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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" vo

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.
  - munk-a 5y ago
    Primaries mostly exist due to the FPTP voting system - dropping that would remove a pretty big reason to have them at all which could lead to cheaper elections... campaign fundraising was ever reigned in - rather, the elections will probably be cheaper but it's unlikely you'd notice due to the insane campaign budgets that are common.
    - asteroidbelt 5y ago
      Cost of elections is not an issue, but replacing FPTP with ranked choice makes candidate less dependent on the party. Remember Trump 2016 elections, when Trump disagreed with the way debates were conducted. Trump had to bend because there could be only one Republican candidate. Not saying Trump was right, but making candidate less dependent on the party (i. e. redistribute the power from the party committee to the candidates) would be good thing.
- subsubzero 5y ago
  If this achieves widespread in the US I could see regional libertarian and green candidates picking up spots in certain areas in US.
  - throw5away 5y ago
    Do you have something US-specific to indicate that this would be the case? Neither empirics nor theory support your claim. https://rangevoting.org/TarrIrvSumm.html https://rangevoting.org/TarrIrvSumm.html
    - sellyme 5y ago
      The very first line of your source references Australia as an example of why ranked voting would not give third parties any influence. This seems like an odd choice, given that Australia currently has five different parties in Parliament, and has in recent history had a third party be the deciding "vote" on who forms government. It seems like an even odder choice for you to reference it as a counterpoint in this specific case given that one of those parties is literally called "the Greens".
- wyre 5y ago
  Statistically, in the US a 3rd party has a 0% chance of winning because a third party has never won. Maybe within the first 100 years; history isn’t my strongest subject.
  - koolba 5y ago
    > Statistically, in the US a 3rd party has a 0% chance of winning because a third party has never won. Not recently for President, but third parties have won at every other level of government including Governors, Representatives, and Senators.
    - munk-a 5y ago
      I would mention that everyone's favorite example in this category (Bernie Sanders) does secure the democratic primary nomination for senate each election - he just refuses to leverage it in the general election. But failing to do that would lead to a much harder general election since the Dems would likely put up a competing candidate and split the vote three ways.
    - dragonwriter 5y ago
      > Not recently for President, Not ever. The Federalists collapsed before we got a Whig, and the Whigs before we got a Republican, and those and the Democratic (ex-Democratic-Republican) parties are the only four that have won the Presidency. > but third parties have won at every other level of government including Governors, Representatives, and Senators. Sure, but its easy to overcount them; state two-party systems (where they haven't been effectively one-party systems) haven't historically always aligned with the national two-party system (e.g., Missouri’s [ed: or, in the real world, Minnesota’s] Farmer-Labor Party was the second (and later first) party in the state for years, alongside the Republicans, before it merged with a local third party—and thereby joined the national Democrats—as the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party.
      - munk-a 5y ago
        I would consider Sanders to be a pretty legitimate third party candidate - VT democrats have coalesced around him recently but his initial bid for Senate was pretty spectacular. He managed to ride an extremely popular mayoral career into a state that is extremely dominated by Burlington population-wise. Burlington metro is roughly as large a proportion of the VT voting block as NYC metro is for NY.
- xdennis 5y ago
  The USA is a two-party state because of the voting system. If people could confidently vote for another party there wouldn't be just two parties. It's even reflected in the language, like how people task about being "bi-partizan" instead of "non-partizan".
  - smitty1e 5y ago
    > The USA is a two-party state because of the voting system. If people could confidently vote for another party there wouldn't be just two parties. There are plenty of other parties, for example: Libertarian, Green, and Constitution. In practice, these minor parties (could be) funded by the opposite end of the spectrum to weaken the other side (just a hunch). But that gets at one possibility of why these minor parties never do better than, say Ross Perot (who got no electoral votes, but sunk Bush41 in 1992): scale. It takes a whale of a party to carry a pond the size of the US. And really, the remaining two nominal parties seem wings of a deeper, stateful organization putting on a show every couple of years. If there is interest in altering the equation, I would suggest https://conventionofstates.com/ https://conventionofstates.com/
    - cryptgno 5y ago
      Plurality voting systems lacking runoff elections lead to two-party states. Maurice Duverger pointed this out in 1964. The Convention of States is a campaign by the Tea Party movement to form an Article V convention, but they are more likely to present a balanced budget amendment, not electoral reform. Key people involved like Jim DeMint have also advocated for a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage—a pretty silly idea if you ask me.
      - smitty1e 5y ago
        The 16th and 17th Amendments, plus the Federal Reserve Act, all in 1913, along with the capping of the House of Representatives at 435 members in 1910, have driven the growth of the Administrative State. And the debt. So now there is a quasi-aristocracy running plays and putting on these electoral shows every couple of years. Calls for substantial reform. Technical people understand the need for clean architecture and political systems. Humans are not code, but our political- and tax systems are a Byzantine train wreck. On a good day. But go ahead and worry about DeMint's opinions, boss.
- ineedasername 5y ago
  What you say is true if general elections in the US, but often not the primary elections where a party determines who its candidate will be. At that stage it's pretty common to have a wider field of candidates. Also, ranking could change the US dynamic of only have 2 choices. Being able to vote 3rd party and then then choose someone from one of the two main parties might drive a lot more people to vote 3rd party because they wouldn't feel it's hurting the chance of having a candidate that represents at least some of their views. This may not change national elections much, but for Senate, and especially House members it could make a difference. Enough to force more coalitions and compromise between parties instead of winner take all. Sure, that outcome isn't guaranteed, but it seems more likely to produce that sort of result than what we have now.
  - username90 5y ago
    With that argument China is also a democracy, since you can vote who will get to run the party. I'd argue that a proper democracy requires new parties to be easily formed and quickly gain momentum and power if they have support from a fraction of the population. I don't think that ranked choices allows for that, as even if the third party "Greens" in this case got 25% of the votes they'd get thrown away in favour of peoples secondary choice.
    - KMag 5y ago
      Minor nit: I believe only party members vote on party leadership, and it's actually difficult to get into the party. Also, I'm under the impression that the voting is multi-tiered, where you vote on your level and region on which member gets elevated to the next level. It's actually an interesting system, and as usual, it seems adding indirection solves some problems while introducing others.
    - jrochkind1 5y ago
      I mean... are you suggesting that some system where someone could get elected with only 25% of the vote would somehow be more democratic? If a party or candidate can only get 25% of the vote in an election for a single position, like mayor, they aren't going to get elected, that's just democracy, right? RCV makes it more likely a third party could get 50% of the vote though, since people can vote for it without worrying about "throwing their vote away", or throwing the election to a right-wing party when they want to vote for the lesser left-wing party.
- Rebelgecko 5y ago
  Does this vary in different parts of the US? Where I live many municipal elections are nonpartisan (no D or R next to someone's name). In some cases (e.g. jungle primary) there may be multiple viable candidates from the same party
- crazygringo 5y ago
  Incorrect. I voted in today's NYC mayoral primary. There are 13 candidates on the Democratic primary ballot. Perhaps 3 are considered "front-runners" but everyone's aware it's entirely possible at least a couple of the others could wind up winning. The race is entirely up in the air. Because NYC is overwhelmingly Democratic, this election almost certainly determines who will be mayor. And not only do you need to do your research on these many candidates, but there are similar lists of more than 2 candidates for Borough President, Comptroller, etc. Welcome to actual democracy where you suddenly do get to express meaningful choices that aren't just between a single candidate preselected by two parties! And know that if your first-choice candidate doesn't win, your vote isn't effectively thrown out. :)
  - tialaramex 5y ago
    > And not only do you need to do your research on these many candidates, but there are similar lists of more than 2 candidates for Borough President, Comptroller, etc. Can you say how many such choices "etcetera" was eliding here? And if possible if there were roles where you had no idea about any of the candidates beyond stuff like incumbency ? I can see New York City is too big to make just having a Mayor on the ballot enough to properly establish democratically elected local government, but in general it seems Americans elect way too many roles.
    - samoube 5y ago
      Here’s a sample ballot from today’s primary in Brooklyn. Voting was for 7 offices, 5 of which were RCV. https://nyc-static.electionhub.com/sampleballots/384760/12/2021P3V1_ELE_DEM_Style_403.pdf https://nyc-static.electionhub.com/sampleballots/384760/12/2...
      - tialaramex 5y ago
        Yeah :/ that does seem excessive. Delegates to the Judicial Convention in particular don't look to me to have a role that justifies expecting citizens to choose eleven of them each cycle.
- malandrew 5y ago
  > There are almost always only 2 choices - the Democratic candidate and the Republican candidate. We really need to get rid of the canonization of the party. If there are only going to be two candidates, let it be two individuals. The party shouldn't even be listed on the ballot. If you haven't done enough research to know which individual belongs to the party you support, then you haven't done enough research to vote. More individuals make this even better because it becomes a forcing function that forces people to actually learn about the individuals they are voting for and each individual's policies. If I ruled the world, I'd go further and require a short 5 question pop quiz about the policies of the candidate you chose and you need 3 out of 5 questions correct for your vote to count.
  - x86_64Ubuntu 5y ago
    >...If I ruled the world, I'd go further and require a short 5 question pop quiz about the policies of the candidate you chose and you need 3 out of 5 questions correct for your vote to count. Yeah, we know how that goes when we try to keep the "wrong" people from voting in the US.
- jrochkind1 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. In NY, what's being discussed in the OP, the ranked choice system is being used only for the primaries. Whoever wins the Democratic party will certainly win the mayoral general election -- but ranked choice voting isn't being used there anyway. So what you're describing isn't actually the context of ranked choice voting in this election. In Chicago, another city where the Democrats always win, they actually have, since 1999, non-partisan primaries. Just one primary, for all parties, top two candidates go on to the general election -- so the general election can be between two generals. It would be interesting to see instead a single ranked-choice election, no primary at all.
- thaumasiotes 5y ago
  > 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. Interesting to apply the term "signaling" to a behavior which other people cannot observe.
  - hollowcelery 5y ago
    It is observable in the aggregate statistics. x% of people voted for so-and-so candidate.
- Spooky23 5y ago
  New York is a fusion voting state with all sorts of parties. Most, like the “Rent is Too Damn High” party fade, but there is a bunch of third parties of varying degrees of relevance.
- nine_k 5y ago
  Imagine there are two major party candidates, D and R, and also a third candidate X who is well-kmown and well-loved, but few believe X can win. Now voters go to the election and mostly put R or D on top place, but consistently put X on the second place. X has a really fair chance to win. This is how the two-party system can be cracked. This is how an already well-known person can be elected without having to join either major party.
  - ameister14 5y ago
    I think most people would put X in first place, then D or R in second just in case. If X can't get enough votes, then they fall back on D or R
  - tialaramex 5y ago
    More over, a way this can actually play is that there's a third candidate Z who has policies many people strongly agree with, but, since they aren't a member of the big parties and don't attract mainstream news focus, few believe they'll win. Under RCV and several other systems, many R and D voters will put Z first, because it can't hurt. They expect Z will be eliminated, since they "know" R or D must win, and their R or D second choice is what they expect to matter but at least they made their preference clear. And then Z wins with 55% of the vote. Even though this is a surprise to Z's voters, it's a pleasant surprise. They wanted Z they just didn't expect it to be possible. Under FPTP this can be made to happen, but you have to persuade people Z can actually win, because they're worried they are "throwing away" their vote until it really happens. Consider Brighton Pavilion in the UK. In 2005, Brighton was held by a Labour Co-Op incumbent, and the Green candidate came a close third. The Greens had to really sell the message that when Lucas stood in 2010 they genuinely had a chance to elect her, if only people who supported Green policies looked past the Red/Blue split and gave Caroline their vote. They made it happen, but it was close, turnout was up considerably, and much of that new turnout voted for Lucas. If you voted for Lucas despite vague Tory leanings, and she hadn't won, you've have been devastated because right behind her was the new Labour candidate whereas even a modest fraction of Lucas' votes going to the Tory would have won them the election. Once she'd shown it was possible Caroline Lucas never looked back, and she now routinely secures a clear majority in elections not the mere plurality required to win. But this has been hard for her party to replicate elsewhere, and while Lucas is an especially personable candidate that can't explain the entire phenomenon. There are likely other constituencies in the UK where Greens could secure a majority if the voters believed the Green candidate has a chance and didn't vote their second or third choice to prevent their least preferred from winning. I'm actually not bullish for RCV, but this sort of problem is exactly why it makes sense.
- mycall 5y ago
  If ranked voting happened everywhere at same time, the independents, who outnumber both Democratic and Republican party numbers combined, might become a force onto themselves and change everyone's assumptions on 3rd party candidates. This won't likely happen without national voting reform, but it is an interesting thought experiment.
  - dwd 5y ago
    At the very least you might given enough independents are elected, hand them the balance of power where the governing party has to deal with them to get bills passed rather than the increasingly difficult task of skimming votes from the rival party. What you really need is a Don "keep the bastards honest" Chipp type to splinter off one of the major parties and form a viable third party with a group of like-minded moderates. Given the state of the GOP it could be time for the likes of Mitt Romney and Liz Cheney backed by operative groups such as the Lincoln Project to give it a crack.
- laurencerowe 5y ago
  > There are almost always only 2 choices - the Democratic candidate and the Republican candidate. I’m an immigrant so some of this may be wrong, but the party system in the US seems to operate very differently to that in most other countries. Primaries make races far more focussed on the individual representative so there is less incentive for serious third parties to emerge as their potential candidates can instead challenge an incumbent in a primary within the same party affiliation. With voters registering with an affiliation rather than joining a party as a member and being subject to that party’s rules, so far as I can tell there is no way for a party to prevent someone from running under their banner so long as they win the primary.
  - nickik 5y ago
    The whole point of this kind of voting is that you would have to relay on primaries. You can just put up 2 or 5 candidates per party without hurting the parties chances of winning. This is the whole point of such voting systems.
- brightball 5y ago
  The goal of voting for a 3rd party is go get to 5% of the popular vote to fully fund the party across the next election cycle. Libertarian party has come the closest, earning 3.1% in 2016 while total 3rd party votes were over 5.5%. If the Green Party voters had voted LP we’d have validated a 3rd party that year. So much political messaging focuses on fear of the other major party that people feel they have to vote opposition rather than voting for who they really want. US elections have been fear driven for years.
- NegativeLatency 5y ago
  Local elections usually have more interesting options for candidates. For example the recent mayoral election in Portland, where the incumbent was pretty much a Democrat and was challenged by a couple of more progressive candidates. The incumbent ended up winning with less than 50% of the vote
endgame 5y ago
"Roo poo" Ricky Muir was better than many of the regulars, IMHO. IIRC he seemed to actually think about the bills in front of him.
- glangdale 5y ago
  He wasn't awful. OTOH while he seemed principled, he often just seemed to vote along with the Coalition then publicly regret it afterwards - helping them get what they wanted on refugees and then being surprised at how inhumane it all was and the extent that the government reneged or slow-played a lot of the concessions he obtained.
  - endgame 5y ago
    If I remember rightly, that was one of his first votes and he wisened up after that. There was an interview early in his term where he admitted he was unfamiliar with the term "balance of power", but he seemed to learn quickly.
caf 5y ago
The whole Ricky Muir / preference-whispering / group-ticket-voting issue was related to the Senate which is a combination of both PR (proportional representation) and STV, a whole additional bucket of worms over the plain STV of single member electorates.
djrobstep 5y ago
There's still a huge problem with the Australian system - seat-based voting. I live in one of the safest seats in Australia, and thus my vote has literally zero effect on any election result - votes only have impact in swing seats. This is also very unfair on third parties - under proportional representation, winning 10% of the vote nationwide means 10% of seats. Under Australia's system, unless those votes are very concentrated in specific seats, it means zero seats.
godelski 5y ago
> but the Australian experience is instructive. No? It is instructive of how parliaments work. IRV doesn't explain the multi-party house and senate given that every other country with a parliament also has a similar distribution. If you're only looking at Australia vs America you're doing the wrong analysis (it is far too limited). Australia vs France just outright disproves your supposition (they use a 2 round system). Or we can look at Germany who has a similar distribution and who also uses MMP (like Australia). In fact, both France and Germany have more parties represented than Australia. I do not understand why Australia is the instructive example and why this is frequently propositioned.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- munk-a 5y ago
  I disagree about the consistent distribution in parliaments. I do think that parliamentary governance is, overall, just a better way to elect heads of state - but up here in Canada we have a parliament and, while the NDP certainly does hold some sway, we're drifting toward a two party system. Surprisingly, it seems most likely that the CPC might collapse and get absorbed into the LPC which then provides conservative opposition to the NDP - but time will tell whether the CPC can recover now that Harper is gone. (I purposefully avoided the common party names since they have connotations how Americans view politics that are extremely inaccurate).
  - godelski 5y ago
    > but up here in Canada we have a parliament and we're drifting toward a two party system Actually this is kinda my point: Canada: Liberal + Conservative = 81.1% (90.5% with Bloc, 97.6% w/ NDP, ) Australia: Liberal + Labor = 84.8% (95.4% with National) Germany: CDU + SPD = 56% (68% w/ AfD, 79.7% w/FDP, 89.4% w/ Left) France: REM + LR = 71.8% (79.9% w/ MoDem, 85.4% w/ UAI, 90.8% w/SOC) I can continue if needed... These 4 countries have 4 different voting systems but what they have in common is a parliament where seats are assigned proportionately to votes (there's no winner take all). Canada and Australia seem to be the closest to America than the others. (Note that I used house numbers for all because they have larger sample sizes so there's a lower bias in distributions) So it is pretty clear that IRV is ''not,, the defining feature here that causes multi-party systems, nor weaker coalitions. Though we'd have to get more into game theory about coalitions to talk more accurately and I want to stress that while I believe voting methods is a strong tool to prevent these things it isn't the only necessary tool (it's just the biggest step forward we can make given the current US system). > (I purposefully avoided the common party names since they have connotations how Americans view politics that are extremely inaccurate). I think this is fair. As I've argued elsewhere America's two party system is closer to a two coalition system. Which actually Australia is a better example of two coalition domination, IMO, than Canada (though I would say a close runner up).
kleton 5y ago
Is Australia a mandatory voting jurisdiction?
- hnick 5y ago
  Yes but enforcement is lax and fines are low.
  - e1g 5y ago
    Still ~90-95% voter turnout (vs ~60% in the USA)
    - asteroidbelt 5y ago
      And lower than 90% turnout is better, right? Because when people are forced to vote, they are on average more likely to vote for a random name they heard on TV than for a candidate with a program they read and the background they studied.
      - e1g 5y ago
        A democratic society, where all votes are equal, benefits when everyone votes, even without a testing how well-informed they are. It encourages personal ownership of collective problems. For every apathetic member who is voting based on ignorance, there is a zealous member voting based on dogma. The more votes we collect, the more accurate is the representation of the whole.
        godelski 5y ago
        > The more votes we collect, the more accurate is the representation of the whole. This isn't true. If voters are voting randomly (or effectively randomly) then that's just noise in the system. Worse, if voting is based on candidate exposure (i.e. voting on who had more TV ads rather than policy) then the votes are explicitly not representative of voter preference (unless the candidate that advertises the most also happens to be the true preference of voters, but we should not assume this to be true). Your statement is only true given a large amount of assumptions which typically do not hold true in practice. It holds true if voters are both informed, vote purely honestly (no strategy or no manipulation which includes through ads), and candidates are fairly representative of public opinions. I don't think anyone would argue that these three assumptions hold true in most elections. Real world doesn't have idealistic conditions. So no, more voters does not result in better representation.
tomjen3 5y ago
>We can vote for the Greens without "throwing our left-of-centre" vote away and still preferring Labor to Liberal. Do the greens get elected, then?
- omegabravo 5y ago
  Federally yes, primarily in the senate however there is one currently sitting house of reps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Greens#Current_Federal_Parliamentarians https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Greens#Current_Fede... There are also 16 state based elected members both in the upper house and lower house https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Australian_Greens_parliamentarians https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Australian_Greens_parl...
anitil 5y ago
I remember there was also some parties that would name themselves suspiciously similar to existing parties and parlay that in to political power via the horse trading you mentioned.
rlayton2 5y ago
There is another great little thing in Australian voting that plays on this - political parties get paid per #1 vote (I think it is about $4 or something). This means you pick the party you want to win, they get paid, and then preference from there.
weswpg 5y ago
This video [0] argues that most Australians fail to understand how the system works and that the mainstream political parties actively mislead voters into thinking that their voice is "wasted" if they vote for a 3rd party [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bleyX4oMCgM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bleyX4oMCgM
- dwd 5y ago
  Most don't understand the upper house (Senate) system as it applies weighting on the redistribution of votes and there is a choice between above the line (party preference) and below the line (tick every box): but the lower house system is fairly straight forward.
- scoopertrooper 5y ago
  That’s not exactly an academic source. Anyone moderately awake during the election cycle is keenly aware we have a preferential voting system (and the basic mechanics) as preference deals between parties are keenly covered by the media.

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.
- munk-a 5y ago
  Primaries mostly exist due to the FPTP voting system - dropping that would remove a pretty big reason to have them at all which could lead to cheaper elections... campaign fundraising was ever reigned in - rather, the elections will probably be cheaper but it's unlikely you'd notice due to the insane campaign budgets that are common.
  - asteroidbelt 5y ago
    Cost of elections is not an issue, but replacing FPTP with ranked choice makes candidate less dependent on the party. Remember Trump 2016 elections, when Trump disagreed with the way debates were conducted. Trump had to bend because there could be only one Republican candidate. Not saying Trump was right, but making candidate less dependent on the party (i. e. redistribute the power from the party committee to the candidates) would be good thing.
subsubzero 5y ago
If this achieves widespread in the US I could see regional libertarian and green candidates picking up spots in certain areas in US.
- throw5away 5y ago
  Do you have something US-specific to indicate that this would be the case? Neither empirics nor theory support your claim. https://rangevoting.org/TarrIrvSumm.html https://rangevoting.org/TarrIrvSumm.html
  - sellyme 5y ago
    The very first line of your source references Australia as an example of why ranked voting would not give third parties any influence. This seems like an odd choice, given that Australia currently has five different parties in Parliament, and has in recent history had a third party be the deciding "vote" on who forms government. It seems like an even odder choice for you to reference it as a counterpoint in this specific case given that one of those parties is literally called "the Greens".
wyre 5y ago
Statistically, in the US a 3rd party has a 0% chance of winning because a third party has never won. Maybe within the first 100 years; history isn’t my strongest subject.
- koolba 5y ago
  > Statistically, in the US a 3rd party has a 0% chance of winning because a third party has never won. Not recently for President, but third parties have won at every other level of government including Governors, Representatives, and Senators.
  - munk-a 5y ago
    I would mention that everyone's favorite example in this category (Bernie Sanders) does secure the democratic primary nomination for senate each election - he just refuses to leverage it in the general election. But failing to do that would lead to a much harder general election since the Dems would likely put up a competing candidate and split the vote three ways.
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    > Not recently for President, Not ever. The Federalists collapsed before we got a Whig, and the Whigs before we got a Republican, and those and the Democratic (ex-Democratic-Republican) parties are the only four that have won the Presidency. > but third parties have won at every other level of government including Governors, Representatives, and Senators. Sure, but its easy to overcount them; state two-party systems (where they haven't been effectively one-party systems) haven't historically always aligned with the national two-party system (e.g., Missouri’s [ed: or, in the real world, Minnesota’s] Farmer-Labor Party was the second (and later first) party in the state for years, alongside the Republicans, before it merged with a local third party—and thereby joined the national Democrats—as the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party.
    - munk-a 5y ago
      I would consider Sanders to be a pretty legitimate third party candidate - VT democrats have coalesced around him recently but his initial bid for Senate was pretty spectacular. He managed to ride an extremely popular mayoral career into a state that is extremely dominated by Burlington population-wise. Burlington metro is roughly as large a proportion of the VT voting block as NYC metro is for NY.
xdennis 5y ago
The USA is a two-party state because of the voting system. If people could confidently vote for another party there wouldn't be just two parties. It's even reflected in the language, like how people task about being "bi-partizan" instead of "non-partizan".
- smitty1e 5y ago
  > The USA is a two-party state because of the voting system. If people could confidently vote for another party there wouldn't be just two parties. There are plenty of other parties, for example: Libertarian, Green, and Constitution. In practice, these minor parties (could be) funded by the opposite end of the spectrum to weaken the other side (just a hunch). But that gets at one possibility of why these minor parties never do better than, say Ross Perot (who got no electoral votes, but sunk Bush41 in 1992): scale. It takes a whale of a party to carry a pond the size of the US. And really, the remaining two nominal parties seem wings of a deeper, stateful organization putting on a show every couple of years. If there is interest in altering the equation, I would suggest https://conventionofstates.com/ https://conventionofstates.com/
  - cryptgno 5y ago
    Plurality voting systems lacking runoff elections lead to two-party states. Maurice Duverger pointed this out in 1964. The Convention of States is a campaign by the Tea Party movement to form an Article V convention, but they are more likely to present a balanced budget amendment, not electoral reform. Key people involved like Jim DeMint have also advocated for a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage—a pretty silly idea if you ask me.
    - smitty1e 5y ago
      The 16th and 17th Amendments, plus the Federal Reserve Act, all in 1913, along with the capping of the House of Representatives at 435 members in 1910, have driven the growth of the Administrative State. And the debt. So now there is a quasi-aristocracy running plays and putting on these electoral shows every couple of years. Calls for substantial reform. Technical people understand the need for clean architecture and political systems. Humans are not code, but our political- and tax systems are a Byzantine train wreck. On a good day. But go ahead and worry about DeMint's opinions, boss.
ineedasername 5y ago
What you say is true if general elections in the US, but often not the primary elections where a party determines who its candidate will be. At that stage it's pretty common to have a wider field of candidates. Also, ranking could change the US dynamic of only have 2 choices. Being able to vote 3rd party and then then choose someone from one of the two main parties might drive a lot more people to vote 3rd party because they wouldn't feel it's hurting the chance of having a candidate that represents at least some of their views. This may not change national elections much, but for Senate, and especially House members it could make a difference. Enough to force more coalitions and compromise between parties instead of winner take all. Sure, that outcome isn't guaranteed, but it seems more likely to produce that sort of result than what we have now.
- username90 5y ago
  With that argument China is also a democracy, since you can vote who will get to run the party. I'd argue that a proper democracy requires new parties to be easily formed and quickly gain momentum and power if they have support from a fraction of the population. I don't think that ranked choices allows for that, as even if the third party "Greens" in this case got 25% of the votes they'd get thrown away in favour of peoples secondary choice.
  - KMag 5y ago
    Minor nit: I believe only party members vote on party leadership, and it's actually difficult to get into the party. Also, I'm under the impression that the voting is multi-tiered, where you vote on your level and region on which member gets elevated to the next level. It's actually an interesting system, and as usual, it seems adding indirection solves some problems while introducing others.
  - jrochkind1 5y ago
    I mean... are you suggesting that some system where someone could get elected with only 25% of the vote would somehow be more democratic? If a party or candidate can only get 25% of the vote in an election for a single position, like mayor, they aren't going to get elected, that's just democracy, right? RCV makes it more likely a third party could get 50% of the vote though, since people can vote for it without worrying about "throwing their vote away", or throwing the election to a right-wing party when they want to vote for the lesser left-wing party.
Rebelgecko 5y ago
Does this vary in different parts of the US? Where I live many municipal elections are nonpartisan (no D or R next to someone's name). In some cases (e.g. jungle primary) there may be multiple viable candidates from the same party
crazygringo 5y ago
Incorrect. I voted in today's NYC mayoral primary. There are 13 candidates on the Democratic primary ballot. Perhaps 3 are considered "front-runners" but everyone's aware it's entirely possible at least a couple of the others could wind up winning. The race is entirely up in the air. Because NYC is overwhelmingly Democratic, this election almost certainly determines who will be mayor. And not only do you need to do your research on these many candidates, but there are similar lists of more than 2 candidates for Borough President, Comptroller, etc. Welcome to actual democracy where you suddenly do get to express meaningful choices that aren't just between a single candidate preselected by two parties! And know that if your first-choice candidate doesn't win, your vote isn't effectively thrown out. :)
- tialaramex 5y ago
  > And not only do you need to do your research on these many candidates, but there are similar lists of more than 2 candidates for Borough President, Comptroller, etc. Can you say how many such choices "etcetera" was eliding here? And if possible if there were roles where you had no idea about any of the candidates beyond stuff like incumbency ? I can see New York City is too big to make just having a Mayor on the ballot enough to properly establish democratically elected local government, but in general it seems Americans elect way too many roles.
  - samoube 5y ago
    Here’s a sample ballot from today’s primary in Brooklyn. Voting was for 7 offices, 5 of which were RCV. https://nyc-static.electionhub.com/sampleballots/384760/12/2021P3V1_ELE_DEM_Style_403.pdf https://nyc-static.electionhub.com/sampleballots/384760/12/2...
    - tialaramex 5y ago
      Yeah :/ that does seem excessive. Delegates to the Judicial Convention in particular don't look to me to have a role that justifies expecting citizens to choose eleven of them each cycle.
malandrew 5y ago
> There are almost always only 2 choices - the Democratic candidate and the Republican candidate. We really need to get rid of the canonization of the party. If there are only going to be two candidates, let it be two individuals. The party shouldn't even be listed on the ballot. If you haven't done enough research to know which individual belongs to the party you support, then you haven't done enough research to vote. More individuals make this even better because it becomes a forcing function that forces people to actually learn about the individuals they are voting for and each individual's policies. If I ruled the world, I'd go further and require a short 5 question pop quiz about the policies of the candidate you chose and you need 3 out of 5 questions correct for your vote to count.
- x86_64Ubuntu 5y ago
  >...If I ruled the world, I'd go further and require a short 5 question pop quiz about the policies of the candidate you chose and you need 3 out of 5 questions correct for your vote to count. Yeah, we know how that goes when we try to keep the "wrong" people from voting in the US.
jrochkind1 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. In NY, what's being discussed in the OP, the ranked choice system is being used only for the primaries. Whoever wins the Democratic party will certainly win the mayoral general election -- but ranked choice voting isn't being used there anyway. So what you're describing isn't actually the context of ranked choice voting in this election. In Chicago, another city where the Democrats always win, they actually have, since 1999, non-partisan primaries. Just one primary, for all parties, top two candidates go on to the general election -- so the general election can be between two generals. It would be interesting to see instead a single ranked-choice election, no primary at all.
thaumasiotes 5y ago
> 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. Interesting to apply the term "signaling" to a behavior which other people cannot observe.
- hollowcelery 5y ago
  It is observable in the aggregate statistics. x% of people voted for so-and-so candidate.
Spooky23 5y ago
New York is a fusion voting state with all sorts of parties. Most, like the “Rent is Too Damn High” party fade, but there is a bunch of third parties of varying degrees of relevance.
nine_k 5y ago
Imagine there are two major party candidates, D and R, and also a third candidate X who is well-kmown and well-loved, but few believe X can win. Now voters go to the election and mostly put R or D on top place, but consistently put X on the second place. X has a really fair chance to win. This is how the two-party system can be cracked. This is how an already well-known person can be elected without having to join either major party.
- ameister14 5y ago
  I think most people would put X in first place, then D or R in second just in case. If X can't get enough votes, then they fall back on D or R
- tialaramex 5y ago
  More over, a way this can actually play is that there's a third candidate Z who has policies many people strongly agree with, but, since they aren't a member of the big parties and don't attract mainstream news focus, few believe they'll win. Under RCV and several other systems, many R and D voters will put Z first, because it can't hurt. They expect Z will be eliminated, since they "know" R or D must win, and their R or D second choice is what they expect to matter but at least they made their preference clear. And then Z wins with 55% of the vote. Even though this is a surprise to Z's voters, it's a pleasant surprise. They wanted Z they just didn't expect it to be possible. Under FPTP this can be made to happen, but you have to persuade people Z can actually win, because they're worried they are "throwing away" their vote until it really happens. Consider Brighton Pavilion in the UK. In 2005, Brighton was held by a Labour Co-Op incumbent, and the Green candidate came a close third. The Greens had to really sell the message that when Lucas stood in 2010 they genuinely had a chance to elect her, if only people who supported Green policies looked past the Red/Blue split and gave Caroline their vote. They made it happen, but it was close, turnout was up considerably, and much of that new turnout voted for Lucas. If you voted for Lucas despite vague Tory leanings, and she hadn't won, you've have been devastated because right behind her was the new Labour candidate whereas even a modest fraction of Lucas' votes going to the Tory would have won them the election. Once she'd shown it was possible Caroline Lucas never looked back, and she now routinely secures a clear majority in elections not the mere plurality required to win. But this has been hard for her party to replicate elsewhere, and while Lucas is an especially personable candidate that can't explain the entire phenomenon. There are likely other constituencies in the UK where Greens could secure a majority if the voters believed the Green candidate has a chance and didn't vote their second or third choice to prevent their least preferred from winning. I'm actually not bullish for RCV, but this sort of problem is exactly why it makes sense.
mycall 5y ago
If ranked voting happened everywhere at same time, the independents, who outnumber both Democratic and Republican party numbers combined, might become a force onto themselves and change everyone's assumptions on 3rd party candidates. This won't likely happen without national voting reform, but it is an interesting thought experiment.
- dwd 5y ago
  At the very least you might given enough independents are elected, hand them the balance of power where the governing party has to deal with them to get bills passed rather than the increasingly difficult task of skimming votes from the rival party. What you really need is a Don "keep the bastards honest" Chipp type to splinter off one of the major parties and form a viable third party with a group of like-minded moderates. Given the state of the GOP it could be time for the likes of Mitt Romney and Liz Cheney backed by operative groups such as the Lincoln Project to give it a crack.
laurencerowe 5y ago
> There are almost always only 2 choices - the Democratic candidate and the Republican candidate. I’m an immigrant so some of this may be wrong, but the party system in the US seems to operate very differently to that in most other countries. Primaries make races far more focussed on the individual representative so there is less incentive for serious third parties to emerge as their potential candidates can instead challenge an incumbent in a primary within the same party affiliation. With voters registering with an affiliation rather than joining a party as a member and being subject to that party’s rules, so far as I can tell there is no way for a party to prevent someone from running under their banner so long as they win the primary.
- nickik 5y ago
  The whole point of this kind of voting is that you would have to relay on primaries. You can just put up 2 or 5 candidates per party without hurting the parties chances of winning. This is the whole point of such voting systems.
brightball 5y ago
The goal of voting for a 3rd party is go get to 5% of the popular vote to fully fund the party across the next election cycle. Libertarian party has come the closest, earning 3.1% in 2016 while total 3rd party votes were over 5.5%. If the Green Party voters had voted LP we’d have validated a 3rd party that year. So much political messaging focuses on fear of the other major party that people feel they have to vote opposition rather than voting for who they really want. US elections have been fear driven for years.
NegativeLatency 5y ago
Local elections usually have more interesting options for candidates. For example the recent mayoral election in Portland, where the incumbent was pretty much a Democrat and was challenged by a couple of more progressive candidates. The incumbent ended up winning with less than 50% of the vote

endgame 5y ago

"Roo poo" Ricky Muir was better than many of the regulars, IMHO. IIRC he seemed to actually think about the bills in front of him.

glangdale 5y ago
He wasn't awful. OTOH while he seemed principled, he often just seemed to vote along with the Coalition then publicly regret it afterwards - helping them get what they wanted on refugees and then being surprised at how inhumane it all was and the extent that the government reneged or slow-played a lot of the concessions he obtained.
- endgame 5y ago
  If I remember rightly, that was one of his first votes and he wisened up after that. There was an interview early in his term where he admitted he was unfamiliar with the term "balance of power", but he seemed to learn quickly.

caf 5y ago

The whole Ricky Muir / preference-whispering / group-ticket-voting issue was related to the Senate which is a combination of both PR (proportional representation) and STV, a whole additional bucket of worms over the plain STV of single member electorates.

djrobstep 5y ago

There's still a huge problem with the Australian system - seat-based voting. I live in one of the safest seats in Australia, and thus my vote has literally zero effect on any election result - votes only have impact in swing seats. This is also very unfair on third parties - under proportional representation, winning 10% of the vote nationwide means 10% of seats. Under Australia's system, unless those votes are very concentrated in specific seats, it means zero seats.

godelski 5y ago

> but the Australian experience is instructive. No? It is instructive of how parliaments work. IRV doesn't explain the multi-party house and senate given that every other country with a parliament also has a similar distribution. If you're only looking at Australia vs America you're doing the wrong analysis (it is far too limited). Australia vs France just outright disproves your supposition (they use a 2 round system). Or we can look at Germany who has a similar distribution and who also uses MMP (like Australia). In fact, both France and Germany have more parties represented than Australia. I do not understand why Australia is the instructive example and why this is frequently propositioned.

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munk-a 5y ago
I disagree about the consistent distribution in parliaments. I do think that parliamentary governance is, overall, just a better way to elect heads of state - but up here in Canada we have a parliament and, while the NDP certainly does hold some sway, we're drifting toward a two party system. Surprisingly, it seems most likely that the CPC might collapse and get absorbed into the LPC which then provides conservative opposition to the NDP - but time will tell whether the CPC can recover now that Harper is gone. (I purposefully avoided the common party names since they have connotations how Americans view politics that are extremely inaccurate).
- godelski 5y ago
  > but up here in Canada we have a parliament and we're drifting toward a two party system Actually this is kinda my point: Canada: Liberal + Conservative = 81.1% (90.5% with Bloc, 97.6% w/ NDP, ) Australia: Liberal + Labor = 84.8% (95.4% with National) Germany: CDU + SPD = 56% (68% w/ AfD, 79.7% w/FDP, 89.4% w/ Left) France: REM + LR = 71.8% (79.9% w/ MoDem, 85.4% w/ UAI, 90.8% w/SOC) I can continue if needed... These 4 countries have 4 different voting systems but what they have in common is a parliament where seats are assigned proportionately to votes (there's no winner take all). Canada and Australia seem to be the closest to America than the others. (Note that I used house numbers for all because they have larger sample sizes so there's a lower bias in distributions) So it is pretty clear that IRV is ''not,, the defining feature here that causes multi-party systems, nor weaker coalitions. Though we'd have to get more into game theory about coalitions to talk more accurately and I want to stress that while I believe voting methods is a strong tool to prevent these things it isn't the only necessary tool (it's just the biggest step forward we can make given the current US system). > (I purposefully avoided the common party names since they have connotations how Americans view politics that are extremely inaccurate). I think this is fair. As I've argued elsewhere America's two party system is closer to a two coalition system. Which actually Australia is a better example of two coalition domination, IMO, than Canada (though I would say a close runner up).

kleton 5y ago

Is Australia a mandatory voting jurisdiction?

hnick 5y ago
Yes but enforcement is lax and fines are low.
- e1g 5y ago
  Still ~90-95% voter turnout (vs ~60% in the USA)
  - asteroidbelt 5y ago
    And lower than 90% turnout is better, right? Because when people are forced to vote, they are on average more likely to vote for a random name they heard on TV than for a candidate with a program they read and the background they studied.
    - e1g 5y ago
      A democratic society, where all votes are equal, benefits when everyone votes, even without a testing how well-informed they are. It encourages personal ownership of collective problems. For every apathetic member who is voting based on ignorance, there is a zealous member voting based on dogma. The more votes we collect, the more accurate is the representation of the whole.
      - godelski 5y ago
        > The more votes we collect, the more accurate is the representation of the whole. This isn't true. If voters are voting randomly (or effectively randomly) then that's just noise in the system. Worse, if voting is based on candidate exposure (i.e. voting on who had more TV ads rather than policy) then the votes are explicitly not representative of voter preference (unless the candidate that advertises the most also happens to be the true preference of voters, but we should not assume this to be true). Your statement is only true given a large amount of assumptions which typically do not hold true in practice. It holds true if voters are both informed, vote purely honestly (no strategy or no manipulation which includes through ads), and candidates are fairly representative of public opinions. I don't think anyone would argue that these three assumptions hold true in most elections. Real world doesn't have idealistic conditions. So no, more voters does not result in better representation.

tomjen3 5y ago

>We can vote for the Greens without "throwing our left-of-centre" vote away and still preferring Labor to Liberal. Do the greens get elected, then?

omegabravo 5y ago
Federally yes, primarily in the senate however there is one currently sitting house of reps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Greens#Current_Federal_Parliamentarians https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Greens#Current_Fede... There are also 16 state based elected members both in the upper house and lower house https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Australian_Greens_parliamentarians https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Australian_Greens_parl...

anitil 5y ago

I remember there was also some parties that would name themselves suspiciously similar to existing parties and parlay that in to political power via the horse trading you mentioned.

rlayton2 5y ago

There is another great little thing in Australian voting that plays on this - political parties get paid per #1 vote (I think it is about $4 or something). This means you pick the party you want to win, they get paid, and then preference from there.

weswpg 5y ago

This video [0] argues that most Australians fail to understand how the system works and that the mainstream political parties actively mislead voters into thinking that their voice is "wasted" if they vote for a 3rd party [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bleyX4oMCgM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bleyX4oMCgM

dwd 5y ago
Most don't understand the upper house (Senate) system as it applies weighting on the redistribution of votes and there is a choice between above the line (party preference) and below the line (tick every box): but the lower house system is fairly straight forward.
scoopertrooper 5y ago
That’s not exactly an academic source. Anyone moderately awake during the election cycle is keenly aware we have a preferential voting system (and the basic mechanics) as preference deals between parties are keenly covered by the media.