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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

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.
  - zozbot234 5y ago
    Yes, approval voting is a simpler system that also tends to reward moderate or "compromise" candidates.
    - JumpCrisscross 5y ago
      > approval voting is a simpler system that also tends to reward moderate or "compromise" candidates I don't have a strong preference between approval and RCV. But I think people closer to politics would. Being able to "be behind" one candidate is a meaningful promoter of civic engagement; forcing that decision is deeply entrenched in our politics. That makes approval voting a tougher sell for implementation than RCV. Given how much better RCV and approval voting are than FPTP, it seems sensible to go with RCV.
      - zozbot234 5y ago
        Implementation is actually a lot simpler. With approval voting, there is no change to the physical paper ballot; you just allow the voter to punch multiple holes on a single ballot, to represent the candidates she "approves" of.
        JumpCrisscross 5y ago
        > Implementation is actually a lot simpler That's not the phase of implementation that's difficult with any of these systems. It's getting the rules changed. Approval voting changes civic engagement in a fundamental way. (It also has much less real-world data behind it.)
      - 5y ago
- twic 5y ago
  The whole point is to allow this. Why don't you like it?
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > I don’t like tank 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. Any system other than plurality allows a candidate with more first place votes to beat one with fewer. Any system other than plurality or majority/runoff allows a candidate with fewer first place votes than the second place. But, much as I dislike IRV, I’m rather skeptical of the “winner should always be one of the top two by first-place vote count” criteria suggested. OTOH, using any ranked ballots method, I can see an argument to do a wide open “primary” using the method and then if the winner is not also the majority first-place winner doing a separate “runoff” election using the same system of, say, 5 runoff candidates, determined as: (1) the candidate that won using the ranked-ballots voting method selected (2) any of the top two by first place votes not selected by (1) (3) the first candidate elected by the selected ranked ballots method when the candidates admitted to the runoff by (1) and (2) are disregarded, plus enough candidates elected by the same method disregarding all previously-admitted candidates to complete the pool of 5 candidates. The idea being to deal with the risk of “candidate was elected due to insufficient exposure and vetting” risk, without fundamentally compromising the desirable behavior of the selected ranked-ballots method.
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.

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.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  Yes, approval voting is a simpler system that also tends to reward moderate or "compromise" candidates.
  - JumpCrisscross 5y ago
    > approval voting is a simpler system that also tends to reward moderate or "compromise" candidates I don't have a strong preference between approval and RCV. But I think people closer to politics would. Being able to "be behind" one candidate is a meaningful promoter of civic engagement; forcing that decision is deeply entrenched in our politics. That makes approval voting a tougher sell for implementation than RCV. Given how much better RCV and approval voting are than FPTP, it seems sensible to go with RCV.
    - zozbot234 5y ago
      Implementation is actually a lot simpler. With approval voting, there is no change to the physical paper ballot; you just allow the voter to punch multiple holes on a single ballot, to represent the candidates she "approves" of.
      - JumpCrisscross 5y ago
        > Implementation is actually a lot simpler That's not the phase of implementation that's difficult with any of these systems. It's getting the rules changed. Approval voting changes civic engagement in a fundamental way. (It also has much less real-world data behind it.)
    - 5y ago
twic 5y ago
The whole point is to allow this. Why don't you like it?
dragonwriter 5y ago
> I don’t like tank 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. Any system other than plurality allows a candidate with more first place votes to beat one with fewer. Any system other than plurality or majority/runoff allows a candidate with fewer first place votes than the second place. But, much as I dislike IRV, I’m rather skeptical of the “winner should always be one of the top two by first-place vote count” criteria suggested. OTOH, using any ranked ballots method, I can see an argument to do a wide open “primary” using the method and then if the winner is not also the majority first-place winner doing a separate “runoff” election using the same system of, say, 5 runoff candidates, determined as: (1) the candidate that won using the ranked-ballots voting method selected (2) any of the top two by first place votes not selected by (1) (3) the first candidate elected by the selected ranked ballots method when the candidates admitted to the runoff by (1) and (2) are disregarded, plus enough candidates elected by the same method disregarding all previously-admitted candidates to complete the pool of 5 candidates. The idea being to deal with the risk of “candidate was elected due to insufficient exposure and vetting” risk, without fundamentally compromising the desirable behavior of the selected ranked-ballots method.

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.