12 ms·

What Is Voter Satisfaction Efficiency?

129 points by cosmojg 5y ago

cosmojg 5y ago
Looking at the results, it's a wonder that IRV (aka "ranked-choice voting") gets more lip service than STAR and approval voting. These latter two seem obviously and measurably superior. My guess is that it all comes down to a lack of education. Maybe civics ought to be a required course in high school and/or college?
- eyelidlessness 5y ago
  I think it’s because most often advocates are not promoting a specific methodology but a broad set of possible electoral reforms. Even people who study this in depth (like the article author) get substantially different results based on what they value and measure, and by methodology. That’s not something a civics class is going to address for people who want more fair choice at the ballot box but can’t possibly know the outcome of one approach or another without seeing it in situ. Edit: I’m saying this from the perspective of someone who’s spent a lot of time reading on the subject and wouldn’t dare pick a favorite for my country (US) or locality. I just want the opportunity to try systems that are likely more fair.
  - infogulch 5y ago
    This is one of the great aspects of states (localities in general) mostly governing themselves even in important things like voting. Some state tries something new, and everyone observes and can learn from the results. If all of the new things states are trying were concentrated in just one state the churn would destabilize it too much. By spreading out the chaos we collectively get to try many new things at once, but avoid being overwhelmed since each locality is dealing with fewer new things.
    - vlovich123 5y ago
      One major drawback is that efficiencies of scale can’t be taken advantage of and inequities at scale are easier to propagate. So we have a very slow process that ends up disenfranchising a larger amount of people than I’d be comfortable with in a modern developed democracy. This is extremely evident when you start comparing how well governments run in other Western democracies.
      - eyelidlessness 5y ago
        I meant to respond to GP earlier and you got to it before me admirably, but if I may be more terse: some of these states are still experimenting with rehabilitating the Confederacy.
- vlovich123 5y ago
  I feel like STAR in practice ends up being approval voting with more complexity. I just learned about V321 though - interesting concept for sure and also holds the important property perhaps as approval voting if I understood it - can be counted by hand once and you can figure out the results.
- dataflow 5y ago
  I'm not sure there's any voting scheme that people would agree shouldn't be changed.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > Looking at the results, it's a wonder that IRV (aka "ranked-choice voting") gets more lip service than STAR and approval voting. These latter two seem obviously and measurably superior. They are obviously and measurably superior when you construct a measure designed around their shared features while ignoring the cultural variation in honest ballot marking for these methods resulting from the fact that the ballots for them ask a question that doesn't have an objective relationship to preferences.
  - infogulch 5y ago
    Can you break that down? Periods are your friend, your comment makes me feel like I'm rereading Moby Dick.
    - notahacker 5y ago
      The main advantage of IRV is that it isn't a particularly strategic vote. You put the candidates you in the order of your actual preference, and that's it (there are edge cases, but compared with other systems, pretty rare ones, and their complexity tends to actually discourage strategic behaviours like elevating a decent candidate you think is more likely to win than your first choices). The strategic considerations you actually might want to make are very basic (if you really, really want to make sure someone doesn't win, you can rank parties you're pretty unimpressed with ahead of them). A ratings ballot, on the other hand, involves massive amounts of thinking. First of all, the concept of what might represent an "honest" approach to intensity of preferences is open to debate. It's US culture to give their Uber driver max marks and tip the serving staff 20%; is this an honest reflection of the intensity of the average American's enthusiasm for service workers relative to people from non-American cultures or simply what they've been taught to do? And real world electoral situations give you all kinds of incentives to do other things (like give your preferred candidate max marks and all the other candidates 0, or all the candidates you don't hate at least 9 out of 10). Is the person who bullet votes max marks for his preferred candidate because that's what the campaign literature suggested really worth more votes than the person who carefully evaluated all the candidates on their merits but doesn't think any of the candidates are worth more than 6 out of 10? With approval voting it's arguably even worse because there's a massive dilemma over whether to vote positively for the candidate(s) you want or negatively to eliminate the risk of candidates you want to lose. Obviously this applies unevenly to different demographics: put someone downright nasty towards a particular demographic on the ballot paper, and suddenly that demographic is under pressure to Approve every other candidate, whilst others continue to happily only vote for candidates they actually want. If you design an efficiency metric with the arguably unjustifiable assumption that votes always represent either a perfect expression of the intensity of their preferences or a simple uniform strategic vote, and you assume that the proportion of people voting strategically is unaffected by voting system, it is unsurprising that voting systems whose main shortcomings are strategic complexity perform well. Even looking at that data, IRV actually outperforms nearly all the systems if you assume IRV voters are honest and voters using the other system are very strategic which isn't unreasonable given the incentive structures of the different systems.
- marcosdumay 5y ago
  Personally, I fail to see how STAR and approval are superior. If I were to lobby for some electoral change, I would lobby for approval votes, because they are easy to lobby for (just change "you gt ONE vote" into "vote for as many people you like"). But compared to ranked choice, it creates a situation where you can't differentiate candidates between who you clearly have a preference, and this has large odds of changing the outcome.
  - jabl 5y ago
    OTOH, with ordinal methods you are forced to distinguish between candidates that you think are equally good. Say if you have three candidates, A, B, and C, where A and B are very similar and you like both, though with a slight preference to A, whereas you dislike C very much. With approval voting you'd approve A and B, with score voting (say the vote is an integer between 1 and 5) you could vote A=5, B=4, C=1 (or A=5, B=5, C=1 if you think A and B are really close). Whereas with an ordinal system you'd vote A-B-C, but you have no way of 'telling the voting math' that the distance between A and B is much shorter than between B and C. Looking at the results of these simulations described in the article, and similar simulations using 'Bayesian regret', it seems that these issues tend to make cardinal systems better. Also, considering the various gotchas of voting systems, there is the famous Arrow impossibility theorem. However, it applies only to ordinal systems. There is no similar thing for cardinal systems.
    - vintermann 5y ago
      > Whereas with an ordinal system you'd vote A-B-C, but you have no way of 'telling the voting math' that the distance between A and B is much shorter than between B and C. Kenneth Arrow is famous for his impossibility theorem, but he also rejected cardinal systems out of hand, because you can't honestly judge the strength of your own preferences compared to other voters. He argued (pretty well, I thought) that the extra information in cardinal systems was useless.
      - jabl 5y ago
        > Kenneth Arrow is famous for his impossibility theorem, but he also rejected cardinal systems out of hand, because you can't honestly judge the strength of your own preferences compared to other voters. He argued (pretty well, I thought) that the extra information in cardinal systems was useless. Indeed, that is a strong argument in favor of approval voting; if everybody votes strategically under score voting it reduces to approval voting, so why bother with the extra complexity of score voting? FWIW, I recall Arrow himself said in some interview that his personal favorite was approval voting. Secondly, I'm not sure I understand the point about strength of preferences. Since everybody has the same range from within to assign preferences, it's all about the relative preferences among the candidates. Doesn't matter if I hate candidate X with the heat of a thousand suns, I can't give that candidate a score of -1000, only the minimum, just like everybody else.
- troydavis 5y ago
  In Seattle, many of us reached the same conclusion as you did. We’re now trying to change Seattle’s primary elections to use approval voting: https://seattleapproves.org/ https://seattleapproves.org/ Approval voting is extremely effective at capturing voters’ preferences, simple to implement, and incredibly easy to explain - not just the ballot, but how the ballots are tabulated and how the winner is chosen. The entity you linked to, The Center for Election Science, has a “howto” for bringing better elections to your city or county: https://electionscience.org/take-action/approval-voting-chapter-program/ https://electionscience.org/take-action/approval-voting-chap.... That’s where we started and I can vouch for it.
  - JumpCrisscross 5y ago
    > easy to explain What is the simple way to pitch its advantage to IRV without using technical terms? The spoiler effect is simple to explain because we’ve seen it. A hypothetical centre squeeze isn’t. My belief is IRV opens the door to approval voting. (I am still sceptical of it, though I welcome experiments like the one your propose in Seattle.) When approval voting advocates oppose IRV in jurisdictions with plurality voting, however, it just splits the effort and leaves FPTP in place.
    - snakeboy 5y ago
      > When approval voting advocates oppose IRV in jurisdictions with plurality voting, however, it just splits the effort and leaves FPTP in place. Sounds like we are in need of some voting-reform voting reforms!
      - kortex 5y ago
        The solution is simple: ban FPTP and give regions X years to come up with a replacement. We can have one big natural experiment on which alternative method is best. One thing about the US for example, states get a lot of latitude on exactly how to conduct elections.
    - obelos 5y ago
      I just don't see any evidence that IRV can be considered a stepping stone to truly better voting methods. Looking empirically at the matter, the places that adopt and later repeal IRV don't adopt better methods. They revert to choose-one. (Or in the case of Burlington, revert to choose-one and then confoundingly re-adopt IRV). Are there counterexamples I'm missing?
- elihu 5y ago
  I think there's a couple reasons. IRV has been around a lot longer and is used in other countries. (It was first used in Australia in 1893.) In the U.S. it's supported most prominently by FairVote, which seems to be a pretty well-funded organization. (FairVote calls the proposal RCV, and most media follows suit.) The main proponent of approval voting seems to be the Center for Election Science, which is a pretty small organization, though I think they've gotten a little bigger over the last few years. There's also some STAR voting groups. None of these groups have huge piles of money to spend. Then there's news organizations (including the NPR story posted here on HN today) promoting RCV/IRV. On its face, IRV seems pretty straightforward and reasonable. It's problems are complicated and hard to describe. The examples of non-monotonic results where voters can cause their preferred candidate to lose by ranking them too highly are counterintuitive and hard to follow, and I wouldn't blame anyone for thinking: "What? that doesn't make sense. You must have made a mistake somewhere..." There's also the common sentiments of "this is an emergency we need to fix right now" and "everyone's already on the RCV bandwagon" and "replacing a broken system with a half-broken system is usually politically more feasible than replacing a broken system with a not-broken system" and "don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good" and so on. There are also criticisms of the other voting systems. Some people are bothered by approval voting's lack of ordered preferences, for instance, and score voting is susceptible to strategic voting where the most extreme rankings have the most influence. STAR voting mitigates that to some extent, but it's not perfect. I worry that we'll replace FPTP with IRV, find out later that it didn't live up to expectations, and then when voting reform advocates start pushing for something better like approval voting or STAR, the voters will say, "why should we believe you when a bunch of voting reform advocates promised unicorns and rainbows and we got a system that doesn't work any better than FPTP?" And then they'll either say to heck with all this voting theory nonsense and go back to FPTP or just live with IRV. And that's optimistically assuming that our future selves don't just abandon democracy itself as an unworkable idea (and though I reject that premise I have to concede that there's no lack of evidence pointing in that direction).
  - kortex 5y ago
    IRV has a non-complicate-to-explain problem: you can screw up the ballot and invalidate your vote. > Unlike many single-winner methods, instant-runoff cannot accept equal rankings, and must discard ballots with multiple first-preferred remaining alternatives: such ballots would be equivalent to casting multiple ballots in a plurality election With all-the hubbub on the last election about vote validity, and hanging chads before that, the last thing we need is screw-up-able ballots. IMHO we should not even consider any methods in which you can violate invariants on a paper ballot. That rules out FPTP, IRV, and any others where the user with pen-and-paper can enter an invalid state. Err, I guess that rules out 321, which is my new favorite. Simple fix: just count multi Bad/Ok/Good entries toward that total. In the first round, you only look at "good" scores, ignoring ok/bad. Then in the bad round, same thing. This ensures a) you can't produce a bad ballot b) ballot counts stay orthogonal for each category c) multi-entries kinda average out. E2: well I guess you can manage to screw up ANY style of paper ballot and violate some invariant. I guess it matters the difficulty of screwing it up and whether it's recoverable.
- IshKebab 5y ago
  Probably because IRV is easier to actually do and doesn't really have any "free variables" in how you should behave. For example if I strongly like candidate A and I like candidate B a bit less then I should obviously rank them first and second. What about scoring? Should I give them 10, 9? But will that penalise B when A is eliminated? Similarly should I give them Good, Good, or Good, Approve? You kind of have to keep the whole voting system model in your head to decide. You might not think it's very difficult but even ranking candidates is too complicated for most people. Anything more complicated than that has no chance in the real world.
- godelski 5y ago
  Honestly I think we just need some big name to advocate for STAR (or any cardinal system). IRV really took off after CGP Grey's video and gained WAY more support after Hasan Minhaj's episode. The only places I see people talking about cardinal systems are Hacker News and the Yang subreddit (though lots of armchair experts advocating for condorcet methods because they don't see criteria other than VSE as being important). I would not expect cardinal methods to enter the public discourse until some famous person talks about it.
- lamename 5y ago
  Maybe, but as I understand it, within voting system reform there's at least one big practical conflict: the tradeoff between 'the best' vs. the simplest voting system that you can convince people is marginally better. The average voter has no clue what's wrong with the current system. Proponents of one system over the other worry that voters will get confused, or worse, that established groups that disagree with the reform could attack a new voting system as too complicated. Personally I think this is part of the reason approval has gotten more traction than score or STAR systems, but who's to say. The Center for Election Science has better PR and web design than https://www.rangevoting.org/ https://www.rangevoting.org/, which largely advocates for Score voting. But it's a multifaceted issue. Academics argue over different methods, and even as a casual observer it seems pretty clear that no system is flawless. For anyone who hasn't read "Gaming the Vote" by Poundstone, it's a useful introduction that discusses both the academic study and practical use of voting systems.
dragonwriter 5y ago
Interesting (but surprising; this is a routine and hard to describe as anything other than intentional “oversight” in analyzing these methods) that Approval gets two forms, but none that recognize that honest ballots in Approval aren’t either of those constants, but a cultural variable that varies within an electorate, and that the similar issues with all restricted preference (approval and 3-2-1 from this list) and score based (score and STAR from the list) methods are completely ignored.
rayiner 5y ago
Not knowing on the same day who won the NYC primary is much more annoying than I thought it would be. I wonder if there is a psychological effect in play here, like lag in a game controller. Makes you feel less like you’re actually in control.
- _delirium 5y ago
  Do you know what the source of the lag is? There's a concept of "rounds" in IRV, but if you have access to computers, a "round" should resolve in less than a second, if election data is digitized. Is the lag digitizing the votes in the first place?
  - vlovich123 5y ago
    I guess (without any research) it’s because you have to fully count all the votes before you start simulating as results may change. You can’t just say “this person has an inescapable lead” because the drop-out of another candidate might net a win. The only case where you can “call” it I think is if someone is likely to get >50% on the first ballot.
  - zone411 5y ago
    It's mostly because of absentee votes.
  - JumpCrisscross 5y ago
    > Do you know what the source of the lag is? Absentee votes. Also, voters have some time to “cure” mistakes, e.g. forgetting to sign their ballot envelope. TL;DR Nothing intrinsic to IRV.
  - adamjb 5y ago
    The machines at the polling places can only count first preferences. Distribution of preferences will occur once the votes are transferred to the central scrutiny centre. https://twitter.com/AntonyGreenABC/status/1407523700342022145 https://twitter.com/AntonyGreenABC/status/140752370034202214...
elihu 5y ago
The thing that surprises me from those graphs is that 100% strategic voting often led to a better result than 100% honest voting.
- xpe 5y ago
  This is by definition; honest voting is not rational (in the narrow sense of the term).
  - elihu 5y ago
    Not necessarily; I think it's usually more of a prisoner's dilemma situation: if you optimize for getting what you want, then the overall outcome is worse. For example, in the results Borda count is much worse when everyone strategic votes. The new results contrast with an older simulation (graph shown down the page): https://electionscience.org/library/tactical-voting-basics/ https://electionscience.org/library/tactical-voting-basics/ Those results show honest voting always being (globally) better. That's one reason why I find the new results surprising.
    - xpe 5y ago
      Thanks for broadening the discussion beyond low-trust, purely self-interested rationality.
dane-pgp 5y ago
It may be hard to model, but I would have liked to see how Asset Voting compared to the other voting systems. Asset Voting seems to be almost unheard of, even among voting reform enthusiasts, despite being over 100 years old and one of the simplest systems out there. Basically it works the same way as a FPTP election, except that after the votes are counted, the losing candidates one by one get to reassign their votes to a remaining candidate. It doesn't guarantee proportional representation, but it does solve the spoiler problem and doesn't force voters to decide whether to "approve" of a weakly-disliked candidate, or how to rank multiple candidates. The ballot papers wouldn't even have to change their instructions, and it can be easily counted by hand, allowing the votes for each candidate to be placed in their own stack, which makes the process more transparent.
- vlovich123 5y ago
  That’s an interesting concept although it does set the likely stage that a candidate pisses off their base by making some kind of personally politically convenient deal. Also the strong opening it leaves for even the appearance of corruption isn’t my favorite property. Are there real works examples of how such systems operate in practice?
  - nicopappl 5y ago
    Yes, Swiss federal parliamentary elections have a similar system. The name of the other parties your vote goes to if the one you voted for didn’t pass is printed on the voting bulletin. The system is a bit more complex, since it’s for the parliament and you aren’t really voting for parties, but for lists, and the votes get transferred depending on how many seats the list filled, but the basic idea is here. This actually influenced my voting choice. I went for a more niche party who had little chance to get a seat. I knew that if it didn’t get enough votes to get a seat, my vote wouldn’t go to waste. It would go to the larger party which already has many seats but doesn’t align with my political views as well as the niche one. It turned out well since the niche party got a seat despite the polling predictions.
- Sniffnoy 5y ago
  I've seen some voting systems include a "delegation" feature, where instead of submitting a full ranking of candidates (or whatever), you can just vote for a single candidate and your full ballot will be determined by their full ballot. What you're describing seems to be basically IRV but where you are forced to delegate? (OK, I guess the runoff isn't truly instant, but still.) I worry that this might have the same sort of monotonicity problems as IRV normally does, only in terms of the candidates' ballots instead of the voters'.
raymondgh 5y ago
I was afraid some math would support a counterintuitive method, but I was glad to learn about 321 Voting for the first time as well as to see that it scored the best. Pretty neat!
- xpe 5y ago
  > I was afraid some math would support a counterintuitive method When you say 'math', what does that mean to you? To me, especially in this case, 'math' as used here (a model) is ultimately a formalization of a decision criteria. The decision criteria used here, VSE, is a value judgment. Assuming the math is correct and the simulation bug free, I'm most interested in assessing the norms (human values and priorities) implicit in the mathematical scoring function. Though mathematical logic is indeed deductive, using it to assess social systems is subjective.
js8 5y ago
I like range voting (of which approval is a special case). It's simple, and it always takes everybody's point of view into account (it doesn't lose any voter information), which is a really nice property IMHO. Yes, you can argue that the more extremely somebody puts the ranges, they have an advantage. (I would argue we should always normalize the cast vote so that most wanted candidate gets 100 and the least wanted 0, but then we take away people's ability to express only mild interest.) And through that, they can in certain cases manipulate the outcome. I feel like we cannot really meaningfully say that there is a difference between "real" preferences and the "manipulated" ones. For example, this article (from my cursory reading) has a model how media (or others) convince somebody to vote for B when his "real" preference is A. But how can we claim that he truly didn't change his "real" preference to vote for B, based on the media discussion? Ultimately, I find it somewhat patronizing to claim that, if the real preferences are (internally in humans) expressed on numerical scale 0-100, and we ask for the number from that numerical scale 0-100, this number can somehow not correspond to real preference. I think there is then a contradiction in the definition of "preference", because then the preference has to be something more complicated, like some condition based on other people's choice, not a simple internal value that is independent of what other people want.
- remolacha 5y ago
  Are you familiar with quadratic voting? It takes into account much of what you’re taking about, with the benefit of being less gameable.
  - js8 5y ago
    Never heard of it, but it looks interesting. My interpretation, not sure if correct, is that basically you're expressing each vote as a point in d-dimensional Euclid space (where d is number of choices), and the result of the vote is the center of mass of all these points. Stated like this it perhaps makes more sense than just linear range voting.
  - ad8e 5y ago
    Quadratic voting is gameable on the candidate side, if candidates have free entry in and out.
ike77 5y ago
It seems it formalizes giving a greater weight to the loud minority. I'm afraid it incentives anger as an effective political signal. Then you end up like in France, where the perception is that a protest is required for any meaningful change to be enacted.
vintermann 5y ago
It looks like it's a metric constructed to justify Range-ish voting systems, a la Warren Smith's Bayesian regret models. It performs the same core sleigh of hand: it takes a very simple view of strategic voting, assuming a fixed share of the electorate vote "strategically" regardless of election method, and making big assumptions about what's a good strategy. That is, to put it mildly, not a reasonable assumption. It varies widely how much information about other people's preferences you need to "vote strategically", and the strategies also vary widely in how risky they are. If I have false beliefs about other people's preferences, how likely is it that I shoot myself in the foot with "strategic" voting? And how likely is it that we get caught in a bad equilibrium where our false beliefs about the other side's preferences reinforce each other? All this makes the sort of modelling attempted here a vain pursuit. You just can't model strategy this naively. But some methods come MUCH better out of this hopelessly naive modelling of strategy than others. For instance, Approval voting requires very little information about other people's beliefs to vote strategically - you just need to know who the top two contenders are - The strategy is to approve the "least evil" of those two, plus any from the rest of the field you prefer to those two. It degenerates to pretty much the same problem as Plurality voting, with maybe slightly better chance to get out of bad equilibriums in the long run. And Range/Score voting is even more extreme: you can vote strategically there even knowing nothing about other people's preferences. Just always use extreme values (0 and 100). By comparison, strategic voting in Condorcet systems requires really exact information about the electorate's full range of preferences - and even then, you usually need to coordinate your strategic voting without the opposition getting wind of it, otherwise they can counter it. It's just not practical. (Likewise, Borda gets a bad rap in these comparisons. It's not a good system, but the likelihood that "strategic voting" will backfire horribly means that in all likelihood, voters would not pursue those strategies. )
- roenxi 5y ago
  > It degenerates to pretty much the same problem as Plurality voting, with maybe slightly better chance to get out of bad equilibriums in the long run. No, in practice, because the top two contenders are likely to be two who are actually popular. Plurality voting typically finds an equilibrium where the "two most popular" candidates are both extremists. http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/ http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/ has some nice plots showing how the two most popular candidates change from centrists under approval voting to relative extremists under plurality. (I advocate IRV because when in doubt the voting system should degenerate into random chaos. 1 person in 100 shouldn't be a big enough margin to secure power as a principle either)
kilotaras 5y ago
What VSE doesn't capture, but I feel is an important part of voting is signaling voter preferences. Election where a democrat vote with 70% of the vote conveys a different information than the one in which 30% of those 70% first went to the green party candidate.
kortex 5y ago
I've been a proponent of STAR for some time, but today I'm happy to learn about 321. It sounds even easier to explain and implement than STAR (though approval is likely the method with the least friction using existing equipment). I really don't see the appeal of IRV, other than momentum. It's harder to implement. It's not really intuitive why you have to rank them. (I belive) it has higher chance of screwing up ballots (e.g. Forgot to rank a candidate). And I don't like how it forces you to split hairs on two equally liked candidates. Minimizing mental friction is important when we struggle to get high voter turnout as-is. I think 321 most closely matches the political climate in America. People tend to like a candidate, hate them, or "eh, they're fine." Also, not totally sure (maybe someone can chime in), but I think 321 is "stateless" or "commutative" in that the counts of Goods, Oks, and Bads are independent. With any runoff methods, each ballot has a "state", because after a knockout, you need to apply the runoff votes based on other information on that ballot. This makes it hard to compose ballots, e.g. for our goofy ass electoral college system. With 321, (I think) you can decompose each "channel" total for each candidate, and aggregate them at a higher level.
- crazygringo 5y ago
  > I think 321 most closely matches the political climate in America. People tend to like a candidate, hate them, or "eh, they're fine." I couldn't disagree more. I voted in yesterday's NYC Democratic mayoral primary (13 candidates on the ballot), and there were three candidates I considered "like", but with a very strong preference for the first over the second, as well as the second over the third. In today's political climate, people tend to be very passionate about their #1 choice, even if there are 3 they "like". That passion matters.
  - godelski 5y ago
    This is an argument for cardinal systems though... (more score/star rather than approval or 321). When ranking you encode in such a way that your preference from one candidate over another is uniform. But in scoring you don't have this limitation. You can express that you REALLY are passionate about 2 candidates but have a slight preference of one over the other, are lukewarm about a few, and really dislike others. Ordinal systems do not allow you to express this. You're right, passion matters.
specialist 5y ago
Geeking out about voting systems is great. Big fan. Even better are voting systems in context. Voter education, cost of administration, quality of outcomes, cultural impact. For examples: - Approval voting has the best balance between simplicity, fairness, and certainty. (For single winner contents.) - The multiple choice systems reduce partisanship, negativity. Because all candidates want to be your second choice. - Eliminating primaries will reduce polarization and voter fatigue.
- xpe 5y ago
  I would really enjoy staying in touch with people who spend a good number of brain cycles on these topic. What forums or discussion groups would you all recommend?
  - walto2 5y ago
    These folks [0] have a discord and a number of other resources. [0]: https://electionscience.org/ https://electionscience.org/
    - xpe 5y ago
      Thanks for the recommendation. The Center for Election Science doesn't hide their preference* and advocacy: > Let’s put approval voting ON THE MAP! * Generally, each organization has some kind of bias, and I appreciate it when they are up-front about it. My preferred group would have these biases / goals: 1. Valuing a diverse group of people 2. Valuing clear and honest discussion about member preferences in voting systems 3. Valuing understanding among the group members 4. Help group members form alliances with each other, should they desire to organize and do advocacy, because while each of us might have our 'preferred' voting system, we all benefit from moving beyond the 'worst' voting systems
      - godelski 5y ago
        What's kinda interesting about Election Science is how they've changed strategies. They used to push STAR till about a year ago and have since moved to approval voting. It seems they have found that approval is easier to sell to the average person and is still good enough. > Valuing clear and honest discussion about member preferences in voting systems This is a difficult thing tbh. A lot of people learn about voting systems from CGP Grey or Hasan Minhaj and get really passionate, so you get an armchair expertise. Then I think many learn about VSE and see Condorcet methods as the obvious winners (I used to be in this camp). But it often takes awhile to internalize all the nuances in voting. About how to balance VSE, resiliency, simplicity, transparency, computational cost, and more. It is one of those problems that looks easier than it is. A lot of very smart people get into it because it is an interesting problem but it is also easy to convince yourself that your understanding is far better than it is. Every time these threads come up I learn something new and I've been interested in the subject for almost a decade. I think the biggest thing I've learned is to look at the people who have been studying the problem for a long time and see why they are making their decisions. It is difficult to separate the signal from the noise. In addition to the discord link I also suggest following Clay Shentrup[0]. He's active with Election Science and the co-inventor of STAR (he also typically joins voting threads on HN. Username is his full name). The reason I follow him is because reading his comments and posts have led me to a lot more sources and brought up a lot of the above nuances I didn't understand when I first started getting into the subject. [0] https://clayshentrup.medium.com/ https://clayshentrup.medium.com/
unholiness 5y ago
These results aren't passing the sniff-test for me. If I understand, "honest" voters in the score-like systems stick to some magically-shared mapping of their own utility to scores on the ballot (totally unreasonable, but let's grant it). Strategic voters, meanwhile, just use the ballots to maximize their own utility. Let's take the simplest, common scenario of two clear frontrunners. In score voting's one-sided strategic scenarios: - Honest voters who support candidate A will put down magical normally-distributed numbers. Their scores for A end up perhaps 10-50% higher than their scores for B. - Strategic voters who support candidate B will maximize B's chance of winning by putting down the highest score for B and the lowest score for A. Score for B will be uniformly 100% higher than scores for B. In this scenario it takes perhaps 2-10 honest A voters for every strategic B voter for A to win. Yet somehow, the VSE for 1-sided strategic score scenarios are all much better than plurality, and equal with approval? This is a commonly-discussed downside for any score voting system, where it gives strategic voters extra power, and, in these 1-sided scenarios, is worse than plurality. The downside is appearing nowhere in this data.
- xpe 5y ago
  > If I understand, "honest" voters in the score-like systems stick to some magically-shared mapping of their own utility to scores on the ballot (totally unreasonable, but let's grant it). Strategic voters, meanwhile, just use the ballots to maximize their own utility. Yes, this is how the terms are generally used in voting systems literature.
- xpe 5y ago
  The VSE metric implicitly rewards strategic voting, because strategic voting works. By "works" I mean it helps the individual voter maximize their chance of having their preferences reflected in the outcome. > VSE cannot measure: > - Any desirable characteristics of a voting method > that do not directly relate to outcome (who wins). This includes, for example, a value judgment that says "strategic voting is less desirable than honest voting".
  - unholiness 5y ago
    An outcome where 30 strategic B voters win over 70 unstrategic A voters is one I would expect VSE to rate very poorly. That is not a value judgement, and is directly related to the outcome.
rjmunro 5y ago
The Junior Eurovision song contest has an interesting system - you must vote for 3 of the 12 entries. Voting for only 1 or 2 is not allowed. I'd be interested to see analysis of this. I don't think it's a good idea for government elections, I just wonder what it would actually do.

129 points by cosmojg 5y ago

Looking at the results, it's a wonder that IRV (aka "ranked-choice voting") gets more lip service than STAR and approval voting. These latter two seem obviously and measurably superior. My guess is that it all comes down to a lack of education. Maybe civics ought to be a required course in high school and/or college?

eyelidlessness 5y ago
I think it’s because most often advocates are not promoting a specific methodology but a broad set of possible electoral reforms. Even people who study this in depth (like the article author) get substantially different results based on what they value and measure, and by methodology. That’s not something a civics class is going to address for people who want more fair choice at the ballot box but can’t possibly know the outcome of one approach or another without seeing it in situ. Edit: I’m saying this from the perspective of someone who’s spent a lot of time reading on the subject and wouldn’t dare pick a favorite for my country (US) or locality. I just want the opportunity to try systems that are likely more fair.
- infogulch 5y ago
  This is one of the great aspects of states (localities in general) mostly governing themselves even in important things like voting. Some state tries something new, and everyone observes and can learn from the results. If all of the new things states are trying were concentrated in just one state the churn would destabilize it too much. By spreading out the chaos we collectively get to try many new things at once, but avoid being overwhelmed since each locality is dealing with fewer new things.
  - vlovich123 5y ago
    One major drawback is that efficiencies of scale can’t be taken advantage of and inequities at scale are easier to propagate. So we have a very slow process that ends up disenfranchising a larger amount of people than I’d be comfortable with in a modern developed democracy. This is extremely evident when you start comparing how well governments run in other Western democracies.
    - eyelidlessness 5y ago
      I meant to respond to GP earlier and you got to it before me admirably, but if I may be more terse: some of these states are still experimenting with rehabilitating the Confederacy.
vlovich123 5y ago
I feel like STAR in practice ends up being approval voting with more complexity. I just learned about V321 though - interesting concept for sure and also holds the important property perhaps as approval voting if I understood it - can be counted by hand once and you can figure out the results.
dataflow 5y ago
I'm not sure there's any voting scheme that people would agree shouldn't be changed.
dragonwriter 5y ago
> Looking at the results, it's a wonder that IRV (aka "ranked-choice voting") gets more lip service than STAR and approval voting. These latter two seem obviously and measurably superior. They are obviously and measurably superior when you construct a measure designed around their shared features while ignoring the cultural variation in honest ballot marking for these methods resulting from the fact that the ballots for them ask a question that doesn't have an objective relationship to preferences.
- infogulch 5y ago
  Can you break that down? Periods are your friend, your comment makes me feel like I'm rereading Moby Dick.
  - notahacker 5y ago
    The main advantage of IRV is that it isn't a particularly strategic vote. You put the candidates you in the order of your actual preference, and that's it (there are edge cases, but compared with other systems, pretty rare ones, and their complexity tends to actually discourage strategic behaviours like elevating a decent candidate you think is more likely to win than your first choices). The strategic considerations you actually might want to make are very basic (if you really, really want to make sure someone doesn't win, you can rank parties you're pretty unimpressed with ahead of them). A ratings ballot, on the other hand, involves massive amounts of thinking. First of all, the concept of what might represent an "honest" approach to intensity of preferences is open to debate. It's US culture to give their Uber driver max marks and tip the serving staff 20%; is this an honest reflection of the intensity of the average American's enthusiasm for service workers relative to people from non-American cultures or simply what they've been taught to do? And real world electoral situations give you all kinds of incentives to do other things (like give your preferred candidate max marks and all the other candidates 0, or all the candidates you don't hate at least 9 out of 10). Is the person who bullet votes max marks for his preferred candidate because that's what the campaign literature suggested really worth more votes than the person who carefully evaluated all the candidates on their merits but doesn't think any of the candidates are worth more than 6 out of 10? With approval voting it's arguably even worse because there's a massive dilemma over whether to vote positively for the candidate(s) you want or negatively to eliminate the risk of candidates you want to lose. Obviously this applies unevenly to different demographics: put someone downright nasty towards a particular demographic on the ballot paper, and suddenly that demographic is under pressure to Approve every other candidate, whilst others continue to happily only vote for candidates they actually want. If you design an efficiency metric with the arguably unjustifiable assumption that votes always represent either a perfect expression of the intensity of their preferences or a simple uniform strategic vote, and you assume that the proportion of people voting strategically is unaffected by voting system, it is unsurprising that voting systems whose main shortcomings are strategic complexity perform well. Even looking at that data, IRV actually outperforms nearly all the systems if you assume IRV voters are honest and voters using the other system are very strategic which isn't unreasonable given the incentive structures of the different systems.
marcosdumay 5y ago
Personally, I fail to see how STAR and approval are superior. If I were to lobby for some electoral change, I would lobby for approval votes, because they are easy to lobby for (just change "you gt ONE vote" into "vote for as many people you like"). But compared to ranked choice, it creates a situation where you can't differentiate candidates between who you clearly have a preference, and this has large odds of changing the outcome.
- jabl 5y ago
  OTOH, with ordinal methods you are forced to distinguish between candidates that you think are equally good. Say if you have three candidates, A, B, and C, where A and B are very similar and you like both, though with a slight preference to A, whereas you dislike C very much. With approval voting you'd approve A and B, with score voting (say the vote is an integer between 1 and 5) you could vote A=5, B=4, C=1 (or A=5, B=5, C=1 if you think A and B are really close). Whereas with an ordinal system you'd vote A-B-C, but you have no way of 'telling the voting math' that the distance between A and B is much shorter than between B and C. Looking at the results of these simulations described in the article, and similar simulations using 'Bayesian regret', it seems that these issues tend to make cardinal systems better. Also, considering the various gotchas of voting systems, there is the famous Arrow impossibility theorem. However, it applies only to ordinal systems. There is no similar thing for cardinal systems.
  - vintermann 5y ago
    > Whereas with an ordinal system you'd vote A-B-C, but you have no way of 'telling the voting math' that the distance between A and B is much shorter than between B and C. Kenneth Arrow is famous for his impossibility theorem, but he also rejected cardinal systems out of hand, because you can't honestly judge the strength of your own preferences compared to other voters. He argued (pretty well, I thought) that the extra information in cardinal systems was useless.
    - jabl 5y ago
      > Kenneth Arrow is famous for his impossibility theorem, but he also rejected cardinal systems out of hand, because you can't honestly judge the strength of your own preferences compared to other voters. He argued (pretty well, I thought) that the extra information in cardinal systems was useless. Indeed, that is a strong argument in favor of approval voting; if everybody votes strategically under score voting it reduces to approval voting, so why bother with the extra complexity of score voting? FWIW, I recall Arrow himself said in some interview that his personal favorite was approval voting. Secondly, I'm not sure I understand the point about strength of preferences. Since everybody has the same range from within to assign preferences, it's all about the relative preferences among the candidates. Doesn't matter if I hate candidate X with the heat of a thousand suns, I can't give that candidate a score of -1000, only the minimum, just like everybody else.
troydavis 5y ago
In Seattle, many of us reached the same conclusion as you did. We’re now trying to change Seattle’s primary elections to use approval voting: https://seattleapproves.org/ https://seattleapproves.org/ Approval voting is extremely effective at capturing voters’ preferences, simple to implement, and incredibly easy to explain - not just the ballot, but how the ballots are tabulated and how the winner is chosen. The entity you linked to, The Center for Election Science, has a “howto” for bringing better elections to your city or county: https://electionscience.org/take-action/approval-voting-chapter-program/ https://electionscience.org/take-action/approval-voting-chap.... That’s where we started and I can vouch for it.
- JumpCrisscross 5y ago
  > easy to explain What is the simple way to pitch its advantage to IRV without using technical terms? The spoiler effect is simple to explain because we’ve seen it. A hypothetical centre squeeze isn’t. My belief is IRV opens the door to approval voting. (I am still sceptical of it, though I welcome experiments like the one your propose in Seattle.) When approval voting advocates oppose IRV in jurisdictions with plurality voting, however, it just splits the effort and leaves FPTP in place.
  - snakeboy 5y ago
    > When approval voting advocates oppose IRV in jurisdictions with plurality voting, however, it just splits the effort and leaves FPTP in place. Sounds like we are in need of some voting-reform voting reforms!
    - kortex 5y ago
      The solution is simple: ban FPTP and give regions X years to come up with a replacement. We can have one big natural experiment on which alternative method is best. One thing about the US for example, states get a lot of latitude on exactly how to conduct elections.
  - obelos 5y ago
    I just don't see any evidence that IRV can be considered a stepping stone to truly better voting methods. Looking empirically at the matter, the places that adopt and later repeal IRV don't adopt better methods. They revert to choose-one. (Or in the case of Burlington, revert to choose-one and then confoundingly re-adopt IRV). Are there counterexamples I'm missing?
elihu 5y ago
I think there's a couple reasons. IRV has been around a lot longer and is used in other countries. (It was first used in Australia in 1893.) In the U.S. it's supported most prominently by FairVote, which seems to be a pretty well-funded organization. (FairVote calls the proposal RCV, and most media follows suit.) The main proponent of approval voting seems to be the Center for Election Science, which is a pretty small organization, though I think they've gotten a little bigger over the last few years. There's also some STAR voting groups. None of these groups have huge piles of money to spend. Then there's news organizations (including the NPR story posted here on HN today) promoting RCV/IRV. On its face, IRV seems pretty straightforward and reasonable. It's problems are complicated and hard to describe. The examples of non-monotonic results where voters can cause their preferred candidate to lose by ranking them too highly are counterintuitive and hard to follow, and I wouldn't blame anyone for thinking: "What? that doesn't make sense. You must have made a mistake somewhere..." There's also the common sentiments of "this is an emergency we need to fix right now" and "everyone's already on the RCV bandwagon" and "replacing a broken system with a half-broken system is usually politically more feasible than replacing a broken system with a not-broken system" and "don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good" and so on. There are also criticisms of the other voting systems. Some people are bothered by approval voting's lack of ordered preferences, for instance, and score voting is susceptible to strategic voting where the most extreme rankings have the most influence. STAR voting mitigates that to some extent, but it's not perfect. I worry that we'll replace FPTP with IRV, find out later that it didn't live up to expectations, and then when voting reform advocates start pushing for something better like approval voting or STAR, the voters will say, "why should we believe you when a bunch of voting reform advocates promised unicorns and rainbows and we got a system that doesn't work any better than FPTP?" And then they'll either say to heck with all this voting theory nonsense and go back to FPTP or just live with IRV. And that's optimistically assuming that our future selves don't just abandon democracy itself as an unworkable idea (and though I reject that premise I have to concede that there's no lack of evidence pointing in that direction).
- kortex 5y ago
  IRV has a non-complicate-to-explain problem: you can screw up the ballot and invalidate your vote. > Unlike many single-winner methods, instant-runoff cannot accept equal rankings, and must discard ballots with multiple first-preferred remaining alternatives: such ballots would be equivalent to casting multiple ballots in a plurality election With all-the hubbub on the last election about vote validity, and hanging chads before that, the last thing we need is screw-up-able ballots. IMHO we should not even consider any methods in which you can violate invariants on a paper ballot. That rules out FPTP, IRV, and any others where the user with pen-and-paper can enter an invalid state. Err, I guess that rules out 321, which is my new favorite. Simple fix: just count multi Bad/Ok/Good entries toward that total. In the first round, you only look at "good" scores, ignoring ok/bad. Then in the bad round, same thing. This ensures a) you can't produce a bad ballot b) ballot counts stay orthogonal for each category c) multi-entries kinda average out. E2: well I guess you can manage to screw up ANY style of paper ballot and violate some invariant. I guess it matters the difficulty of screwing it up and whether it's recoverable.
IshKebab 5y ago
Probably because IRV is easier to actually do and doesn't really have any "free variables" in how you should behave. For example if I strongly like candidate A and I like candidate B a bit less then I should obviously rank them first and second. What about scoring? Should I give them 10, 9? But will that penalise B when A is eliminated? Similarly should I give them Good, Good, or Good, Approve? You kind of have to keep the whole voting system model in your head to decide. You might not think it's very difficult but even ranking candidates is too complicated for most people. Anything more complicated than that has no chance in the real world.
godelski 5y ago
Honestly I think we just need some big name to advocate for STAR (or any cardinal system). IRV really took off after CGP Grey's video and gained WAY more support after Hasan Minhaj's episode. The only places I see people talking about cardinal systems are Hacker News and the Yang subreddit (though lots of armchair experts advocating for condorcet methods because they don't see criteria other than VSE as being important). I would not expect cardinal methods to enter the public discourse until some famous person talks about it.
lamename 5y ago
Maybe, but as I understand it, within voting system reform there's at least one big practical conflict: the tradeoff between 'the best' vs. the simplest voting system that you can convince people is marginally better. The average voter has no clue what's wrong with the current system. Proponents of one system over the other worry that voters will get confused, or worse, that established groups that disagree with the reform could attack a new voting system as too complicated. Personally I think this is part of the reason approval has gotten more traction than score or STAR systems, but who's to say. The Center for Election Science has better PR and web design than https://www.rangevoting.org/ https://www.rangevoting.org/, which largely advocates for Score voting. But it's a multifaceted issue. Academics argue over different methods, and even as a casual observer it seems pretty clear that no system is flawless. For anyone who hasn't read "Gaming the Vote" by Poundstone, it's a useful introduction that discusses both the academic study and practical use of voting systems.

dragonwriter 5y ago

Interesting (but surprising; this is a routine and hard to describe as anything other than intentional “oversight” in analyzing these methods) that Approval gets two forms, but none that recognize that honest ballots in Approval aren’t either of those constants, but a cultural variable that varies within an electorate, and that the similar issues with all restricted preference (approval and 3-2-1 from this list) and score based (score and STAR from the list) methods are completely ignored.

rayiner 5y ago

Not knowing on the same day who won the NYC primary is much more annoying than I thought it would be. I wonder if there is a psychological effect in play here, like lag in a game controller. Makes you feel less like you’re actually in control.

_delirium 5y ago
Do you know what the source of the lag is? There's a concept of "rounds" in IRV, but if you have access to computers, a "round" should resolve in less than a second, if election data is digitized. Is the lag digitizing the votes in the first place?
- vlovich123 5y ago
  I guess (without any research) it’s because you have to fully count all the votes before you start simulating as results may change. You can’t just say “this person has an inescapable lead” because the drop-out of another candidate might net a win. The only case where you can “call” it I think is if someone is likely to get >50% on the first ballot.
- zone411 5y ago
  It's mostly because of absentee votes.
- JumpCrisscross 5y ago
  > Do you know what the source of the lag is? Absentee votes. Also, voters have some time to “cure” mistakes, e.g. forgetting to sign their ballot envelope. TL;DR Nothing intrinsic to IRV.
- adamjb 5y ago
  The machines at the polling places can only count first preferences. Distribution of preferences will occur once the votes are transferred to the central scrutiny centre. https://twitter.com/AntonyGreenABC/status/1407523700342022145 https://twitter.com/AntonyGreenABC/status/140752370034202214...

elihu 5y ago

The thing that surprises me from those graphs is that 100% strategic voting often led to a better result than 100% honest voting.

xpe 5y ago
This is by definition; honest voting is not rational (in the narrow sense of the term).
- elihu 5y ago
  Not necessarily; I think it's usually more of a prisoner's dilemma situation: if you optimize for getting what you want, then the overall outcome is worse. For example, in the results Borda count is much worse when everyone strategic votes. The new results contrast with an older simulation (graph shown down the page): https://electionscience.org/library/tactical-voting-basics/ https://electionscience.org/library/tactical-voting-basics/ Those results show honest voting always being (globally) better. That's one reason why I find the new results surprising.
  - xpe 5y ago
    Thanks for broadening the discussion beyond low-trust, purely self-interested rationality.

dane-pgp 5y ago

It may be hard to model, but I would have liked to see how Asset Voting compared to the other voting systems. Asset Voting seems to be almost unheard of, even among voting reform enthusiasts, despite being over 100 years old and one of the simplest systems out there. Basically it works the same way as a FPTP election, except that after the votes are counted, the losing candidates one by one get to reassign their votes to a remaining candidate. It doesn't guarantee proportional representation, but it does solve the spoiler problem and doesn't force voters to decide whether to "approve" of a weakly-disliked candidate, or how to rank multiple candidates. The ballot papers wouldn't even have to change their instructions, and it can be easily counted by hand, allowing the votes for each candidate to be placed in their own stack, which makes the process more transparent.

vlovich123 5y ago
That’s an interesting concept although it does set the likely stage that a candidate pisses off their base by making some kind of personally politically convenient deal. Also the strong opening it leaves for even the appearance of corruption isn’t my favorite property. Are there real works examples of how such systems operate in practice?
- nicopappl 5y ago
  Yes, Swiss federal parliamentary elections have a similar system. The name of the other parties your vote goes to if the one you voted for didn’t pass is printed on the voting bulletin. The system is a bit more complex, since it’s for the parliament and you aren’t really voting for parties, but for lists, and the votes get transferred depending on how many seats the list filled, but the basic idea is here. This actually influenced my voting choice. I went for a more niche party who had little chance to get a seat. I knew that if it didn’t get enough votes to get a seat, my vote wouldn’t go to waste. It would go to the larger party which already has many seats but doesn’t align with my political views as well as the niche one. It turned out well since the niche party got a seat despite the polling predictions.
Sniffnoy 5y ago
I've seen some voting systems include a "delegation" feature, where instead of submitting a full ranking of candidates (or whatever), you can just vote for a single candidate and your full ballot will be determined by their full ballot. What you're describing seems to be basically IRV but where you are forced to delegate? (OK, I guess the runoff isn't truly instant, but still.) I worry that this might have the same sort of monotonicity problems as IRV normally does, only in terms of the candidates' ballots instead of the voters'.

raymondgh 5y ago

I was afraid some math would support a counterintuitive method, but I was glad to learn about 321 Voting for the first time as well as to see that it scored the best. Pretty neat!

xpe 5y ago
> I was afraid some math would support a counterintuitive method When you say 'math', what does that mean to you? To me, especially in this case, 'math' as used here (a model) is ultimately a formalization of a decision criteria. The decision criteria used here, VSE, is a value judgment. Assuming the math is correct and the simulation bug free, I'm most interested in assessing the norms (human values and priorities) implicit in the mathematical scoring function. Though mathematical logic is indeed deductive, using it to assess social systems is subjective.

js8 5y ago

I like range voting (of which approval is a special case). It's simple, and it always takes everybody's point of view into account (it doesn't lose any voter information), which is a really nice property IMHO. Yes, you can argue that the more extremely somebody puts the ranges, they have an advantage. (I would argue we should always normalize the cast vote so that most wanted candidate gets 100 and the least wanted 0, but then we take away people's ability to express only mild interest.) And through that, they can in certain cases manipulate the outcome. I feel like we cannot really meaningfully say that there is a difference between "real" preferences and the "manipulated" ones. For example, this article (from my cursory reading) has a model how media (or others) convince somebody to vote for B when his "real" preference is A. But how can we claim that he truly didn't change his "real" preference to vote for B, based on the media discussion? Ultimately, I find it somewhat patronizing to claim that, if the real preferences are (internally in humans) expressed on numerical scale 0-100, and we ask for the number from that numerical scale 0-100, this number can somehow not correspond to real preference. I think there is then a contradiction in the definition of "preference", because then the preference has to be something more complicated, like some condition based on other people's choice, not a simple internal value that is independent of what other people want.

remolacha 5y ago
Are you familiar with quadratic voting? It takes into account much of what you’re taking about, with the benefit of being less gameable.
- js8 5y ago
  Never heard of it, but it looks interesting. My interpretation, not sure if correct, is that basically you're expressing each vote as a point in d-dimensional Euclid space (where d is number of choices), and the result of the vote is the center of mass of all these points. Stated like this it perhaps makes more sense than just linear range voting.
- ad8e 5y ago
  Quadratic voting is gameable on the candidate side, if candidates have free entry in and out.

ike77 5y ago

It seems it formalizes giving a greater weight to the loud minority. I'm afraid it incentives anger as an effective political signal. Then you end up like in France, where the perception is that a protest is required for any meaningful change to be enacted.

vintermann 5y ago

It looks like it's a metric constructed to justify Range-ish voting systems, a la Warren Smith's Bayesian regret models. It performs the same core sleigh of hand: it takes a very simple view of strategic voting, assuming a fixed share of the electorate vote "strategically" regardless of election method, and making big assumptions about what's a good strategy. That is, to put it mildly, not a reasonable assumption. It varies widely how much information about other people's preferences you need to "vote strategically", and the strategies also vary widely in how risky they are. If I have false beliefs about other people's preferences, how likely is it that I shoot myself in the foot with "strategic" voting? And how likely is it that we get caught in a bad equilibrium where our false beliefs about the other side's preferences reinforce each other? All this makes the sort of modelling attempted here a vain pursuit. You just can't model strategy this naively. But some methods come MUCH better out of this hopelessly naive modelling of strategy than others. For instance, Approval voting requires very little information about other people's beliefs to vote strategically - you just need to know who the top two contenders are - The strategy is to approve the "least evil" of those two, plus any from the rest of the field you prefer to those two. It degenerates to pretty much the same problem as Plurality voting, with maybe slightly better chance to get out of bad equilibriums in the long run. And Range/Score voting is even more extreme: you can vote strategically there even knowing nothing about other people's preferences. Just always use extreme values (0 and 100). By comparison, strategic voting in Condorcet systems requires really exact information about the electorate's full range of preferences - and even then, you usually need to coordinate your strategic voting without the opposition getting wind of it, otherwise they can counter it. It's just not practical. (Likewise, Borda gets a bad rap in these comparisons. It's not a good system, but the likelihood that "strategic voting" will backfire horribly means that in all likelihood, voters would not pursue those strategies. )

roenxi 5y ago
> It degenerates to pretty much the same problem as Plurality voting, with maybe slightly better chance to get out of bad equilibriums in the long run. No, in practice, because the top two contenders are likely to be two who are actually popular. Plurality voting typically finds an equilibrium where the "two most popular" candidates are both extremists. http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/ http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/ has some nice plots showing how the two most popular candidates change from centrists under approval voting to relative extremists under plurality. (I advocate IRV because when in doubt the voting system should degenerate into random chaos. 1 person in 100 shouldn't be a big enough margin to secure power as a principle either)

kilotaras 5y ago

What VSE doesn't capture, but I feel is an important part of voting is signaling voter preferences. Election where a democrat vote with 70% of the vote conveys a different information than the one in which 30% of those 70% first went to the green party candidate.

kortex 5y ago

I've been a proponent of STAR for some time, but today I'm happy to learn about 321. It sounds even easier to explain and implement than STAR (though approval is likely the method with the least friction using existing equipment). I really don't see the appeal of IRV, other than momentum. It's harder to implement. It's not really intuitive why you have to rank them. (I belive) it has higher chance of screwing up ballots (e.g. Forgot to rank a candidate). And I don't like how it forces you to split hairs on two equally liked candidates. Minimizing mental friction is important when we struggle to get high voter turnout as-is. I think 321 most closely matches the political climate in America. People tend to like a candidate, hate them, or "eh, they're fine." Also, not totally sure (maybe someone can chime in), but I think 321 is "stateless" or "commutative" in that the counts of Goods, Oks, and Bads are independent. With any runoff methods, each ballot has a "state", because after a knockout, you need to apply the runoff votes based on other information on that ballot. This makes it hard to compose ballots, e.g. for our goofy ass electoral college system. With 321, (I think) you can decompose each "channel" total for each candidate, and aggregate them at a higher level.

crazygringo 5y ago
> I think 321 most closely matches the political climate in America. People tend to like a candidate, hate them, or "eh, they're fine." I couldn't disagree more. I voted in yesterday's NYC Democratic mayoral primary (13 candidates on the ballot), and there were three candidates I considered "like", but with a very strong preference for the first over the second, as well as the second over the third. In today's political climate, people tend to be very passionate about their #1 choice, even if there are 3 they "like". That passion matters.
- godelski 5y ago
  This is an argument for cardinal systems though... (more score/star rather than approval or 321). When ranking you encode in such a way that your preference from one candidate over another is uniform. But in scoring you don't have this limitation. You can express that you REALLY are passionate about 2 candidates but have a slight preference of one over the other, are lukewarm about a few, and really dislike others. Ordinal systems do not allow you to express this. You're right, passion matters.

specialist 5y ago

Geeking out about voting systems is great. Big fan. Even better are voting systems in context. Voter education, cost of administration, quality of outcomes, cultural impact. For examples: - Approval voting has the best balance between simplicity, fairness, and certainty. (For single winner contents.) - The multiple choice systems reduce partisanship, negativity. Because all candidates want to be your second choice. - Eliminating primaries will reduce polarization and voter fatigue.

xpe 5y ago
I would really enjoy staying in touch with people who spend a good number of brain cycles on these topic. What forums or discussion groups would you all recommend?
- walto2 5y ago
  These folks [0] have a discord and a number of other resources. [0]: https://electionscience.org/ https://electionscience.org/
  - xpe 5y ago
    Thanks for the recommendation. The Center for Election Science doesn't hide their preference* and advocacy: > Let’s put approval voting ON THE MAP! * Generally, each organization has some kind of bias, and I appreciate it when they are up-front about it. My preferred group would have these biases / goals: 1. Valuing a diverse group of people 2. Valuing clear and honest discussion about member preferences in voting systems 3. Valuing understanding among the group members 4. Help group members form alliances with each other, should they desire to organize and do advocacy, because while each of us might have our 'preferred' voting system, we all benefit from moving beyond the 'worst' voting systems
    - godelski 5y ago
      What's kinda interesting about Election Science is how they've changed strategies. They used to push STAR till about a year ago and have since moved to approval voting. It seems they have found that approval is easier to sell to the average person and is still good enough. > Valuing clear and honest discussion about member preferences in voting systems This is a difficult thing tbh. A lot of people learn about voting systems from CGP Grey or Hasan Minhaj and get really passionate, so you get an armchair expertise. Then I think many learn about VSE and see Condorcet methods as the obvious winners (I used to be in this camp). But it often takes awhile to internalize all the nuances in voting. About how to balance VSE, resiliency, simplicity, transparency, computational cost, and more. It is one of those problems that looks easier than it is. A lot of very smart people get into it because it is an interesting problem but it is also easy to convince yourself that your understanding is far better than it is. Every time these threads come up I learn something new and I've been interested in the subject for almost a decade. I think the biggest thing I've learned is to look at the people who have been studying the problem for a long time and see why they are making their decisions. It is difficult to separate the signal from the noise. In addition to the discord link I also suggest following Clay Shentrup[0]. He's active with Election Science and the co-inventor of STAR (he also typically joins voting threads on HN. Username is his full name). The reason I follow him is because reading his comments and posts have led me to a lot more sources and brought up a lot of the above nuances I didn't understand when I first started getting into the subject. [0] https://clayshentrup.medium.com/ https://clayshentrup.medium.com/

unholiness 5y ago

These results aren't passing the sniff-test for me. If I understand, "honest" voters in the score-like systems stick to some magically-shared mapping of their own utility to scores on the ballot (totally unreasonable, but let's grant it). Strategic voters, meanwhile, just use the ballots to maximize their own utility. Let's take the simplest, common scenario of two clear frontrunners. In score voting's one-sided strategic scenarios: - Honest voters who support candidate A will put down magical normally-distributed numbers. Their scores for A end up perhaps 10-50% higher than their scores for B. - Strategic voters who support candidate B will maximize B's chance of winning by putting down the highest score for B and the lowest score for A. Score for B will be uniformly 100% higher than scores for B. In this scenario it takes perhaps 2-10 honest A voters for every strategic B voter for A to win. Yet somehow, the VSE for 1-sided strategic score scenarios are all much better than plurality, and equal with approval? This is a commonly-discussed downside for any score voting system, where it gives strategic voters extra power, and, in these 1-sided scenarios, is worse than plurality. The downside is appearing nowhere in this data.

xpe 5y ago
> If I understand, "honest" voters in the score-like systems stick to some magically-shared mapping of their own utility to scores on the ballot (totally unreasonable, but let's grant it). Strategic voters, meanwhile, just use the ballots to maximize their own utility. Yes, this is how the terms are generally used in voting systems literature.
xpe 5y ago
The VSE metric implicitly rewards strategic voting, because strategic voting works. By "works" I mean it helps the individual voter maximize their chance of having their preferences reflected in the outcome. > VSE cannot measure: > - Any desirable characteristics of a voting method > that do not directly relate to outcome (who wins). This includes, for example, a value judgment that says "strategic voting is less desirable than honest voting".
- unholiness 5y ago
  An outcome where 30 strategic B voters win over 70 unstrategic A voters is one I would expect VSE to rate very poorly. That is not a value judgement, and is directly related to the outcome.

rjmunro 5y ago

The Junior Eurovision song contest has an interesting system - you must vote for 3 of the 12 entries. Voting for only 1 or 2 is not allowed. I'd be interested to see analysis of this. I don't think it's a good idea for government elections, I just wonder what it would actually do.