9 ms·

I’m in MA and our question 2 is whether to institute it, though it wouldn’t apply to presidential elections. I think it’s a great idea. The only specific criti

I’m in MA and our question 2 is whether to institute it, though it wouldn’t apply to presidential elections. I think it’s a great idea. The only specific criticism I’ve seen is that it’s “more complicated” but to me that’s a price worth paying for the improved representation of the public will. What’s surprised me is that I’ve heard several smart people tell me that they weren’t sure because they had heard that “it can cause unexpected results”, but hadn’t dug deep enough to elaborate. Has anyone come across strong, detailed arguments against it?

pfisch 6y ago
Wouldn't it increase the odds of an extreme and/or single issue candidate winning? I mean isn't the point of it that a 3rd party candidate would have a more viable shot at winning? Though I suppose it would also better express the voters' will if those 3rd party candidates still lost.
- DFHippie 6y ago
  If they win it's hard to say this will be a result the electorate finds disappointing. The advantage for mainstream candidates is that third parties won't be spoilers, which is currently a relatively common occurrence (and why Maine has ranked-choice voting).
- Buttons840 6y ago
  RCV eliminates the spoiler effect, but I don't think that necessarily means that 3rd party candidates have a higher chance of winning. I don't know. It is nice to be able to show your support for third party candidates in the way that matters most, by actually voting for them, even if they still have little chance of winning. It's nice to be able to do this without throwing your vote away. You no longer have to choose between strategic voting and showing support for your favorite candidate. Even with RCV there will still be political parties with varying popularity, and there will still be 2 at the top that are most popular. At least we wont have to have candidates strategically drop out to avoid being a spoiler any more.
  - heintje_ghulam 6y ago
    It doesn't eliminate the spoiler effect. Here's a simple example of what can happen under RCV: Pretend Bernie Sanders in 2016 ran under the Green Party after dropping out of the Democratic Primary. RCV claims to eliminate the spoiler effect, so it is "safe" for all the people who want Bernie as their first choice to actually express that. Assume everyone who likes Bernie the best follows that: they put Bernie as their first choice and either Trump or Clinton as their second choice. Presumably more will have Clinton as their second choice than Trump since Clinton is more centrist than Trump who is on the right. Say the "first choice" votes go as follows: - 45% top choice Trump - 35% top choice Bernie - 20% top choice Hillary Hillary gets eliminated and the people who put Hillary as their first choice now have their second choices distributed among the remaining candidates. Say that split goes (within the 20%): - 6% 2nd choice Trump - 14% 2nd choice Bernie Trump wins, even if all the Bernie voters had Hillary as their 2nd choice, because their second choices didn't count for anything. So the claim that it was "safe" to express their true preferences and put Bernie as their first choice completely backfired. summary: among three choices, under Ranked Choice Voting, you only get your votes moved to your 2nd choice in Ranked Choice if you do not come in 2nd place overall. If your candidate comes in 2nd, your votes are worthless. A system that fixes this and other issues is STAR Voting, and it's what people should be pushing for: https://www.equal.vote/ https://www.equal.vote/ https://www.starvoting.us/ https://www.starvoting.us/
    - lhopki01 6y ago
      Surely in your example STAR Voting would have had the same result? Hilary (and all other lesser candidates of which there are none) get eliminated leaving Bernie and Trump. Then preferences of Hilary voters for those two are calculated (Preference for a runoff between Bernie and Trump are already determined) so you end up with the exact same result.
      - heintje_ghulam 6y ago
        You're assuming the scores were chosen from e.g. 1,2,3, and people gave their first preference 1, second preference 2, and third preference 3. So yes, if you force everyone to rank the candidates like in Ranked Choice Voting, in this case you get the same outcome as Ranked Choice Voting. STAR doesn't restrict people to strict ranking though.
- MikeTheGreat 6y ago
  I think it actually increases the chances of a common 2nd choice winning. Extreme candidates are only going to draw from their limited constituencies, but a choice that's "nice, but not my top choice, but I'd like them if my top choice doesn't get elected" candidate for a lot of people actually does really well in this sort of system.
- ggggtez 6y ago
  It has the opposite effect that you described. Consider the 2000 Gore v Bush v Nader. Bush won with a minority of votes. But if they used Ranked Choice, and Nader voters are generally assumed to have the preference order (Nader > Gore > Bush) then Gore would have won. We can assume that politically, Nader is to the left of Gore, and Bush is to the right. So in fact, ranked choice voting helps the candidate that is in the political center!
  - wyldfire 6y ago
    > So in fact, ranked choice voting helps the candidate that is in the political center! I think you might be right, but the single case you cited doesn't make it so.
    - jacques_chester 6y ago
      Australian politics is dominated by policies aimed at the median voter. That's over a century of cases.
  - smichel17 6y ago
    It's more nuanced than this. RCV helps the median in the way you suggest when the median is more popular, by allowing the more extreme voters to avoid splitting the vote. In the example, by allowing Nader voters to fall back to Gore once Nader is eliminated. But, when the race is closer, it flip flops to have the opposite direction. Say Nader is marginally more popular among liberals. Now Gore is eliminated first, and Nader beats Bush. But hold on, what about the conservatives, who voted Bush > Gore > Nader? They've been screwed, because Gore was eliminated before Bush, so the system never considered their preference for Gore over Nader. And actually, if enough of them had flipped their vote and gone Gore > Bush > Nader, then Bush would be eliminated first, resulting in Gore's victory -- the lesser evil. If you are liberal and have a hard time identifying this as a problem, consider the reverse: an election in the south, where voting D > R > Tea party results in the tea party candidate winning, but voting R > D > Y elects the mainstream Republican. So the short summary is that, under RCV, it's only safe for you to put your favorite candidate first if: A) Your favorite is likely to win, or B) The election is not close -- you know your favorite(s) will be eliminated before your next choice, who is likely to win. It is still an improvement over FPTP, where you always have to vote for a likely-to-win candidate, but not as good as any form of score voting (e.g. approval, STAR).
- mbesto 6y ago
  > Wouldn't it increase the odds of an extreme and/or single issue candidate winning? You act like this isn't happening already.
- rthomas6 6y ago
  If a candidate is everyone's second choice, I don't think you can call them extreme or single issue.
ianwalter 6y ago
I haven't but seems like a threat to the two-party system and those invested in it.
- brixon 6y ago
  This is the main reason why I like it. The current two parties have a choke hold on the government and a third (or fourth) party has no chance today.
- jacques_chester 6y ago
  Multi-member electorates are far more likely to produce multi-party systems. Australia's lower house is single-member electorates and remains dominated by major parties. Its upper house is composed of multi-member electorates (one for each state) and consequently, that's where minor parties and independents most frequently show up.
ggggtez 6y ago
No there are no real valid arguments against ranked choice voting. Ranked choice has the benefit that the there is no point in "gaming" your vote, so your optimal strategy and nash-equilibrium is to provide your real candidate preference order. The key benefit of ranked choice is that voters will tell you what they actually want (even if their favorite candidate has no chance to win).
- NickM 6y ago
  Ranked choice has the benefit that the there is no point in "gaming" your vote, so your optimal strategy and nash-equilibrium is to provide your real candidate preference order. This is very demonstrably false, both theoretically and in the real world. Ranked choice voting only solves the spoiler effect in cases where the spoiler candidate has a small enough amount of support as to be rendered non-competitive, but if you have more than two candidates who are competitive then the spoiler effect comes back in full force. This is not just theoretical; it happened in the Burlington 2009 mayoral election, and fallout from that election led to ranked choice being repealed shortly afterward. So, not only does ranked choice still incentive strategic voting sometimes, but it does it in a way that is harder to see and understand. There are other non-ranked voting systems like approval voting and score voting that are much simpler and better in this respect. Ranked choice also has other drawbacks - like violating the monotonicity criterion - as well as more practical issues like making it impossible to distribute the counting process across precincts. No there are no real valid arguments against ranked choice voting. This is also quite incorrect. Our current system of first-past-the-post is bad, yeah, but there are plenty of valid arguments against ranked choice and - in my opinion - there are much better systems we could choose instead.
  - 6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago
    IIRC, the Burlington election as evidence of a failure isn’t universally agreed. Some point to it as an example of it working.
    - jacques_chester 6y ago
      It's also maddening that a single mayoral election is apparently the slam dunk counterexample. Meanwhile, Australia has been voting this way for a century. And over that time period, I think there have been fewer ugly paradoxes than in the US.
ElijahLynn 6y ago
I haven't fully absorbed this but Nicky Case built some visualization tools around this and other methods. https://ncase.me/ballot/ https://ncase.me/ballot/ (To Build a Better Ballot)
- NickM 6y ago
  I came here to post that link. This is by far the best introduction to the topic that I've ever seen, and makes a complex issue with plenty of subtle, non-obvious consequences very accessible.
- wyldfire 6y ago
  That's pretty interesting. Thanks for sharing. IMO I'd probably settle for anything beyond FPTP but it's good to know that there's research behind the options.
coldpie 6y ago
We have it here in St Paul for city elections. It is definitely more complicated. It sounds easy in practice--just rank your candidates--but how you actually put that down on paper in a machine-readable way is a bit non-obvious. Here's an example of how it actually looks[1]. Now imagine that same thing, for every office on the ballot... It's not too bad if you know what you're doing, but it's easy to see how someone would do it wrong. To be clear, I'm a huge fan of RCV and think it is massively unethical that we do not have it (or some similar system) for all elections. I consider elections that don't use RCV to be borderline invalid. [1] https://www.minnpost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/default/files/mpls-sample-ballot.png https://www.minnpost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/default/fi...
- BurritoAlPastor 6y ago
  The layout of that ballot isn’t helping. For comparison, I’ve found the RCV ballot in San Francisco pretty intuitive (https://sfelections.sfgov.org/sites/default/files/Images/Demo_Ballot.gif https://sfelections.sfgov.org/sites/default/files/Images/Dem...)
- 1980phipsi 6y ago
  It would be nice if groups (including but not limited to political parties) could provide recommended ballots, in line with straight ticket voting, but in a ranked choice setting so for instance, the Democrat ballot might recommend the Democrat first and then the Green Party candidate second (or something like that).
paulgb 6y ago
It can occasionally lead to weird results, the most often cited is the 2009 Burlington Mayor election[1] where more voters preferred Montroll to Kiss, but Kiss was the winner. The counter-argument to this is that plurality voting quite frequently leads to weird results (spoiler effects, etc.), and it seems relatively rare in RCV in practice. [1] https://ranked.vote/report/us/vt/btv/2009/03/mayor https://ranked.vote/report/us/vt/btv/2009/03/mayor
- lhopki01 6y ago
  >where more voters preferred Montroll to Kiss That's only true in the first two rounds. In total more voters preferred Kiss over Montroll.
  - paulgb 6y ago
    > That's only true in the first two rounds. In total more voters preferred Kiss over Montroll. No, in total 4064 voters preferred Montroll to Kiss, while 3476 voters preferred Kiss to Montroll. "Preferred" here means either that they ranked a candidate above the other, or that they ranked a candidate and did not rank the other. (Some ballots ranked neither candidate, and so are not considered) Edit: I did the math independently, but it lines up with the Wiki page here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Burlington_mayoral_election#Analysis_of_the_2009_election https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Burlington_mayoral_electi...
    - lhopki01 6y ago
      Ah yes you're right. I wasn't looking at the 3rd most popular candidate in the first round. That being said the results would have been the same Under STAR voting too which people seem to suggest is better than RCV. Personally I like strict proportional representation with a Parliamentary system. This way you get what people want and you don't get a leader from a different party than the legislative.
      - smichel17 6y ago
        I'm not sure why you think the results would have been the same. I would guess that STAR voting would have Montroll beating Kiss in the runoff.
ggggtez 6y ago
When talking about argument against RCV, you'd need to come up with a way to create a "spoiler" effect. While it's trivial to create a spoiler in the current system ( Bush v Gore v Nader ), trying to create a spoiler in RCV is much much harder. Go ahead and try. Then compare that to what would have happened in the current "one vote" system. You can easily see that RCV is clearly an improvement and makes it much harder to have 3rd party candidates spoil the election by stealing votes from the most popular candidate.
defertoreptar 6y ago
> Has anyone come across strong, detailed arguments against it? There's a simpler way that's much easier for voters to understand: "approval voting." You mark all the candidates you approve of, and the candidate(s) with the most total votes wins.
- Miner49er 6y ago
  This feels like voter disenfranchisement to me. For an example, I don't "approve" of any candidates in our current presidential election. I'm simply going to vote for what I think is best, strategically. If I had to say who I "approved of" (and took the words literally) I would vote no-one. I suppose I would end up still voting strategically and ignore the wording, but would all voters?
  - a1369209993 6y ago
    TBF, first past the post is even worse in this regard (any vote that doesn't support a member of the Democratic-or-Republican Party is effectively entirely ignored), and ranked-choice isn't much better unless it includes a "leave the office empty" option, which also improves approval voting.
  - defertoreptar 6y ago
    That's not so much an argument against approval voting as it is an argument for carefully and clearly wording the ballot. That's true of any voting system.
- jacques_chester 6y ago
  This basically devolves to FPTP.
  - pitaj 6y ago
    Why?
    - jacques_chester 6y ago
alasdair_ 6y ago
Approval voting is simpler and has a similar end result.
exclipy 6y ago
Australian here. Firstly, ranked choice voting is so much better than first-past-the-post and you should do it. But since you asked, Australia has seen one problem in recent years. But this is a problem specific to the conditions we have here. Firstly, some background: 1. In the Australian Senate, the single pool of voters from the state are deciding on 12 senators (EDIT: oops, should be 6). This is decided by running the ranked-choice algorithm until 12 remain (EDIT: 6). 2. In the Senate, there are now dozens of parties, so the ballot is hilariously wide. 3. Australia has compulsory preferencing. You MUST rank all parties on the ballot. 4. Because you can't expect the population to rank dozens of candidates at the polling booth, each party can decide for their voters what order to rank the other parties. So how do the parties decide how to rank the other parties? Backroom deals. Who knows what the terms of the deals are. In any case, it's not the voters who decide. The result is that minor parties like the Sports Party and the Motoring Enthusiasts Party, who each get almost no direct votes, jostled their way up just high enough on the preference lists of enough major parties that they ended up snagging one of the seats. More details here: https://www.fairvote.org/reforming-the-australian-senate https://www.fairvote.org/reforming-the-australian-senate But as I said, this is made possible by the specific conditions of the electoral system here. It wouldn't be a problem if the election were for a single candidate, or if there were no party-defined preferences (necessitating non-mandatory ranking).
- jacques_chester 6y ago
  A nitpick: in a normal election, half of the Senate faces election, so 6 per state. It's only double-dissolution elections where all 12 face election at the same time. In those scenarios minor parties and independents are much more likely to get elected, because the quota is halved. Voting above the line works basically fine. What happened is that the major parties were too lazy to discuss things with many minor parties, who then went off and arranged their own preference deals.
- erentz 6y ago
  The multi member district approach is preferable to single member districts because it gives a more proportional result. The Australian example demonstrates this in the extreme with very large multi member Senate districts electing different parties and single member House districts which end up electing the usual two parties only, maintaining the duopoly. Arguably multi member districts of between 3-5 members would be a better sweet spot. Removing the need to rank all members is also an easy solution. If someone doesn’t want their vote to transfer beyond their first or second (etc) preference why should they be forced to? Where STV is used in NZ for local elections you just rank those you want to rank. The Australian requirement to rank all probably stems from their compulsory voting requirement.
dragonwriter 6y ago
> The only specific criticism I’ve seen is that it’s “more complicated” but to me that’s a price worth paying for the improved representation of the public will. The main problem with IRV (RCV is a horrible name for it, since its one of a large class of ranked-choice methods) is that, for the complexity of a ranked-choice method, it gives pretty much the least benefit of any single-winner system. (The multimember district version of IRV, STV, is a fairly reasonable proportional system, on the other hand.)

pfisch 6y ago

Wouldn't it increase the odds of an extreme and/or single issue candidate winning? I mean isn't the point of it that a 3rd party candidate would have a more viable shot at winning? Though I suppose it would also better express the voters' will if those 3rd party candidates still lost.

DFHippie 6y ago
If they win it's hard to say this will be a result the electorate finds disappointing. The advantage for mainstream candidates is that third parties won't be spoilers, which is currently a relatively common occurrence (and why Maine has ranked-choice voting).
Buttons840 6y ago
RCV eliminates the spoiler effect, but I don't think that necessarily means that 3rd party candidates have a higher chance of winning. I don't know. It is nice to be able to show your support for third party candidates in the way that matters most, by actually voting for them, even if they still have little chance of winning. It's nice to be able to do this without throwing your vote away. You no longer have to choose between strategic voting and showing support for your favorite candidate. Even with RCV there will still be political parties with varying popularity, and there will still be 2 at the top that are most popular. At least we wont have to have candidates strategically drop out to avoid being a spoiler any more.
- heintje_ghulam 6y ago
  It doesn't eliminate the spoiler effect. Here's a simple example of what can happen under RCV: Pretend Bernie Sanders in 2016 ran under the Green Party after dropping out of the Democratic Primary. RCV claims to eliminate the spoiler effect, so it is "safe" for all the people who want Bernie as their first choice to actually express that. Assume everyone who likes Bernie the best follows that: they put Bernie as their first choice and either Trump or Clinton as their second choice. Presumably more will have Clinton as their second choice than Trump since Clinton is more centrist than Trump who is on the right. Say the "first choice" votes go as follows: - 45% top choice Trump - 35% top choice Bernie - 20% top choice Hillary Hillary gets eliminated and the people who put Hillary as their first choice now have their second choices distributed among the remaining candidates. Say that split goes (within the 20%): - 6% 2nd choice Trump - 14% 2nd choice Bernie Trump wins, even if all the Bernie voters had Hillary as their 2nd choice, because their second choices didn't count for anything. So the claim that it was "safe" to express their true preferences and put Bernie as their first choice completely backfired. summary: among three choices, under Ranked Choice Voting, you only get your votes moved to your 2nd choice in Ranked Choice if you do not come in 2nd place overall. If your candidate comes in 2nd, your votes are worthless. A system that fixes this and other issues is STAR Voting, and it's what people should be pushing for: https://www.equal.vote/ https://www.equal.vote/ https://www.starvoting.us/ https://www.starvoting.us/
  - lhopki01 6y ago
    Surely in your example STAR Voting would have had the same result? Hilary (and all other lesser candidates of which there are none) get eliminated leaving Bernie and Trump. Then preferences of Hilary voters for those two are calculated (Preference for a runoff between Bernie and Trump are already determined) so you end up with the exact same result.
    - heintje_ghulam 6y ago
      You're assuming the scores were chosen from e.g. 1,2,3, and people gave their first preference 1, second preference 2, and third preference 3. So yes, if you force everyone to rank the candidates like in Ranked Choice Voting, in this case you get the same outcome as Ranked Choice Voting. STAR doesn't restrict people to strict ranking though.
MikeTheGreat 6y ago
I think it actually increases the chances of a common 2nd choice winning. Extreme candidates are only going to draw from their limited constituencies, but a choice that's "nice, but not my top choice, but I'd like them if my top choice doesn't get elected" candidate for a lot of people actually does really well in this sort of system.
ggggtez 6y ago
It has the opposite effect that you described. Consider the 2000 Gore v Bush v Nader. Bush won with a minority of votes. But if they used Ranked Choice, and Nader voters are generally assumed to have the preference order (Nader > Gore > Bush) then Gore would have won. We can assume that politically, Nader is to the left of Gore, and Bush is to the right. So in fact, ranked choice voting helps the candidate that is in the political center!
- wyldfire 6y ago
  > So in fact, ranked choice voting helps the candidate that is in the political center! I think you might be right, but the single case you cited doesn't make it so.
  - jacques_chester 6y ago
    Australian politics is dominated by policies aimed at the median voter. That's over a century of cases.
- smichel17 6y ago
  It's more nuanced than this. RCV helps the median in the way you suggest when the median is more popular, by allowing the more extreme voters to avoid splitting the vote. In the example, by allowing Nader voters to fall back to Gore once Nader is eliminated. But, when the race is closer, it flip flops to have the opposite direction. Say Nader is marginally more popular among liberals. Now Gore is eliminated first, and Nader beats Bush. But hold on, what about the conservatives, who voted Bush > Gore > Nader? They've been screwed, because Gore was eliminated before Bush, so the system never considered their preference for Gore over Nader. And actually, if enough of them had flipped their vote and gone Gore > Bush > Nader, then Bush would be eliminated first, resulting in Gore's victory -- the lesser evil. If you are liberal and have a hard time identifying this as a problem, consider the reverse: an election in the south, where voting D > R > Tea party results in the tea party candidate winning, but voting R > D > Y elects the mainstream Republican. So the short summary is that, under RCV, it's only safe for you to put your favorite candidate first if: A) Your favorite is likely to win, or B) The election is not close -- you know your favorite(s) will be eliminated before your next choice, who is likely to win. It is still an improvement over FPTP, where you always have to vote for a likely-to-win candidate, but not as good as any form of score voting (e.g. approval, STAR).
mbesto 6y ago
> Wouldn't it increase the odds of an extreme and/or single issue candidate winning? You act like this isn't happening already.
rthomas6 6y ago
If a candidate is everyone's second choice, I don't think you can call them extreme or single issue.

ianwalter 6y ago

I haven't but seems like a threat to the two-party system and those invested in it.

brixon 6y ago
This is the main reason why I like it. The current two parties have a choke hold on the government and a third (or fourth) party has no chance today.
jacques_chester 6y ago
Multi-member electorates are far more likely to produce multi-party systems. Australia's lower house is single-member electorates and remains dominated by major parties. Its upper house is composed of multi-member electorates (one for each state) and consequently, that's where minor parties and independents most frequently show up.

ggggtez 6y ago

No there are no real valid arguments against ranked choice voting. Ranked choice has the benefit that the there is no point in "gaming" your vote, so your optimal strategy and nash-equilibrium is to provide your real candidate preference order. The key benefit of ranked choice is that voters will tell you what they actually want (even if their favorite candidate has no chance to win).

NickM 6y ago
Ranked choice has the benefit that the there is no point in "gaming" your vote, so your optimal strategy and nash-equilibrium is to provide your real candidate preference order. This is very demonstrably false, both theoretically and in the real world. Ranked choice voting only solves the spoiler effect in cases where the spoiler candidate has a small enough amount of support as to be rendered non-competitive, but if you have more than two candidates who are competitive then the spoiler effect comes back in full force. This is not just theoretical; it happened in the Burlington 2009 mayoral election, and fallout from that election led to ranked choice being repealed shortly afterward. So, not only does ranked choice still incentive strategic voting sometimes, but it does it in a way that is harder to see and understand. There are other non-ranked voting systems like approval voting and score voting that are much simpler and better in this respect. Ranked choice also has other drawbacks - like violating the monotonicity criterion - as well as more practical issues like making it impossible to distribute the counting process across precincts. No there are no real valid arguments against ranked choice voting. This is also quite incorrect. Our current system of first-past-the-post is bad, yeah, but there are plenty of valid arguments against ranked choice and - in my opinion - there are much better systems we could choose instead.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago
  IIRC, the Burlington election as evidence of a failure isn’t universally agreed. Some point to it as an example of it working.
  - jacques_chester 6y ago
    It's also maddening that a single mayoral election is apparently the slam dunk counterexample. Meanwhile, Australia has been voting this way for a century. And over that time period, I think there have been fewer ugly paradoxes than in the US.

ElijahLynn 6y ago

I haven't fully absorbed this but Nicky Case built some visualization tools around this and other methods. https://ncase.me/ballot/ https://ncase.me/ballot/ (To Build a Better Ballot)

NickM 6y ago
I came here to post that link. This is by far the best introduction to the topic that I've ever seen, and makes a complex issue with plenty of subtle, non-obvious consequences very accessible.
wyldfire 6y ago
That's pretty interesting. Thanks for sharing. IMO I'd probably settle for anything beyond FPTP but it's good to know that there's research behind the options.

coldpie 6y ago

We have it here in St Paul for city elections. It is definitely more complicated. It sounds easy in practice--just rank your candidates--but how you actually put that down on paper in a machine-readable way is a bit non-obvious. Here's an example of how it actually looks[1]. Now imagine that same thing, for every office on the ballot... It's not too bad if you know what you're doing, but it's easy to see how someone would do it wrong. To be clear, I'm a huge fan of RCV and think it is massively unethical that we do not have it (or some similar system) for all elections. I consider elections that don't use RCV to be borderline invalid. [1] https://www.minnpost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/default/files/mpls-sample-ballot.png https://www.minnpost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/default/fi...

BurritoAlPastor 6y ago
The layout of that ballot isn’t helping. For comparison, I’ve found the RCV ballot in San Francisco pretty intuitive (https://sfelections.sfgov.org/sites/default/files/Images/Demo_Ballot.gif https://sfelections.sfgov.org/sites/default/files/Images/Dem...)
1980phipsi 6y ago
It would be nice if groups (including but not limited to political parties) could provide recommended ballots, in line with straight ticket voting, but in a ranked choice setting so for instance, the Democrat ballot might recommend the Democrat first and then the Green Party candidate second (or something like that).

paulgb 6y ago

It can occasionally lead to weird results, the most often cited is the 2009 Burlington Mayor election[1] where more voters preferred Montroll to Kiss, but Kiss was the winner. The counter-argument to this is that plurality voting quite frequently leads to weird results (spoiler effects, etc.), and it seems relatively rare in RCV in practice. [1] https://ranked.vote/report/us/vt/btv/2009/03/mayor https://ranked.vote/report/us/vt/btv/2009/03/mayor

lhopki01 6y ago
>where more voters preferred Montroll to Kiss That's only true in the first two rounds. In total more voters preferred Kiss over Montroll.
- paulgb 6y ago
  > That's only true in the first two rounds. In total more voters preferred Kiss over Montroll. No, in total 4064 voters preferred Montroll to Kiss, while 3476 voters preferred Kiss to Montroll. "Preferred" here means either that they ranked a candidate above the other, or that they ranked a candidate and did not rank the other. (Some ballots ranked neither candidate, and so are not considered) Edit: I did the math independently, but it lines up with the Wiki page here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Burlington_mayoral_election#Analysis_of_the_2009_election https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Burlington_mayoral_electi...
  - lhopki01 6y ago
    Ah yes you're right. I wasn't looking at the 3rd most popular candidate in the first round. That being said the results would have been the same Under STAR voting too which people seem to suggest is better than RCV. Personally I like strict proportional representation with a Parliamentary system. This way you get what people want and you don't get a leader from a different party than the legislative.
    - smichel17 6y ago
      I'm not sure why you think the results would have been the same. I would guess that STAR voting would have Montroll beating Kiss in the runoff.

ggggtez 6y ago

When talking about argument against RCV, you'd need to come up with a way to create a "spoiler" effect. While it's trivial to create a spoiler in the current system ( Bush v Gore v Nader ), trying to create a spoiler in RCV is much much harder. Go ahead and try. Then compare that to what would have happened in the current "one vote" system. You can easily see that RCV is clearly an improvement and makes it much harder to have 3rd party candidates spoil the election by stealing votes from the most popular candidate.

defertoreptar 6y ago

> Has anyone come across strong, detailed arguments against it? There's a simpler way that's much easier for voters to understand: "approval voting." You mark all the candidates you approve of, and the candidate(s) with the most total votes wins.

Miner49er 6y ago
This feels like voter disenfranchisement to me. For an example, I don't "approve" of any candidates in our current presidential election. I'm simply going to vote for what I think is best, strategically. If I had to say who I "approved of" (and took the words literally) I would vote no-one. I suppose I would end up still voting strategically and ignore the wording, but would all voters?
- a1369209993 6y ago
  TBF, first past the post is even worse in this regard (any vote that doesn't support a member of the Democratic-or-Republican Party is effectively entirely ignored), and ranked-choice isn't much better unless it includes a "leave the office empty" option, which also improves approval voting.
- defertoreptar 6y ago
  That's not so much an argument against approval voting as it is an argument for carefully and clearly wording the ballot. That's true of any voting system.
jacques_chester 6y ago
This basically devolves to FPTP.
- pitaj 6y ago
  Why?
  - jacques_chester 6y ago

alasdair_ 6y ago

Approval voting is simpler and has a similar end result.

exclipy 6y ago

Australian here. Firstly, ranked choice voting is so much better than first-past-the-post and you should do it. But since you asked, Australia has seen one problem in recent years. But this is a problem specific to the conditions we have here. Firstly, some background: 1. In the Australian Senate, the single pool of voters from the state are deciding on 12 senators (EDIT: oops, should be 6). This is decided by running the ranked-choice algorithm until 12 remain (EDIT: 6). 2. In the Senate, there are now dozens of parties, so the ballot is hilariously wide. 3. Australia has compulsory preferencing. You MUST rank all parties on the ballot. 4. Because you can't expect the population to rank dozens of candidates at the polling booth, each party can decide for their voters what order to rank the other parties. So how do the parties decide how to rank the other parties? Backroom deals. Who knows what the terms of the deals are. In any case, it's not the voters who decide. The result is that minor parties like the Sports Party and the Motoring Enthusiasts Party, who each get almost no direct votes, jostled their way up just high enough on the preference lists of enough major parties that they ended up snagging one of the seats. More details here: https://www.fairvote.org/reforming-the-australian-senate https://www.fairvote.org/reforming-the-australian-senate But as I said, this is made possible by the specific conditions of the electoral system here. It wouldn't be a problem if the election were for a single candidate, or if there were no party-defined preferences (necessitating non-mandatory ranking).

jacques_chester 6y ago
A nitpick: in a normal election, half of the Senate faces election, so 6 per state. It's only double-dissolution elections where all 12 face election at the same time. In those scenarios minor parties and independents are much more likely to get elected, because the quota is halved. Voting above the line works basically fine. What happened is that the major parties were too lazy to discuss things with many minor parties, who then went off and arranged their own preference deals.
erentz 6y ago
The multi member district approach is preferable to single member districts because it gives a more proportional result. The Australian example demonstrates this in the extreme with very large multi member Senate districts electing different parties and single member House districts which end up electing the usual two parties only, maintaining the duopoly. Arguably multi member districts of between 3-5 members would be a better sweet spot. Removing the need to rank all members is also an easy solution. If someone doesn’t want their vote to transfer beyond their first or second (etc) preference why should they be forced to? Where STV is used in NZ for local elections you just rank those you want to rank. The Australian requirement to rank all probably stems from their compulsory voting requirement.

dragonwriter 6y ago

> The only specific criticism I’ve seen is that it’s “more complicated” but to me that’s a price worth paying for the improved representation of the public will. The main problem with IRV (RCV is a horrible name for it, since its one of a large class of ranked-choice methods) is that, for the complexity of a ranked-choice method, it gives pretty much the least benefit of any single-winner system. (The multimember district version of IRV, STV, is a fairly reasonable proportional system, on the other hand.)