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Disappointed to not see any mention of ranked choice voting. I think the winner takes all system leads to a two-party duopoly and makes it difficult for interme

Disappointed to not see any mention of ranked choice voting. I think the winner takes all system leads to a two-party duopoly and makes it difficult for intermediate positions to win. P.S: Yes, I know Australia has ranked choice and they also have problems. Of course it's not a panacea, there are other problems like the role of money in politics. But it will be better than what we have today, and should reduce polarization considerably over time IMO.

mmcconnell1618 6y ago
Harvard Business Review podcast had an interesting take on this which suggested that the party-aligned primary system was the main cause. They applied Porter's 5 Forces to politics and suggested ranked choice voting would be one of the main ways to break to duopoly. https://hbr.org/podcast/2020/06/applying-porters-five-forces-to-fix-u-s-politics https://hbr.org/podcast/2020/06/applying-porters-five-forces...
- raz32dust 6y ago
  It makes sense right? It's so ridiculous to see Biden and Bernie battle it out in "Stage 1", and then only one of them gets to go against Trump. Instead of Biden, Bernie and Trump and everyone else just run together in a race as it should really be. We might have even had a better person on the Republican side in this case.
  - birdyrooster 6y ago
    Maybe every four years we switch between FPTP and RC
tunesmith 6y ago
Ranked choice voting is always a semi-poisoned subject because of the IRV adherents' insistence on calling IRV "ranked choice voting". Ranked choice voting is preference capturing mechanism that yields very valuable data. IRV is one of many possible counting implementations.
- 13415 6y ago
  Isn't the problem that although rank-based systems have many desirable properties, they are particularly prone to strategic voting and manipulation? I personally think they are good in cooperative settings where voters have no strong incentive to vote strategically, but are they really so desirable for adversarial situations like national elections?
  - tunesmith 6y ago
    I suppose you could extend that all the way back past the practice of voting... ultimately democratic voting isn't as good as some kind of scalable deliberative consensus mechanism that educates people, but we don't have one of those. But anyway, there's also a lot of misinformation out there about voting methods. For instance, most sources say that all Condorcet methods are flawed, but that's because they conflate Condorcet counting with the various tie-breaking methods when there are cycles. The latter can be flawed, but the former is not. If there's a Condorcet winner, it doesn't run afoul of Arrow's theorem or anything. The main "flaw" with a Condorcet winner is that you can have a Condorcet winner without that candidate having "majority approval", depending on how you measure "approval".
  - scythe 6y ago
    >they are particularly prone to strategic voting and manipulation? IRV and AV are particularly prone to strategic voting. Amusingly, the best catalog of IRV's failures is generally provided by AV proponents, and the best catalog of AV problems can be found on FairVote.org. The ranked-choice systems which satisfy a criterion called ISDA -- independence of Smith-dominated alternatives, or more poignantly, independence of losers -- are harder to manipulate. These are all "Condorcet" methods, because ISDA is a generalization of Condorcet. ISDA means roughly that if a candidate is not in contention to win (the "Smith set"), it doesn't matter where they appear on your ballot. I could rank Vermin Supreme and Ron Paul #1 and #2 and the algorithm basically cancels it out and starts me at #3. The reason that ISDA is so effective at preventing strategic voting is that in order to vote strategically, I have to misrank a candidate who might actually win; in other words, I must accept a realistic risk of encouraging an outcome I don't really want. That's a pretty good disincentive, in my opinion. However, the worry about strategic voting seems to be at least a little overblown. Australia does deal with "how-to-vote" cards[1], but this is a way to prevent "allied" parties from accidentally competing with each other. In 2009, there was concern over a monotonicity violation in Australian elections where supporters of one of the parties were encouraged to misrank another party. However, the voters didn't go along with the plan, and instead voted honestly: https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/howtovote-cards-awaken-the-rebel-in-innercity-voter-20101115-17uga.html https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/howtovote-cards-... https://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-05-04/an-example-of-non-monotonicity-and-opportunites-for-tactical-vot/9389768 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-05-04/an-example-of-non-mon...

mmcconnell1618 6y ago

Harvard Business Review podcast had an interesting take on this which suggested that the party-aligned primary system was the main cause. They applied Porter's 5 Forces to politics and suggested ranked choice voting would be one of the main ways to break to duopoly. https://hbr.org/podcast/2020/06/applying-porters-five-forces-to-fix-u-s-politics https://hbr.org/podcast/2020/06/applying-porters-five-forces...

raz32dust 6y ago
It makes sense right? It's so ridiculous to see Biden and Bernie battle it out in "Stage 1", and then only one of them gets to go against Trump. Instead of Biden, Bernie and Trump and everyone else just run together in a race as it should really be. We might have even had a better person on the Republican side in this case.
- birdyrooster 6y ago
  Maybe every four years we switch between FPTP and RC

tunesmith 6y ago

Ranked choice voting is always a semi-poisoned subject because of the IRV adherents' insistence on calling IRV "ranked choice voting". Ranked choice voting is preference capturing mechanism that yields very valuable data. IRV is one of many possible counting implementations.

13415 6y ago
Isn't the problem that although rank-based systems have many desirable properties, they are particularly prone to strategic voting and manipulation? I personally think they are good in cooperative settings where voters have no strong incentive to vote strategically, but are they really so desirable for adversarial situations like national elections?
- tunesmith 6y ago
  I suppose you could extend that all the way back past the practice of voting... ultimately democratic voting isn't as good as some kind of scalable deliberative consensus mechanism that educates people, but we don't have one of those. But anyway, there's also a lot of misinformation out there about voting methods. For instance, most sources say that all Condorcet methods are flawed, but that's because they conflate Condorcet counting with the various tie-breaking methods when there are cycles. The latter can be flawed, but the former is not. If there's a Condorcet winner, it doesn't run afoul of Arrow's theorem or anything. The main "flaw" with a Condorcet winner is that you can have a Condorcet winner without that candidate having "majority approval", depending on how you measure "approval".
- scythe 6y ago
  >they are particularly prone to strategic voting and manipulation? IRV and AV are particularly prone to strategic voting. Amusingly, the best catalog of IRV's failures is generally provided by AV proponents, and the best catalog of AV problems can be found on FairVote.org. The ranked-choice systems which satisfy a criterion called ISDA -- independence of Smith-dominated alternatives, or more poignantly, independence of losers -- are harder to manipulate. These are all "Condorcet" methods, because ISDA is a generalization of Condorcet. ISDA means roughly that if a candidate is not in contention to win (the "Smith set"), it doesn't matter where they appear on your ballot. I could rank Vermin Supreme and Ron Paul #1 and #2 and the algorithm basically cancels it out and starts me at #3. The reason that ISDA is so effective at preventing strategic voting is that in order to vote strategically, I have to misrank a candidate who might actually win; in other words, I must accept a realistic risk of encouraging an outcome I don't really want. That's a pretty good disincentive, in my opinion. However, the worry about strategic voting seems to be at least a little overblown. Australia does deal with "how-to-vote" cards[1], but this is a way to prevent "allied" parties from accidentally competing with each other. In 2009, there was concern over a monotonicity violation in Australian elections where supporters of one of the parties were encouraged to misrank another party. However, the voters didn't go along with the plan, and instead voted honestly: https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/howtovote-cards-awaken-the-rebel-in-innercity-voter-20101115-17uga.html https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/howtovote-cards-... https://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-05-04/an-example-of-non-monotonicity-and-opportunites-for-tactical-vot/9389768 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-05-04/an-example-of-non-mon...