5 ms·

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 the

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.
    - ClayShentrup 8y ago
      No. I did my first exit polling in a small town in Texas and no one had any problems scoring the candidates.
      - ClayShentrup 8y ago
        Oops, link. http://scorevoting.net/Beaumont.html http://scorevoting.net/Beaumont.html
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.

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.
  - ClayShentrup 8y ago
    No. I did my first exit polling in a small town in Texas and no one had any problems scoring the candidates.
    - ClayShentrup 8y ago
      Oops, link. http://scorevoting.net/Beaumont.html http://scorevoting.net/Beaumont.html

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.