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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 reall

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.
- andrewla 8y ago
  Thanks for pointing to the Burlington election, that's a remarkable data set showing the theoretical worst case of IRV actually occurring in real life! The problem, though, is one of correctness, not complexity -- I would maintain that almost anyone could look at that election summary and understand why the conclusion that was reached was reached. And if they had had a traditional non-instant runoff election, the result would likely have been the same. It's hard to even explain why the outcome was "wrong" because the tabulation of the results is so intuitive. > 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. The question for the intuition is "how many stars to I give this candidate". What does it mean to give them one more star? One person's four-star vote carries exactly as much weight as four people's one-star vote, which seems incredibly odd. An Amazon product with a hundred one star reviews is intuitively worse than one with 10 five star reviews.
  - quadrangle 8y ago
    > if they had had a traditional non-instant runoff election, the result would likely have been the same Certainly not! In Burlington, people know the Republican can't win. So, like everyone in the current system, people would (and have both before and since IRV) vote strategically. So, the less-hardcore Republicans would vote Democrat in order to stop the Progressive. In fact, if IRV had not been repealed, a good portion of the Republicans would betray their favorite and vote Dem as 1st choice (dishonestly) in the future in order to stop the Progressive from ever winning again. Furthermore, when vote splitting happens in a current system, everyone readily gets why it was "wrong" and they adapt their strategies accordingly. > What does it mean to give them one more star? It means they are one more point ahead of the others. > One person's four-star vote carries exactly as much weight as four people's one-star vote, which seems incredibly odd The weight is relative, that's all that matters. As long as people understand the system, they can realize that they are throwing away part of their vote if they only put a 1-star and nothing else. Four people who put 1-star for candidate A might have put 5 stars for candidate B. They are influencing the race just as much as anyone else. Here's what it means to be equal: Any voter can score the opposite of another voter and they will cancel out. Our votes can have equal weight if that's possible. That's not always possible in our current system or with IRV. > An Amazon product with a hundred one star reviews is intuitively worse than one with 10 five star reviews. If there were 110 voters, then every item is relative to that vote. There's 100 1-star votes for candidate A and 10 5-star votes for candidate B? That means candidate B got zeros (blanks are no points) from 100 candidates. A candidate with 100 zero-star votes and only 10 5-star votes is a worse option.

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.

andrewla 8y ago
Thanks for pointing to the Burlington election, that's a remarkable data set showing the theoretical worst case of IRV actually occurring in real life! The problem, though, is one of correctness, not complexity -- I would maintain that almost anyone could look at that election summary and understand why the conclusion that was reached was reached. And if they had had a traditional non-instant runoff election, the result would likely have been the same. It's hard to even explain why the outcome was "wrong" because the tabulation of the results is so intuitive. > 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. The question for the intuition is "how many stars to I give this candidate". What does it mean to give them one more star? One person's four-star vote carries exactly as much weight as four people's one-star vote, which seems incredibly odd. An Amazon product with a hundred one star reviews is intuitively worse than one with 10 five star reviews.
- quadrangle 8y ago
  > if they had had a traditional non-instant runoff election, the result would likely have been the same Certainly not! In Burlington, people know the Republican can't win. So, like everyone in the current system, people would (and have both before and since IRV) vote strategically. So, the less-hardcore Republicans would vote Democrat in order to stop the Progressive. In fact, if IRV had not been repealed, a good portion of the Republicans would betray their favorite and vote Dem as 1st choice (dishonestly) in the future in order to stop the Progressive from ever winning again. Furthermore, when vote splitting happens in a current system, everyone readily gets why it was "wrong" and they adapt their strategies accordingly. > What does it mean to give them one more star? It means they are one more point ahead of the others. > One person's four-star vote carries exactly as much weight as four people's one-star vote, which seems incredibly odd The weight is relative, that's all that matters. As long as people understand the system, they can realize that they are throwing away part of their vote if they only put a 1-star and nothing else. Four people who put 1-star for candidate A might have put 5 stars for candidate B. They are influencing the race just as much as anyone else. Here's what it means to be equal: Any voter can score the opposite of another voter and they will cancel out. Our votes can have equal weight if that's possible. That's not always possible in our current system or with IRV. > An Amazon product with a hundred one star reviews is intuitively worse than one with 10 five star reviews. If there were 110 voters, then every item is relative to that vote. There's 100 1-star votes for candidate A and 10 5-star votes for candidate B? That means candidate B got zeros (blanks are no points) from 100 candidates. A candidate with 100 zero-star votes and only 10 5-star votes is a worse option.