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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-b

by 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.
- zestyping 5y ago
  With IRV, you can put a compromise or third-party candidate first _only if they have no chance_. In other words, it's purely symbolic. As soon as the third-party candidate starts to become competitive, the spoiler effect returns. It becomes risky to vote for your true favourite, and voters are forced to vote strategically as they do now. So IRV will not help us escape from polarized two-party politics; it will continue to entrench the duopoly. IRV has other serious problems with fairness (a much higher spoiled ballot rate, disproportionately in low-income areas), practical implementation (requiring a redesign of ballots and counting software), and security (it isn't summable, which makes it harder to conduct a risk-limiting audit). Approval is also imperfect, but it is simple, cheap, effective, and has none of these problems.
  - openandshut 5y ago
    help me out here, I don't understand how the spoiler effect returns if the third party candidate becomes competitive. Wouldn't that just mean they have a chance of winning? Suppose Dave Chappelle ran in 2020 and 40% of people voted for him and they all had Biden ranked at #2. 15% rank Biden #1, and 45% rank Trump #1 with no #2 marked. Biden wins, no? edit: found your explainer elsewhere, currently reading. edit edit: Huh, that is weird.
    - elihu 5y ago
      That's a pretty good example, because it illustrates a disconnect between how people expect IRV/RCV to work and how it actually works. Biden would be eliminated first, because he had the fewest 1st choice votes in the first round. The Dave Chappelle voters' 2nd choices for Biden don't matter: they're thrown out because Biden was eliminated. So, it comes down to Chappelle with 40% and Trump with 45%. If none of the Biden voters listed Chappelle as their second choice, then Trump wins. If enough voters had Chappelle as their second choice, then Chappelle wins. The lesson from this example is: it's quite possible that your second choices don't matter, because they're eliminated too early. We could come up with other examples that show that it isn't always safe to put your first choice first, either. IRV/RCV is non-monotonic, which means in some cases you can cause a candidate to lose by ranking them higher.
mabbo 5y ago
> RCV is non-monotonic, which means it's possible that ranking someone first might actually cause them to lose. I'm intrigued. Can you explain how that works? I'm not saying I don't believe you- I'll bet it is possible, but I cannot see how, and I want to!
- zestyping 5y ago
  If you're a visual thinker, you might enjoy these: http://zesty.ca/voting/voteline http://zesty.ca/voting/voteline http://zesty.ca/voting/sim http://zesty.ca/voting/sim Or, if you prefer logic: The intuition for "something strange could happen" is that IRV only uses some of the information on the ballots. Initially it uses just the top ranking on each ballot, and then at other points in the process, it might flip to using the second ranking on some of the ballots, and so on. There are these sudden trigger thresholds that cause big discontinuities in what gets counted—and that should feel weird. We have this pile of ballots that could all count for A or B; why should that decision depend on some unrelated other ballots? That's the mechanism by which ranking someone higher can cause them to lose. Only some of the second ranks on the ballots will get to count, and depending which ones get counted, we could get a totally different outcome. Suppose A, B, and C are all competitive in an election, with no one having an outright majority, but A has a little more support than B, who has a little more support than C. It could be the case that A is in a winning position because C supporters mostly like A as their second choice; when C gets eliminated first, those ballots count for A and A wins. But let's say B supporters all like C as their second choice, and you persuade some B supporters to switch to A. If enough of them switch away from B that B is eliminated first, then all those B supporters' ballots will count for C, and that can cause C to win. So by campaigning for A, you made A lose! The general idea is that if B and C are close, which way it tips can have a sweeping effect on whose second choices get counted, which can affect A. It should feel intuitively scary that a small shift in one part of the election can have a magnified effect on a different part. It's not good for systems to be unstable like that.
- remram 5y ago
  If some people change their vote from A-B-C to B-A-C, that can cause A to be eliminated instead of B in the first round, and B in the second (if C beats B but C doesn't beat A). Changing the winner from B to C.
sjfidsfkds 5y ago
If I approve of two candidates, but I like one more than the other, approval voting doesn’t seem to allow me to express that preference. Do I vote for both candidates, or only the one I like the most? As a naive voter who isn’t going to research that question, will I make the right choice?
- elihu 5y ago
  It's a hard question. I think it comes down to: are you more afraid of your top choice losing, or your least-favorite choice winning? If the former, then just vote for your first choice. If the latter, vote for everyone but your first choice. (This is an improvement over FPTP because you at least have the option to support multiple candidates if you want to.) Some people don't like this aspect of approval voting, and really want to give an ordering or a score. Score voting is like approval voting, but you give a score. All the scores are totaled up, and the winner has the highest total. This is a pretty good system, but it has a problem: honest voters who aren't enthusiastic about a candidate might rate their candidate 6/10, whereas a very opinionated partisan voter might rate their candidate 10/10. So, the people with the most extreme opinions have more influence: 6 partisans gives a score of 60, whereas ten unenthusiastic voters also gives an equal score of 60. Under score voting, strategic voting means always maximizing your positions: always 10/10 or 0/10, nothing in-between. Basically this is the same as approval voting. So, I'd suggest that approval voting is usually better because it puts strategic voters and honest voters on an equal playing field. There's another voting system called STAR (score then automatic runoff), in which you use score voting to select the top two candidates, and then you do an instant runoff by maximizing all the votes for the top two candidates. For instance, if our top two candidates are A and B and if someone marked candidate A as 7 and candidate B as 4, then that turns into A:10 and B:0. If another person has A as 6 and B as 6, then they don't have a preference and that ballot is dropped. STAR isn't perfect (what if an extreme party runs two ideologically-similar candidates and they both make it to the runoff?) but it's a pretty reasonable compromise system that allows voters to score candidates rather than just making a yes/no choice.
- juped 5y ago
  you approve anyone who you approve of approval voting is a special case of score voting where the range of scores is limited to 0 and 1. if you want to express different levels of preference, you can expand this range and get full score voting. the downside is this puts a heavier burden on the voter to decide on scores (if it's 0-99, i give my first choice 99, but what do i give my second choice? 98? 75? 50? my choice might depend on what i expect other voters to think makes sense as a score)
asteroidbelt 5y ago
Approval voting may lead to election of weak candidates, no? Like there's a strong right candidate, disapproved by left, there's strong left, disapproved by right, and there's meh candidate approved by both. Either strong right or strong left might be better for both left and right. Thank you for pointing to the flaws of RCV though. It has flaws, but still looks like an improvement. In London mayor they were using "Contingent vote" system, which is AFAIU RCV with only two options, which is weaker than RCV. And in the next elections they switched it to FPTP, which is unfortunate.
- soberpeach 5y ago
  Regarding your comment about approval, isn't that the intended outcome? You elect the candidate that the most people approve of, regardless of whether or not there are other "stronger" candidates. The population would be better served than if one of the "strong" left or right candidates were elected. You could also just not vote for any other candidates if you don't think they'd do a good job. In your example, the left or the right could just not vote for the "meh" candidate if they truly don't believe they would be a good person to lead, and if they do vote for them, then they should be happy at the outcome regardless.
  - elihu 5y ago
    Yeah, it's literally "elect the candidate with the highest approval rating" which seems like a fair and reasonable outcome. (That's assuming that people vote honestly, but according to at least one analysis [1], the outcome isn't very much less democratically optimal if people vote strategically in approval voting rather than honestly.) [1] https://electionscience.org/library/tactical-voting-basics/ https://electionscience.org/library/tactical-voting-basics/
  - asteroidbelt 5y ago
    > You elect the candidate that the most people approve of, regardless of whether or not there are other "stronger" candidates. It may be a strategic voting: I approve anyone who is not democrat (or republican). > The population would be better served than if one of the "strong" left or right candidates were elected. Not necessarily. Perhaps it is better when left/right candidates alternate (driving important changes in their area of interests), than weak candidates elected every time.
vitus 5y ago
One important distinction to make is that RCV isn't the same as Instant Runoff Voting (IRV); rather, IRV is a specific (the most commonly championed, as far as I can tell) implementation of RCV, likely because it's the easiest to explain. Note that all RCV implementations have limitations, per the oft-cited https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theore... which outlines a number of ostensibly desirable attributes then demonstrates that no RCV implementation can satisfy all of them. But that's not to say that approval voting methods are flawless, either. One often cited desirable property is the Condorcet criterion, namely, if one candidate beats all others in head-to-head matchups, that candidate should be the winner. (There's a related Condorcet Loser criterion which is the inverse: if one candidate loses to all others in head-to-head matchups, that candidate should not be elected.) Suppose we applied approval voting to a simplified view of the 2016 election. (Y to indicate approval, N to indicate disapproval) - 48%: Partisan R. Trump (Y) > Stein (N) > Clinton (N) - 48%: Partisan D. Clinton (Y) > Stein (N) > Trump (N) - 3%: 3rd-party, very slight D lean. Stein (Y) > Clinton (Y) > Trump (N) - 1%: 3rd-party, very slight R lean. Stein (Y) > Trump (Y) > Clinton (N) Stein beats both Clinton and Trump in head-to-head matchups, 52% to 48%. But with an approval voting system (selecting Clinton with 51% approval), this fails the Condorcet criterion! (IRV is no better here, to be clear. And Condorcet methods have their own pathologies.)
- elihu 5y ago
  As far as I know, the label RCV as it's commonly used in the United States (and advocated most prominently by FairVote) usually means the same thing as IRV. Perhaps there are some minor differences in terms of specifying exactly what happens if a ballot doesn't rank all the candidates, or ranks two candidates equally. Perhaps using RCV to mean an exact system rather than a whole category of voting systems is imprecise, but I think that ship has already sailed. It's also sometimes called alternative vote, and the Australians call it preferential voting. I've wondered if IRV couldn't be substantially improved by using Borda count for the elimination step rather than eliminating the candidate with the least first-choice options. (I think there's an actual name for that system, but I don't remember what it is.)
  - 5y ago

by elihu 5y ago

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.

zestyping 5y ago
With IRV, you can put a compromise or third-party candidate first _only if they have no chance_. In other words, it's purely symbolic. As soon as the third-party candidate starts to become competitive, the spoiler effect returns. It becomes risky to vote for your true favourite, and voters are forced to vote strategically as they do now. So IRV will not help us escape from polarized two-party politics; it will continue to entrench the duopoly. IRV has other serious problems with fairness (a much higher spoiled ballot rate, disproportionately in low-income areas), practical implementation (requiring a redesign of ballots and counting software), and security (it isn't summable, which makes it harder to conduct a risk-limiting audit). Approval is also imperfect, but it is simple, cheap, effective, and has none of these problems.
- openandshut 5y ago
  help me out here, I don't understand how the spoiler effect returns if the third party candidate becomes competitive. Wouldn't that just mean they have a chance of winning? Suppose Dave Chappelle ran in 2020 and 40% of people voted for him and they all had Biden ranked at #2. 15% rank Biden #1, and 45% rank Trump #1 with no #2 marked. Biden wins, no? edit: found your explainer elsewhere, currently reading. edit edit: Huh, that is weird.
  - elihu 5y ago
    That's a pretty good example, because it illustrates a disconnect between how people expect IRV/RCV to work and how it actually works. Biden would be eliminated first, because he had the fewest 1st choice votes in the first round. The Dave Chappelle voters' 2nd choices for Biden don't matter: they're thrown out because Biden was eliminated. So, it comes down to Chappelle with 40% and Trump with 45%. If none of the Biden voters listed Chappelle as their second choice, then Trump wins. If enough voters had Chappelle as their second choice, then Chappelle wins. The lesson from this example is: it's quite possible that your second choices don't matter, because they're eliminated too early. We could come up with other examples that show that it isn't always safe to put your first choice first, either. IRV/RCV is non-monotonic, which means in some cases you can cause a candidate to lose by ranking them higher.

mabbo 5y ago

> RCV is non-monotonic, which means it's possible that ranking someone first might actually cause them to lose. I'm intrigued. Can you explain how that works? I'm not saying I don't believe you- I'll bet it is possible, but I cannot see how, and I want to!

zestyping 5y ago
If you're a visual thinker, you might enjoy these: http://zesty.ca/voting/voteline http://zesty.ca/voting/voteline http://zesty.ca/voting/sim http://zesty.ca/voting/sim Or, if you prefer logic: The intuition for "something strange could happen" is that IRV only uses some of the information on the ballots. Initially it uses just the top ranking on each ballot, and then at other points in the process, it might flip to using the second ranking on some of the ballots, and so on. There are these sudden trigger thresholds that cause big discontinuities in what gets counted—and that should feel weird. We have this pile of ballots that could all count for A or B; why should that decision depend on some unrelated other ballots? That's the mechanism by which ranking someone higher can cause them to lose. Only some of the second ranks on the ballots will get to count, and depending which ones get counted, we could get a totally different outcome. Suppose A, B, and C are all competitive in an election, with no one having an outright majority, but A has a little more support than B, who has a little more support than C. It could be the case that A is in a winning position because C supporters mostly like A as their second choice; when C gets eliminated first, those ballots count for A and A wins. But let's say B supporters all like C as their second choice, and you persuade some B supporters to switch to A. If enough of them switch away from B that B is eliminated first, then all those B supporters' ballots will count for C, and that can cause C to win. So by campaigning for A, you made A lose! The general idea is that if B and C are close, which way it tips can have a sweeping effect on whose second choices get counted, which can affect A. It should feel intuitively scary that a small shift in one part of the election can have a magnified effect on a different part. It's not good for systems to be unstable like that.
remram 5y ago
If some people change their vote from A-B-C to B-A-C, that can cause A to be eliminated instead of B in the first round, and B in the second (if C beats B but C doesn't beat A). Changing the winner from B to C.

sjfidsfkds 5y ago

If I approve of two candidates, but I like one more than the other, approval voting doesn’t seem to allow me to express that preference. Do I vote for both candidates, or only the one I like the most? As a naive voter who isn’t going to research that question, will I make the right choice?

elihu 5y ago
It's a hard question. I think it comes down to: are you more afraid of your top choice losing, or your least-favorite choice winning? If the former, then just vote for your first choice. If the latter, vote for everyone but your first choice. (This is an improvement over FPTP because you at least have the option to support multiple candidates if you want to.) Some people don't like this aspect of approval voting, and really want to give an ordering or a score. Score voting is like approval voting, but you give a score. All the scores are totaled up, and the winner has the highest total. This is a pretty good system, but it has a problem: honest voters who aren't enthusiastic about a candidate might rate their candidate 6/10, whereas a very opinionated partisan voter might rate their candidate 10/10. So, the people with the most extreme opinions have more influence: 6 partisans gives a score of 60, whereas ten unenthusiastic voters also gives an equal score of 60. Under score voting, strategic voting means always maximizing your positions: always 10/10 or 0/10, nothing in-between. Basically this is the same as approval voting. So, I'd suggest that approval voting is usually better because it puts strategic voters and honest voters on an equal playing field. There's another voting system called STAR (score then automatic runoff), in which you use score voting to select the top two candidates, and then you do an instant runoff by maximizing all the votes for the top two candidates. For instance, if our top two candidates are A and B and if someone marked candidate A as 7 and candidate B as 4, then that turns into A:10 and B:0. If another person has A as 6 and B as 6, then they don't have a preference and that ballot is dropped. STAR isn't perfect (what if an extreme party runs two ideologically-similar candidates and they both make it to the runoff?) but it's a pretty reasonable compromise system that allows voters to score candidates rather than just making a yes/no choice.
juped 5y ago
you approve anyone who you approve of approval voting is a special case of score voting where the range of scores is limited to 0 and 1. if you want to express different levels of preference, you can expand this range and get full score voting. the downside is this puts a heavier burden on the voter to decide on scores (if it's 0-99, i give my first choice 99, but what do i give my second choice? 98? 75? 50? my choice might depend on what i expect other voters to think makes sense as a score)

asteroidbelt 5y ago

Approval voting may lead to election of weak candidates, no? Like there's a strong right candidate, disapproved by left, there's strong left, disapproved by right, and there's meh candidate approved by both. Either strong right or strong left might be better for both left and right. Thank you for pointing to the flaws of RCV though. It has flaws, but still looks like an improvement. In London mayor they were using "Contingent vote" system, which is AFAIU RCV with only two options, which is weaker than RCV. And in the next elections they switched it to FPTP, which is unfortunate.

soberpeach 5y ago
Regarding your comment about approval, isn't that the intended outcome? You elect the candidate that the most people approve of, regardless of whether or not there are other "stronger" candidates. The population would be better served than if one of the "strong" left or right candidates were elected. You could also just not vote for any other candidates if you don't think they'd do a good job. In your example, the left or the right could just not vote for the "meh" candidate if they truly don't believe they would be a good person to lead, and if they do vote for them, then they should be happy at the outcome regardless.
- elihu 5y ago
  Yeah, it's literally "elect the candidate with the highest approval rating" which seems like a fair and reasonable outcome. (That's assuming that people vote honestly, but according to at least one analysis [1], the outcome isn't very much less democratically optimal if people vote strategically in approval voting rather than honestly.) [1] https://electionscience.org/library/tactical-voting-basics/ https://electionscience.org/library/tactical-voting-basics/
- asteroidbelt 5y ago
  > You elect the candidate that the most people approve of, regardless of whether or not there are other "stronger" candidates. It may be a strategic voting: I approve anyone who is not democrat (or republican). > The population would be better served than if one of the "strong" left or right candidates were elected. Not necessarily. Perhaps it is better when left/right candidates alternate (driving important changes in their area of interests), than weak candidates elected every time.

vitus 5y ago

One important distinction to make is that RCV isn't the same as Instant Runoff Voting (IRV); rather, IRV is a specific (the most commonly championed, as far as I can tell) implementation of RCV, likely because it's the easiest to explain. Note that all RCV implementations have limitations, per the oft-cited https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theore... which outlines a number of ostensibly desirable attributes then demonstrates that no RCV implementation can satisfy all of them. But that's not to say that approval voting methods are flawless, either. One often cited desirable property is the Condorcet criterion, namely, if one candidate beats all others in head-to-head matchups, that candidate should be the winner. (There's a related Condorcet Loser criterion which is the inverse: if one candidate loses to all others in head-to-head matchups, that candidate should not be elected.) Suppose we applied approval voting to a simplified view of the 2016 election. (Y to indicate approval, N to indicate disapproval) - 48%: Partisan R. Trump (Y) > Stein (N) > Clinton (N) - 48%: Partisan D. Clinton (Y) > Stein (N) > Trump (N) - 3%: 3rd-party, very slight D lean. Stein (Y) > Clinton (Y) > Trump (N) - 1%: 3rd-party, very slight R lean. Stein (Y) > Trump (Y) > Clinton (N) Stein beats both Clinton and Trump in head-to-head matchups, 52% to 48%. But with an approval voting system (selecting Clinton with 51% approval), this fails the Condorcet criterion! (IRV is no better here, to be clear. And Condorcet methods have their own pathologies.)

elihu 5y ago
As far as I know, the label RCV as it's commonly used in the United States (and advocated most prominently by FairVote) usually means the same thing as IRV. Perhaps there are some minor differences in terms of specifying exactly what happens if a ballot doesn't rank all the candidates, or ranks two candidates equally. Perhaps using RCV to mean an exact system rather than a whole category of voting systems is imprecise, but I think that ship has already sailed. It's also sometimes called alternative vote, and the Australians call it preferential voting. I've wondered if IRV couldn't be substantially improved by using Borda count for the elimination step rather than eliminating the candidate with the least first-choice options. (I think there's an actual name for that system, but I don't remember what it is.)
- 5y ago