13 ms·

Alaska Ranked Choice Voting Cast Vote Record [JSON at the Bottom]

79 points by malshe 4y ago

themitigating 4y ago
I'd love to see this implemented in other elections.
- tryptophan 4y ago
  I wouldn't. This method of ranked choice voting is really bad. FPTP is awful. IRV is awful-1%. Why not choose something good like range or approval voting that doesn't have all these bizarre gotchas and strategies about who is 3rd? Score and range are even simpler to tabulate than IRV.
  - pclmulqdq 4y ago
    IRV is really bad, and this is an example as to why. If you want to use a confusing voting system (to the average person, IRV is very confusing), you should be doing the Condorcet algorithm with an IRV tiebreaker among the winners. Approval voting, on the other hand, is very simple to understand and doesn't have the same spoiler effect problems that FPTP and IRV both have.
    - colinmhayes 4y ago
      Approval still disincentivizes third parties. If you're the tie breaking vote(which is the only time your vote actually matters) your incentive is to vote only for the candidate you most support.
      - pclmulqdq 4y ago
        In terms of strategic voting, if you are okay with 2 candidates in a close 3+ candidate race, refusing to vote for one of them in favor of the other risks the candidate you don't prefer winning the election. I think your idea about being the tiebreaker is a little reductive, since it really assumes you are choosing between 1 of n candidates you like, and that the other candidates are known to be losers.
hadlock 4y ago
This is an impressive level of transparency. Usually when you get government "transparency" it is in the form of a PDF of poorly photocopied documents as images which are effectively useless from a analysis standpoint, unless you have many humans ready to read/transcribe. The fact that it's in a modern data-friendly format, is super impressive. I would have been happy if they'd even managed to put it in a CSV without headers
- RajT88 4y ago
  You will be interested in the OpenElections github account: https://github.com/openelections https://github.com/openelections
- golf1052 4y ago
  >Usually when you get government "transparency" it is in the form of a PDF of poorly photocopied documents as images which are effectively useless from a analysis standpoint, unless you have many humans ready to read/transcribe. Of the largest 20 cities in the US, all but one have open data sites where you can programmatically pull down datasets. I feel like this is more becoming the norm rather than the exception. Maybe it's just smaller municipalities that don't have open data sites?
  - pchristensen 4y ago
    Which one doesn't? (curious)
    - golf1052 4y ago
      Jacksonville
- jerrybender 4y ago
  These (not official) spreadsheets may interest you https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1TtnlrfCMs9C4exLsKhzpPUpB9Uc-rFl2QLUAP6zZIe8/edit#gid=2143573942 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1TtnlrfCMs9C4exLsKhzp... https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1vpSCiNFolwtG765Lxe92Tm1_KBo0IwHH/edit#gid=9181399 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1vpSCiNFolwtG765Lxe92...
hash872 4y ago
Seems pretty clear that RCV had (another) Condorcet failure here- Begich is the clear Condorcet winner. This is the same issue that famously happened in the 2009 Burlington mayor's election, leading to an angry voter recall of RCV. Pairwise Preferences 88222 Begich > Peltola 79574 Peltola > Begich Begich wins with 52.5% against Peltola 101530 Begich > Palin 63681 Palin > Begich Begich wins with 61.4% against Palin 91418 Peltola > Palin 86271 Palin > Peltola Peltola wins with 51.4% against Palin Edit to include all of the failures here. I am copying this from a comment on r/endfptp, analysis is not mine (link below): Condorcet Failure: Begich beats Peltola by 52.5% and Palin by 61.4%. Favorite Betrayal Failure: If 2913 Palin voters that preferred Begich to Peltola betrayed Palin by strategically ranking Begich 1st he would of won instead of Peltola. Monotonicity Failure: If Peltola were able to gain the support of 5825 Palin voters, she would of lost to Begich. Participation Failure: If 5825 Palin voters that preferred Begich to Peltola had forgotten to vote, Begich would of won. Consistency Failure: If 5828 Palin>Begich voters, 2915 Begich voters, and 2914 Peltola>Begich voters were removed from the election, Begich would have won and if you counted just those removed votes, Begich also would of won https://www.reddit.com/r/EndFPTP/comments/x9oupk/2022_alaska_special_general_vote_breakdown/ https://www.reddit.com/r/EndFPTP/comments/x9oupk/2022_alaska...
- wslack 4y ago
  If you can get a city/county/state to adopt Condorcet, by all means have at it. IRV is much better than FPTP because FPTP encourages candidates to drop out of a race so that their supporters can unite around one ideologically aligned candidates - meaning we lose the "signal" from those other candidates. IRV, on the other hand, does not encourage candidates to drop out, allowing the voters to express their views more clearly.
  - gamegoblin 4y ago
    The Alaska data shows that this is not the case. For instance, if Palin had dropped out, Begich would have won. Palin pulled enough votes from Begich in the first round that Begich was eliminated, even though he would have beaten Peltola in the final. Almost all Palin voters would have preferred Begich to Peltola, so they could have gotten a better result by lying about their preferences and strategically voting for Begich as their first choice. Expressing their views honestly resulted in a worse outcome than if they had expressed their views dishonestly. Among voting nerds this failure mode is referred to as "favorite betrayal" -- https://electowiki.org/wiki/Favorite_betrayal_criterion https://electowiki.org/wiki/Favorite_betrayal_criterion
hunterb123 4y ago
Ranked choice voting is a complete scam, obscured by complexity. I would never live anywhere that has it.
- ketzo 4y ago
  What about it is a scam?
  - hunterb123 4y ago
    It makes voting so complex you can't follow it, allowing manipulation. It's much simpler to have one vote from one person for one candidate. You shouldn't have to have a degree in stats (and that doesn't help much) to calculate the winner. Voters should be confident in the system and that means being able to verify it yourself with simple addition. Ranked choice voting is like the current tax code, full of exceptions and rules for the elite to manipulate while the common person gets boned.
    - ceejayoz 4y ago
      > It's much simpler to have one vote from one person for one candidate. If there's only two candidates.
      - hunterb123 4y ago
        No, it's simple addition for all candidates. You either got a vote from a person or not, leave it at that. Currently you have Alaska being majority red but Pelosi losing to a Democrat, I wonder how that happened. But certain people when they lose want to change things, whether it's advocating abolishing the Electoral College or implementing a complex RCV system to create arbitrary rules to tip the scales to candidates they favor. -- edit @mikeyouse -- No I'm not mad, as I said I prefer to live in a place that has a simpler voting system where it's easy for everyone verify the vote and be confident in the system. I'm maybe more disappointed in people allowing it and being that naive. Do you feel the same way about the tax code or should just voting be complicated? How do you feel about the EC system? Were you advocating getting rid of it recently? There's a certain group of people wanting to flip the game table up here recently. -- edit @ceejayoz -- So the flipside of your statement would be you "grumping" about the simpler system. Has RCV solved the split vote issue? Hint: no it hasn't. Nor was that ever really a problem, just an excuse to implement RCV. -- edit @esoterica -- That's an extremely partisan take and not at all what I've heard from Alaskan friends. Pelosi is well respected in the party and in the state, no matter what liberals think, they usually mix her up with Tina Fey anyways.
tunesmith 4y ago
I haven't reviewed the json in depth but I wonder if the data is sufficient to also test against other vote-counting methods such as Condorcet. BTW, I've always found the descriptions of Condorcet to be self-defeating, even on Wikipedia (and my edits have been rejected). I've always considered there to be a conceptual separation between the Condorcet method itself, and the various "tie-breaking" schemes that are bolted on if the Smith Set has more than one member. But in the voting literature, they're always communicated together. The reason this causes confusion is that then a "Condorcet Method" can then be described as having this flaw or that, when those flaws almost entirely come up only in those tie-breaking scenarios. So then Condorcet itself gets painted with the same broad brush. But an election with a single-member Smith Set is free of all of those flaws that only apply to the tie-breaker methods. And personally, I don't see why we should be so scared of a multi-member Smith Set. The presence of which is an accurate indicator that the voting population is actually unable to come to a clear decision - that is valuable information! In a Democratic election, I'd honestly be more interested in having a runoff election at that point, rather than trying to bolt on some sort of flawed tie-breaking vote-counting mechanism.
- KerrickStaley 4y ago
  One could advocate for the adoption of Smith-IRV. It's easy to explain (it's the same as IRV, we just filter it down to the Smith set first waves hand) and it satisfies the Condorcet criterion. (I really like this framing BTW, separating the concepts of the Smith set and the tie-breaking process).
  - tunesmith 4y ago
    I'd go for that. As far as I'm concerned, Smith-IRV is better than IRV in every circumstance. The only counterpoint I've seen are twisty arguments about a modified "Majority Criterion", where a single-member Smith Set might not (arguably) be someone that a majority "voted for". Which would seem to apply just as much to IRV as well, but IRV adherents that make this point seem to think that the mechanics of IRV somehow overcome that.
  - fdsjgfklsfd 4y ago
notriddle 4y ago
If you're going to talk about vote counting systems, please consult this interactive blog post: https://ncase.me/ballot/ https://ncase.me/ballot/ And the HN discussion surrounding it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30847133 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30847133 [Unfortunately, while you can test ranked choice voting systems against each other directly using examples, you can't really test them against cardinal voting systems because the ballots aren't the same. At best, you use statistical models to compare them.]
- godelski 4y ago
  We should really note a key difference in ordinal vs cardinal systems that has a lot of effects surrounding them. That's how the information is embedded. In a ranked system all candidates your preference between any two candidates, in order, is equidistant. In cardinal systems, since you score candidates, your preference doesn't have to be equidistant. You can have a 0 distance between any choices or a large gap. This is pretty powerful and comes at no real cost (plus they are scalable and trivial to calculate winners since it is just argmax(sum of columns))
  - jacques_chester 4y ago
    The problem with cardinal systems is that political parties will tell their followers "just vote 10.0 for me and 0.0 for everyone else". Enough people will do that to obviate the other advantages. Exhaustive or even partially exhaustive RCV makes that tactic impossible.
    - godelski 4y ago
      You can still do that tactic in RCV by simply voting for a single candidate and leaving the rest blank. I'm not sure why people keep talking about this strategy as if it is unique or a coup d'etat. Additionally, no system is invulnerable to a strategy or candidates manipulating voters. So pointing out one strategy is an ineffective means of argument because you need to compare the results of strategies across different systems and the harm that they can cause (see favorite betrayer as one that causes a lot of harm and what I think the vast majority of voter concerns are with. I'll let you see how cardinal systems vs ordinal systems handle this). The issue I see with voting discussions is people don't realize how complex social choice is but just latch onto a few CGP Gray videos and defend their preference with a resolve well beyond their experience. That manipulation is also an easy to overcome strategy as you can bullet vote your favorite candidates. There actually isn't any real strategic advantage to not voting your preference (albeit minor ones). There's no concept of tossing your vote away by scoring your preferred candidate high (the most common strategy is to weight your safe candidate the same or just below, but above your actual preference). Yes, you have to teach people how to vote under this new system but that's no difference than teaching them to rank candidates (instead we teach to give them a ?/5 star review. A concept people are highly familiar with).
collegeburner 4y ago
Any old data for comparison points?
pmarreck 4y ago
If the Republicans dominate Alaska, how did a Democrat win? In IRV, wouldn't someone whose first choice was a Republican candidate almost definitely pick another Republican candidate as their second choice? I thought the whole point of IRV was to prevent a 3rd candidate "splitting a vote"
- ciabattabread 4y ago
  The quality of the candidate matters.
- frob 4y ago
  There were two Republicans in the race and one was Sarah Palin. People in Alaska have strong opinions about her, especially after she quit the governorship half-way through to go be a reality TV actor. There were many GOP voters that chose the other republican as their first choice and the Democrat as their second because they disliked Palin more than an R after her name could make up for. In fact, this seems like the perfect example of ranked-choice voting giving people the outcome they preferred.
  - gamegoblin 4y ago
    > In fact, this seems like the perfect example of ranked-choice voting giving people the outcome they preferred. 52.5% of people preferred Begich to Peltola. That majority of voters did not get the outcome they preferred. Imagine an election with 6 candidates. 5 candidates each get 20% of the 1st round voting, and 1 candidate gets 0% of the 1st round voting, but everybody marks him as their 2nd choice. He is nobody's favorite, but everyone likes him over their alternatives to their favorite. It seems reasonable to me that a good voting system should select this guy who is broadly approved by everyone. But in IRV, he is eliminated in the first round. The recent Alaska election was much less egregious version of this same failure mode.
    - t-writescode 4y ago
      It's arguably still a better situation than FPTP. In other countries, like Australia, where they're used to alternative styles of voting, they have guides on how to vote and who to put in what rank to match what a given party thinks is the best rundown of potentials. Alaska will get there.
smm11 4y ago
Everywhere else in everything a vote is a vote. Then when it comes to politics, you need the most byzantine structure imaginable.
- bombcar 4y ago
  It would be really bad if people looked at mass-market general elections from a mathematical point of view.
- Spivak 4y ago
  Every voting system causes people to vote strategically, the best ones are when the strategic vote and and an individual’s actual preferences line up. I want A, and if not A then I guess B, and if not B I guess C isn’t that complicated. Determining a system to tally those votes in a way that represents everyone’s preferences faithfully is when you start needing math.
  - smm11 4y ago
    See? My post was downvoted 3. Not 1, not 7. But 3.
- fdsjgfklsfd 4y ago
  When you rate products on Amazon, do you just get one vote for "this is my favorite product" and you can't express any opinion about any of the others? When students are evaluated by their teachers, do the teachers just say "this student is the best" and not express anything about any of the others?
MichaelCollins 4y ago
In my view, the priority of a democratic system is to ensure peaceful transitions of power by providing the perception of fairness. The perception of an election being fair is more important than an election being actually fair, although both at once is obviously desirable. My concern with sophisticated voting schemes like Condorcet or RCV is that these systems may be too complicated for some unsophisticated voters to understand, and therefore risk the perception of unfairness. FPTP is less fair, but is easy to understand and is therefore easy to perceive as fair. FPTP is simple enough that any common fool can hold a mock election with his friends and trivially calculate the winner. Send that same man to the Condorcet method wikipedia page and I think his eyes will glaze over before he figures it out. It may be the case that my concern is misplaced, so I support testing these voting methods in low-stake elections, such as this one in Alaska. But I recommend caution when applying these methods to high-stake elections. Peaceful transitions of power is more important than anything else, and anything that might risk that peace should be considered with caution.
- rayiner 4y ago
  I agree 100%. The perception of fairness is the most important thing. Elections need to be transparent and simple enough that even idiots and skeptics of government still must begrudgingly acknowledge the results.
  - bosswipe 4y ago
  - phkahler 4y ago
    >> The perception of fairness is the most important thing. And yet, we add a single level of quantization (the electoral college) and half the country loses their mind whenever the "majority vote" candidate doesn't win. Maybe something a little more complicated would be good ;-)
    - rayiner 4y ago
      The electoral college isn’t a voting rule (for deciding who wins) it’s a power distribution rule (for deciding who does the electing). But you’re correct that even that modest complexity causes people to have a fit every four years when it doesn’t reflect their intuitive understanding of how elections should work.
simonw 4y ago
Wow, that zip file of JSON is 6.5MB, but when you decompress it you get a 382.MB CvrExport.json file! I guess repetitive JSON compresses REALLY well. I tried playing with it in SQLite but that CvrExport JSON needs some extra work to break it up into separate tables for it to be readable. Here's a demo that shows the other tables but ignores the 300MB+ one: https://lite.datasette.io/?sql=https://gist.githubusercontent.com/simonw/0e6901974a14ab7d56c2746a04d72c8c/raw/49f6d766d242425ce42c3dee646b48396f481f29/database.sql https://lite.datasette.io/?sql=https://gist.githubuserconten...
- dlbucci 4y ago
  A year ago, I was making a game for JS13K, where the goal is to make a game that fits in a zip file under 13,312 bytes. I had a two spots that were using the exact same copy-pasted chunk of code, so I figured I'd refactor it into a function to save space, but it actually _increased_ the size of the final zip when I did so. Turns out zip files compress repetitions of the same exact text _very_ well.
  - dekhn 4y ago
    Yes, the algorithm zip uses in this case uses backrefs "LZ77 algorithms achieve compression by replacing repeated occurrences of data with references to a single copy of that data existing earlier in the uncompressed data stream. A match is encoded by a pair of numbers called a length-distance pair, which is equivalent to the statement "each of the next length characters is equal to the characters exactly distance characters behind it in the uncompressed stream". (The distance is sometimes called the offset instead.)" This is a different technique from entropy coding, which gets its improvements by allocating fewer bits for more frequent symbols. But most modern compresses uses a mix, for example gzip uses DEFLATE, which is a combination of literal backrefs and dynamic and static Huffman tables. and Yes, JSON is usually absurdly compressible.
- yyyk 4y ago
  >Wow, that zip file of JSON is 6.5MB, but when you decompress it you get a 382.MB CvrExport.json file! Not only is it so small, but it's easy to improve while remaining compatible with zip: Infozip -9 -> 5693Kb zopfli -> 5437Kb
godelski 4y ago
I don't get the hubbub around ordinal voting. It has a serious embedding problem that is solved in cardinal systems. The problem is that by ranking candidates the distance between two candidates is identically spaced. Instead by scoring candidates you are better able to express this distance (even in simple systems like approval). This quickly resolves issues like the favorite betrayer (strong spoiler effect) and resolves some strategy issues (no system is immune to all strategies fwiw). Plus you get a much easier to calculate election (`argmax([candidate.sum() for candidate in candidate_list])`, which also has nice sampling properties for winner estimates and verification). Aren't these the systems we want to be using? I mean could you imagine the Arizona recount with an ordinal system? Or RP or Schultz? What a disaster that would have been.
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago
  > by scoring candidates you are better able to express this distance We have no cultural context for this distance. Until that can be harmonized, such systems are DOA.
  - godelski 4y ago
    That distance is voter preference. Which I think we have a pretty clear cultural context of.
- yyyk 4y ago
  Cardinal voting systems ask for information few voters really have, and we get GIGO. We arguably shouldn't want to receive the cardinal info if they did have it because that mainly helps ultra-partisan voters. They allow candidates to improve their position if there's a more extreme candidate to their side, because voters may still want to express the ordinal preference.
  - godelski 4y ago
    > Cardinal voting systems ask for information few voters really have Voters don't know which candidates they prefer? If you really believe this (in the strong sense, not the weak sense) then I think you have to throw out voting all together. Maybe I'm missing your point? > voters may still want to express the ordinal preference. This is a feature, not a bug. Cardinal systems can capture ordinal preference but ordinal systems can't capture cardinal preference. (obviously not exactly)
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
idlewords 4y ago
I was a big proponent of ranked choice voting until I got a chance to talk with a number of voters in New Hampshire and Maine in the runup to the 2020 election. One of those states has ranked-choice and the other doesn't, so whenever I got a chance I would bring up the topic. I was surprised at how negative a reaction some voters had to the scheme. Digging in a bit, their perception of unfairness seemed to come from the fact that some people's votes would be counted more than others'. That is, if you voted for a series of fringe candidates in increasing likelihood of electability, your vote might be counted several times, while someone who voted for the mainstream candidate would just get their vote counted once. This kind of folk analysis of ranked-choice voting makes some people very mistrustful of the method and is hard to counter. Since elections are a social phenomenon, and not just a mathematical exercise, and given our current atmosphere of mistrust and attacks against the electoral process itself, I think the interest in having a crystal clear criterion for winning ("most votes wins") outweighs the many theoretical advantages of ranked choice.
- googlryas 4y ago
  It might help them understand that their votes aren't actually counted multiple times - every #1 vote for a fringe candidate is, essentially just thrown out.
  - idlewords 4y ago
    I'm talking about voter perceptions and politically effective attacks on ranked choice voting, not its mathematical properties. A complete understanding of the latter by all voters would remove the problem, but practically speaking you end up in a PR fight where one side is trying to condescendingly explain a math problem to the other. That's not a good place for the explaining side to be, and in a political environment already polarized by education level, it is a losing fight. People are going to trust their gut over anything some egghead from the political opposition tells them.
    - googlryas 4y ago
      I don't think the math really needs to be explained - just telling people how to operate it. Millions of Australians vote via a similar system and they're not all constantly scratching their head over the Condorcet paradox.
jmyeet 4y ago
Ranked choice voting should be the standard. Some point to Alaska's special election as a failure of some sort. It isn't. A large number of Republican voters simply put only one choice. Had they ranked Palin as #2 (assuming this was their preference) she would've won by a significant margin. Now whether they didn't understand the system or they really didn't want Palin as a second choice we can only speculate about. The rules for any election should be strictly interpreted. Trying to divine the intent of the voter (as happened in Florida in 2000) is a subjective and really dangerous standard to use. If something could be better or clearer you fix it in the next election. You don't try and ret con it into the election just run. The first past the post ("FPTP") system used in the majority of American elections is just horrible. Spoiler candidates are a real problem (eg [1]). The only issue with the Alaska system is one of education. That can take some time but it'll be worth it. I'm glad Alaska is being transparent about the results by publishing this. We certainly don't need to make the voting system even more complicated as some other commenters suggest. [1]: https://www.tampabay.com/news/florida-politics/2022/08/25/fpl-funds-secretly-paid-for-a-spoiler-candidate-in-a-2018-florida-race/ https://www.tampabay.com/news/florida-politics/2022/08/25/fp...
- phkahler 4y ago
  >> The only issue with the Alaska system is one of education. Yep, they just got educated. Next election will IMHO see more 2nd choices!
  - fdsjgfklsfd 4y ago
    Next election will likely see fewer candidates, as parties realize that Hare RCV still suffers from the spoiler effect, despite all the lies from its proponents, and that they still have to eliminate all but one candidate from their party if they want to win.
- harshreality 4y ago
  Ranked choice describes a family of systems. Plain IRV is not that much better than FPTP. They're both terrible. If an election area is going to all the trouble to convert to ranked choice ballots, plain IRV should not be the system they use to calculate the results.
malshe 4y ago
I posted this before going to teach a class without any specific expectations about the response to the post. I am pleasantly surprised by so many high quality comments!

79 points by malshe 4y ago

themitigating 4y ago

I'd love to see this implemented in other elections.

tryptophan 4y ago
I wouldn't. This method of ranked choice voting is really bad. FPTP is awful. IRV is awful-1%. Why not choose something good like range or approval voting that doesn't have all these bizarre gotchas and strategies about who is 3rd? Score and range are even simpler to tabulate than IRV.
- pclmulqdq 4y ago
  IRV is really bad, and this is an example as to why. If you want to use a confusing voting system (to the average person, IRV is very confusing), you should be doing the Condorcet algorithm with an IRV tiebreaker among the winners. Approval voting, on the other hand, is very simple to understand and doesn't have the same spoiler effect problems that FPTP and IRV both have.
  - colinmhayes 4y ago
    Approval still disincentivizes third parties. If you're the tie breaking vote(which is the only time your vote actually matters) your incentive is to vote only for the candidate you most support.
    - pclmulqdq 4y ago
      In terms of strategic voting, if you are okay with 2 candidates in a close 3+ candidate race, refusing to vote for one of them in favor of the other risks the candidate you don't prefer winning the election. I think your idea about being the tiebreaker is a little reductive, since it really assumes you are choosing between 1 of n candidates you like, and that the other candidates are known to be losers.

hadlock 4y ago

This is an impressive level of transparency. Usually when you get government "transparency" it is in the form of a PDF of poorly photocopied documents as images which are effectively useless from a analysis standpoint, unless you have many humans ready to read/transcribe. The fact that it's in a modern data-friendly format, is super impressive. I would have been happy if they'd even managed to put it in a CSV without headers

RajT88 4y ago
You will be interested in the OpenElections github account: https://github.com/openelections https://github.com/openelections
golf1052 4y ago
>Usually when you get government "transparency" it is in the form of a PDF of poorly photocopied documents as images which are effectively useless from a analysis standpoint, unless you have many humans ready to read/transcribe. Of the largest 20 cities in the US, all but one have open data sites where you can programmatically pull down datasets. I feel like this is more becoming the norm rather than the exception. Maybe it's just smaller municipalities that don't have open data sites?
- pchristensen 4y ago
  Which one doesn't? (curious)
  - golf1052 4y ago
    Jacksonville
jerrybender 4y ago
These (not official) spreadsheets may interest you https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1TtnlrfCMs9C4exLsKhzpPUpB9Uc-rFl2QLUAP6zZIe8/edit#gid=2143573942 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1TtnlrfCMs9C4exLsKhzp... https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1vpSCiNFolwtG765Lxe92Tm1_KBo0IwHH/edit#gid=9181399 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1vpSCiNFolwtG765Lxe92...

hash872 4y ago

Seems pretty clear that RCV had (another) Condorcet failure here- Begich is the clear Condorcet winner. This is the same issue that famously happened in the 2009 Burlington mayor's election, leading to an angry voter recall of RCV. Pairwise Preferences 88222 Begich > Peltola 79574 Peltola > Begich Begich wins with 52.5% against Peltola 101530 Begich > Palin 63681 Palin > Begich Begich wins with 61.4% against Palin 91418 Peltola > Palin 86271 Palin > Peltola Peltola wins with 51.4% against Palin Edit to include all of the failures here. I am copying this from a comment on r/endfptp, analysis is not mine (link below): Condorcet Failure: Begich beats Peltola by 52.5% and Palin by 61.4%. Favorite Betrayal Failure: If 2913 Palin voters that preferred Begich to Peltola betrayed Palin by strategically ranking Begich 1st he would of won instead of Peltola. Monotonicity Failure: If Peltola were able to gain the support of 5825 Palin voters, she would of lost to Begich. Participation Failure: If 5825 Palin voters that preferred Begich to Peltola had forgotten to vote, Begich would of won. Consistency Failure: If 5828 Palin>Begich voters, 2915 Begich voters, and 2914 Peltola>Begich voters were removed from the election, Begich would have won and if you counted just those removed votes, Begich also would of won https://www.reddit.com/r/EndFPTP/comments/x9oupk/2022_alaska_special_general_vote_breakdown/ https://www.reddit.com/r/EndFPTP/comments/x9oupk/2022_alaska...

wslack 4y ago
If you can get a city/county/state to adopt Condorcet, by all means have at it. IRV is much better than FPTP because FPTP encourages candidates to drop out of a race so that their supporters can unite around one ideologically aligned candidates - meaning we lose the "signal" from those other candidates. IRV, on the other hand, does not encourage candidates to drop out, allowing the voters to express their views more clearly.
- gamegoblin 4y ago
  The Alaska data shows that this is not the case. For instance, if Palin had dropped out, Begich would have won. Palin pulled enough votes from Begich in the first round that Begich was eliminated, even though he would have beaten Peltola in the final. Almost all Palin voters would have preferred Begich to Peltola, so they could have gotten a better result by lying about their preferences and strategically voting for Begich as their first choice. Expressing their views honestly resulted in a worse outcome than if they had expressed their views dishonestly. Among voting nerds this failure mode is referred to as "favorite betrayal" -- https://electowiki.org/wiki/Favorite_betrayal_criterion https://electowiki.org/wiki/Favorite_betrayal_criterion

hunterb123 4y ago

Ranked choice voting is a complete scam, obscured by complexity. I would never live anywhere that has it.

ketzo 4y ago
What about it is a scam?
- hunterb123 4y ago
  It makes voting so complex you can't follow it, allowing manipulation. It's much simpler to have one vote from one person for one candidate. You shouldn't have to have a degree in stats (and that doesn't help much) to calculate the winner. Voters should be confident in the system and that means being able to verify it yourself with simple addition. Ranked choice voting is like the current tax code, full of exceptions and rules for the elite to manipulate while the common person gets boned.
  - ceejayoz 4y ago
    > It's much simpler to have one vote from one person for one candidate. If there's only two candidates.
    - hunterb123 4y ago
      No, it's simple addition for all candidates. You either got a vote from a person or not, leave it at that. Currently you have Alaska being majority red but Pelosi losing to a Democrat, I wonder how that happened. But certain people when they lose want to change things, whether it's advocating abolishing the Electoral College or implementing a complex RCV system to create arbitrary rules to tip the scales to candidates they favor. -- edit @mikeyouse -- No I'm not mad, as I said I prefer to live in a place that has a simpler voting system where it's easy for everyone verify the vote and be confident in the system. I'm maybe more disappointed in people allowing it and being that naive. Do you feel the same way about the tax code or should just voting be complicated? How do you feel about the EC system? Were you advocating getting rid of it recently? There's a certain group of people wanting to flip the game table up here recently. -- edit @ceejayoz -- So the flipside of your statement would be you "grumping" about the simpler system. Has RCV solved the split vote issue? Hint: no it hasn't. Nor was that ever really a problem, just an excuse to implement RCV. -- edit @esoterica -- That's an extremely partisan take and not at all what I've heard from Alaskan friends. Pelosi is well respected in the party and in the state, no matter what liberals think, they usually mix her up with Tina Fey anyways.

tunesmith 4y ago

I haven't reviewed the json in depth but I wonder if the data is sufficient to also test against other vote-counting methods such as Condorcet. BTW, I've always found the descriptions of Condorcet to be self-defeating, even on Wikipedia (and my edits have been rejected). I've always considered there to be a conceptual separation between the Condorcet method itself, and the various "tie-breaking" schemes that are bolted on if the Smith Set has more than one member. But in the voting literature, they're always communicated together. The reason this causes confusion is that then a "Condorcet Method" can then be described as having this flaw or that, when those flaws almost entirely come up only in those tie-breaking scenarios. So then Condorcet itself gets painted with the same broad brush. But an election with a single-member Smith Set is free of all of those flaws that only apply to the tie-breaker methods. And personally, I don't see why we should be so scared of a multi-member Smith Set. The presence of which is an accurate indicator that the voting population is actually unable to come to a clear decision - that is valuable information! In a Democratic election, I'd honestly be more interested in having a runoff election at that point, rather than trying to bolt on some sort of flawed tie-breaking vote-counting mechanism.

KerrickStaley 4y ago
One could advocate for the adoption of Smith-IRV. It's easy to explain (it's the same as IRV, we just filter it down to the Smith set first waves hand) and it satisfies the Condorcet criterion. (I really like this framing BTW, separating the concepts of the Smith set and the tie-breaking process).
- tunesmith 4y ago
  I'd go for that. As far as I'm concerned, Smith-IRV is better than IRV in every circumstance. The only counterpoint I've seen are twisty arguments about a modified "Majority Criterion", where a single-member Smith Set might not (arguably) be someone that a majority "voted for". Which would seem to apply just as much to IRV as well, but IRV adherents that make this point seem to think that the mechanics of IRV somehow overcome that.
- fdsjgfklsfd 4y ago

notriddle 4y ago

If you're going to talk about vote counting systems, please consult this interactive blog post: https://ncase.me/ballot/ https://ncase.me/ballot/ And the HN discussion surrounding it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30847133 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30847133 [Unfortunately, while you can test ranked choice voting systems against each other directly using examples, you can't really test them against cardinal voting systems because the ballots aren't the same. At best, you use statistical models to compare them.]

godelski 4y ago
We should really note a key difference in ordinal vs cardinal systems that has a lot of effects surrounding them. That's how the information is embedded. In a ranked system all candidates your preference between any two candidates, in order, is equidistant. In cardinal systems, since you score candidates, your preference doesn't have to be equidistant. You can have a 0 distance between any choices or a large gap. This is pretty powerful and comes at no real cost (plus they are scalable and trivial to calculate winners since it is just argmax(sum of columns))
- jacques_chester 4y ago
  The problem with cardinal systems is that political parties will tell their followers "just vote 10.0 for me and 0.0 for everyone else". Enough people will do that to obviate the other advantages. Exhaustive or even partially exhaustive RCV makes that tactic impossible.
  - godelski 4y ago
    You can still do that tactic in RCV by simply voting for a single candidate and leaving the rest blank. I'm not sure why people keep talking about this strategy as if it is unique or a coup d'etat. Additionally, no system is invulnerable to a strategy or candidates manipulating voters. So pointing out one strategy is an ineffective means of argument because you need to compare the results of strategies across different systems and the harm that they can cause (see favorite betrayer as one that causes a lot of harm and what I think the vast majority of voter concerns are with. I'll let you see how cardinal systems vs ordinal systems handle this). The issue I see with voting discussions is people don't realize how complex social choice is but just latch onto a few CGP Gray videos and defend their preference with a resolve well beyond their experience. That manipulation is also an easy to overcome strategy as you can bullet vote your favorite candidates. There actually isn't any real strategic advantage to not voting your preference (albeit minor ones). There's no concept of tossing your vote away by scoring your preferred candidate high (the most common strategy is to weight your safe candidate the same or just below, but above your actual preference). Yes, you have to teach people how to vote under this new system but that's no difference than teaching them to rank candidates (instead we teach to give them a ?/5 star review. A concept people are highly familiar with).

collegeburner 4y ago

Any old data for comparison points?

pmarreck 4y ago

If the Republicans dominate Alaska, how did a Democrat win? In IRV, wouldn't someone whose first choice was a Republican candidate almost definitely pick another Republican candidate as their second choice? I thought the whole point of IRV was to prevent a 3rd candidate "splitting a vote"

ciabattabread 4y ago
The quality of the candidate matters.
frob 4y ago
There were two Republicans in the race and one was Sarah Palin. People in Alaska have strong opinions about her, especially after she quit the governorship half-way through to go be a reality TV actor. There were many GOP voters that chose the other republican as their first choice and the Democrat as their second because they disliked Palin more than an R after her name could make up for. In fact, this seems like the perfect example of ranked-choice voting giving people the outcome they preferred.
- gamegoblin 4y ago
  > In fact, this seems like the perfect example of ranked-choice voting giving people the outcome they preferred. 52.5% of people preferred Begich to Peltola. That majority of voters did not get the outcome they preferred. Imagine an election with 6 candidates. 5 candidates each get 20% of the 1st round voting, and 1 candidate gets 0% of the 1st round voting, but everybody marks him as their 2nd choice. He is nobody's favorite, but everyone likes him over their alternatives to their favorite. It seems reasonable to me that a good voting system should select this guy who is broadly approved by everyone. But in IRV, he is eliminated in the first round. The recent Alaska election was much less egregious version of this same failure mode.
  - t-writescode 4y ago
    It's arguably still a better situation than FPTP. In other countries, like Australia, where they're used to alternative styles of voting, they have guides on how to vote and who to put in what rank to match what a given party thinks is the best rundown of potentials. Alaska will get there.

smm11 4y ago

Everywhere else in everything a vote is a vote. Then when it comes to politics, you need the most byzantine structure imaginable.

bombcar 4y ago
It would be really bad if people looked at mass-market general elections from a mathematical point of view.
Spivak 4y ago
Every voting system causes people to vote strategically, the best ones are when the strategic vote and and an individual’s actual preferences line up. I want A, and if not A then I guess B, and if not B I guess C isn’t that complicated. Determining a system to tally those votes in a way that represents everyone’s preferences faithfully is when you start needing math.
- smm11 4y ago
  See? My post was downvoted 3. Not 1, not 7. But 3.
fdsjgfklsfd 4y ago
When you rate products on Amazon, do you just get one vote for "this is my favorite product" and you can't express any opinion about any of the others? When students are evaluated by their teachers, do the teachers just say "this student is the best" and not express anything about any of the others?

MichaelCollins 4y ago

In my view, the priority of a democratic system is to ensure peaceful transitions of power by providing the perception of fairness. The perception of an election being fair is more important than an election being actually fair, although both at once is obviously desirable. My concern with sophisticated voting schemes like Condorcet or RCV is that these systems may be too complicated for some unsophisticated voters to understand, and therefore risk the perception of unfairness. FPTP is less fair, but is easy to understand and is therefore easy to perceive as fair. FPTP is simple enough that any common fool can hold a mock election with his friends and trivially calculate the winner. Send that same man to the Condorcet method wikipedia page and I think his eyes will glaze over before he figures it out. It may be the case that my concern is misplaced, so I support testing these voting methods in low-stake elections, such as this one in Alaska. But I recommend caution when applying these methods to high-stake elections. Peaceful transitions of power is more important than anything else, and anything that might risk that peace should be considered with caution.

rayiner 4y ago
I agree 100%. The perception of fairness is the most important thing. Elections need to be transparent and simple enough that even idiots and skeptics of government still must begrudgingly acknowledge the results.
- bosswipe 4y ago
- phkahler 4y ago
  >> The perception of fairness is the most important thing. And yet, we add a single level of quantization (the electoral college) and half the country loses their mind whenever the "majority vote" candidate doesn't win. Maybe something a little more complicated would be good ;-)
  - rayiner 4y ago
    The electoral college isn’t a voting rule (for deciding who wins) it’s a power distribution rule (for deciding who does the electing). But you’re correct that even that modest complexity causes people to have a fit every four years when it doesn’t reflect their intuitive understanding of how elections should work.

simonw 4y ago

Wow, that zip file of JSON is 6.5MB, but when you decompress it you get a 382.MB CvrExport.json file! I guess repetitive JSON compresses REALLY well. I tried playing with it in SQLite but that CvrExport JSON needs some extra work to break it up into separate tables for it to be readable. Here's a demo that shows the other tables but ignores the 300MB+ one: https://lite.datasette.io/?sql=https://gist.githubusercontent.com/simonw/0e6901974a14ab7d56c2746a04d72c8c/raw/49f6d766d242425ce42c3dee646b48396f481f29/database.sql https://lite.datasette.io/?sql=https://gist.githubuserconten...

dlbucci 4y ago
A year ago, I was making a game for JS13K, where the goal is to make a game that fits in a zip file under 13,312 bytes. I had a two spots that were using the exact same copy-pasted chunk of code, so I figured I'd refactor it into a function to save space, but it actually _increased_ the size of the final zip when I did so. Turns out zip files compress repetitions of the same exact text _very_ well.
- dekhn 4y ago
  Yes, the algorithm zip uses in this case uses backrefs "LZ77 algorithms achieve compression by replacing repeated occurrences of data with references to a single copy of that data existing earlier in the uncompressed data stream. A match is encoded by a pair of numbers called a length-distance pair, which is equivalent to the statement "each of the next length characters is equal to the characters exactly distance characters behind it in the uncompressed stream". (The distance is sometimes called the offset instead.)" This is a different technique from entropy coding, which gets its improvements by allocating fewer bits for more frequent symbols. But most modern compresses uses a mix, for example gzip uses DEFLATE, which is a combination of literal backrefs and dynamic and static Huffman tables. and Yes, JSON is usually absurdly compressible.
yyyk 4y ago
>Wow, that zip file of JSON is 6.5MB, but when you decompress it you get a 382.MB CvrExport.json file! Not only is it so small, but it's easy to improve while remaining compatible with zip: Infozip -9 -> 5693Kb zopfli -> 5437Kb

godelski 4y ago

I don't get the hubbub around ordinal voting. It has a serious embedding problem that is solved in cardinal systems. The problem is that by ranking candidates the distance between two candidates is identically spaced. Instead by scoring candidates you are better able to express this distance (even in simple systems like approval). This quickly resolves issues like the favorite betrayer (strong spoiler effect) and resolves some strategy issues (no system is immune to all strategies fwiw). Plus you get a much easier to calculate election (`argmax([candidate.sum() for candidate in candidate_list])`, which also has nice sampling properties for winner estimates and verification). Aren't these the systems we want to be using? I mean could you imagine the Arizona recount with an ordinal system? Or RP or Schultz? What a disaster that would have been.

JumpCrisscross 4y ago
> by scoring candidates you are better able to express this distance We have no cultural context for this distance. Until that can be harmonized, such systems are DOA.
- godelski 4y ago
  That distance is voter preference. Which I think we have a pretty clear cultural context of.
yyyk 4y ago
Cardinal voting systems ask for information few voters really have, and we get GIGO. We arguably shouldn't want to receive the cardinal info if they did have it because that mainly helps ultra-partisan voters. They allow candidates to improve their position if there's a more extreme candidate to their side, because voters may still want to express the ordinal preference.
- godelski 4y ago
  > Cardinal voting systems ask for information few voters really have Voters don't know which candidates they prefer? If you really believe this (in the strong sense, not the weak sense) then I think you have to throw out voting all together. Maybe I'm missing your point? > voters may still want to express the ordinal preference. This is a feature, not a bug. Cardinal systems can capture ordinal preference but ordinal systems can't capture cardinal preference. (obviously not exactly)

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

idlewords 4y ago

I was a big proponent of ranked choice voting until I got a chance to talk with a number of voters in New Hampshire and Maine in the runup to the 2020 election. One of those states has ranked-choice and the other doesn't, so whenever I got a chance I would bring up the topic. I was surprised at how negative a reaction some voters had to the scheme. Digging in a bit, their perception of unfairness seemed to come from the fact that some people's votes would be counted more than others'. That is, if you voted for a series of fringe candidates in increasing likelihood of electability, your vote might be counted several times, while someone who voted for the mainstream candidate would just get their vote counted once. This kind of folk analysis of ranked-choice voting makes some people very mistrustful of the method and is hard to counter. Since elections are a social phenomenon, and not just a mathematical exercise, and given our current atmosphere of mistrust and attacks against the electoral process itself, I think the interest in having a crystal clear criterion for winning ("most votes wins") outweighs the many theoretical advantages of ranked choice.

googlryas 4y ago
It might help them understand that their votes aren't actually counted multiple times - every #1 vote for a fringe candidate is, essentially just thrown out.
- idlewords 4y ago
  I'm talking about voter perceptions and politically effective attacks on ranked choice voting, not its mathematical properties. A complete understanding of the latter by all voters would remove the problem, but practically speaking you end up in a PR fight where one side is trying to condescendingly explain a math problem to the other. That's not a good place for the explaining side to be, and in a political environment already polarized by education level, it is a losing fight. People are going to trust their gut over anything some egghead from the political opposition tells them.
  - googlryas 4y ago
    I don't think the math really needs to be explained - just telling people how to operate it. Millions of Australians vote via a similar system and they're not all constantly scratching their head over the Condorcet paradox.

jmyeet 4y ago

Ranked choice voting should be the standard. Some point to Alaska's special election as a failure of some sort. It isn't. A large number of Republican voters simply put only one choice. Had they ranked Palin as #2 (assuming this was their preference) she would've won by a significant margin. Now whether they didn't understand the system or they really didn't want Palin as a second choice we can only speculate about. The rules for any election should be strictly interpreted. Trying to divine the intent of the voter (as happened in Florida in 2000) is a subjective and really dangerous standard to use. If something could be better or clearer you fix it in the next election. You don't try and ret con it into the election just run. The first past the post ("FPTP") system used in the majority of American elections is just horrible. Spoiler candidates are a real problem (eg [1]). The only issue with the Alaska system is one of education. That can take some time but it'll be worth it. I'm glad Alaska is being transparent about the results by publishing this. We certainly don't need to make the voting system even more complicated as some other commenters suggest. [1]: https://www.tampabay.com/news/florida-politics/2022/08/25/fpl-funds-secretly-paid-for-a-spoiler-candidate-in-a-2018-florida-race/ https://www.tampabay.com/news/florida-politics/2022/08/25/fp...

phkahler 4y ago
>> The only issue with the Alaska system is one of education. Yep, they just got educated. Next election will IMHO see more 2nd choices!
- fdsjgfklsfd 4y ago
  Next election will likely see fewer candidates, as parties realize that Hare RCV still suffers from the spoiler effect, despite all the lies from its proponents, and that they still have to eliminate all but one candidate from their party if they want to win.
harshreality 4y ago
Ranked choice describes a family of systems. Plain IRV is not that much better than FPTP. They're both terrible. If an election area is going to all the trouble to convert to ranked choice ballots, plain IRV should not be the system they use to calculate the results.

malshe 4y ago

I posted this before going to teach a class without any specific expectations about the response to the post. I am pleasantly surprised by so many high quality comments!