25 ms·

What is ranked-choice voting and why is New York using it?

• tunesmith 5y ago
  What's great about RCV (not IRV specifically) is that if the ballot data sets are retained, you can write software to recount them using other RCV algorithms. I'm curious when we'll next have a Condorcet Winner that isn't the IRV winner.
  • rattray 5y ago
    Interesting – I wonder how much of that data will be published by NY… definitely sounds interesting to explore.
  • nine_k 5y ago
    Since voting data are anonymized by construction, it should even be fine to publish as is.
    • throw5away 5y ago
      Nope! This is a problem with high-cardinality ordinal voting methods. Since factorial is a very fast growing function, you can easily encode a pattern in down-ballot candidates and buy and verify a specific ballot. Commonly what's done is that we truncate the ballot and only allow people to express, say, 5 preferences.
  • mc32 5y ago
    I don’t like rank choice voting because it can result in someone with fewer first place votes than the first or second candidate to win if the conditions are right. We’ve seen surprise results where an obscure candidate has won when too many top choices split the first choice votes and someone relegated to the floor vacuums up all the throwaway votes (people think they have to “spend” all their votes)
    • AnimalMuppet 5y ago
      > I don’t like tank [sic] choice voting because it can result in someone with fewer first place votes than the first or second candidate to win if the conditions are right. Why do you consider that the "wrong" outcome?
      • mc32 5y ago
        Because the way people understand it is that if candidate #1 doesn't win, then candidate #2 would win, maybe candidate #3, but not candidate #5. And people are often disappointed to learn that the first, second or third, 1st choice vote-getters are not the winners but rather the #1 3rd, 4th, or 5th choice vote getter can end up winning (again because people think they HAVE to cast all votes --which obviously they don't, but that enables the possibility of the throwaway candidate winning)
      • dragonwriter 5y ago
        The rest of the comment seems to explain that the problem is that poorly considered candidates win because people don't give as much care below the top spot in a wide pool of candidates: > We’ve seen surprise results where an obscure candidate has won when too many top choices split the first choice votes and someone relegated to the floor vacuums up all the throwaway votes (people think they have to “spend” all their votes) I think its an understandable concern under any single round ranked-ballots method where you arr likely to have a large pool of cnadidates. But it can be simply remedied with a two-round system using the same method iterated to select a manageable pool of candidates (possibly gating in the top couple first-place vote getters even if they otherwise wouldn’t be in the top) for the runoff round, which still uses the same ranked-ballots method with more confidence that all the candidates have been vetted because there is a narrower field. This keeps the integrity of whatever ranked-ballots method is chosen while avoiding the (small, but not nonexistent) risk of winning by flying under the radar.
    • JumpCrisscross 5y ago
      > an obscure candidate has won when too many top vs fixates split the first choice votes and someone relegated to the floor vacuums up all the throwaway votes That’s the point. The compromise candidate won. If the top candidates had spent less time mud slinging they may have remained in others’ top two or three.
  • spoonjim 5y ago
    Would that be meaningful when the method is known to the voters ahead of time? It’s like the team with fewer total yards winning the Super Bowl... wouldn’t be that surprising since both teams know that it’s points that decide the game.
    • tunesmith 5y ago
      I suppose some meaning could be lost if people are voting tactically from the awareness that they're in an IRV election. But on the other hand, if a voting system's implementation incentivizes voters to vote against their true preferences, then that by itself should be an indication that the voting system is flawed. (It's not true that every voting method incentivizes tactical voting; this is a common misreading of Arrow's Theorem.)
      • dane-pgp 5y ago
        I agree that Arrow's Theorem is often misread (as it doesn't apply to score-based voting systems, or single-winner elections) but it's perhaps more important to mention the Gibbard–Satterthwaite theorem here, which is similarly misrepresented. That theorem effectively says that all sensible voting systems will in certain conditions allow a voter to gain a better outcome by voting insincerely (i.e. tactically). However, it doesn't say how easy it is for a voter to determine the correct tactical vote to make, so potentially a voter would need perfect information about all the other votes cast in order for their tactic to succeed.
• ortusdux 5y ago
  King County is exploring using RCV. https://www.king5.com/article/news/politics/king-county-to-consider-ranked-choice-voting/281-99ac30e8-0fa5-42ce-909d-c8832ad20354 https://www.king5.com/article/news/politics/king-county-to-c...
  • TulliusCicero 5y ago
    Explanatory note: King County is the county in which Seattle is located.
    • dont__panic 5y ago
      Thank you, I was really confused by this because the NYC borough of Brooklyn is actually synonymous with Kings County, and I assumed that OP had merely forgotten the s.
  • coryrc 5y ago
    Without MMP it's not going to change who gets in. The 49.9% of people opposed to Kshama Sawant get no voice (yes, that's city of Seattle, but easier example for non-locals) in IRV(RCV) nor FPTP. Tacoma did this a few years ago and nothing came of it.
• _gtly 5y ago
  There was a helpful visualization/animation of how ranked choice voting works in the NY Times: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/nyregion/ranked-choice-voting-nyc.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/nyregion/ranked-cho...
• spicybright 5y ago
  This is a good video explaining how it works on a general level: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Z2fRPRkWvY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Z2fRPRkWvY Really hope it catches on.
• gadi1993 5y ago
  I'm Israeli and I was recently shocked to learn the rest of the world trusts electronic voting and vote by mail. We have a very simple and strict voting process here - the key feature which builds the trust in voting is that every 4 poll workers are responsible for the integrity of only up to 800 votes. We don't have fraud allegations because you would have to blame over 150 different people simultaneously (and often much more, on the order of hundreds of people, when you take into consideration the practical constrains) to change a single seat. It's very simple to convince a person of the integrity that this process. We have a high turnout which completely contradicts the claim that mail / electronic voting increases turnout. Electronic voting / mail voting give the power of changing the results to a handful of people who control the voting machines / know the voter rolls. Whether they will or had abused it is anyone's guess - but pretending that controversy over election process is inevitable is plainly wrong. The entire premise of elections is to prove to the losing side that the process was fair, so I find it unbelievable so many countries overlook that and give things like convenience and corona safety a priority.
  • ant6n 5y ago
    Most western democracies don’t have a problem with fraud allegations in voting. It’s really only the US. And even there, the allegations are mostly a political ploy to push for policies that disenfranchis voters of other parties. Which again doesn’t exist in other Western democracies.
    • gadi1993 5y ago
      French had massive mail voting fraud in 1975, after which they banned it. The entire point of elections is proving your government is trustable, you can't trust your government with it because then it's like a self signed certificate, circular trust problem. Who rigs elections in Russia? The government. Who is most likely to rig elections? The government. You can't trust government with elections, and just because the government shows you documents doesn't mean anything. Governments fabricate documents all the time. If all you require from corrupt politicians to remain in control is a bunch of mailed documents, you can be sure they'll get those documents mailed. I'm just completely dumbfounded people living within countries with these elections think they are democracies.
• dragonwriter 5y ago
  I really hate that Instant Runoff Voting, which is almost literally the worst possible voting method with ranked choice ballots, has somehow gotten the name “Ranked Choice Voting” stuck to it. It’s like if “Democratic Elections” became a specific name for Plurality voting.
  • adjkant 5y ago
    Hey, we do live in a Democracy* after all!
  • tunesmith 5y ago
    Yeah, when you name the spec after one particular implementation, you're gonna cause confusion. Anyway, I handle it by just using RCV to refer to how the ballot is filled out. The vote counting method is IRV.
  • _AzMoo 5y ago
    Why is Instant Runoff Voting the worst possible voting method?
    • antognini 5y ago
      "Worst possible" might be a bit strong, but an important property that a voting system should have is that it finds the Condorcet winner if one exists. The Condorcet winner is the candidate who beats every other candidate in a head-to-head election. IRV is not guaranteed to find a Condorcet winner. The problem with IRV is that you can have a candidate who is everyone's second choice, but then loses out on the first ballot because too few people ranked them first.
      • slownews45 5y ago
        I've been voting RCV and I've yet to see this actually occur in practice. The candidates who are marketing themselves so well that they are second on almost everyone's ballot (in a 13 person race!) are generally FIRST on a fair number (relative to all 13 folks).
• google234123 5y ago
  Will this make New York more or less left wing? I'm actually curious.
  • slownews45 5y ago
    If it's also tied to open primary system it tends to make right wing places more left and left wing places more moderate. Otherwise you get a pyramid of control that drives towards extremes. Historically, let's say dems = 51% of voters, everyone votes party line. Dems have a primary, and someone (usually pretty far left) motivates base and gets 30% of primary vote and wins primary with most votes. Let's assume a 10% of dem's vote in primaries. So you have 10% * 50% * 30% = 1.5% of voters voting for the primary winner. They then go onto a matchup in general, but because it's a dem district, they win there as well (republicans usually also pick someone further right). So 1.5% of more extreme / activist voters end up really deciding, because by the time you get to general there is no more competition.
    • gipp 5y ago
      NY primaries are closed, but themselves now use RCV, and have much higher turnout than that, since they are usually the de facto general election.
    • dane-pgp 5y ago
      This "pyramid of control" observation is extremely under-appreciated. We are living in a time of extreme polarization and division, not just between parties but within them, as societies try to deal with an increasingly complex world where shifting battlefronts no longer align with traditional ideological boundaries, all while we're being mesmerized by the novel psychological environment that social media creates. Even if the "pyramid of control" doesn't drive parties towards extremes, it perhaps drives them towards memes; that is, simplistic but clear ideas that stand out among the noise. Unfortunately, while that might be enough to create a coherent identity for a party, it doesn't do anything to guarantee that the party has any sort of broad support from the population, which further alienates people from politics.
  • belval 5y ago
• slownews45 5y ago
  I love RCV where we are. * You can vote for the random third party candidate without worrying about throwing away your vote. * You seem to get a bit more moderation where we are if you also have an open primary / no primary type voting which gets really nice. California does top two past the pole of any party inf the general which means even republican votes can matter in a dem on dem election (common out here) or dem votes can pull back things in a R vs R general (rarer but does happen).
  • nickik 5y ago
    In RCV your first point is not actually true. Its better then First Pass the Post (like literally anything else). Score based voting actually does have the effect you want.
• nickik 5y ago
  Ranked Choice Voting is not really a good idea. It has very strange unintuitive behavior. Doing Score based voting is just much better and arguably simpler and less work. I specially like the Star-Voting, where they do a runoff at the end to cover some extra cases. They also have a few variants for multi-winner and representational voting. Its also much more familiar for people from real live, like online review. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STAR_voting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STAR_voting P.S: Wow a lot of down-votes. RCV is just the alternative that got the most marketing, but once you start looking into the different systems I really don't understand people can stick with RCV just because its slightly better then the system before. If you are gone invest all this effort in improving the system, why not go to something easier and objectively better. This video shows the issue very well (one of the people involved in Star voting made it): https://youtu.be/-4FXLQoLDBA https://youtu.be/-4FXLQoLDBA
  • taywrobel 5y ago
    Do you have any data around how many people in practice rank candidates between 2 and 4 (assuming a 1-5 scale)? Given how polarizing politics tends to be, especially in a two party system such as America, I’d wager that most people put all 5’s for candidates of their party and all 1’s for candidates of the other party.
    • jez 5y ago
      But the thing is that's beside the point. Even if they do that, it still allows them to express approval of multiple candidates, instead of just one in plurality voting. And the fact that there's no weird elimination rounds means that: - it's easier to teach people ("most votes wins") - it's easy to double check the results ("most votes wins") - it's incentive compatible (you never put someone you hope loses above someone you hope wins) Even if you never use 2 – 4 on a 1 – 5 scale, it's still better because you're making the same decision for multiple candidates. Only using the max and min scores in score voting / range voting has a name: approval voting. For each candidate, you're answering the question: "Would I be ok with this person being elected?"
    • nickik 5y ago
• the_reformation 5y ago
  Worth considering the argument against ranked-choice voting: https://www.wsj.com/articles/ranked-choice-voting-is-second-best-11604348234 https://www.wsj.com/articles/ranked-choice-voting-is-second-...
  • taywrobel 5y ago
    Can you summarize or provide a non-paywall link? It’s frustrating that they claim RCV is second best but (presumably) put what they argue is best below the fold.
    • thepete2 5y ago
      main points are 1. may decrease voter turnout by 5-6% 2. not as obviously fair as traditional voting 3. increases existing divides I personally think none of them are good enough points, they can all be dealt with. And 3 just means you can vote for who you like best, not just the ones in power.
      • karmelapple 5y ago
        Yeah, the idea of "increases existing divides" is extremely bad faith. It lets similar candidates make a case for their small differences, but allows: * voters to not waste their vote on one of 10 different similar candidates, hoping they picked the one with the most backing so they don't get a split vote * more than just two or three candidates to run and have a reasonable chance of winning The more people running, the better. Sure, there's some level where it gets a little over the top, but there are safeguards in place for that like minimum number of signatures from verified residents of a city/county/state, so there's currently extremely little risk of RCV being enacted and 100 candidates showing up on ballots. And even if that did happen, so what? Look up a few of the candidates and pick the one that seems to represent you best.
    • chishaku 5y ago
      Spoiler alert: they don't argue what's best. Very weak evidence offered but the motivation behind the article was near the top. "They also appeal to more ideological voters—especially on the left—by arguing that they can express their views with more precision in a ranked-choice system."
• r3trohack3r 5y ago
  If you want to get involved bringing RCV to vote in your state, all 50 states have an RCV movement. You can find and join your states movement here: https://www.rankthevote.us/states https://www.rankthevote.us/states
• JumpCrisscross 5y ago
  It frankly forced me to research more candidates than I would have. The amount of familiarity I have for every e.g. City Council candidate (which were RCV) versus DA candidate (who were standard voted) is night and day.
  • thepete2 5y ago
    IIRC in some applications of ranked choice voting it's possible to rank an arbitrary number of choices. So even voting the old-fashioned way would be fine.
    • JumpCrisscross 5y ago
      > in some applications of ranked choice voting it's possible to rank an arbitrary number of choices In New York City, it was arbitrary and up to five. So yes, perfectly backwards compatible.
• tadmilbourn 5y ago
  Great to see this on Hacker News! I'm a former YC Founder who's been working with NYC on voter education for this year's elections through RankedVote (https://www.rankedvote.co https://www.rankedvote.co). You can get a sense for what it's like to vote in a ranked-choice election here: https://app.rankedvote.co/elections/7568/Best-NYC-Pizza-Topping/7554/vote https://app.rankedvote.co/elections/7568/Best-NYC-Pizza-Topp... And you can see the results visualized here (over 20K people voted in this one!): https://app.rankedvote.co/elections/7568/Best-NYC-Pizza-Topping/7554/results https://app.rankedvote.co/elections/7568/Best-NYC-Pizza-Topp... And you can see Mayor Bill de Blasio eating a pepperoni pizza as a result of this here: https://twitter.com/therecount/status/1404809865235767315 https://twitter.com/therecount/status/1404809865235767315
  • lalaland1125 5y ago
    Very nice work! Do you think there is a need to educate voters on how to tactically vote in ranked choice voting? Every voting system has strategies to use it effectively and most voters are not used to the tactics necessary for ranked choice voting. We see a lot of education in how to use the ballot simply, but very little education on "advanced tactics". In particular, a lot of NYC voters aren't ranking either Wiley or Adams, which is a huge mistake as those are very likely to be in the final round.
    • tadmilbourn 5y ago
      Thanks! The idea is to use software to promote this reform (as well as Final-Five Voting...which is Open Primaries + RCV) As for advanced tactics, if you're really into it, Rob Richie, the CEO of FairVote (leading national advocacy org) put this in the New York Times over the weekend. It spells out a bunch of scenarios (e.g. "I want Garcia to win and Stringer to lose.") and how to tactically vote for each. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/18/opinion/nyc-mayoral-election-ballot.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/18/opinion/nyc-mayoral-elect... BUT the point I'd want to drive home is that ranked-choice allows you to be FAR more able to "vote for who you believe is best" than in the more common most votes wins approach (where you have to be strategic the moment a 3rd candidate enters).
• benlivengood 5y ago
  Alaska is now also using RCV for general elections and even has open primaries. I'm hoping RCV spreads quickly enough to more states to break the political gridlock and intense partisanship.
• thepete2 5y ago
  It gets rid of "I wanna vote for X, but they don't have a chance" and thus leads to more honest votes. IMO the major downside is complexity.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • ehmmmmmmmm 5y ago
    It also gets rid of people who are too dumb to understand RCV. Hee hee. Intellectual filter on the voting population. :)
    • fourseventy 5y ago
      dude
    • thepete2 5y ago
      I very much want dumb people to have representation.
      • ehmmmmmmmm 5y ago
        No, you don't want dumb people to have representation, because idiots will spread misinformation (everything from climate change being fake to masks being unnecessary) and adopt corrupt practices to garner their votes. Smart people are less vulnerable to misinformation. You want people who believe science, have a sense of foresight for several years, understand international politics, and how resources and economics work to decide the future of the country.
        • goatse-4-u 5y ago
          You're the problem. Go fuck yourself you repulsive elitist prick: * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * / \ \ / \ * *| | \ | | * *| `. | | : * *` | | \| | * * \ | / / \\\ ____ \\ : * * \ \/ ___~~ ~____| \ | * * \ \__~ ~__\ | * * \_ \ _.______ .______\| | * * \ \______// _ ___ _ (_(__> \ | * * \ . C ___) ______ (_(____> | / * * /\ | C ____)/ \ (_____> |_/ * * / /\| C_____) | (___> / \ * * | ( _C_____)\______/ // _/ / \ * * | \ |__ \\_________// (__/ | * * | \ \____) `____ ___' | * * | \_ ___\ /_ _/ | * * | / | | \ | * * | | / \ \ | * * | / / | | \ |* * | / / \__/\___/ | |* * | / | | | |* * | | | | | |* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• tjscott 5y ago
  An Australian comic author has written an easy to understand comic about exactly this. Let Dennis the election koala explain it, with a worked example: https://www.chickennation.com/voting/ https://www.chickennation.com/voting/
  • sumedh 5y ago
    What if the the 4th guy was second most preferred candidate of all voters? https://electionscience.org/library/the-center-squeeze-effect/ https://electionscience.org/library/the-center-squeeze-effec...
• preordained 5y ago
  Betteridge's law strikes again!
  • Afton 5y ago
    You think the answer to the headline is "no"?
• catern 5y ago
  The really unfortunate thing about NYC's ranked choice voting is that you're limited to ranking only 5 candidates. This means you still need to engage in tactical voting. You can't just rank the candidates you like, in the order you like them, because your genuine top 5 choices might not include the people who are most likely to win. You'll be "throwing your vote away" unless you include the most-likely-to-win candidates - that is, unless you vote tactically. I've seen lots of discussion in NYC where people are trying to figure out the right tactical voting to do given their views and given the fact that they can only rank 5 candidates. Ranked choice voting is supposed to make tactical voting essentially irrelevant, so this is disappointing.
  • adjkant 5y ago
    I don't disagree it's not ideal if you have more than 5 choices you like, but let's not over criticize a small flaw without appreciating the massive progress here. I read "horrible and unfortunate" and can see how people would take that to mean "back to FPTP". I voted today and put 3 small candidates and two who "have a chance". I'm really excited to see how those 3 candidates shake out in the rounds, and that alone might give them a lot more power next race. That's super exciting to me and I think we can celebrate that and then push to improve the issues after :)
    • catern 5y ago
      Yes, sorry, "horrible" was a bit strong and I edited that out of my comment immediately after posting it, heh... I do appreciate the progress, but I worry that people will regard this incarnation of ranked choice voting as "more complicated" when the entire point is that it's less complicated for the individual voter...
      • thepete2 5y ago
        Could you elaborate how RCV is less complicated? Just by eliminating tactical voting? In traditional voting you often limit yourself to the incumbents, isn't that a lot fewer choices?
• AussieWog93 5y ago
  We've had this in Australia since day 1 of Federation. One important factor the article didn't quite emphasise is how this voting system can break up the two party duopoly without creating 1920s-Reichstag-esque anarchy. It's completely normal to put a third party as your first preference, while still indicating that you'd prefer Kodos to Kang. In practical terms, it means the Dems would actually have to do some work in order to win the black vote, and likewise for the Republicans and working class white people.
  • ekimekim 5y ago
    Fellow Aussie and RCV-enthusiast here, but minor correction: RCV was introduced in 1918 in response to elections where a minority candidate won due to vote splitting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_system_of_Australia#Preferential_voting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_system_of_Australia#...
  • foobarbazetc 5y ago
    Your last paragraph shows a lack of depth in understanding American history and politics. -- an Australian/American living in the US.
    • munk-a 5y ago
      Would you mind elaborating a bit on that point? From what I've seen RCV does tend to have a really strong moderating pull on elections that something like MMP manages to dodge, but it does mean that big tent parties will often experience strong pull off and, honestly, the African American community is often under served by a lot of Dem economic policies - though I'm really speaking in demographic generalities here.
  • twelvechairs 5y ago
    Worth noting Australia is still generally a 2-party system in the lower house (1 representative each area) but less so in the senate (where each state elects the top 12 senators). Australians still look at envy at the New Zealand and German systems of Mixed Member Proportional representation (MMP) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed-member_proportional_representation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed-member_proportional_re...
• ant6n 5y ago
  The system allows ppl to vote a third party without „wasting“ their vote. It favors consensus candidates — that’s great when a single representative is needed (like a major). For parliaments, however, the system favors the two main parties, since a candidate needs those 50% support. This means parliament, which _should_ reflect the pluralism of society, will not actually reflect that pluralism. In effect, this ranked ballot business is a way to appear to engage in voting reform without actually wanting to change anything about the outdated 2-party system. In Canada, the liberals promised election reform. Until it turned out that ranked ballot was not going to be recommended by the electoral reform commission. Since that was the system the Liberals wanted in order to improve their chances in future elections, and they had little interest in actually representative voting systems, they scuttled the process and reneged on their promise that this would be the last election using the first past the post system.
• djbebs 5y ago
  Personally I don't see much benefit for this system, opposed to approval voting.
  • s0ss 5y ago
    Have you read about how it works?
  • karmelapple 5y ago
    Both are miles beyond first past the post, and both scare many people just because it's something new and different. Hopefully you can support any change locally that gets us off of first past the post. Once we get some voting changes, hopefully that makes future changes even easier to make... though I know that's wishful thinking.
    • elihu 5y ago
      > Both are miles beyond first past the post, Actually, that's debatable. There was an interesting simulation done awhile back [1] that compared voting systems, and they found that if people voted honestly then IRV is better, but if people vote strategically the result isn't any more democratically optimal than FPTP. Which is what we should probably expect to happen when voters figure out that it's only safe to put your first choice first when they're the overwhelming favorite to win or they have no hope of winning. Otherwise it's complicated: you could cause your favorite candidate to lose by ranking them too high. Obviously this is one simulation and results would be different with different assumptions. But I think it's worth pushing back on the idea that IRV is way better. It solves the problem of minor candidates being spoilers, but what if people actually start voting for minor candidates and they become major candidates? With 3 or more major candidates IRV starts looking like not such a great system. The problem with talking about this is that the problems with FPTP are readily apparent and easy to explain. The problems with IRV aren't obvious and are harder to explain. [1] https://electionscience.org/library/tactical-voting-basics/ https://electionscience.org/library/tactical-voting-basics/
      • karmelapple 5y ago
• kyleblarson 5y ago
  Possibly naive question here but in my limited exposure to articles about RCV it seems to be popular in more historically liberal areas. Is that true and why might that be the case?
  • lr4444lr 5y ago
    The progenitor Kenneth Arrow was pretty wonkish even among economists. RCV appeals to technocrats, who like the provability of its assertions. It's also a change from tradition. People with these tendencies tend to skew left.
    • Ericson2314 5y ago
      real technocrats know instant runoff is quite lousy. It's very unclear why this is the alternative that becomes so popular.
      • lr4444lr 5y ago
        Why is it lousy on technocratic terms?
  • _AzMoo 5y ago
    Because liberal (progressive) areas are full of people who are advocating for change. What that change should actually be varies greatly between individuals, so there is lots of fragmentation and in-fighting. The idea that you could vote for your specific niche but fall back to your preferred monolith is desirable because you don't feel like you're wasting your vote by voting for a minor party who will likely never win a seat. Conservative areas are full of people who want to maintain the status quo. They have varying ideas about how things should be but are unified by the fundamental idea that things shouldn't change. Since there is far less fragmentation, there is far less need to give your voice to a niche so they're happy to have their vote go directly to a monolith.
  • tadmilbourn 5y ago
    New York City is the one driving the news cycle right now (and rightfully so as 8 million people have the potential to use RCV for the first time). And people view NYC as pretty liberal. But a great thing about RCV is that it's not inherently partisan or favoring of left or right. As a result, in addition to being used in places like New York City, San Francisco, and Maine...it recently passed for use in Alaska and nearly two dozen cities in Utah. That's a pretty diverse set of locales across the U.S. Article on Alaska: https://www.vox.com/2020/11/19/21537126/alaska-measure-2-ranked-choice-voting-results https://www.vox.com/2020/11/19/21537126/alaska-measure-2-ran... Article on Utah: https://www.sltrib.com/news/politics/2021/05/11/many-utahns-will-use/ https://www.sltrib.com/news/politics/2021/05/11/many-utahns-...
• obelos 5y ago
  It’s exciting to see another community replace the most pessimal voting method with the second most pessimal one! (In terms of Bayesian regret). I hope the experience is not so frustrating that they end up repealing it as several other municipalities have done after being dissatisfied with IRV/RCV’s weird behaviors.
• delecti 5y ago
  I feel like approval voting gets overlooked too much in discussions of voting systems. It's so much simpler than instant runoff, and so much less prone to spoilers than first-past-the-post.
  • bostonvaulter2 5y ago
    Yeah, I'm a big fan of approval voting, the amount of tactical voting is much less compared to most other voting systems (including Plurality and Ranked Choice). In particular a big flaw of Ranked Choice Voting is the center squeeze effect. This site has a good overview of it: https://electionscience.org/library/the-center-squeeze-effect/ https://electionscience.org/library/the-center-squeeze-effec...
• dekhn 5y ago
  back when I was a postdoc my group had a journal club and some joker decided to include a paper comparing different alternative voting schemes (US seems to be mostly "majority vote and full runoffs with ties). We made it through instant runoff, and a few other approaches, and then Of course, the Joker decided to lay a landmine at the last minute (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theore...) at which point the hardcore quantative biologists all started paying attention. "Wait... there are interesting math problems relevant to politics? Math... solves a real world problem? Why am I working in biology?"
  • dane-pgp 5y ago
    Did the Joker admit that Arrow's impossibility theorem doesn't apply to score-based voting systems, or to single-winner elections at all? Some people just want to watch the world learn.
    • dekhn 5y ago
      Well, it was 20 years ago, but I do recall there was some discussion at the end about where Arrow's applied, and where it didn't.
      • selimthegrim 5y ago
        Where'd all the quantitative biologists migrate to?
• blazespin 5y ago
  Downside with RCV is it really doesn't do anything it purports to do, but major upside is it encourages voter education. Which, IMHO, is by far the biggest problem with American politics.
  • s0ss 5y ago
    Care to elaborate? I fail to see how it "doesn't do anything it purports to do". It allows people to pick/rank multiple candidates, which neuters the whole "least of two evils" problem traditional elections have. It would also destroy the two party duopoly, If it were used more widely. That'd be great.
    • coryrc 5y ago
      IRV has nearly the same effect as FPTP on the two-party system. Sorry, I don't know if this is a good link: https://electionscience.org/library/irv-degrades-to-plurality/ https://electionscience.org/library/irv-degrades-to-pluralit...
      • dane-pgp 5y ago
        Even if IRV keeps the same two parties in power forever, there is still scope for it vastly improving politics by improving the platforms of those parties. For example, if large numbers of Democrat voters decided it was safe to vote Green and put the Democrats as their second choice, the Democrats would quickly start to adopt more Green policies for fear that the two-party system kicks them out and the Greens become the major left-wing party. As another example, if the Democrats were confident that there are more voters out there who are moderates than far-left voters, they could confidently oppose some far-left policies while knowing that they would still be the second-preference of far-left voters. That would allow them to appeal to more GOP voters and avoid being associated with fringe policies, while also expanding the Overton Window.
• dllthomas 5y ago
  I don't like instant runoff. It seems like it systematically rejects compromise, and I think finding the proper compromise is an important goal of a voting system. For instance, imagine a sectarian society split roughly equally between 3 religions, with 4 candidates running. The first three push theocracy favoring their respective religion, while the fourth favors tolerance and secular government. If, statistically, most of the citizens favor their flavor of theocracy, are happy to put up with secular tolerance, and are vehemently (maybe violently) opposed to living under another religions theocracy, it seems that clearly the best choice is that fourth candidate. If everyone votes their honest preferences, the first thing IRV does is throw away that fourth candidate. The vote might not go that way if enough people recognize the situation and vote strategically, ranking what they see as the proper compromise artificially high. But that's true of any voting system and undermines major selling points of RCV.
  • lotsofpulp 5y ago
    Ranked choice voting does not throw away the fourth candidate, assuming people are voting for the secular person as 2nd in your example.
    • wslack 5y ago
      His point is that if few rank the fourth candidate first, they will be the first eliminated in the runoff process.
      • lotsofpulp 5y ago
        Oh, yes, instant runoff is not the way to count, I agree.
    • dllthomas 5y ago
      Most RCV systems in practice use IRV (including, IIUC, the New York system under discussion), and I believe I was correct in what I attributed to IRV vs RCV more generally.
    • coryrc 5y ago
• kragen 5y ago
  It's unfortunate that NPR isn't aware that there are ranked-choice voting methods other than IRV, which is what they describe in this article.† Australia, for example, uses a variant of Hare-Clark STV, which is a much better ranked-choice voting method than IRV (though it reduces to IRV in single-winner elections), and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schulze_method https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schulze_method is a ranked-choice voting method used by many organizations which guarantees that the Condorcet winner, if any, wins—a property STV lacks. All these methods are vulnerable to Arrow's paradox, but many of them would produce better results in practice than IRV or especially the antiquated first-past-the-post method normally used in the US. In general, though, you can't expect democratic elections to produce results of higher quality than the voters, and the last year and a half of covid response has made it clear that the voters are of very low quality—not just in New York, but worldwide. As long as your healthcare, retirement, and policing are run by people who believe in astrology, creationism, witchcraft, Holocaust denial, vaccine-caused autism, and global-warming denial, they aren't going to be run well. Democracy is much less bad than the alternatives, but even democratic governments are spectacularly incompetent. Putting them in charge of anything important is like giving a machete to a chimpanzee. https://www.pewresearch.org/2010/09/30/why-should-we-care-what-people-think-when-so-many-are-so-dumb/ https://www.pewresearch.org/2010/09/30/why-should-we-care-wh... (25% of USAns believed in astrology, 68% in creationism) https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-birther-myth-stuck-around-for-years-the-election-fraud-myth-might-too/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-birther-myth-stuck-... (34% of USAns think Obama was born in Kenya) https://news.gallup.com/poll/276929/fewer-continue-vaccines-important.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/276929/fewer-continue-vaccines-... (10% of USAns think vaccines cause autism) https://slate.com/human-interest/2020/10/millennials-holocaust-knowledge-survey-debate.html https://slate.com/human-interest/2020/10/millennials-holocau... (63% of USAns couldn't place the Holocaust's Jewish death toll to within a factor of 3) https://spot.colorado.edu/~huemer/papers/passivity.htm https://spot.colorado.edu/~huemer/papers/passivity.htm Michael Huemer's classic paper covering a lot of such figures, and their implications for public policy; quoting Delli Karpini and Keeter: > The most commonly known fact about George [H.W.] Bush’s opinions while he was president was that he hated broccoli. During the 1992 presidential campaign 89 percent of the public knew that Vice President Quayle was feuding with the television character Murphy Brown, but only 19 percent could characterize Bill Clinton’s record on the environment. Also during that campaign, 86 percent of the public knew that the Bushes’ dog was named Millie, yet only 15 percent knew that both presidential candidates supported the death penalty. Judge Wapner (host of the television series “The People’s Court”) was identified by more people than were Chief Justices Burger or Rehnquist. It might sound like I'm picking on the US in particular here, but the US is just where we have the most data. The situation is nearly as bad, or even worse, everywhere else. ______ † Perhaps they are aware but assume their public is too dumb to understand the difference.
• alamortsubite 5y ago
  If electoral systems interest you, I highly recommend William Poundstone's "Gaming the Vote: Why Elections Aren't Fair (and What We Can Do About It)". It focuses on the USA, so it's maybe better appreciated by American readers, but I found it highly entertaining and edifying, as I have several of the author's other works.
• godelski 5y ago
  RCV doesn't solve what is claimed in the article. It is interesting since countries that they give as examples are clear evidence of this. (Yes, I'm going to advocate cardinal systems like Approval, Range/Score, and STAR) > More moderate candidates. RCV doesn't encourage this at all. Australia is a clear example of this. In the house Liberal and Labor (the two major parties) control 85% of seats. The next major party (National) is part of a coalition with the Liberals and this sums to 95%. Things are only slightly better in the senate. Look at any country that uses IRC/RCV and you'll see a similar pattern. The system didn't encourage more parties and more moderates, Australia still has divided politics like America. As to the more parties, I have an alternative explanation. They use a parliament, which uses proportionate representation. Don't buy it? Go look at countries with parliaments and don't have IRV and you'll find similar distributions. We also need to recognize that in America our parties are closer to coalitions in other countries out of the necessity. I'm not sure how anyone can look at someone like AOC or Sanders and think they are the same "party" (by other country norms) as Biden or Pelosi (similarly on the Republican side, though Trump caused a consolidation). > ranked-choice voting can drastically reduce the possibility of spoilers. Yes, but no. It reduces spoilers when a candidate is not going to win anyways (e.g. Jo Jorgensen spoiling Trump). But this does not prevent spoiling when candidates are similar (e.g. Bernie spoiling Biden), which is the specific type of spoiling that we are concerned about![0] This is known as the Favorite Betrayer[1] and is of grave concern if we want more parties (IRV/RCV fails this) > More cost-effective __than other runoff elections__ The reason for the qualifier is because cardinal systems are extremely cost-effective. They have higher VSE than RCV (maximal VSE is from Condorcet methods, but not significantly higher than any cardinal system[2][3]), they scale better (you give candidates independent values instead of comparing, although you can rank if that's easier for you and you don't mess anything up), and you don't have to do any run-offs/mini-elections/rounds (STAR requires 2 rounds of voting max), which it isn't uncommon for IRV to cause many rounds of voting. This greatly increases complexity and reduces transparency (cardinal systems are trivial to calculate). Why is transparency important? Just look at Arizona. Now imagine if the system was more complicated (no matter what side of the argument you're on there should be an argument for a clear and easy to calculate system for the winner. Multiple rounds of vote counting greatly increases complexity and chance for mistakes, which compound). > Less negative campaigning. There's no evidence for this. Australia's ads don't look that different from American ones. So I'm not sure what they are getting on about. There's plenty of attack ads. I also want to plug Election Science[4] (I'm not affiliated), another non-partisan voting group (they previously advocated for STAR but have shifted to Approval with the explanation being that Approval is "good enough" and lower complexity/higher transparency) [0] https://electionscience.org/library/the-spoiler-effect/ https://electionscience.org/library/the-spoiler-effect/ (see video for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtKAScORevQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtKAScORevQ) [1] https://electowiki.org/wiki/Favorite_betrayal_criterion https://electowiki.org/wiki/Favorite_betrayal_criterion (A voter can never get a worse result by expressing the maximum support for their favorite candidate) [2] Voting methods animated (author is a HN user): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4FXLQoLDBA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4FXLQoLDBA [3] VSE (which isn't the only metric btw. Especially compare bounds due to strategy): https://electionscience.github.io/vse-sim/VSE/ https://electionscience.github.io/vse-sim/VSE/ [4] https://electionscience.org/ https://electionscience.org/
• 6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
  Here's my obligatory plug for approval voting. Approval is the "checkboxes instead of radio buttons" voting method. Select any, instead of select one. Vote for whoever you want and the candidate with the most votes wins. It gets rid of a lot of the drawbacks of FPTP while retaining its simplicity, unlike IRV. I've always wanted to get people to vote on voting systems with a variety of voting methods and see what wins by what method. I'd vote this: [ ] FPTP [x] Approval [x] IRV Approval > IRV > FPTP As an aside: It's a pet peeve when people call instant runoff voting (IRV) "ranked choice voting (RCV)." There are many kinds of RCV, and IRV is just one, and it has some pretty undesirable properties (a condorcet winner doesn't always win, so there can be a losing candidate that the majority prefers over the winner).
  • lostdog 5y ago
    So many plugs for approval voting in these threads, but it just seems so terrible for what people really want to express. For example, in 2016, plenty of people wanted Sanders more than Clinton. Who are they supposed to "approve?" Many of them would note their preference by just approving Sanders and not Clinton, which is the opposite of what a voting system is supposed to help achieve.
    • obelos 5y ago
      People voting for the only candidate they want just doesn’t strike me as a failure. The failure comes when someone has to vote for someone who is not their preferred. That said, the 2016 Dem primary doesn’t seem like a useful example for testing the constraints of any voting system since there were really only two viable candidates. All methods work equally well under those conditions. Why would someone approve both of the only two candidates when only one of them could win?
      • lostdog 5y ago
        I was talking about the general election not the primary. (If we used a decent voting system, then all popular candidates could go to the general).
    • 5y ago
• glangdale 5y ago
  A lot of nitpicking here, as is typical on HN, but the Australian experience is instructive. We can vote for the Greens without "throwing our left-of-centre" vote away and still preferring Labor to Liberal. Ranking only up to 5 is reasonable - if you want the simplicity of the old system, and don't want to research beyond 3 candidates, don't! I can't see the weird complaining about having to learn more about candidates - there's usually only a few viable well-known candidates. You don't have to go research the Natural Law Party or Animal Justice or whoever. The only cautionary tale is the whole horse-trading element of preferences does lead to some weird candidates making it in at the margins. We had someone who was semi-famous for engaging in a Kangaroo poo fight get in this way: https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/it-was-people-play-would-be-senator-ricky-muir-on-the-kangaroo-poo-fight-20130909-2tg2g.html https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/it-was-people-play-w... But this "preference whispering" is more of a big deal when preferences were allocated by parties - we had an option where you could vote a single '1' for a given party and it was their preferences that wound up being automatically applied (if you didn't go through hand-numbering all the preferences). So minor party deals became a huge deal. It's not going to be so big if you only have to number 5 and don't even have to keep numbering.
  • onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
    In this US, you would rarely need to do any additional research. There are almost always only 2 choices - the Democratic candidate and the Republican candidate. Anyone voting for another candidate is simply saying that's who they /REALLY/ wish would win, but most people aren't willing to throw their vote in the garbage to virtue signal. That 3rd party candidate almost never has a chance at winning. Neither does the alternative from your own party. Stacked ranking simply allows you to say "I hate both candidates from the major parties, and I'd rather have this other person in office, but since I have to pick one of the two of them, I guess I'll pick X."
    • kmkemp 5y ago
      It would mostly be for primaries, where the field is wider, but don't discount how ranked choice voting could lead to more than 2 viable parties.
• caf 5y ago
  Actual results from the last Australian Federal Election showing how the count proceeded in each electorate/division: https://results.aec.gov.au/24310/Website/Downloads/HouseDopByDivisionDownload-24310.csv https://results.aec.gov.au/24310/Website/Downloads/HouseDopB... (The count continues even after a candidate gets over 50% just in order to get a notional "two candidate preferred" count between the last two remaining).
• yonran 5y ago
  “Lots of people don't fill out all the choices” is an important downside. We’ve had Instant Runoff Voting in San Francisco since 2004, and people still don’t fill out all the choices, so their votes are discarded whereas the voters probably would have voted among the final two choices had there been a runoff election. For example, in June 2018 London Breed won the mayoral election against two candidates who were closer aligned politically (Jane Kim and Mark Leno, who were further left) https://dbaron.org/sf-elections-rcv/#%7B%22election%22%3A%2220180627%22%2C%22filters%22%3A%5B%5D%7D https://dbaron.org/sf-elections-rcv/#%7B%22election%22%3A%22... and in Nov 2019 Chesa Boudin won the District Attorney race against 3 candidates who were more moderate https://dbaron.org/sf-elections-rcv/#%7B%22election%22%3A%22CVR_Export_20191125163446%22%2C%22filters%22%3A%5B%5D%2C%22contest%22%3A%22339%22%7D https://dbaron.org/sf-elections-rcv/#%7B%22election%22%3A%22... . In both cases, the margin of victory was far more narrow than the number of votes that were exhausted in the final round of voting, so due to insufficient voter education I would consider vote splitting still a significant problem even with IRV. (Another possibility is that the ballots are exhausted by the 3 candidate limit in San Francisco.)
• yboris 5y ago
  As an excellent alternative: Approval Voting An amazing in-depth interview podcast from 80,000 Hours on the subject: "Politics is so much worse because we use an atrocious 18th century voting system" https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/aaron-hamlin-voting-reform/ https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/aaron-hamlin-voting-...
• lowbloodsugar 5y ago
  I like how we're all debating how we should best choose our masters, rather than how we can vote on the issue directly, like in a democracy.
  • renewiltord 5y ago
    There was a candidate like that in California (for the state senate?). Anyway, his whole pitch was “If you elect me, I will allow you to vote through me as a proxy. Every bill will have you able to vote and then I’ll vote the way people have told me to vote” I am somewhat sure this dude existed and he may be the same guy who ran as a name full of 1s and 0s that decoded as ASCII to some nonsense. But if it didn’t happen, I dreamed it.
• throwaway0a5e 5y ago
  Call my cynical but there's no way this is happening in NYC unless the establishment has crunched the numbers and decided it benefits them. Vermont state elections, Cleveland, etc. I could see those switching as a genuine experiment. But NY is too tightly under the control of the entrenched establishment to be doing this unless the establishment benefits.
  • jrockway 5y ago
    I think it's more complicated than that. Ranked choice voting was put on the ballot and 75% voted in favor, so if it's some scam from the powers that be, they did get a lot of people to agree with them. I believe the underlying problem was that in 2009 an expensive runoff election was needed, and that was the catalyst to start thinking about IRV. Saving tax dollars is about all you can find for the underlying motive.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
• jffry 5y ago
  Interesting anecdote: When I lived in Cambridge, MA in 2015, we had an election for 9 city council seats with 23 candidates. Here's a specimen ballot from that election (PDF): https://www.cambridgema.gov/election/~/media/483A54C6BC8546F8AD407D87FACFFC5E.ashx https://www.cambridgema.gov/election/~/media/483A54C6BC8546F... The "slate" strategy (called "horse-trading" in this article) was strongly entrenched for that election. The idea is that if you and other people all support some "slate" that is a subset of the running candidates, then if you all rank those candidates in the same order on your ballot, it can boost every one of those candidates chances of being elected (this strategy is most effective in multi-seat races, such as this 9-seat city council race). The reason this works is that if a candidate meets the quota of first-choice votes needed to earn a seat, they are elected. If more people chose them as first choice than the quota, some of the ballots will instead roll over and count for their second choice (etc etc). Which ballots move on? This is largely influenced by the overall proportion of second-choice votes. So if everybody packed the two candidates in the same order, it maximizes the number of ballots for that candidate that will be used in the second-choice tally. All voting systems have tradeoffs. The nice property of this one is that I was able to elect multiple city councilors who supported policies that mattered to me. Likewise, as long as 1/9th (plus one) of the city's population put a candidate as their #1 choice in that election, that candidate was guaranteed a seat. That sounds pretty fair to me!
• paretoman 5y ago
  Here's an interactive explainer for Ranked Choice voting and more: https://www.smartvotesim.com/irv https://www.smartvotesim.com/irv Yesterday, I was pleasantly surprised to see another great interactive explainer by Harry Stevens in the Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/interactive/2021/ranked-choice-voting-guide/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/interactive/2021/ran...
  • paretoman 5y ago
    Okay, one more from Justin because it is a video: https://youtu.be/yhO6jfHPFQU https://youtu.be/yhO6jfHPFQU Of course, everyone already knows CGP Grey's videos, right? .. wait.. nobody's posted it yet? OK, here's his whole video set: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7tWHJfhiyo&index=1&list=PLkLBH5Kzphe0Qu8mCW1Leef2xSxPK1FIe https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7tWHJfhiyo&index=1&list=PLk...
• _spduchamp 5y ago
  We had a ranked ballot election here in Canada and it was amazing! Candidates when out knocking on doors could say, "I might not get your first choice but help me understand what I could do to be your second choice." It was a less divisive election and there were new young candidates were on the ballot that wouldn't have run under the old first-past-the-post system. There is less incentive for attack campaigns in these types of elections. Here's a nicely done report about that... https://www.unlockdemocracy.ca/londonleads https://www.unlockdemocracy.ca/londonleads
• hash872 5y ago
  I'm a bit skeptical of ranked choice voting- one of the key issues for the US that rarely gets discussed is that we can't use it to elect our President, due to the 12th Amendment, unless you're OK with the states selecting him/her instead. The 12th Amendment states that the Presidential winner has to have a majority of the Electoral College votes on the first round of voting- no multiple rounds- otherwise each state gets to cast one vote to pick who out of the top 3 candidates gets the job. (Yes it technically says 'the House' picks, but it's not the full House of Representatives- instead they give each state 1 vote). I've presented this to various ranked choice voting enthusiasts, and have never heard a good response. Feel free to read the plain text of the 12th Amendment for yourself, it seems quite clear to me! 'The person having the greatest Number of votes for President, shall be the President, if such number be a majority of the whole number of Electors appointed; and if no person have such majority, then from the persons having the highest numbers not exceeding three on the list of those voted for as President, the House of Representatives shall choose immediately, by ballot, the President.' https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/amendmentxii https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/amendmentxii
  • gizmo385 5y ago
    > one of the key issues for the US that rarely gets discussed is that we can't use it to elect our President, due to the 12th Amendment, unless you're OK with the states selecting him/her instead. The 12th Amendment states that the Presidential winner has to have a majority of the Electoral College votes on the first round of voting- no multiple rounds- otherwise each state gets to cast one vote to pick who out of the top 3 candidates gets the job This sounds like it would preclude a nation-wide RCV implementation (without a constitutional amendment), but a per state implementation of RCV would still be an improvement over the current system in my opinion. I don't see how that would run afoul of the constitution, but I'm not a lawyer.
  • joshuamorton 5y ago
    Well that's easy: you're mistaken. The 12th amendment manager the election by the electors, these are representatives. So someone needs a simple majority of the 538 electoral votes when those are tallied in January. How the states determine which electors to send is up to each state. New York could select it's electors based on a ranked choice ballot.
• elihu 5y ago
  This isn't very good reporting by NPR. The downsides they list are just straw men easily dismissed by RCV proponents, and they give an appearance of fair-and-balanced coverage while making opponents of RCV sound like Luddites. (It also seems like they got all their information from, say, chatting with people from FairVote and not by actually reading online discussions like this one here.) RCV does have some serious problems. Eliminating the candidate with the least first-place votes at each round means a high probability of rejecting compromise candidates that may be a lot of voters' second choice. Also, placing your first-choice candidate first isn't always a safe choice. RCV is non-monotonic, which means it's possible that ranking someone first might actually cause them to lose. That's weird, and I think it's a good enough reason to investigate other options. I think we should use approval voting in single-winner state and national elections. It's simple and it solves the problem of 3rd party candidates being spoilers (which is why most voting reform advocates dislike FPTP in the first place) without introducing any new problems. STAR is also a pretty good system. Approval voting is currently used in Fargo ND and they recently adopted it in St. Louis as well. There's a lot at stake when we change our election systems. I think one of the biggest risks is that we adopt RCV widely and then when people figure out that it's not actually all that great, they aren't going to want to try something different. They'll either say "democracy just doesn't work very well and there's nothing we can do about it", or they'll go back to FPTP because they were misled by a successful PR campaign that sounds like it has the backing of voting system experts. Voting systems should be changed rarely, and when it happens we should use the best available system, not chase the latest fad.
  • aplummer 5y ago
    > RCV does have some serious problems. Eliminating the candidate with the least first-place votes at each round means a high probability of rejecting compromise candidates that may be a lot of voters' second choice. Also, placing your first-choice candidate first isn't always a safe choice. RCV is non-monotonic, which means it's possible that ranking someone first might actually cause them to lose. That's weird, and I think it's a good enough reason to investigate other options. This is actually not true and the opposite of what happens. With RCV, people feel comfortable putting compromise or 3rd party candidates first because they know they aren't throwing away a vote. It creates a system where there is more middle ground and less black and white 2 party systems.
• 55555 5y ago
  How about everyone gets 100 votes and can give any number to each candidate. Wouldn't this be better?
• vb42 5y ago
  I recently built a visual exploration of ranked-choice voting that might be of interest: https://vinaybhaip.com/ranked-choice https://vinaybhaip.com/ranked-choice. At the end of the the visual explanation, it allows you to simulate different elections
• Timothycquinn 5y ago
  GCP Gray has a great series on voting systems. Here is his one on Alternative Voting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Y3jE3B8HsE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Y3jE3B8HsE Highly recommend his videos. Funny and informative. Also his Podcast, Hello Internet is awesome.
• nappy 5y ago
  In a reality where people have limited time and mental energy to properly rank order all candidates for all positions, the jungle (non-partisan) primary practiced in Louisiana and some other states is a wonderful alternative. The unfortunate reality of RCV is that it provides a disproportionate amount of voting power to those who have more resources to spend time on assessment of their true preferences. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonpartisan_blanket_primary https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonpartisan_blanket_primary
• nappy 5y ago
  It always blows my mind when people breathlessly tell me why RCV is so clearly the answer, and they've never heard of Arrow's Impossibility Theorem.
• ethn 5y ago
  In social choice theory, May's theorem states that simple majority voting is the only anonymous, neutral, and positively responsive social choice function between two alternatives. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/May%27s_theorem https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/May%27s_theorem
• RocketSyntax 5y ago
  MA did this last year
• grumblenum 5y ago
  What is the name of the voting system where the tabulators decide my vote for me and I get a sticker for showing up?