7 ms·

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

by 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.
    - dragonwriter 8y ago
      > In STAR, 5 points is simply "most points" i.e. most support. It doesn't mean something semantically. Yes, so you import the well-known cultural variation in numeric rating systems without concrete semantics for rating levels into your voting system. That's a great idea. More data on ballots is good only as long as it has a consistent meaning and is used in a way that is consistent with that meaning. STAR (and other score voting systems) gather noise and pretend it is signal.
      - quadrangle 8y ago
        STAR gathers scores that voters choose when looking at the pool of candidates. It uses those in tabulating the outcome. They have an effect. There's no sense in which this is noise. I don't even understand the claim.
    - iainmerrick 8y ago
      I looked at the website. STAR Voting allows voters to rate all the candidates similar to how we rate books on Amazon Ah yes, Amazon, that site with famously reliable and unbiased user reviews. This is a terrible idea. It’s a bad voting system made worse by appeal to similarity with popular apps and websites, which themselves use a really bad voting system.
      - quadrangle 8y ago
        It's not a terrible idea, it's a bad metaphor from imperfect people trying to explain a perfectly fine idea. STAR voting is NOT like rating books on Amazon, it's just superficially similar. At Amazon, if you don't like any of a bunch of books, none of them get 5 stars. With STAR voting, you award points not to mean anything, but only to decide how much ahead in the race you want to push each candidate versus the others. Whoever you want to win most, you push them ahead with all 5 available points. That's it. Your reaction and misunderstanding does further my annoyance at the people explaining STAR using the Amazon analogy, and I think that bad comparison is harming support for what is truly an excellent voting system.
- andrewla 8y ago
  IRV has problems, but complexity, intuition, and explanation are not three of them. Intuiting what "giving one star more or less to a candidate" means is really difficult to understand as a voter. "If more voters had given Kodos four stars instead of three, he could have won" is a headache inducing explanation. Approval voting is the only alternative to IRV or plurality voting that seems to match the level of intuitiveness of both the voting process and the tabulation process.
  - xvedejas 8y ago
    The way to turn ballots into results is just a simple division, numerator (sum of scores) over denominator (number of voters). Try to explain to me the function from ballots to results in IRV with 5 candidates in as simple of terms? It's absolutely much harder to analyze IRV and predict what is going to happen. In every range voting scenario, I can show you a bunch of ballots and you could quickly figure out the smallest change required to make a different person win. With IRV, I imagine you'd first start by drawing a big tree of options, and then simulating every way each could play out...
  - quadrangle 8y ago
    I seriously doubt that anyone would get a headache over "if people had given that losing candidate higher scores, they would have won". I don't even see how you can honestly claim that to be anything but completely intuitive to everyone. If IRV complexity and explanations were not a problem, we wouldn't see today's reality where IRV proponents themselves constantly make incorrect claims about it. Not always (and not in the linked article here), but often people get the intuition that their 2nd choice will get counted when their 1st choice is eliminated, and then try to get them to understand why their 2nd choice was not counted (because their 2nd choice had already been eliminated) while someone else's 2nd choice was counted… What happened in Burlington before they repealled IRV shows not only people getting intuitions about IRV wrong but people often don't even get what happened in Burlington because it seems so counter-intuitive. https://www.equal.vote/Burlington https://www.equal.vote/Burlington And yet, that scenario is common enough. Burlington is just the case where all the ballot stats were released so we can study it.
- dragonwriter 8y ago
  All score methods are bad (especially in a large multicultural polity) because mapping from subjective opinion and preference to numeric scores is inconsistent and, particularly, highly culturally variable. If there were an objective way to measure actual utilities, score-based methods would be great (and economics and policy assessment would be much simpler, and...)
  - quadrangle 8y ago
    There is no such mapping, especially with STAR. So, the critique of scoring based on mapping being variable is fundamentally a misunderstanding. In STAR voting, you have up to 5 points to give to each candidate. You effectively get to push each candidate ahead in the race relative to the others by as many as 5 steps forward. There is NOTHING subjective about the meaning of points. They are just points. More points wins. They have no cultural signficance, no opinion, nothing subjective.
    - dragonwriter 8y ago
      > There is no such mapping, especially with STAR. Yes, there's a mapping to a (typically 0-5) numerical rating like those popular in online review systems, which is a motivation for the forced acronym, and exactly the similarity that is viewed as making it particularly intuitive and accessible. Cultural differences in how such rating systems are used for similar preferences have been studied considerably. It's true that you can also view STAR as a limited bucket (and so forced-tie for any but the smallest candidate pool) ranked-ballot method, in which you force voters to arbitrarily select which intercandidate ranking preferences to suppress, and then do a completely wacky (from a ranked preference perspective) method of tallying the ballots.
      - quadrangle 8y ago
        It's unfortunate that the branding emphasizes the bad-to-good popular ratings metaphor. I agree that is a problem. It is indeed a form of ranking that allows ties and has a limited resolution. But the limited resolution does help with simplicity. From a UI perspective, presenting a ranked ballot that allows ties is unfortunately complicated. That's what STAR actually could/should be though. And the tallying method is fine, not wacky. In a sense, it's like Borda Count to get to two finalists and then IRV for the finalists. That avoids all the worst aspects of IRV (which are all symptoms of the way its multi-round elimination ignores the preferences of many voters while counting the preferences of others).
- ClayShentrup 8y ago
  You underestimate IRV's complexity and lack of transparency. I gave a talk on this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2q_eMUGCU5U&t=487 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2q_eMUGCU5U&t=487
  - quadrangle 8y ago
    Did you mean to reply to me? The comment you replied to simply says that IRV is much more complex than STAR. How is that underestimating anything?
Zarel 8y ago
The problems with IRV are pretty huge: https://rangevoting.org/IrvExec.html https://rangevoting.org/IrvExec.html There are many examples of voters in real-world IRV elections _do_ rank their favorite candidates last, to help them win (the same problem plurality voting has, but worse, because there are multiple plurality runoff votes). Mathematical models also agree – situations in which IRV produces bad results are extremely common. Something like 70% of possible situations where IRV and plurality voting produce different results, the IRV result is worse than the plurality result. Approval voting and range voting are really the only voting systems I know of that are strictly better than plurality. They have their flaws, but per Arrow's Impossibility Theorem, there aren't any voting systems without flaws.
- roenxi 8y ago
  > IRV result is worse than the plurality result Huh? There isn't a clear-cut way of determining the best voting system, so how were they compare the two? That matters quite a lot. There are situations where IRV get so complicated it is unpredictable, but living in Australia that does sometimes feel like a feature - if the polity expresses no strong consensus preference, random selection amongst candidates is not a bad idea. > Approval voting and range voting are ... strictly better Yeah, totally [0]. Approval voting looks like the one to use just in terms of doing what a voting system does. Any system that lets neutrals and moderates in occasionally is better than plurality. And plurality is streaks ahead of having no choice at all. [0] http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/ http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/
- geekpowa 8y ago
  The resource is link is a very weak critique of IRV. consider their criticism of Aus 2007 general election. https://rangevoting.org/Aus07.html https://rangevoting.org/Aus07.html The key point which is laboured a couple of times is that some seat results are different than plurality outcomes. But that is a feature of IRV, not a bug. Had the election been run under plurality rules voters would of voted differently and this fact seems to of escaped the author of this website. Voters who preferenced greens first, recognising a minor parties zero chance of winning under plurality would of instead cast votes according to two party preferred lineup, who mostly would ideologically align with labour. But under IRV they can vote for anyone they feel more closely represents them but still have meaningful input into a 2PP outcome. Show me a critique of an IRV outcome where 2PP outcome violates Monotonicity and you'll have a real critique of IRV.
SilasX 8y ago
>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. Similar issue for end-to-end auditable homomorphically encrypted voting systems. Yes, anyone can check the math in theory ... but not the typical voter.
- aaron_m04 8y ago
  But does the typical voter have anybody they trust who _can_ check the math? It's analogous to people trusting FOSS software despite lacking the skills or time to check the code -- they trust it because they trust people who are able to check the code.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
lists 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. > 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. It's fascinating how a similar constraint arises in industry software engineer; more than fascinating
tunesmith 8y ago
I've never understood the criticism that Condorcet is hard to understand. If one candidate would beat all others head-to-head, that candidate wins. That's it. The weirdness comes in the strange tiebreaker methods if there's a "loop", but when you have a lot of voters, loops are rare. (Condorcet proponents would probably get more mileage if they had a better conceptual split between methods that identify the Smith Set, and methods that seek to award single winners of multi-member Smith Sets - those "tiebreakers" are where all the problems happen, and none of those flaws are relevant in elections where there is a Condorcet Winner.)

by cwmma 8y ago

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.
  - dragonwriter 8y ago
    > In STAR, 5 points is simply "most points" i.e. most support. It doesn't mean something semantically. Yes, so you import the well-known cultural variation in numeric rating systems without concrete semantics for rating levels into your voting system. That's a great idea. More data on ballots is good only as long as it has a consistent meaning and is used in a way that is consistent with that meaning. STAR (and other score voting systems) gather noise and pretend it is signal.
    - quadrangle 8y ago
      STAR gathers scores that voters choose when looking at the pool of candidates. It uses those in tabulating the outcome. They have an effect. There's no sense in which this is noise. I don't even understand the claim.
  - iainmerrick 8y ago
    I looked at the website. STAR Voting allows voters to rate all the candidates similar to how we rate books on Amazon Ah yes, Amazon, that site with famously reliable and unbiased user reviews. This is a terrible idea. It’s a bad voting system made worse by appeal to similarity with popular apps and websites, which themselves use a really bad voting system.
    - quadrangle 8y ago
      It's not a terrible idea, it's a bad metaphor from imperfect people trying to explain a perfectly fine idea. STAR voting is NOT like rating books on Amazon, it's just superficially similar. At Amazon, if you don't like any of a bunch of books, none of them get 5 stars. With STAR voting, you award points not to mean anything, but only to decide how much ahead in the race you want to push each candidate versus the others. Whoever you want to win most, you push them ahead with all 5 available points. That's it. Your reaction and misunderstanding does further my annoyance at the people explaining STAR using the Amazon analogy, and I think that bad comparison is harming support for what is truly an excellent voting system.
andrewla 8y ago
IRV has problems, but complexity, intuition, and explanation are not three of them. Intuiting what "giving one star more or less to a candidate" means is really difficult to understand as a voter. "If more voters had given Kodos four stars instead of three, he could have won" is a headache inducing explanation. Approval voting is the only alternative to IRV or plurality voting that seems to match the level of intuitiveness of both the voting process and the tabulation process.
- xvedejas 8y ago
  The way to turn ballots into results is just a simple division, numerator (sum of scores) over denominator (number of voters). Try to explain to me the function from ballots to results in IRV with 5 candidates in as simple of terms? It's absolutely much harder to analyze IRV and predict what is going to happen. In every range voting scenario, I can show you a bunch of ballots and you could quickly figure out the smallest change required to make a different person win. With IRV, I imagine you'd first start by drawing a big tree of options, and then simulating every way each could play out...
- quadrangle 8y ago
  I seriously doubt that anyone would get a headache over "if people had given that losing candidate higher scores, they would have won". I don't even see how you can honestly claim that to be anything but completely intuitive to everyone. If IRV complexity and explanations were not a problem, we wouldn't see today's reality where IRV proponents themselves constantly make incorrect claims about it. Not always (and not in the linked article here), but often people get the intuition that their 2nd choice will get counted when their 1st choice is eliminated, and then try to get them to understand why their 2nd choice was not counted (because their 2nd choice had already been eliminated) while someone else's 2nd choice was counted… What happened in Burlington before they repealled IRV shows not only people getting intuitions about IRV wrong but people often don't even get what happened in Burlington because it seems so counter-intuitive. https://www.equal.vote/Burlington https://www.equal.vote/Burlington And yet, that scenario is common enough. Burlington is just the case where all the ballot stats were released so we can study it.
dragonwriter 8y ago
All score methods are bad (especially in a large multicultural polity) because mapping from subjective opinion and preference to numeric scores is inconsistent and, particularly, highly culturally variable. If there were an objective way to measure actual utilities, score-based methods would be great (and economics and policy assessment would be much simpler, and...)
- quadrangle 8y ago
  There is no such mapping, especially with STAR. So, the critique of scoring based on mapping being variable is fundamentally a misunderstanding. In STAR voting, you have up to 5 points to give to each candidate. You effectively get to push each candidate ahead in the race relative to the others by as many as 5 steps forward. There is NOTHING subjective about the meaning of points. They are just points. More points wins. They have no cultural signficance, no opinion, nothing subjective.
  - dragonwriter 8y ago
    > There is no such mapping, especially with STAR. Yes, there's a mapping to a (typically 0-5) numerical rating like those popular in online review systems, which is a motivation for the forced acronym, and exactly the similarity that is viewed as making it particularly intuitive and accessible. Cultural differences in how such rating systems are used for similar preferences have been studied considerably. It's true that you can also view STAR as a limited bucket (and so forced-tie for any but the smallest candidate pool) ranked-ballot method, in which you force voters to arbitrarily select which intercandidate ranking preferences to suppress, and then do a completely wacky (from a ranked preference perspective) method of tallying the ballots.
    - quadrangle 8y ago
      It's unfortunate that the branding emphasizes the bad-to-good popular ratings metaphor. I agree that is a problem. It is indeed a form of ranking that allows ties and has a limited resolution. But the limited resolution does help with simplicity. From a UI perspective, presenting a ranked ballot that allows ties is unfortunately complicated. That's what STAR actually could/should be though. And the tallying method is fine, not wacky. In a sense, it's like Borda Count to get to two finalists and then IRV for the finalists. That avoids all the worst aspects of IRV (which are all symptoms of the way its multi-round elimination ignores the preferences of many voters while counting the preferences of others).
ClayShentrup 8y ago
You underestimate IRV's complexity and lack of transparency. I gave a talk on this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2q_eMUGCU5U&t=487 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2q_eMUGCU5U&t=487
- quadrangle 8y ago
  Did you mean to reply to me? The comment you replied to simply says that IRV is much more complex than STAR. How is that underestimating anything?

Zarel 8y ago

The problems with IRV are pretty huge: https://rangevoting.org/IrvExec.html https://rangevoting.org/IrvExec.html There are many examples of voters in real-world IRV elections _do_ rank their favorite candidates last, to help them win (the same problem plurality voting has, but worse, because there are multiple plurality runoff votes). Mathematical models also agree – situations in which IRV produces bad results are extremely common. Something like 70% of possible situations where IRV and plurality voting produce different results, the IRV result is worse than the plurality result. Approval voting and range voting are really the only voting systems I know of that are strictly better than plurality. They have their flaws, but per Arrow's Impossibility Theorem, there aren't any voting systems without flaws.

roenxi 8y ago
> IRV result is worse than the plurality result Huh? There isn't a clear-cut way of determining the best voting system, so how were they compare the two? That matters quite a lot. There are situations where IRV get so complicated it is unpredictable, but living in Australia that does sometimes feel like a feature - if the polity expresses no strong consensus preference, random selection amongst candidates is not a bad idea. > Approval voting and range voting are ... strictly better Yeah, totally [0]. Approval voting looks like the one to use just in terms of doing what a voting system does. Any system that lets neutrals and moderates in occasionally is better than plurality. And plurality is streaks ahead of having no choice at all. [0] http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/ http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/
geekpowa 8y ago
The resource is link is a very weak critique of IRV. consider their criticism of Aus 2007 general election. https://rangevoting.org/Aus07.html https://rangevoting.org/Aus07.html The key point which is laboured a couple of times is that some seat results are different than plurality outcomes. But that is a feature of IRV, not a bug. Had the election been run under plurality rules voters would of voted differently and this fact seems to of escaped the author of this website. Voters who preferenced greens first, recognising a minor parties zero chance of winning under plurality would of instead cast votes according to two party preferred lineup, who mostly would ideologically align with labour. But under IRV they can vote for anyone they feel more closely represents them but still have meaningful input into a 2PP outcome. Show me a critique of an IRV outcome where 2PP outcome violates Monotonicity and you'll have a real critique of IRV.

SilasX 8y ago

>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. Similar issue for end-to-end auditable homomorphically encrypted voting systems. Yes, anyone can check the math in theory ... but not the typical voter.

aaron_m04 8y ago
But does the typical voter have anybody they trust who _can_ check the math? It's analogous to people trusting FOSS software despite lacking the skills or time to check the code -- they trust it because they trust people who are able to check the code.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

lists 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. > 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. It's fascinating how a similar constraint arises in industry software engineer; more than fascinating

tunesmith 8y ago

I've never understood the criticism that Condorcet is hard to understand. If one candidate would beat all others head-to-head, that candidate wins. That's it. The weirdness comes in the strange tiebreaker methods if there's a "loop", but when you have a lot of voters, loops are rare. (Condorcet proponents would probably get more mileage if they had a better conceptual split between methods that identify the Smith Set, and methods that seek to award single winners of multi-member Smith Sets - those "tiebreakers" are where all the problems happen, and none of those flaws are relevant in elections where there is a Condorcet Winner.)