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This whole conversation is a good demonstration of why FPTP succeeds and is popular -- it is easy to understand, and most of the other systems are not. When a v

This whole conversation is a good demonstration of why FPTP succeeds and is popular -- it is easy to understand, and most of the other systems are not. When a voting system is hard to understand, people will tend to see conspiracies and fraud even though there isn't any, and they will lose trust in the system. With FPTP, every voter casts one vote for one candidate, and the candidate with the most votes wins. Simple. If you need a website with diagrams to explain the abstruse differences between different voting mechanisms, I think you've already failed. This stuff is certainly of academic interest but the average voter cannot handle it.

lalaithion 4y ago
This is why I endorse STAR voting: https://www.equal.vote/star https://www.equal.vote/star. The explanation behind it is simple enough for most people to understand, because it's a combination of 5 star ratings, which are everywhere in society, and FPTP.
- bena 4y ago
  At worst, you've made single vote FPTP with extra steps. Give your guy 5, everyone else 0. The goal is to get in the runoff and to keep others out. If everyone adopts this strategy, it's the same as FPTP. At best, you're made RCV/IRV with extra steps. Because still you give your guy 5 stars, but now there's people you do not want at all. They're 0s. Then there are people you're ok with, but would rather have your guy win. They're 1s. That way, if the runoff is between one of your 0s and one of your 1s, you're making sure a 0 doesn't win. Which is exactly RCV/IRV where you've ranked them 1, 2, and 3. Past that, candidates towards the bottom of the ballot are going to get shafted. There is incredible decision fatigue in having to rank everyone 0 - 5 stars. After a while, you will either give up or just start picking more arbitrarily. RCV/IRV is fine. Condorcet is fine. Star voting is just bad.
  - lalaithion 4y ago
    https://www.equal.vote/accuracy https://www.equal.vote/accuracy Star voting outperforms IRV on both 100% honest and 100% strategic election strategies. Decision fatigue is easier for Star than for IRV—just rate everyone you don't care about as a 2, whereas for IRV, if you want to distinguish between "8 people I don't know" and "person I hate", you have to decide on a ranking order for the 8 people.
  - godelski 4y ago
    > At best, you're made RCV/IRV with extra steps I'd argue that every single word in this small claim is wrong. Scoring isn't equivalent to ranking unless the conditions are that you cannot score two candidates the same and that you must fill in every possible score vale (i.e. rank). Neither of these conditions are true for any cardinal system. You can score candidates the same and you can score candidates with variable distances (e.g. 5,3,2,1. Note there is no 4). This has different embedding properties. You actually can express more information in cardinal this way. Second, run-off voting is much more complicated. Cardinal systems are determined by argmax of a reduce-sum. Which is trivially parallelizable and only requires a singular election. Run-offs require multi-elections. Even in simple cases like this one, there were 2 elections (and that's with 3 candidates!). This doesn't scale well either.
philjohn 4y ago
But as we've seen in the UK, and the US it leaves a great deal of people, especially those in safe (or gerrymandered) districts feeling unrepresented. UKIP getting 13% of the vote in a general election, showing a large amount of support, but not winning a single seat is, in my opinion, a travesty (and I vehemently disagree with their platform and what they stand for). It left 13% of the electorate feeling that their views were not represented in any way whatsoever .
- twblalock 4y ago
  That seems like more of a problem with proportional representation than ranked-choice voting. If only 13% of voters support UKIP, UKIP would not win elections no matter what kind of voting system you have: ranked choice, instant runoff, etc. On the other hand, with proportional representation, if a party gets 13% of the vote it would end up with 13% of the seats in Parliament. That's a different type of system, though, and it is hard to reconcile with a per-constituency election system.
  - jacobr1 4y ago
    > That's a different type of system, though, and it is hard to reconcile with a per-constituency election system. One way to reconcile it is with different legislative bodies. Exchange the house of lords for a proportional body, and keep the commons local to constituencies.
pmyteh 4y ago
FPTP has more failures than IRV in general, they're just less visible because you don't have the ranking data to work out the hypotheticals. That may be good for FPTP's popularity, but doesn't make it a decent voting system. FWIW I also disagree with the suggestion that people can't handle it. Plenty of countries use ranked or proportional voting systems and their citizens understand how to use them just fine. They may not be able to perfectly optimise their preferences, but then they can't do it in FPTP either (and it's provably impossible to do so in every case whatever the voting system).

lalaithion 4y ago

This is why I endorse STAR voting: https://www.equal.vote/star https://www.equal.vote/star. The explanation behind it is simple enough for most people to understand, because it's a combination of 5 star ratings, which are everywhere in society, and FPTP.

bena 4y ago
At worst, you've made single vote FPTP with extra steps. Give your guy 5, everyone else 0. The goal is to get in the runoff and to keep others out. If everyone adopts this strategy, it's the same as FPTP. At best, you're made RCV/IRV with extra steps. Because still you give your guy 5 stars, but now there's people you do not want at all. They're 0s. Then there are people you're ok with, but would rather have your guy win. They're 1s. That way, if the runoff is between one of your 0s and one of your 1s, you're making sure a 0 doesn't win. Which is exactly RCV/IRV where you've ranked them 1, 2, and 3. Past that, candidates towards the bottom of the ballot are going to get shafted. There is incredible decision fatigue in having to rank everyone 0 - 5 stars. After a while, you will either give up or just start picking more arbitrarily. RCV/IRV is fine. Condorcet is fine. Star voting is just bad.
- lalaithion 4y ago
  https://www.equal.vote/accuracy https://www.equal.vote/accuracy Star voting outperforms IRV on both 100% honest and 100% strategic election strategies. Decision fatigue is easier for Star than for IRV—just rate everyone you don't care about as a 2, whereas for IRV, if you want to distinguish between "8 people I don't know" and "person I hate", you have to decide on a ranking order for the 8 people.
- godelski 4y ago
  > At best, you're made RCV/IRV with extra steps I'd argue that every single word in this small claim is wrong. Scoring isn't equivalent to ranking unless the conditions are that you cannot score two candidates the same and that you must fill in every possible score vale (i.e. rank). Neither of these conditions are true for any cardinal system. You can score candidates the same and you can score candidates with variable distances (e.g. 5,3,2,1. Note there is no 4). This has different embedding properties. You actually can express more information in cardinal this way. Second, run-off voting is much more complicated. Cardinal systems are determined by argmax of a reduce-sum. Which is trivially parallelizable and only requires a singular election. Run-offs require multi-elections. Even in simple cases like this one, there were 2 elections (and that's with 3 candidates!). This doesn't scale well either.

philjohn 4y ago

But as we've seen in the UK, and the US it leaves a great deal of people, especially those in safe (or gerrymandered) districts feeling unrepresented. UKIP getting 13% of the vote in a general election, showing a large amount of support, but not winning a single seat is, in my opinion, a travesty (and I vehemently disagree with their platform and what they stand for). It left 13% of the electorate feeling that their views were not represented in any way whatsoever .

twblalock 4y ago
That seems like more of a problem with proportional representation than ranked-choice voting. If only 13% of voters support UKIP, UKIP would not win elections no matter what kind of voting system you have: ranked choice, instant runoff, etc. On the other hand, with proportional representation, if a party gets 13% of the vote it would end up with 13% of the seats in Parliament. That's a different type of system, though, and it is hard to reconcile with a per-constituency election system.
- jacobr1 4y ago
  > That's a different type of system, though, and it is hard to reconcile with a per-constituency election system. One way to reconcile it is with different legislative bodies. Exchange the house of lords for a proportional body, and keep the commons local to constituencies.

pmyteh 4y ago

FPTP has more failures than IRV in general, they're just less visible because you don't have the ranking data to work out the hypotheticals. That may be good for FPTP's popularity, but doesn't make it a decent voting system. FWIW I also disagree with the suggestion that people can't handle it. Plenty of countries use ranked or proportional voting systems and their citizens understand how to use them just fine. They may not be able to perfectly optimise their preferences, but then they can't do it in FPTP either (and it's provably impossible to do so in every case whatever the voting system).