5 ms·

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

by 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.
- crazygringo 5y ago
  It's easy enough to have a scanner reject an invalid ballot and force you to fill out a new one. At least in NYC where I vote, you feed it into the scanner yourself. And you've always been able to produce invalid ballots, like voting for two candidates when you're only allowed to pick one. You're describing a UX problem which has UX solutions. It's not even remotely a justification for selecting a democratic procedure to express the will of the people.
  - obelos 5y ago
    Another benefit of Approval Voting ballots is you basically cannot spoil them. You can't rate/rank the same candidate more than once, and marking multiple candidates is valid.
  - kortex 5y ago
    > You're describing a UX problem which has UX solutions. It's not even remotely a justification for selecting a democratic procedure to express the will of the people. Agreed but that's far from my only gripe with FPTP and IRV.

by elihu 5y ago

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.

crazygringo 5y ago
It's easy enough to have a scanner reject an invalid ballot and force you to fill out a new one. At least in NYC where I vote, you feed it into the scanner yourself. And you've always been able to produce invalid ballots, like voting for two candidates when you're only allowed to pick one. You're describing a UX problem which has UX solutions. It's not even remotely a justification for selecting a democratic procedure to express the will of the people.
- obelos 5y ago
  Another benefit of Approval Voting ballots is you basically cannot spoil them. You can't rate/rank the same candidate more than once, and marking multiple candidates is valid.
- kortex 5y ago
  > You're describing a UX problem which has UX solutions. It's not even remotely a justification for selecting a democratic procedure to express the will of the people. Agreed but that's far from my only gripe with FPTP and IRV.