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What 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

What 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 ago
  Yes, 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 ago
    The 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.
tnicks 8y ago
"I want to say I like A more than I like B" You can convey this by only submitting a single choice on your ballot (a powerful tactic in AV). Conversely, you can vote everyone BUT the one you wish to harm. And by default you can vote NOTA. While it may be that Approval Voting is not the "perfect" answer, it is far better than most and comes with the added benefit of easy adoption/implementation and simple explanation.
- magduf 8y ago
  >You can convey this by only submitting a single choice on your ballot (a powerful tactic in AV) Yeah, but then you run the risk of a Trump getting elected in an election between Trump, Hillary, and Bernie, where you really want Bernie, and you really don't like Hillary at all, but you'll still take her any day over the utter disaster that is Trump. This is why AV isn't that great: all they have to do is put up a truly revolting candidate to scare voters into voting for the not-as-revolting candidate, and she gets elected because there's no way for voters to express a clear preference.
comnetxr 8y ago
While I would certainly be more happy in a world with either IRV or Condorcet method than FPTP, I think this argument against IRV is too simplistic. The situation is candidates D, R with the largest numbers of voters who prefer them first, and consensus candidate I with smaller first preference than D, R but lots of 2nd preference. Under any Condorcet method, the D and R voters can hurt their candidate by ranking I as second (later-no-harm criterion). This leads to a negative partisanship spiral, say, as D/R voters feel like they must only rank 1 candidate in order to counter the threat from the other party doing the same, and thus the consensus candidate I, which would be the Condorcet winner under voter's true preferences, does not become the winner under the actual votes. IRV does a better job of inducing everyone to rank choices.
- ClayShentrup 8y ago
  The Later-no-harm criterion is basically a nonsensical idea invented to make IRV look better than it is. See a Princeton math PhD dissect it here. http://scorevoting.net/LNH http://scorevoting.net/LNH tl;dr for non-experts (I co-founded the Center for Election Science and have studied voting methods since 2006). The idea behind LNH is that if I vote for the Green in 1st place, it's "safe" to then rank the Democrat 2nd, because that can't cause the Democrat to defeat the Green. See this explained visually in this video by Andy Jennings, another CES co-founder who did his math PhD thesis on voting methods. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtKAScORevQ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtKAScORevQ The Later-no-harm criterion is highly misleading, because "safe" here means safe for the CANDIDATE. But tactical voting is about what's good for the VOTER, not the candidate. With IRV, the Green voter's best strategy is to actually rank the Democrat in 1st place. So the whole notion that he can safely rank the Democrat #2 after he's ranked the Green #1 starts with a false premise. If he's rational, he WILL NOT rank the Green #1. It's the same reasoning that Democratic primary voters have about far left candidates. Even if you win the nomination and advance to the general, you're so far left that you'll probably lose against the Republican, by not capturing enough of the center of the electorate. Approval Voting actually makes it safe to ALWAYS vote your favorite. And, in general, to vote for everyone you prefer to your favorite of the frontrunners.
  - 8y ago
ClayShentrup 8y ago
> I will always find "Approval" to be unsatisfying because I want to say I like A more than I like B. This is the "expressiveness fallacy". https://www.electionscience.org/library/expressiveness-in-approval-vs-ranked-ballots/ https://www.electionscience.org/library/expressiveness-in-ap... tl;dr Total information throughput for a voting system is a function of THREE things: 1. Amount of information you can express on a ballot. 2. Accuracy of that information (which is distorted if the system gives you an incentive to dishonestly/tactically vote) . 3. Tabulation efficiency — how effectively does the system utilize the info on the ballots (for example there are numerous ranked voting systems from IRV, to Borda, to the entire Condorcet family; and IRV is extremely lossy) . When you factor these all together, Approval Voting does surprisingly well, especially because it's so good at #2 and #3. See this graph of performance as measured by Bayesian regret. http://scorevoting.net/BayRegsFig.html http://scorevoting.net/BayRegsFig.html Essentially what's happening is that the people who's approval threshold sits between candidates A and B (i.e. those people who only approve one of them) will, in a statistical sense, have about the same A-vs-B preference as the people who voted for both or neither of them. So the aggregate effect doesn't really suffer from your inability to express a ranked preference for all candidates. Voting is statistical. To really drive that home, note that you could switch to a better voting method and STOP VOTING, and STILL get better election outcomes. The tiny impact your vote has on the process is statistically negligible. The properties of the voting system matter vastly more.
- brianolson 8y ago
  "Approval Voting does surprisingly well" and I agree that it's a mathematically valid and efficient solution that does _surprisingly_ well, but other systems do better (Cordorcet, etc). Also in the messy human emotional sense, it's still _unsatisfying_ that I might Approval vote for Bernie and Hillary but I still want to say I like one better, and I still think that difference matters.
  - jamesonquinn 8y ago
    The article focuses on approval versus IRV, and the advantages it gives for approval are valid. As you know, there are various other methods (Condorcet, STAR, 3-2-1, etc.) that keep most of approval's advantages, but sacrifice simplicity for better expressiveness. It would be as unreasonable for the advocates of such methods to try to undermine real-world campaigns for approval, as it would be for approval advocates to undermine those other methods.

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 ago
Yes, 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 ago
  The 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.

tnicks 8y ago

"I want to say I like A more than I like B" You can convey this by only submitting a single choice on your ballot (a powerful tactic in AV). Conversely, you can vote everyone BUT the one you wish to harm. And by default you can vote NOTA. While it may be that Approval Voting is not the "perfect" answer, it is far better than most and comes with the added benefit of easy adoption/implementation and simple explanation.

magduf 8y ago
>You can convey this by only submitting a single choice on your ballot (a powerful tactic in AV) Yeah, but then you run the risk of a Trump getting elected in an election between Trump, Hillary, and Bernie, where you really want Bernie, and you really don't like Hillary at all, but you'll still take her any day over the utter disaster that is Trump. This is why AV isn't that great: all they have to do is put up a truly revolting candidate to scare voters into voting for the not-as-revolting candidate, and she gets elected because there's no way for voters to express a clear preference.

comnetxr 8y ago

While I would certainly be more happy in a world with either IRV or Condorcet method than FPTP, I think this argument against IRV is too simplistic. The situation is candidates D, R with the largest numbers of voters who prefer them first, and consensus candidate I with smaller first preference than D, R but lots of 2nd preference. Under any Condorcet method, the D and R voters can hurt their candidate by ranking I as second (later-no-harm criterion). This leads to a negative partisanship spiral, say, as D/R voters feel like they must only rank 1 candidate in order to counter the threat from the other party doing the same, and thus the consensus candidate I, which would be the Condorcet winner under voter's true preferences, does not become the winner under the actual votes. IRV does a better job of inducing everyone to rank choices.

ClayShentrup 8y ago
The Later-no-harm criterion is basically a nonsensical idea invented to make IRV look better than it is. See a Princeton math PhD dissect it here. http://scorevoting.net/LNH http://scorevoting.net/LNH tl;dr for non-experts (I co-founded the Center for Election Science and have studied voting methods since 2006). The idea behind LNH is that if I vote for the Green in 1st place, it's "safe" to then rank the Democrat 2nd, because that can't cause the Democrat to defeat the Green. See this explained visually in this video by Andy Jennings, another CES co-founder who did his math PhD thesis on voting methods. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtKAScORevQ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtKAScORevQ The Later-no-harm criterion is highly misleading, because "safe" here means safe for the CANDIDATE. But tactical voting is about what's good for the VOTER, not the candidate. With IRV, the Green voter's best strategy is to actually rank the Democrat in 1st place. So the whole notion that he can safely rank the Democrat #2 after he's ranked the Green #1 starts with a false premise. If he's rational, he WILL NOT rank the Green #1. It's the same reasoning that Democratic primary voters have about far left candidates. Even if you win the nomination and advance to the general, you're so far left that you'll probably lose against the Republican, by not capturing enough of the center of the electorate. Approval Voting actually makes it safe to ALWAYS vote your favorite. And, in general, to vote for everyone you prefer to your favorite of the frontrunners.
- 8y ago

ClayShentrup 8y ago

> I will always find "Approval" to be unsatisfying because I want to say I like A more than I like B. This is the "expressiveness fallacy". https://www.electionscience.org/library/expressiveness-in-approval-vs-ranked-ballots/ https://www.electionscience.org/library/expressiveness-in-ap... tl;dr Total information throughput for a voting system is a function of THREE things: 1. Amount of information you can express on a ballot. 2. Accuracy of that information (which is distorted if the system gives you an incentive to dishonestly/tactically vote) . 3. Tabulation efficiency — how effectively does the system utilize the info on the ballots (for example there are numerous ranked voting systems from IRV, to Borda, to the entire Condorcet family; and IRV is extremely lossy) . When you factor these all together, Approval Voting does surprisingly well, especially because it's so good at #2 and #3. See this graph of performance as measured by Bayesian regret. http://scorevoting.net/BayRegsFig.html http://scorevoting.net/BayRegsFig.html Essentially what's happening is that the people who's approval threshold sits between candidates A and B (i.e. those people who only approve one of them) will, in a statistical sense, have about the same A-vs-B preference as the people who voted for both or neither of them. So the aggregate effect doesn't really suffer from your inability to express a ranked preference for all candidates. Voting is statistical. To really drive that home, note that you could switch to a better voting method and STOP VOTING, and STILL get better election outcomes. The tiny impact your vote has on the process is statistically negligible. The properties of the voting system matter vastly more.

brianolson 8y ago
"Approval Voting does surprisingly well" and I agree that it's a mathematically valid and efficient solution that does _surprisingly_ well, but other systems do better (Cordorcet, etc). Also in the messy human emotional sense, it's still _unsatisfying_ that I might Approval vote for Bernie and Hillary but I still want to say I like one better, and I still think that difference matters.
- jamesonquinn 8y ago
  The article focuses on approval versus IRV, and the advantages it gives for approval are valid. As you know, there are various other methods (Condorcet, STAR, 3-2-1, etc.) that keep most of approval's advantages, but sacrifice simplicity for better expressiveness. It would be as unreasonable for the advocates of such methods to try to undermine real-world campaigns for approval, as it would be for approval advocates to undermine those other methods.