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The three stated solutions: > 1. Non-partisan, single-ballot primaries. Seems reasonable by itself, but it won't scale to more than a few parties. > 2. Insta
by harshreality 8y ago
The three stated solutions:
> 1. Non-partisan, single-ballot primaries.
Seems reasonable by itself, but it won't scale to more than a few parties.
> 2. Instant-runoff voting, (commonly known as IRV, but in the article/transcript they call it Ranked-choice voting).
No. Absolutely not. IRV is awful.
https://rangevoting.org/ https://rangevoting.org/
The good options are range voting (which collapses in the pathological case to simple approval voting, which isn't too bad itself). Or, if you're willing to live with some compromises, one of the Condorcet variants. The problem with the Condorcet voting system family is that it's more complex, less intuitive, and doesn't nicely aggregate: to break ties/loops you have to have granular voting data. The complexity means that when someone doesn't like the voting outcome, FOX or CNN can find some talking head to say "voting system is unfair! election stolen!" nonsense, and get traction because most people wouldn't understand Condorcet or why it works the way it does.
> 3. Non-biased non-gerrymandered redistricting.
Sure, but this needs to be defined strictly, with each voting district bounded by significant geographical features (rivers, mountains), and when geo features aren't available as boundaries, the boundary must be within a certain percentage of a convex hull. In other words, severely constraining the volume of concave points. Nothing like (-1,-1) to (-1, 1) to (1, 1) to (-0.5, 0), to (1, -1). That -0.5, 0 takes a big pacman-like bite out of the square volume, so it wouldn't be permitted. There are actual districts like that, or more like a blocky-letter-C or a blocky-letter-L shape, and it's absurd.
- kkylin 8y agoPrescriptions #3 are nice in spirit, but there are practical constraints to consider. For one thing, in addition to geographical boundaries, congressional districts also need to conform to existing administrative boundaries like county lines. These, in turn, are tied to services, taxes, etc. Not to say whether it can or cannot be done, nor whether it should or should not, but it's far from simple to just redraw congressional districts. For anyone interested in gerrymandering and related issues, I've found this to be a nice resource: https://sites.duke.edu/quantifyinggerrymandering https://sites.duke.edu/quantifyinggerrymandering . (In full disclosure, I know some of the people responsible for this but am not involved in the work.)
- gowld 8y agoIRV is only awful in irrelevant corner cases that only political science wonks care about. When the electorate's preferences is a statistical tie, it doesn't matter who wins, as long as one party isn't forcing all the tiebreaks to go their way.
- function_seven 8y ago> When the electorate's preferences is a statistical tie, it doesn't matter who wins I wish this was more front and center in these types of discussions. Imagine a race between Alice and Bob. Alice gets 9,500 votes, Bob 9,521 votes. But—due to some controversial rules—10 of Alice's and 40 of Bob's votes are invalidated. Alice wins. This is not a scandal or a problem. The original vote totals were a tie. The new vote totals are also a tie. Essentially a coin flip determined the winner. For purposes of determining who won, 49%===51%. If a candidate is truly wanted by the electorate, then they need to do better than 50% +1 anyway.
- wnoise 8y agoIt's awful precisely when it would start delivering a different result than FPTP, because that's when strategic voting comes into play.
- harshreality 8y agoI don't think that's true at all. It provides the illusion of compatibility with 3rd party voting, while saddling it with strategic voting pathologies not so different from winner-take-all. Here's a summary: https://rangevoting.org/IrvPathologySurvey.html https://rangevoting.org/IrvPathologySurvey.html
- aaron_m04 8y agoIt seems to me that the weirdness comes from this if/else block in how IRV works. if (highest voted candidate has more than 50%) { That candidate is winner } else { use 2nd picks of voters for least voted candidate IRV() // recursive } A really desirable algorithm wouldn't be a piecewise function like this.