8 ms·

I don't understand why so many people working for reform support ranked choice voting instead of approval voting, which on top of performing more consistently [

• jacques_chester 8y ago
  Approval voting collapses to FPTP once the parties tell their voters "just mark one box". This is an unavoidable vulnerability in any scheme that doesn't involve an exhaustive and exlusive ranking.
  • Epenthesis 8y ago
    Why would the voters listen to them if they did in fact approve of multiple candidates?
    • mtgx 8y ago
      For the same reason they don't vote for a third-party candidate in the general, even if they like that candidate much more - they want to maximize the chance of winning for the "lesser evil" and not risk the "greater evil" winning. I do like approval voting as well, for the same mentioned reasons, but I worry that after a few elections people would start voting strategically, and then it could take another few decades to change the voting system again. The more important part isn't ranked choice or approval voting anyway - both are single-winner voting systems which are far from ideal for elections involving Congress/Parliaments and local legislature. It's much preferable to have a proportional representation voting system for those.
      • CarVac 8y ago
        How is there any increased risk of "greater evil" winning from third party voting in approval voting?
        • jacques_chester 8y ago
          You may safely rely on both the greater evil and lesser evils saying so.
          • dllthomas 8y ago
            Maybe. But it should be less effective when it's obviously bullshit than when there's at least a kernel of truth.
    • jacques_chester 8y ago
      First, because the parties will say "don't risk your vote!" and deliberately muddy the waters. Second, because in a voluntary voting situation the voter population is dominated by partisans, who are more motivated to vote. This isn't a hypothetical. Queensland introduced "optional" preferential voting and one of the majors promptly campaigned on "Just Vote 1" in order to wedge the opposing coalition.
      • harshreality 8y ago
        GP was talking about approval voting. What Queensland uses, (which they call) Preferential voting, is IRV (instant-runoff voting). That's not approval voting. It might initially seem like IRV's ranking (A>B>C>D>E) would be a better voting system than Approval Voting (where voters simply say A-yes, B-yes, others-no). Relative rankings seem at first glance to express more information. But it turns out that the way you have to count relative rankings either leads to pathological consequences for 3rd parties (see IRV), just like winner-takes-all voting, or the counting method becomes complex and byzantine in corner cases (see Condorcet). It's all explained on rangevoting.org
        • jacques_chester 8y ago
          I am aware of the difference between IRV and approval voting. I am pointing out that there are examples in the wild of non-exhaustive systems being exploited. Approval is non-exhaustive by design, but even in a system where exhaustiveness had been the norm for decades a single political party in a single election was able to substantially regress its performance.
          • deleted 8y ago
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        • dragonwriter 8y ago
          > Preferential voting is IRV. Most real and proposed balloting methods (other than range/score voting) are preferential, they differ in the restrictions on he expressed preferences; IRV (and lots of other systems), as usually defined, relies on a fully-ranked forced-preference (no ties) ballot. Approval has an implicitly fully-ranked two-preference-rank ballot with unlimited ties, FPTP (whether plurality or majority/runoff) has an implicitly fully-ranked two-preference-rank ballot with ties allowed only in the second rank. > Relative rankings seem to express more information They do, there is no “seem". They also do so more consistently. Forced preferences can have the reverse problem of forced ties, though (which is abstractly a point in favor of unforced ranking ballots, but there's less work done on resolution procedures for them.) > but it turns out that the way you have to count relative rankings either leads to pathological consequences for 3rd parties (see IRV), just like winner-takes-all voting, or the counting method becomes complex and byzantine in corner cases (see Condorcet). Bucklin is simpler to count than IRV and doesn't have it's pathological effects; the main concrete criticism I've seen is that if truncation is allowed rather than forced-preference, and if the no-majority fallback is highest-vote-total-on-last-round, it may encourage truncation and devolve to plurality. (But a similar charge of incentive to bullet-vote is made against approval.)
    • dragonwriter 8y ago
      > Why would the voters listen to them if they did in fact approve of multiple candidates? What does “approve of multiple candidates” even mean? Preferring one candidate over another has a clear meaning. Approval does not; as well as meaning honest, uninfluenced ballots are going to vary from voter to voter even with the same actual assessment of candidates, that makes it a lot easier for voters to be manipulated by influencers as to the right way to map preferences to ballot markings. Approval is good for open-ballot voting on, e.g, where to go to lunch (where “approve” means “commit to attend if the option is chosen”.) It's a poor choice for public, secret-ballot elections.
      • CarVac 8y ago
        Approval doesn't have to mean the same thing for everyone.
        • dragonwriter 8y ago
          > Approval doesn't have to mean the same thing for everyone. If it doesn't, then your ballots have no consistent meaning and any process for aggregating them produces garbage output in terms of aggregating social preference. Consistency of meaning of ballot markings and the resolution process being sensible in terms of that meaning are the most critical minimal standards for a voting system. Otherwise, voting is a farce and distraction, not a serious way of guaranteeing that government is accountable.
          • ben_w 8y ago
            That problem already exists.
            • dragonwriter 8y ago
              Arguably, sure, that's one characterization of the problem alternative voting systems seek to solve. That isn't a reason to choose a system that maximizes the degree to which that problem is preserved.
          • 8y ago
  • carry_bit 8y ago
    People understand the current system well, so the new system collapsing to it isn't that bad.
  • kragen 8y ago
    It's okay if some voters decide to throw away 90% of their vote by approval-voting for one candidate instead of, say, 10 candidates. If half of the voters do that, while the other half vote rationally, then the voters who voted more rationally will have cast 91% of the votes in the election, and the voters who decided to "Just Vote 1" will be almost irrelevant, except in a close choice between two broadly-appealing candidates. In approval voting, the strategy to maximize the influence of your vote is to vote for half of the candidates, or at least half of the candidates who are likely to win. (Well, except that arguably in nearly all election schemes, the instrumentally rational strategy is to stay home and do something productive, like baking a pie, having sex, or writing some software; this is why voting is obligatory in nearly all functioning democracies.)
• gowld 8y ago
  Ranked choice is simple to explain and understand. Approval voting would encourage people to NOT vote for people they would accept, for fear that it would hurt their favorite.
  • pspeter3 8y ago
    Is ranked choice voting not susceptible to strategic voting?
    • jacques_chester 8y ago
      It is, but if the ranking is exhaustive then it cannot regress to de facto FPTP. You wind up with an arguably more benign form of strategic voting: preference deals. The point here is that approval voting, range voting etc work better than IRV under a number of ideal conditions. But political parties have no incentive to cooperate with the ideal conditions. They want to beat the other party.
      • dragonwriter 8y ago
        > It is, but if the ranking is exhaustive then it cannot regress to de facto FPTP. Requiring exhaustive (or even second-level) ranking has been ruled unconstitutional (at the state level) in a couple of US states when forms of Bucklin voting were used; which makes any method that relies on compulsory multiple ranking (rather than accepting truncated rankings) more difficult to implement. Which isn't a fundamental problem, but it's something to be tactically aware of.
        • jboles 8y ago
          It seems the US cannot have so many nice things (like preferential voting, and therefore a diversity of candidates) because someone might feel that their freedoms are under threat. (I have thought this before about other things I have come across. Universal healthcare, and taxes to pay for it, come to mind)
      • ClayShentrup 8y ago
• mikeash 8y ago
  Let’s say there are three candidates, one I think is literally Satan, one I think is horrendous but a lot better than Satan, and then some boring but somehow unelectable person. Obviously I vote for the last one and don’t vote for Satan, but do I vote for the middle one?
  • CarVac 8y ago
    Some in your position would, some wouldn't. It's effectively stochastic sampled ranked choice across the population.
    • mikeash 8y ago
      How do I decide which to do? You make it sound simple, but “approve of” is not a simple concept.
      • Spivak 8y ago
        Completely serious, no /s here's your strategy. * Get a 5 sided die. * Rank each candidate from 0-5. * For each candidate roll the die and vote for them if your roll is less than or equal to your rank. I very much dislike approval voting because the way to make people the happiest is to turn it into stochastic STAR.
        • ClayShentrup 8y ago
          I think you mean rate, not rank. In any case this is silly. The correct strategy is outlined here. http://scorevoting.net/RVstrat6.html http://scorevoting.net/RVstrat6.html The evidence overwhelmingly shows that Approval Voting works well, arriving at outcomes that represent the will of the people. http://scorevoting.net/BayRegsFig.html http://scorevoting.net/BayRegsFig.html
          • Spivak 8y ago
            Correct, I meant rate. My strategy isn't about strategic voting, it's how to represent the actual preferences of voters when all you have is approve/not approve.
• SilasX 8y ago
  Yeah. Now answer every clarifying question about what it means to "approve of" someone. Edit: I wasn't asking you to explain it to me; I was asking how you break it down for the average person so that they don't need to keep depending on the election officials to disambiguate every case.
  • CarVac 8y ago
    The beauty of it is that it doesn't have to be the same for everyone.
  • ben_w 8y ago
    Is that really necessary? Use the same definition you were already using. You recon “approve” is exclusive? Write down the one you would have voted for in FPTP. Had trouble deciding which of three to vote for? List all three. Someone’s borderline? Go with your gut. Or your head, whichever.
  • imh 8y ago
    You can give any candidates you like a tally. The one with the most tallies wins. Do you want to increase some candidates' total tallies? Then "approve" of them on your ballot.
• nessus42 8y ago
  I'm going to have to spend some time reading over your reference when I have the free time, since it looks quite interesting. But I can already tell you by the complexity of what that article is trying to show that most people won't understand it and won't care. When I vote, it's in part to declare what I want and what I believe in. I generally don't like Democrats and I don't like Republicans. If I want to vote for the Green Party candidate, then I want to vote for the Green Party candidate and make it known that that's who I want to win. I don't want to be stating that I equally approve of both the Green Party candidate and the Democratic candidate since that doesn't accurately represent my opinion. Given that the Green Party candidate is not going to win, I generally vastly prefer the Democratic candidate to the Republican candidate, even if I don't like the Democratic candidate one bit. I don't want to vote in a way in which my statement is that I equally prefer the Democratic candidate to Green Party candidate. I want to vote in a way that states, "I want the Green Party candidate to win. And if I can't have that, I'll reluctantly settle for the Democratic candidate over the Republican candidate." Voting in a way in which one's desires are clearly indicated is what most people would want, I imagine, even if it has some counterintuitive results at times. Also, at least on a cursory reading, it seems that the author of the article has a bias towards "moderate" candidates winning. Who says that I want a moderate candidate to win? I want some serious progressive change!
  • CarVac 8y ago
    It's not that the author is biased towards moderate candidates; the author wants the moderate candidate to win when the mean of the population's normally distributed political beliefs lie closest to the moderate candidate. The posit is that the spoiler effect is bad: Fielding an additional extreme candidate on one side should not be helpful to the other side.
    • nessus42 8y ago
      Well, I really should read the article you cite because it looks interesting, but take this example: There are three candidates: Republican, Democrat, and Green. 60% of the population wants the Green candidate to win, but will settle for the Democrat reluctantly. They absolutely, positively do not want the Republican to win. 40% of the population wants the Republican to win but under no circumstance wants the Green candidate to win. So with Instant Runoff elections, the majority gets their wish. The Green Candidate wins. With Approval Voting, 60% of the people vote the Green Party Candidate, 40% of the people vote for the Republican Party Candidate, and 100% of the people vote for the Democratic Candidate. The Democratic candidate wins. I don't see how this is a win for Approval Voting. The candidate that wins is a candidate that no one really wanted. Well, clearly my example is rather contrived, but I suspect (perhaps out of ignorance) that any situation in which Instant Runoff would cause counter-intuitive results is also rather unlikely. I'll definitely have to look at your reference, though. I do find such issues very interesting
• dragonwriter 8y ago
  > I don't understand why so many people working for reform support ranked choice voting instead of approval voting Because IRV (“ranked choice voting”) may be the worst non-malicious use known of ranked choice ballots, but approval allows even less information about preferences to be expressed and does so in a way where the honest marking of ballots isn't even clear. Plus, once you get people using ranked ballots, debate over better counting procedure is possible without disrupting how people cast ballots. Approval is a worse method from which any improvement is more disruptive.
• cabalamat 8y ago
  On problem with approval voting is you can only vote yes or no to each candidate. Imagine there are 3 candidates, Candidate-A you like, Candidate-B you dislike and Candidate-C you are so-so about. It's obvious how to vote for A and B, but not obvious for C. Under ranking voting systems (such as AV) is is obvous how to vote. You do it in this in this order: Candidate-A, Candidate-C, Candidate-B. Under scoring systems, where you give each candidate a score (say 10 for the best to 0 for the worst), it is also reasonably simple for to vote: Candidate-A 10, Candidate-B 0, Candidate-C somewhere in between. But here again there are problems? If I give C a high score, he is more likely to beat B (which I want) but also more likely to beat A (which I don't want). So that's an incentive for dishonest voting.
  • CarVac 8y ago
    The fact that the decision to approve of candidate C is not easy makes you effectively a swing voter; the chance that you do or don't vote for them is reflective of your approval of them. Either way it doesn't incentivize dishonesty, and it doesn't cause weird squeeze-outs of the middle candidate the way IRV does. I can see how that's less clear cut to a voter, though.
  • ThinkingGuy 8y ago
    Here's the voting system I would like to see implemented: Every voter still gets a single vote in each race, but you can have your vote apply either toward or against a single candidate. The candidate with the highest total of "# of 'against' votes" subtracted from "# of 'for' votes" wins. This would allow voters more freedom of expression than the current system, while being simpler than ranked voting. I understand that it could conceivably (and probably frequently would) result in the winner being the person with the smaller negative number of votes. But at least then they couldn't claim a "mandate for change" based on a broad support of the populace.
    • desdiv 8y ago
      FYI what you are describing is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disapproval_voting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disapproval_voting
• kibwen 8y ago
  Let's hold a vote on the matter. Then, once we've determined the winner, let's hold another vote using the winner and cross our fingers that we reach a fixpoint. (Seriously, if we get anything at all other than first-past-the-post in my lifetime, I'll be happy.)
• bradbeattie 8y ago
  I get that a single-winner voting system can't satisfy all criteria, but the contortions Range/Approval voting advocates go through to rationalize its failure of the https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majority_criterion https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majority_criterion is concerning.
  • abecedarius 8y ago
    Candidate X is loved by a slight majority and hated by the rest. (Maybe he campaigned on kicking the minority out of the country.) Literally everyone is lukewarm about candidate Y. What outcome should we want? I can’t see this majority criterion as an absolute good.
    • yourbandsucks 8y ago
      Candidate X for sure. I'd rather have some occasional chaos than guaranteed stagnation.
• deleted 8y ago
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• mjevans 8y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schulze_method https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schulze_method VERY Roughly: Eliminate the weakest candidates until there's a winner. Only this method is a formal mathematical twist on that to make it computationally easier for computers to process while yielding the same result. In previous posts I've wanted two additions to this method, but I'm modifying the second after thinking about it. * None of the Above / No Confidence (same, this wins == new vote all old candidates banned) * Allow for a single preference list but don't require all candidates ranked. Confusingly, allowing NotA above other candidates should only yield a warning. It might technically express desired behavior (if my candidates don't win, I have no confidence) while placing it ABOVE some candidates implies that there's not critical confidence in them, a re-run without them would be preferable, BUT that a win with them over another candidate in the race or no-confidence if it isn't stronger than them overall is still preferable.
• Terr_ 8y ago
  I have an "engineering reason" for you. Look at this as a once-in-a-lifetime chance to redesign the user-interface and API of a major product with a huge and diverse set of extremely conservative users. 1. You need to support transitional back-ends for certain users (e.g. instant runoffs) 2. You strongly want to avoid a "new system" that cannot be replaced and has no room for expansion. ___ Any voting system able to handle ranked-preference voting can trivially be "dumbed down" for a certain set of customers who want approval-voting -- it's almost as simple as mapping integers to booleans. In contrast, if everything is built assuming inputs are boolean values for each item in a set, your system is crippled. You either have to hope that everybody loves approval-voting, or admit defeat and switch it back to the old (i.e. current) stupid system of "pick one".
  • AstralStorm 8y ago
    Or you could go for an even richer system of score voting with integers out of a limited set. You can convert ordinal ranks to scores directly meaning the set exactly same as number of candidates. By that, each median score represents median ordering in a ranked ballot. You may lose certain properties that are relevant in case of direct ties but nobody really cares about that in big constituencies. Heck, you can also keep counts of each score in case the dominant is needed for a tie breaker. Approval voting is a score system with a binary score. Rules are simple: in case of rank scores, candidate with lowest median rank wins, if there is a tie candidate with higher count of low scores wins. This converts IRV or other ranked system to Bucklin vote. In case of approval scores, replace lowest with highest.
• deleted 8y ago
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