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Advocating for ranked choice right now is really just a way to get people to see the enormous flaws in the current system and understand that there are real alt

Advocating for ranked choice right now is really just a way to get people to see the enormous flaws in the current system and understand that there are real alternatives. The idea that there is more than one way to hold a vote is still an unexplored concept for most of the public. Once people understand the problem better the details of the replacement will be more competently debated. "Ranked choice" has a nice ring to it when giving someone the elevator pitch, and the name implies the voter is given more authority which is true. I find this easier than trying to start by explaining an acronym. Once they get engaged then i pivot to other methods.

dane-pgp 4y ago
Thank you for giving that very practical advice about how to engage people on the issue of electoral reform. I think that a lot of advocates for reform (especially on a site like this) tend to think of voting as a purely abstract exercise, and that the ideal reform is one which meets various mathematical criteria, but that seems to be the same sort of mistake as thinking that the best software is the one which uses the most efficient algorithms. STAR voting, for example, may be more expressive, in that it allows the voter to input more information into the process, but I'm not actually sure that's a necessary goal, and it may even be an anti-goal, since the more input is required from a user, the higher the cognitive load, the more scope for things going wrong, the more attack surface for someone to spread misinformation, and the more error-prone / time-consuming / expensive the voting and counting process is. Given that a vote typically has thousands of bits of information in aggregate, even with FPTP ballots, and the output only needs to be a single winner, it seems that allowing more input isn't actually a benefit. Instead, what is needed is more honest input, i.e. resistance to tactical voting (which I concede STAR voting is probably better at than RCV). Unless we want to make elections forever dependent on voting machines whose firmware is written by the lowest bidder (or biggest campaign contributor) we should always prefer voting systems where the ballots can be counted by hand, in as distributed a way as possible. A team counting plurality ballots can stack them into N piles, for N candidates, and the heights of those piles are roughly proportional to the votes for each candidate. To do the same for RCV requires N! piles, and for STAR voting requires 6N piles. Approval voting requires 2^N piles (so it is preferable to STAR if there are 4 or fewer candidates) whereas asset voting requires just N, like FPTP.

dane-pgp 4y ago

Thank you for giving that very practical advice about how to engage people on the issue of electoral reform. I think that a lot of advocates for reform (especially on a site like this) tend to think of voting as a purely abstract exercise, and that the ideal reform is one which meets various mathematical criteria, but that seems to be the same sort of mistake as thinking that the best software is the one which uses the most efficient algorithms. STAR voting, for example, may be more expressive, in that it allows the voter to input more information into the process, but I'm not actually sure that's a necessary goal, and it may even be an anti-goal, since the more input is required from a user, the higher the cognitive load, the more scope for things going wrong, the more attack surface for someone to spread misinformation, and the more error-prone / time-consuming / expensive the voting and counting process is. Given that a vote typically has thousands of bits of information in aggregate, even with FPTP ballots, and the output only needs to be a single winner, it seems that allowing more input isn't actually a benefit. Instead, what is needed is more honest input, i.e. resistance to tactical voting (which I concede STAR voting is probably better at than RCV). Unless we want to make elections forever dependent on voting machines whose firmware is written by the lowest bidder (or biggest campaign contributor) we should always prefer voting systems where the ballots can be counted by hand, in as distributed a way as possible. A team counting plurality ballots can stack them into N piles, for N candidates, and the heights of those piles are roughly proportional to the votes for each candidate. To do the same for RCV requires N! piles, and for STAR voting requires 6N piles. Approval voting requires 2^N piles (so it is preferable to STAR if there are 4 or fewer candidates) whereas asset voting requires just N, like FPTP.