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Gentle reminder that approval voting has been tried & discarded by a number of organizations over the decades (it's literally centuries old!) The main issue is

Gentle reminder that approval voting has been tried & discarded by a number of organizations over the decades (it's literally centuries old!) The main issue is that consistently 80+% of voters 'bullet vote', or simply select one candidate despite their options. Is it a terrible flaw or something that makes AV unusable? Of course not- but it should cool some of the more heated claims. The IEEE, Mathematical Association of America, and the Dartmouth Alumni Association have all tried & discarded AV- as they consistently found that the vast majority of voters bullet vote https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approval_voting#Other_organizations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approval_voting#Other_organiza... Moreover, it's inferior to a simple runoff with a large number of candidates. As Dartmouth found, when you have 6-8+ candidates, even with AV the plurality winner will be a pretty small chunk of total votes cast (like less than 40 or even 30%). Pretty ironic result for a method that claims that to help find the consensus solution! Unpopular opinion, FPTP with a runoff is superior to AV or RCV just for sheer workability & finding the consensus candidate. Even more unpopular opinion, voting systems just don't matter that much- healthy democracies have been plenty stable with FPTP (the UK has like the most extreme version possible), unhealthy democracies will be unstable no matter which voting system is used

clairity 5y ago
> "...with AV the plurality winner will be a pretty small chunk of total votes cast (like less than 40 or even 30%). Pretty ironic result for a method that claims that to help find the consensus solution!" that's not ironic. that's closer to the complex reality of heterogeneous interests and perspectives. what's unnatural is the idea that 50+% of a group would naturally, in an unbiased setting, pick only 2 viable candidates out of millions, and then vote consistently for one of them.
- hash872 5y ago
  Many people find selecting a candidate for political office with 20-30% support to be deeply suboptimal. You're flirting with your government being perceived as illegitimate by regular citizens. At the national level these are incredibly powerful offices- imagine a divisive President ruling the US having won under 30% of votes cast. This is how civil wars start. Yes there are a few countries whose systems work out that way (the UK at times), and it's been criticized for decades. >what's unnatural is the idea that 50+% of a group This is literally how a runoff works- a pragmatic system that's been used for decades by 50+ countries globally. It also enhances democratic legitimacy, as the majority of people feel invested in having voted for the eventual winner. (To be fair, I will say that using AV to select the top two candidates who then go to a runoff is pretty interesting)
  - clairity 5y ago
    what you're literally suggesting is that manufacturing consent is the righteous course. democracy shouldn't hinge on getting the vote 'right' or on the 'legitimacy' of a single elected representative. we're at a point in history, where we can instead have dozens/hundreds of representatives without much administrative burden via technology. plurality of perspective and expertise is what makes a society stronger, not a singular hegemony. the legitimacy of government emerges from the totality of its actions (and non-actions), not from cult of personality.
    - Eelongate 5y ago
      The most important objective of a democracy should be the peaceful transition of power, facilitated by a perception of legitimacy and fairness. Anything else is secondary to that perception. Peaceful transitions of power are important foremost because political violence is abhorrent. Secondly, systems with established track records for peaceful transitions of power encourage people to feel confident about the future, which in turn encourages long term investment and robust economic growth.
- ClayShentrup 5y ago
  There's no such thing as a guaranteed majority nor is that the point of voting. https://web.archive.org/web/20190219005032/https://sites.google.com/a/electology.org/www/utilitarian-majoritarian https://web.archive.org/web/20190219005032/https://sites.goo...
jfengel 5y ago
In the US we do have something like a runoff. We have primary elections and then general elections. It's not quite the same thing, but neither is it the same as plain FPTP. The American system acknowledges the fact that there are long-term stable coalitions. Even if you went to a single election with a runoff, you're going to end up with similar dynamics. Most of the candidates will say, "If I'm your first choice, your second choice should be that other guy who is in my coalition and believes most of the same things that I do." There may well be other candidates on the ballot, but they'll usually find themselves unable to win without a coalition to present a slate of candidates. They're in exactly the same position as "third party" candidates already are. The systems aren't identical and don't produce identical outcomes, but they're a lot closer than I think people make it out to be. A simple procedural change isn't going to fix what's wrong with the American body politic. There is no perfect tiny party out there with all the right answers that everybody would agree with if only the two main parties would just get out of the way. That is what each of hundreds of tiny parties tell themselves. And that's why there's really no such thing as a "third party". Really, there are hundreds of "hundredth parties" who disagree with each other as much as they disagree with the two main parties, because they haven't put forth the effort of hammering out and nurturing the uneasy coalitions that go into making a dominant party.
- snarf21 5y ago
  I'd agree with you IF all our primaries were on the same day and there wasn't this caucus >> primaries in a new state each day
  - jfengel 5y ago
    That's a weirdness for the Presidential election, the only elected national office holder. That one is weird a lot of different ways. But for the various state and district offices, that doesn't matter. There, you really are voting at the same time as all of the other people with an interest in it. I'd say the bigger issue is that for a number of places, only one party really has a chance, and the general election is a foregone conclusion. Voters really only get one bite at the apple, during the primaries. (The voters for the other party never really get a bite at the apple, but they are so far outnumbered that no tweak to the voting system will fix that. They have to hope that the elected representative will keep their interests in mind.)
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
ClayShentrup 5y ago
This is nonsense. For instance, in the last approval voting election for the board of trustees at Dartmouth, there was an average of 1.8 approvals per ballot for four candidates. The average voter voted for almost half of the candidates. http://scorevoting.net/BulletBugaboo http://scorevoting.net/BulletBugaboo Approval voting is beloved by game theory experts specifically for its immense resistance to strategy. It was adopted by a 64% landslide majority in Fargo and a 68% landslide majority in St Louis.
- lalaland1125 5y ago
  Approval voting isn't resistant to strategy. Whether or not to bullet vote or not is a very complicated strategic decision that has huge effects.
  - godelski 5y ago
    No voting system is resistant to _all_ strategies, but some strategies are worse than other strategies.
  - ClayShentrup 5y ago
    Yes, approval voting is resistant to strategy. Here are Bayesian regret and VSE figures showing it performs excellently, generally better than IRV/RCV in all kinds of strategic scenarios. https://www.rangevoting.org/BayRegsFig https://www.rangevoting.org/BayRegsFig https://rpubs.com/Jameson-Quinn/VSE5key https://rpubs.com/Jameson-Quinn/VSE5key Here's a mathematical proof that, even in the worst case scenario where 100% of voters are maximally strategic, approval voting elects the Condorcet winner (candidate who beats every rival head-to-head). https://www.rangevoting.org/AppCW https://www.rangevoting.org/AppCW Moreover, in 422 of the 440 ranked choice voting elections since 2004, the winner was the candidate with the most first-place votes. So even if it was true that everyone would just bullet vote with approval voting, approval voting would still elect the same winner as RCV 96% of the time. At radically lower cost and complexity. https://clayshentrup.medium.com/bullet-voting-is-fine-52e6f22057a9 https://clayshentrup.medium.com/bullet-voting-is-fine-52e6f2...
godelski 5y ago
Gentle reminder that instant runoff voting has been tried & discarded by a number of organizations over the decades (it's literally centuries old!) It's been tried in America and discarded in the past several times in many different places. It is also how they vote in Australia (which is similarly divided as the US). I don't disagree that Approval has issues. I think we can improve upon these with score or STAR. But I think it is very naive to start a post with such a criticism and then ignore that it applies even more strongly to the alternative method being presented (either Exhaustive Voting or Two-Round).
- hash872 5y ago
  I'm not for IRV, you're confusing that with a 'normal' or two round runoff. In a normal runoff there are two rounds, the second round is a few weeks or a month after the first one- the French, most famously, do this for their President. I agree that IRV is pretty terrible https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-round_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-round_system
  - godelski 5y ago
    I'm a little lost at the response. My comment ends mentioning Two-round.
garmaine 5y ago
> Unpopular opinion, FPTP with a runoff is superior to AV or RCV just for sheer workability & finding the consensus candidate You had me up until here, but there's no way this claim is true. FPTP with a runoff is exactly how San Francisco elections are held, and it has made the elections there essentially a one-party system. Voters get to choose between two establishment wings of the Democratic Party at each runoff. It's even worse than plain old FPTP.
- hash872 5y ago
  San Francisco uses ranked choice voting or IRV, not a two-round runoff. I should've used a different term to avoid confusion. Here's what I mean by a two-round system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-round_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-round_system I don't think that the voting system has made SF 'essentially a one-party system', as tons & tons of cities across the US just use normal FPTP and are still very Democratic. Just as tons of rural states just use normal FPTP and are still very Republican. This is what I mean by, voting systems are overrated and just don't have the large effects that enthusiasts want them to have. It's a seductive argument for left-brained engineering types who are systems thinkers, but it's just not empirically true
  - garmaine 5y ago
    California has a top-two primary system, not IRV, which as far as I can tell is the same as the "two-round system" you link to. So the primary is a free-for-all and the actual election has the top two polling candidates from the primaries, regardless of party affiliation. This was sold as a way of breaking the two-party duopoly, which it did, but not in the expected way. Instead of getting third parties or independents into that second spot, in heavily blue areas like SF they instead typically get the democratic vote split among two candidates, who go on to compete against each other in the general election. So now instead of third parties being locked by the mechanics of FPTP voting, they get third parties and republicans locked out! Went from a duopoly to a monopoly. (E.g. the last senate election in California was between Dianne Feinstein and Kevin de León, both establishment dems. Nancy Pelosi also faced a democrat in 2020.)
troydavis 5y ago
Regarding your comment that: > consistently 80+% of voters 'bullet vote', or simply select one candidate St. Louis's election with Approval Voting in March 2021 seems to dispel that. In a Mayoral race with 4 candidates, voters approved an average of 1.56 candidates (https://stlouis-mo.gov/government/departments/board-election-commissioners/documents/election-results/upload/Mar21-Final-Official-Summary.pdf https://stlouis-mo.gov/government/departments/board-election...). Voters understood and used the system, and they didn't bullet vote. 1.56 is a ton of additional expression. As I wrote in https://twitter.com/SeattleApproves/status/1458920042842574849 https://twitter.com/SeattleApproves/status/14589200428425748..., with 15 Mayoral candidates in 2021, Seattle's average may be much higher. It's quite possibly the average will be above 2.

clairity 5y ago

> "...with AV the plurality winner will be a pretty small chunk of total votes cast (like less than 40 or even 30%). Pretty ironic result for a method that claims that to help find the consensus solution!" that's not ironic. that's closer to the complex reality of heterogeneous interests and perspectives. what's unnatural is the idea that 50+% of a group would naturally, in an unbiased setting, pick only 2 viable candidates out of millions, and then vote consistently for one of them.

hash872 5y ago
Many people find selecting a candidate for political office with 20-30% support to be deeply suboptimal. You're flirting with your government being perceived as illegitimate by regular citizens. At the national level these are incredibly powerful offices- imagine a divisive President ruling the US having won under 30% of votes cast. This is how civil wars start. Yes there are a few countries whose systems work out that way (the UK at times), and it's been criticized for decades. >what's unnatural is the idea that 50+% of a group This is literally how a runoff works- a pragmatic system that's been used for decades by 50+ countries globally. It also enhances democratic legitimacy, as the majority of people feel invested in having voted for the eventual winner. (To be fair, I will say that using AV to select the top two candidates who then go to a runoff is pretty interesting)
- clairity 5y ago
  what you're literally suggesting is that manufacturing consent is the righteous course. democracy shouldn't hinge on getting the vote 'right' or on the 'legitimacy' of a single elected representative. we're at a point in history, where we can instead have dozens/hundreds of representatives without much administrative burden via technology. plurality of perspective and expertise is what makes a society stronger, not a singular hegemony. the legitimacy of government emerges from the totality of its actions (and non-actions), not from cult of personality.
  - Eelongate 5y ago
    The most important objective of a democracy should be the peaceful transition of power, facilitated by a perception of legitimacy and fairness. Anything else is secondary to that perception. Peaceful transitions of power are important foremost because political violence is abhorrent. Secondly, systems with established track records for peaceful transitions of power encourage people to feel confident about the future, which in turn encourages long term investment and robust economic growth.
ClayShentrup 5y ago
There's no such thing as a guaranteed majority nor is that the point of voting. https://web.archive.org/web/20190219005032/https://sites.google.com/a/electology.org/www/utilitarian-majoritarian https://web.archive.org/web/20190219005032/https://sites.goo...

jfengel 5y ago

In the US we do have something like a runoff. We have primary elections and then general elections. It's not quite the same thing, but neither is it the same as plain FPTP. The American system acknowledges the fact that there are long-term stable coalitions. Even if you went to a single election with a runoff, you're going to end up with similar dynamics. Most of the candidates will say, "If I'm your first choice, your second choice should be that other guy who is in my coalition and believes most of the same things that I do." There may well be other candidates on the ballot, but they'll usually find themselves unable to win without a coalition to present a slate of candidates. They're in exactly the same position as "third party" candidates already are. The systems aren't identical and don't produce identical outcomes, but they're a lot closer than I think people make it out to be. A simple procedural change isn't going to fix what's wrong with the American body politic. There is no perfect tiny party out there with all the right answers that everybody would agree with if only the two main parties would just get out of the way. That is what each of hundreds of tiny parties tell themselves. And that's why there's really no such thing as a "third party". Really, there are hundreds of "hundredth parties" who disagree with each other as much as they disagree with the two main parties, because they haven't put forth the effort of hammering out and nurturing the uneasy coalitions that go into making a dominant party.

snarf21 5y ago
I'd agree with you IF all our primaries were on the same day and there wasn't this caucus >> primaries in a new state each day
- jfengel 5y ago
  That's a weirdness for the Presidential election, the only elected national office holder. That one is weird a lot of different ways. But for the various state and district offices, that doesn't matter. There, you really are voting at the same time as all of the other people with an interest in it. I'd say the bigger issue is that for a number of places, only one party really has a chance, and the general election is a foregone conclusion. Voters really only get one bite at the apple, during the primaries. (The voters for the other party never really get a bite at the apple, but they are so far outnumbered that no tweak to the voting system will fix that. They have to hope that the elected representative will keep their interests in mind.)

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

ClayShentrup 5y ago

This is nonsense. For instance, in the last approval voting election for the board of trustees at Dartmouth, there was an average of 1.8 approvals per ballot for four candidates. The average voter voted for almost half of the candidates. http://scorevoting.net/BulletBugaboo http://scorevoting.net/BulletBugaboo Approval voting is beloved by game theory experts specifically for its immense resistance to strategy. It was adopted by a 64% landslide majority in Fargo and a 68% landslide majority in St Louis.

lalaland1125 5y ago
Approval voting isn't resistant to strategy. Whether or not to bullet vote or not is a very complicated strategic decision that has huge effects.
- godelski 5y ago
  No voting system is resistant to _all_ strategies, but some strategies are worse than other strategies.
- ClayShentrup 5y ago
  Yes, approval voting is resistant to strategy. Here are Bayesian regret and VSE figures showing it performs excellently, generally better than IRV/RCV in all kinds of strategic scenarios. https://www.rangevoting.org/BayRegsFig https://www.rangevoting.org/BayRegsFig https://rpubs.com/Jameson-Quinn/VSE5key https://rpubs.com/Jameson-Quinn/VSE5key Here's a mathematical proof that, even in the worst case scenario where 100% of voters are maximally strategic, approval voting elects the Condorcet winner (candidate who beats every rival head-to-head). https://www.rangevoting.org/AppCW https://www.rangevoting.org/AppCW Moreover, in 422 of the 440 ranked choice voting elections since 2004, the winner was the candidate with the most first-place votes. So even if it was true that everyone would just bullet vote with approval voting, approval voting would still elect the same winner as RCV 96% of the time. At radically lower cost and complexity. https://clayshentrup.medium.com/bullet-voting-is-fine-52e6f22057a9 https://clayshentrup.medium.com/bullet-voting-is-fine-52e6f2...

godelski 5y ago

Gentle reminder that instant runoff voting has been tried & discarded by a number of organizations over the decades (it's literally centuries old!) It's been tried in America and discarded in the past several times in many different places. It is also how they vote in Australia (which is similarly divided as the US). I don't disagree that Approval has issues. I think we can improve upon these with score or STAR. But I think it is very naive to start a post with such a criticism and then ignore that it applies even more strongly to the alternative method being presented (either Exhaustive Voting or Two-Round).

hash872 5y ago
I'm not for IRV, you're confusing that with a 'normal' or two round runoff. In a normal runoff there are two rounds, the second round is a few weeks or a month after the first one- the French, most famously, do this for their President. I agree that IRV is pretty terrible https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-round_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-round_system
- godelski 5y ago
  I'm a little lost at the response. My comment ends mentioning Two-round.

garmaine 5y ago

> Unpopular opinion, FPTP with a runoff is superior to AV or RCV just for sheer workability & finding the consensus candidate You had me up until here, but there's no way this claim is true. FPTP with a runoff is exactly how San Francisco elections are held, and it has made the elections there essentially a one-party system. Voters get to choose between two establishment wings of the Democratic Party at each runoff. It's even worse than plain old FPTP.

hash872 5y ago
San Francisco uses ranked choice voting or IRV, not a two-round runoff. I should've used a different term to avoid confusion. Here's what I mean by a two-round system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-round_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-round_system I don't think that the voting system has made SF 'essentially a one-party system', as tons & tons of cities across the US just use normal FPTP and are still very Democratic. Just as tons of rural states just use normal FPTP and are still very Republican. This is what I mean by, voting systems are overrated and just don't have the large effects that enthusiasts want them to have. It's a seductive argument for left-brained engineering types who are systems thinkers, but it's just not empirically true
- garmaine 5y ago
  California has a top-two primary system, not IRV, which as far as I can tell is the same as the "two-round system" you link to. So the primary is a free-for-all and the actual election has the top two polling candidates from the primaries, regardless of party affiliation. This was sold as a way of breaking the two-party duopoly, which it did, but not in the expected way. Instead of getting third parties or independents into that second spot, in heavily blue areas like SF they instead typically get the democratic vote split among two candidates, who go on to compete against each other in the general election. So now instead of third parties being locked by the mechanics of FPTP voting, they get third parties and republicans locked out! Went from a duopoly to a monopoly. (E.g. the last senate election in California was between Dianne Feinstein and Kevin de León, both establishment dems. Nancy Pelosi also faced a democrat in 2020.)

troydavis 5y ago

Regarding your comment that: > consistently 80+% of voters 'bullet vote', or simply select one candidate St. Louis's election with Approval Voting in March 2021 seems to dispel that. In a Mayoral race with 4 candidates, voters approved an average of 1.56 candidates (https://stlouis-mo.gov/government/departments/board-election-commissioners/documents/election-results/upload/Mar21-Final-Official-Summary.pdf https://stlouis-mo.gov/government/departments/board-election...). Voters understood and used the system, and they didn't bullet vote. 1.56 is a ton of additional expression. As I wrote in https://twitter.com/SeattleApproves/status/1458920042842574849 https://twitter.com/SeattleApproves/status/14589200428425748..., with 15 Mayoral candidates in 2021, Seattle's average may be much higher. It's quite possibly the average will be above 2.