

Your zesty link detracts from the conversation. The zesty link makes a simplifying assumption, that under first past the post (called Plurality) voters vote for the nearest candidate according to some distance. For example, if 40% believe in A and 60% believe in B, and there one candidate, X, standing on platform A, and two candidates, Y and Z, standing on minor variants of platform B, the votes split 30% for Y, 30% for Z, and X gets elected with 40%. It is easy to see how the 2016 presidential election would have worked out if this assumption was realistic. Hillary 52%, Donald(Republican) 24%, Never-Trump(Republican) 24%. Hillary wins by a landslide, despite playing a sub-optimal electoral college game. The assumption is very far from realistic. I next turn to whether the lack of realism matters. Imagine a three way race, with two old established parties, A and B, and a new third party, C. Under first past the post voters who prefer C > B > A, vote B, to avoid letting A in. Meanwhile voters who prefer C > A > B vote A to avoid letting B in. Under first past the post (FPTP) it is very hard to start a new party. We might frame the issue this way: who decides the fate of the third party candidate? Under FPTP the third party candidate loses and this decision was taken long ago, by men now dead, when they opted for FPTP. Under IRV the fate of the third party depends on today's voters. If they are voting C > B > A and C > A > B then the third party candidate stages an upset victory. If they are voting B > A > C and A > B > C then the third party candidate is humiliated and doesn't bother running again. The argument for IRV over FPTP is that we prefer that the fate of the third party candidate be in the hands of the voters, rather than seeing the third party candidate lose automatically, by the game theory of FPTP. The zesty link simplifies away the problem that IRV is intended to solve. But it doesn't argue that the problem is small; it cannot do that because every-one can see that the spoiler effect under FPTP is a big issue. Instead it refuses to mention the problem, simplifies it away, and hopes that nobody notices. That is derailing, not contributing.

dublin 8y ago

I don't have time to jump down that rabbit-hole, but it seems to me, the best way would be for each voter to have two votes available to use for each candidate - one positive, as normal, the other negative, meaning, basically, "anyone but this idiot"... Voters could use one, both, or neither.

abecedarius 8y ago
It's funny we're using this exact voting method to rank the comments in this conversation. Imagine promoting IRV for this: "Everyone just sort all of the comments into your preferred order, and then we'll do these rounds of selection based on that data to pick the top comment. Simple." Sorry, I'm being very unfair -- politics has different tradeoffs -- but the idea amuses me.
xvedejas 8y ago
Restricting the number of votes each voter can cast causes the same problems as FPTP, the so called "spoiler effect". Ideally a voting system tries to get information from each voter about their opinion of each candidate. Why prematurely throw away most of that information? However, a system similar enough to your example has been used for years by the Quakers, where each voter gives a score of +1, 0, or -1 to each option/candidate. The difference here is that you can give +1 to multiple candidates, and -1 to multiple candidates. Giving your opinion on one candidate in no way limits your ability to give opinion on other candidates.

mabbo 8y ago

You know, reading about Ranked Pair voting you have just made a convert of me. This is a fantastic method. You'll never be able to sell it to the general public, of course, but if you could do it for just one election I think you'd have everyone on board just from the results of it.

nostrademons 8y ago

I wish that the simulator worked in reverse, i.e. instead of showing for which center-of-opinions a given candidate would win, it would show given a distribution-of-opinion, how should a candidate position themselves to win? This is a much more interesting question to me, first because the candidates' positions are more mutable than the voters' opinions and second because as someone whose political opinions are often non-aligned with major parties, I really wish that there was an incentive for viable 3rd-party candidates to give a voice to my views. The ncase.me simulator linked elsewhere on this thread seems more useful: https://ncase.me/ballot/ https://ncase.me/ballot/

baq 8y ago
this post cites OP's http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/ http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/ directly as an inspiration. both are well worth the time.

neuronexmachina 8y ago

Probably-dumb question: Does ranked-pairs use the same type of ballot as IRV, and just tabulate the results differently? Or is it a different ballot?

dragonwriter 8y ago
Almost all ranked methods use the same kind of ranked ballots with differences in tabulation, differing occasionally in whether ties or truncated ballots are allowed. Range/Score (and STAR, which is a variation) use numeric score rankings on a preset range, and some methods use a limited set of ranks rather than (allowing voters to use up to) as many as candidates (Approval can be viewed as two-rank system.)

iainmerrick 8y ago

Condorcet is definitely an important property to have. But you also need a solution when there isn’t an outright Condorcet winner, and there is no good solution to that. The tie-breaking mechanism of every Condorcet method is basically impossible to explain in simple terms, ranked pairs included. I often wonder if we should just use Condorcet and if there isn’t a clear winner, declare the result a tie. (That would likely be vulnerable to a kind of DoS attack, though.)

microcolonel 8y ago
Not to mention IRV/RCV usually produces a condorcet winner AFAIK.
dragonwriter 8y ago
> But you also need a solution when there isn’t an outright Condorcet winner, and there is no good solution to that. The tie-breaking mechanism of every Condorcet method is basically impossible to explain in simple terms, ranked pairs included. The Smith set is as easy to explain as the Condorcet winner, and random selection is trivial, so random selection from the Smith set seems to be a simple Condorcet tiebreaker.
- iainmerrick 8y ago
  So the tie-breaker is essentially to toss a coin? Hmm, there might be something in that...
  - dragonwriter 8y ago
    Limited to the Smith set, but sure. Same as lots of places do with FPTP and a tie; no Condorcet winner is effectively a “Condorcet tie” between the members of the Smith set, each of whom beats every candidate outside the set, but where victory within the set is undeterminable.
    - iainmerrick 8y ago
      Yes, UK elections use coin tosses on ties. It’s pretty rare to get an exact tie when thousands of people are voting, though, and it’s also hard to argue against the coin toss when literally nothing separates the two candidates. The Smith set tie would occur more often, and in complex scenarios where it really isn’t clear that it actually is a dead heat.

r00fus 8y ago

Pretty much everything out there is stellar In comparison to what we have (FPTP) which sucks rocks. IRV has its flaws but they are minor in comparison to the voting system we have.

xvedejas 8y ago
It's really all the mistakes that even proponents of IRV are making about how it behaves that really keeps me up at night. I'm not convinced voters understand the system well enough to vote optimally. This effect and how it results in bizarre strategic voting is enough for me to consider IRV to be worse than FPTP.

oh_sigh 8y ago

Yes, that is a property of IRV, but in a real life situation involving hundreds of millions of voters, does this situation have an even slight chance of happening?

xvedejas 8y ago
Yes, other posters have linked to an example of it happening in Burlington, VT. I recall reading it happens around 20% of the time.
- oh_sigh 8y ago
  That only has a population of 40k so that means there are fewer than 10k voters
  - xvedejas 8y ago
    More voters voting in the same way (proportionally) doesn't affect the results of IRV.

philwelch 8y ago

IMO the biggest problem with IRV is that it bypasses the root problem, which is that we assume we are electing a single person at all. It's entirely possible (even within the confines of the US Constitution!) to virtually never do this. Elect the House of Representatives by statewide party list. Senate is hard because each state has two senators elected non-simultaneously; otherwise statewide STV would work. Since the President is already elected by the Electoral Congress, skip the popular Presidential election and select the Electoral Congress by sortition among all eligible registered voters in a state (similar to jury selection except without being able to arbitrarily send people home) and have them personally interview the candidates before voting their personal consciences.

domador 8y ago

Maybe IRV got an early start as a poster child of alternative voting systems, thus it's popularity. In any case, I would argue along with other commenters that IRV's run-offs would probably be far easier to understand for the general electorate than other, more complex vote-processing systems. I would very much disagree with your (xvedejas's) characterization of ranked pairs as being simpler than IRV, though range voting would indeed seem easier to explain and implement than IRV. A math major (or at least a minor) seems like a requirement for someone to understand the ranked pair system. I was unfamiliar with the ranked pairs system, and will study it more to understand it better. It looks promising as far as technical excellence, though I'm afraid it'd still be too hard to understand for the general populace in most (or all) countries. One thing I suspect about range voting is that it seems to require strategic voting. A voter would still need to give a very favorable score to a majority party that's kind of aligned with their views, as opposed to giving them a lower score than a minority/third party he or she would prefer. One of the strongest appeals to me from IRV is the opportunity it provides for a minority party to unseat majority parties, which is appealing given the political stagnation experienced by many countries. I had also thought that it allowed voters to avoid strategic voting and express their true, individual voting preferences. After reading IRV's description in http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/ http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/ , I realized that I had misunderstood one important detail. I had thought that the least popular candidates were eliminated first until only the top two candidates remained, and the one with most votes among them remained. I dislike that the "real" IRV (not the one that was in my head) first checks for a 50%-plus-one majority before eliminating the bottom candidates. That feels too much like the first-past-the-post system for my liking. I wonder if having successive rounds where the least-favorite first place candidate is eliminated would make most people's favorite candidates "bubble up" to the top, producing a final match between two highly-favored candidates. I wonder if such a system is closer to a Condorcet method than the real IRV...

DominikPeters 8y ago
> I dislike that the "real" IRV first checks for a 50%-plus-one majority before eliminating the bottom candidates. Suppose that a candidate has a majority at the beginning. Then this continues to be the case as other candidates are eliminated. Thus, this majority candidate will be elected at the end. So this extra "if-clause" only speeds up computation, it does not change the voting rule.

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abalone 8y ago

I think this post is really just arguing for some kind of ranked choice voting system to better support third party candidates. You’re criticizing a specific implementation of ranked choice, but I think the author was just using IRV to represent the general concept. It’s possible they are not aware of the technical differences. Could you elaborate on why you think plurality is better than IRV?

sneak 8y ago

Every time I see something along these lines, I think of a discussion between people debating which base OS to use to build a platform to power billions of mobile phones: Plan 9, or BeOS? It doesn’t matter. It ain’t gonna happen. Not because IRV or condorcet is or isn’t better, but simply because of the installed base. Getting literally everyone to a) understand the subtle differences and then b) agree to switch and c) agree to switch to the same system is impossible because literally every step of the process is itself impossible. This is not me being pessimistic, this is me being realistic. Humorously, a top down dictatorial approach would be the only way to “improve” (by some estimations) the current democratic implementation. You’d have to not care about democracy to upgrade democracy.

Mbioguy 8y ago
Yes, it's impossible to convince a large number of people to switch, which perfectly explains why Maine is still using FPtP despite the large push for RCV a few years ago. /s Proof by contradiction, mate. It's not impossible, just hard. There's plenty of things that once we're said to be impossible, and the data agreed... until they happened. Everything had to have had a first time.

ClayShentrup 8y ago

Well I'm sure you'll be happy that Fargo North Dakota adopted approval voting last night by a massive majority.

JoshuaDavid 8y ago

BTW if you want to play with the model of IRV voting shown on that website (so you can get an idea of when the non-monotonic results hit, etc), I threw together a jsfiddle: http://jsfiddle.net/p4L6do1m/1/ http://jsfiddle.net/p4L6do1m/1/