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Approval Voting versus Instant Runoff Voting
- zacharyautin11 8y agoIf only we could use approval voting to vote for a new voting system. Free elections are not always fair.
- specialist 8y agoPeople hate change. A few of us have been sneaking approval voting in wherever it makes sense. Familiarize people with the process. One example is we use approval voting for prioritorizing our motions during membership meetings. Previously, our endorsement process was a major food fight, was way too dependent on the order which motions (from the floor) were recognized (unfair, yielding results not representative of the membership) and took way too long. Now, using approval voting to pre-rank the motions, everyone sees the process is open, fair, accountable.
- incog-neato 8y agoI think this would have a much more dramatic benefit toward US politics than the elimination of the electoral college, adding new US states, or fighting gerrymandering would.
- shawabawa3 8y agoDoes Approval Voting really pass the "favourite betrayal criterion"? There are scenarios where if you don't vote for both Good and Ideal, bad will win, and scenarios where if you do vote for both Good and Ideal, Good will win (over Ideal) You obviously don't know which scenario you're in when you vote, so you don't know whether you should vote for both good+ideal or just ideal - both options can cause a worse result I suppose the idea is that you use polling to decide which scenario is more likely and vote accordingly
- kbutler 8y agoYes, approval voting leaves the door open for some tactical voting. So if candidate #1 would win a simple majority (50.01% of voters), but is absolutely hated by everyone else, but #2 is "acceptable" or second best to 100% of the voters, should #1 win? We are used to the binary "simple majority takes all" in elections, but maybe the compromise "everybody is pretty OK with this one" _should_ win. If it were a group of friends going to a restaurant, or playing a game, #2 sounds like a much better option.
- foobarchu 8y agoI'm not totally convinced that particular compromise should win. The issue I have with it is whether political candidates should have to please everyone. Using that strategy would likely lead to a lot of charismatic but ineffective people getting elected. None of big issues would get any sort of resolution, because the candidates that the most people are ok with are the ones with the fewest controversial stances.
- alistairSH 8y agoBut, the alternative is the dysfunctional partisan mess we have in the US. If parties split government, nothing gets done (save a lot of finger-pointing and chest-thumping). If a single party controls government, "progress" is made, but that progress is likely to be extreme and to the displeasure of a massive portion of the electorate.
- lupire 8y agoThese criteria are moot as regards popular systems. They cover cases where opinion is so mixed that no single-vote system can reliably pick a winner.
- jnty 8y agoUsing polling data to vote tactically is exactly what we want to avoid and gives undue power to pollsters (and the people paying them.)
- jadell 8y agoGood winning over Ideal is a desired outcome when Ideal doesn't have the votes to win. That's one of the main attractions of non-plurality voting. The point of approval voting is not to rank candidates as Ideal > Good > Bad, that's what IRV is. Approval voting says, "These candidates are equally acceptable to me, so I'll be happy if any of them win over the candidates I didn't vote for."
- notahacker 8y agoSure, but what the OP is saying is that in practice there's a massive tactical decision over whether to vote for "good" or not in a tight race, because "these candidates are equally acceptable to me" is a relatively rare situation
- jadell 8y agoI don't think that's a rare situation at all. There's a large population out there that doesn't identify with R/D (in US politics), but does identify more closely with a 3rd party. But they never vote for them because "tactics". That doesn't mean those people wouldn't find R or D acceptable, it just means the're ideologically closer to a 3rd party. What AV is trying to get at is the situation where the most people are accepting of the outcome. If a candidate is not acceptable, you don't vote for them. The situation you're describing is not one of selecting from Ideal, Good, Bad; it's the situation of selecting from Ideal, Somewhat Bad, Bad. If you're unwilling to vote for a candidate, they are by definition not "Good" to you. So you would just vote for the Ideal candidate in that situation. In the worse case (everyone just votes for a single candidate), AV simply acts as FPTP. In the average and best case, the candidate that is acceptable to the most voters wins. Look at it from the view of the US's extreme polarization: if I'm strongly for A, and you're strongly against A, nothing will be done if A wins. But I'm strongly for A, and we're both "meh" on B, then B might not get everything done that either of us wants, but at least the process won't completely break down.
- notahacker 8y agoBut assuming most of these people consider R and D acceptable but actively prefer the third party (if they consider them equally acceptable FPTP isn't really depriving them of their ideal electoral choice), AV is inferior to most other non FPTP votes like IRV, which accurately represent their preference for the third party first, and the Rs and Ds only if that party can't win. AV has a pretty significant "if I tick the good candidate box, am I impairing my ideal candidate's chances of winning?" problem.
- jamesonquinn 8y agoThe "favorite betrayal" criterion is defined mathematically. In your scenario, as long as you approve Ideal, you are not betraying your favorite, even if you also approve Good. The only betrayal would be if you didn't approve Ideal. And in approval voting, there is no way others could be voting so that betrayal would be a good idea. You are talking about a form of strategic voting — whether or not you approve Good. But it isn't favorite betrayal. In fact, it isn't betrayal at any level. All rational approval strategy (assuming a convex distribution over others' votes) is "semi-honest" in that you never approve a less-liked candidate but not a more-liked one. The only strategic choice is where to set your threshold, then honestly approve all candidates above it. According to the Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem, any voting method has some form of strategy, so in that sense the best you can possibly do is ensure that all strategy is semi-honest. Approval is optimal in this sense.
- schuyler2d 8y agoArticle makes some good arguments for approval voting, but the "Ballot Spoilage" argument is a bit disingenuous. Ballots can't be spoiled in approval voting because any set of circles can be filled in. However it's a lot easier to corrupt a ballot undetected. Just fill in more bubbles for your candidate.
- tromp 8y agoPerhaps then each candidate should be marked with either a "0" or a "+". It is difficult to change either of these into the other without signs of tampering.
- DennisP 8y agoThat's fixable by using voting machines to print the ballots. E.g. fill in the circles but also print the number of filled-in circles for each contest. Or, print only the selected candidate names.
- DaanVanVugt 8y agoThis is easily prevented by additionally marking the number of candidates chosen.
- jnty 8y agoYet this would then increase spoilage significantly would it not?
- DaanVanVugt 8y agoIt could be an additional multiple choice field, with N+1 options. Both would need to be filled in for the form to be valid.
- jnty 8y agoI'm not sure I understand, nor how this would combat the problem that I can accidentally spoil my ballot by miscounting the number of choices I've made. An easy mistake to make - even easier if you have a condition like dyslexia.
- dsfyu404ed 8y agoAs a libertarian anything that increases the ability of a 3rd party go gain traction interest me but something smells very off about the recent uptick in discussion of alternatives. If these changes were actually beneficial to the underdog in the general case you'd see them being pushed by the left or the right on a state by state basis depending on the political make up of any given state. The parties aren't run by idiots. They've crunched the numbers. They know whether the alternatives would benefit them or not. Likewise it makes me very uneasy that we mostly only see people who align with one party pushing for alternate systems. I'm not opposed to alternate voting systems but I'd like to see one actually increase the power of the underdog(s) in a one party state (the only kind of state where the powers that be feel secure enough to make this kind of change) in the US before I support one. I don't want something that sounds good but furthers the status quo. Political diversity is one of the US's strengths and anything that furthers the status quo is bad for that. Edit: why is this opinion unacceptable?
- pmyteh 8y ago<raises hand> And political scientists! (No-one listens to us, of course). More seriously, the case for standard First-Past-The-Post voting is really bad in terms of its decision-making properties. It's really only as dominant as it is, where it is, because of its historical position. Exactly what you might replace it with is a trickier question, with multiple plausible candidates, all better than FPTP and all different from each other. I lean towards Single Transferable Vote, and its special case AV/IRV in single member elections, but reasonable people can disagree. Intriguingly, the British Parliament has just effectively used approval voting to try to break its Brexit deadlock. It failed in this case largely because many members voted highly tactically for their 'ideal' option only, not for what they could live with. AV/IRV would have been a better choice, I think, if a compromise winner was actually wanted.
- lupire 8y agoThe main benefit of FPTP, for third parties, is that they can hijack elections by acting as "anti-tiebreaker" (Threatening to turn their nearest ally into a lose by joining the election, unless that nearest ally adopts their platform). This is why third parties generally (and openly) advocate for FPTP. Of course, the simple and well-tested solution is to reduce the power of the Executive, move power to Parliament, and assign power proportionally to parties.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- tromp 8y agoIt's a bit silly to argue that candidates take up too much space on a IRV ballot when it would suffice to duplicate only the box and not their name, as in 1st 2nd 3rd choice John Adams [ ] [ ] [ ] Ben Franklin [ ] [ ] [ ] Tom Jefferson [ ] [ ] [ ] Betsy Ross [ ] [ ] [ ]
- hadrien01 8y agoOr just put in a number in a single column boxes like in Australia or Ireland.
- erentz 8y agoAnd same in NZ where they’re used in local elections.
- magduf 8y ago>Or just put in a number in a single column boxes like in Australia or Ireland. What do you do when some moron voter can't count and reuses the same number, or skips a number? This kind of voting scheme seems like it would much too complicated and confusing to the average American voter.
- Frondo 8y agoThrow the ballot out. People mis-fill ballots now. People will always mis-fill ballots. The column of numbers thing seems extremely intuitive and wouldn't baffle a significant number of American voters; certainly it wouldn't lead to hanging-chad type situations.
- dragonwriter 8y ago> What do you do when some moron voter can't count and reuses the same number, or skips a number? Skipping is no problem. If you want, it's fairly trivial to modify IRV to allow equal preferences.
- sandGorgon 8y agothis is a non-US problem - in India, we typically have a dozen candidates in every election constituency. IRV is not very practical.
- DebtDeflation 8y agoIt seems to me that Approval Voting might have the unintended negative consequence of electing a joke candidate, since you do not rank your choices nor are you limited to how many you can choose. Unfortunately, many voters would not give a second thought to ticking "Mickey Mouse" or similar in addition to their main choice and alternates, since there is no tradeoff involved. Under IRV or Ranked Choice, few voters would likely rank the joke candidate high.
- mcphage 8y ago> It seems to me that Approval Voting might have the unintended negative consequence of electing a joke candidate I think we've already crossed that particular bridge.
- dj-wonk 8y agoBut there is a downside, by your own logic. If you vote for a candidate that you disapprove of (don’t want to elect), you run the risk of increasing their support.
- nayuki 8y agoCGP Grey talking about approval voting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orybDrUj4vA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orybDrUj4vA
- jnty 8y agoSurely this disenfranchises those most willing to compromise, who are probably going to end up being those who support small parties? Let's say you a Right and Left party, and breakout Far Left which is actually very popular but has previously lacked electoral support due to its 'outsider' status. People's favourites might look like this: Right: 30% Left: 30% Far left: 40% However, 75% of Far Left favourites actually vote for Left too, because they prefer them to right. This ends up with the following result: Right: 30% Left: 60% Far left: 40% So we are left with 'establishment' mediocrity instead of the most popular result. Is this OK because a majority of people don't actually want 'far left'? Maybe. Intuitively though, I think taking preferences away will freak people out, particularly in situations where there might be different levels - what if there was a Far Right party that Far Left voters really don't want in - would some end up voting for Right to avoid that happening? They might win despite having 70% unpopularity! I'd prefer difficult counting processes over a blunting of people's democratic will.
- duxup 8y agoI don't know what you mean by "'establishment' mediocrity". Nothing in your example means that the "Left" has to be "establishment" or "mediocrity".
- incog-neato 8y ago"Left" and "Right" are nearly meaningless when people can have stances on an issue-by-issue basis. As someone who has important disagreements with both big US parties, some would call me a moderate, and I feel disenfranchised by the current system, which doesn't let me pick the person whom I agree with most.
- PaulHoule 8y agoYep, IRV sends you right into the jaws of Arrow's Theorem which is not a nice place to be.
- dj-wonk 8y agoArrow’s Impossibility Theorem, as I understand it, applies quite broadly to voting systems. To put it simply, you can’t avoid it. You just decide what trade offs you want to live with.
- PaulHoule 8y agoLooking at it closely I think it gets particularly gruesome when you try to do a "perfect" job of determining people's preferences.
- jamesonquinn 8y agoArrow's theorem applies only to ordinal voting methods. Approval is not actually subject to Arrow's theorem; it's not even well-defined whether it passes the criteria. However, there are various voting impossibility theorems inspired by Arrow which do apply to approval. Most notably, Gibbard-Satterthwaite.
- Symmetry 8y agoI really like Wikipedia's page comparing voting systems. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_electoral_systems#Comparisons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_electoral_system... No voting system is perfect but Approval Voting is my favorite. Still, most schemes that people have put forward are far better than the First Past the Post and there's been some momentum for IRV in Mass, where I live, so I've been helping with canvassing and it looks like our efforts might be paying off.
- a_imho 8y agoSortition is the most democratic way of electing representatives.
- jamesonquinn 8y agoSortition (that is, random selection) is a system for roughly-proportional representation; that is, for choosing multiple winners for a legislature so as to represent a population. Approval voting is a way of picking a single winner. They solve entirely separate problems. (Sortition is nearly optimal if your only goal is to match the distribution of voters by a subset of equally-weighted representatives. Technically, it's possible to improve on it slightly by allowing voters to cluster themselves into a hierarchical structure of parties and factions, then performing sortition under the constraint that each party and/or faction must come within 1 seat of its correct proportional representation. This kind of technique is called "reduced-variance sampling" when used in sequential monte carlo sampling. But sortition, or party-clustered sortition, pays no attention to candidate quality. Most people would agree that if there are two candidates that hold the same ideology, but the only difference is that one of the two has a medical problem that only allows them to work for 1 hour a week, the other one would make a better representative. Sortition cannot be fixed to take this kind of factor into account, which is a big part of why many people prefer more traditional voting methods.)
- a_imho 8y agoOne can most certainly pick even a single winner at random. Equal chance to represent, there is no fairer way than that. Voting inherently leads to a money/campaign/popularity contest (and parties, more often than not 2), it is very good at keeping the status quo by feeding back to itself. I'm not aware of any large scale studies of election method preferences, but keep in mind 1. people are used to voting 2. even if they are aware fairer methods exist their self interest is to keep voting if they think they will benefit from the resulting unfair system.
- brianolson 8y agoWhat the article misses is that there are alternatives better than BOTH approval or IRV. I will always find "Approval" to be unsatisfying because I want to say I like A more than I like B. I will always find IRV to be dumb because it has bad outcomes and for no additional cost or complexity those ranked ballots could have been counted by a Condorcet method that results in better democracy. https://bolson.org/irv/ https://bolson.org/irv/
- hackinthebochs 8y ago>because it has bad outcomes and for no additional cost or complexity those ranked ballots could have been counted by a Condorcet method that results in better democracy. Can you show how the differences in outcomes is better using the Condorcet method?
- brianolson 8y agoYes, there was a real world election run using IRV that got the wrong answer. Fortunately the full (anonymized) vote set was released and we can see how it would have gone using other election methods. https://bolson.org/irv/ https://bolson.org/irv/ I've also done simulations of millions of elections with various election algorithms and there are trends about what works and what doesn't: https://bolson.org/voting/twographs.html https://bolson.org/voting/twographs.html
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- hackinthebochs 8y agoThe behavior graphs seem to use a linear "happiness" metric to judge the quality of outcome. I question this choice. It is not intuitive to me that some unit of happiness should cancel out a unit of misery when it comes to determining election outcomes. The IRV page extrapolates the majority principle for two choices to more than two choices, but its not obvious that this is correct. There are arguments that need to be made before we can start comparing the quality of outcomes between voting methods.
- specialist 8y agoApproval Voting is the best balance between fairness and simplicity. I switched from IRV (RCV) to Approval Voting once I better understood the challenges of election administration. That said, FPTP is just about the worst. For election administration, it's the most brittle, where the margin of error too often exceeds the margin for winning. So I'd happily support IRV, RCV, score voting, approval voting as a replacement.
- dj-wonk 8y agoI appreciate your opinion, but I want to point out that our definitions of fairness and simplicity may vary. Much of scholarly work around elections systems strives to ground itself on particular formal criteria.
- specialist 8y ago"opinion" Comparative fairness is well documented. This graph is a good appromixation: https://www.electionscience.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/comparing_voting_methods_simplicity_group_satisfaction-1.png https://www.electionscience.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/c... https://www.electionscience.org/library/approval-voting-versus-irv/ https://www.electionscience.org/library/approval-voting-vers... Simplicity also accounts for election integrity concerns (ease of tabulation and auditing).
- dj-wonk 8y agoCan you share the context for the graph? Do you have a formal definition for how you are using ‘fairness’?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- specialist 8y agoThe second link is the article featuring that graph. Start with Arrow's Impossibility Theorem. You have the maths to better understand this stuff than me. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow's_impossibility_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow's_impossibility_theorem https://www.math.wisc.edu/~meyer/math141/voting2.html https://www.math.wisc.edu/~meyer/math141/voting2.html I have focused on election integrity. For me, arguing the relative merits ranked choice voting strategies is (unforgivable) bikeshedding and ultimately results in no action. Like getting stuck arguing 4.5x vs 4.75x better than FPTP while the world burns. For election integrity, other real world concerns also must be factored. Like voter education, verifying the hardware & software, ease of tabulation & auditing, feasibility of doing a manual recount, etc. In conclusion, Approval Voting is almost as fair as the ideal Score Voting but much easier to implement.
- fsargent 8y agoIt can't be mentioned enough that Approval Voting works with existing voting machines. One of the unfortunate difficulties with IRV is that it often requires a wholesale replacement of the voting infrastructure. The Center for Election Science is a big supporter of IRV as a better system than our current "Choose One" voting method, but we've found that Approval Voting is both more descriptive and less prone to strategy, as well as being significantly easier to implement and use. NB: I'm the Chair of the Board for The Center for Election Science. AMA.
- incog-neato 8y agoIs there any real momentum for any kind of change at the US Federal level? Do politicians talk to you? What's the buzz?