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Show HN: RankedVote – SurveyMonkey but focused on ranked-choice voting

220 points by tadmilbourn 4y ago

RankedVote is a web app that allows you to run online contests and make decisions using ranked-choice voting (RCV). RCV is an electoral system used in Maine, Alaska, New York City and dozens of cities across the United States. RankedVote’s goal is to build support for RCV by giving people an easy way to run contests and make decisions online.

tadmilbourn 4y ago
Hi HN! I’ve been running RankedVote as a solo founder for over a year and have had great success (and luck) with it being used to educate voters in New York City and Alaska. Bill de Blasio even ate a piece of pepperoni pizza as the result of one contest held on RankedVote. BUT…what I’m looking for at this stage are use cases outside of direct voter education where RankedVote can be applied. By crossing over into everyday uses, RankedVote can better promote ranked-choice voting to people who are unaware of it. Recently, I’ve seen it used for anything from mascot naming contests, to monthly book club selections, to scrum prioritization, to deciding what character should be included in a new version of a video game. Question to the HN Community: Where would you use ranked-choice voting in your life (or at work) to make decisions?
- WORMS_EAT_WORMS 4y ago
  Really well done and congrats! I think the market specifically for “Ranked-Choice Voting” is probably way smaller than the need for “easy/better/awesome polling and survey tools”. Just keep that in mind as you grow and good luck with everything
  - tadmilbourn 4y ago
    Thanks for the kind words! And, you're exactly right. The online world of people specifically interested in tools for ranked-choice voting is quite small. The question I'm trying to answer is what use cases does ranked-choice voting work better than other existing survey/polling options? That way, someone could be looking for a solution to that specific problem. Right now, most of RankedVote's users are already aware of RCV and then try to apply that in some scenario at work where a simple voting tool would have been the alternative.
    - clairity 4y ago
      ranked choice is a primitive form of conjoint analysis, so that might be an avenue for exploration. marketers aren't always statistically rigorous in how they poll and analyze markets (which is one of the reasons product management rose in prominence, because of the promise of more analytic rigor). even simple versions of conjoint can be an informative tool in the toolbox, but the studies and the existing tools are expensive. i don't know for sure that there is a big enough market there for VC, but i'm sure a good marketer could make a nice business out of it.
- clolege 4y ago
  Distributed chess games. One team uses ranked choice, the other uses approval. Seattle will be voting to adopt one of the two for city primaries next month, and it would be sweet way to pit the two systems against each other.
- mritchie712 4y ago
  "What feature should we build next?" Could be a good one. I don't know that it's actually a good thing to ask of your users, but I could definitely see people thinking it's a good thing to ask.
- burkaman 4y ago
  What should we get for our team lunch today?
  - tadmilbourn 4y ago
    Early on, I saw these relatively big spikes of traffic every week day in the early afternoon. Turns out it was a school that was voting on what game to play at recess. Similar idea.
- goodpoint 4y ago
  Please support Condorcet voting.
- specialist 4y ago
  I've used misc voting systems in product development. Approval voting for bug triage. Ranked Choice Voting for prioritization (eg features, reqs). Roman Eval (thumbs up or down) for acceptance testing and hiring candidates. Using democracy at work is super light weight and fully transparent. Helped a lot with accountability. Initially I had to be the heavy, coercing the team to honor their own votes. Over time, as people grokked it, teams would self-enforce. aka Empowerment. Just to reiterate about administrative burden, quickly voting on stuff greatly reduced time spent nursing the misc bug tracking and project management tools. A huge win.
- nerpderp82 4y ago
  How about on HN, you only have 10 article upvotes a day, use them wisely.
endisneigh 4y ago
though I think the app looks great. I’ve never seen the point of ranked choice. Approval voting seems faster to vote, easier to implement and explain
- tadmilbourn 4y ago
  Thanks! And both approval and RCV are steps in the right direction. For whatever reason, RCV has been implemented more broadly (but still just a tiny fraction of the US). I've been very encouraged by the results in Alaska after the special election that just happened there in August. 85% found it simple. 73% ranked multiple candidates. And the election workers implementing it had a flawless go of it. Some data from one of the groups that helped educate voters: https://alaskansforbetterelections.com/polling-shows-alaskan-voters-understand-ranked-choice-voting/ https://alaskansforbetterelections.com/polling-shows-alaskan...
  - dane-pgp 4y ago
    > 85% found it simple. 73% ranked multiple candidates. But what's conspicuously absent from these statistics is how happy the voters are with the outcome (compared to a counterfactual world where the election had been carried out under FPTP and a potentially different candidate won). Sadly it was an outcome which allowed Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) to make the argument[0] that: > 60% of Alaska voters voted for a Republican, but thanks to a convoluted process and ballot exhaustion — which disenfranchises voters — a Democrat ‘won.’ This is exactly the sort of well-poisoning that supporters of other voting reforms are afraid of. [0] https://www.independentsentinel.com/60-of-voters-cast-ballots-for-republicans-a-democrat-won-in-alaska/ https://www.independentsentinel.com/60-of-voters-cast-ballot...
    - creata 4y ago
      If the problem was ballot exhaustion, couldn't that have been solved by doing what Australia does, i.e. asking voters to rank all the candidates? That doesn't seem like a problem with instant runoff voting itself.
- 4y ago
mnomitch 4y ago
Hi! I actually made a similar site for my own purposes - https://poller.io https://poller.io - and I've been using it with friends for a while. One interesting finding. I was expecting that Instant Runoff would be the method we all preferred. I also included plurality winner, Borda Count and the Condorcet winner (if there was one) in the list of results. After using this with friends for decisions, I realized that a lot of choices that did very well in borda count were getting eliminated in the IRV. If you have a lot of options in the poll, there's a good chance that an option that will make the majority happy gets eliminated because it has very few first place votes. Academically, I knew this was a possibility, but in practice it happened a ton. This made us change to borda counts as our method of choice for things (and then we promised to not game the system). But... if there's a Condorcet Winner, we always go with that. I also thought that having a borda count as the method of eliminating the "last place" choice in each IRV round would be kinda nifty. This still lets people game the system though, and is kind of a gross hack. Just letting you know our experience in case it is helpful for future options on polls! Good luck!
- tadmilbourn 4y ago
  Thanks! And I hadn't come across Poller before. Pretty cool. FYI - RankedVote actually uses a type of Borda Count as its tiebreaking mechanism. Not quite what you're saying, but is better than picking a name out of a hat! You bring up a lot of interesting points on what people feel happy with after voting. None of these systems is perfect. Each can be picked apart in various ways. That's why I tend to frame things in terms of "does this move things forward from the status quo?"
  - mnomitch 4y ago
    Oh interesting. If you don't mind me asking, what is the tie breaking mechanism? And totally agreed on the framing. Also, prepare yourself for the feedback of "we should have a runoff election with the top two" and then people completely rejecting the concept that you've already done the runoff. :)
    - tadmilbourn 4y ago
SamBam 4y ago
A question and a comment: 1. Would it be straightforward to add other voting systems? The easiest one to add would be approval voting ("Check off any option you'd support"). This has very similar benefits to ranked voting, and is more appropriate in many situations. 2. Your description of "How Ranked-Choice Voting Works" describes the "first round" and then the "next round" and "repeat until a winner is found." While those of us who understand RCV understand that these rounds are automatically built into the system, I think it's never made clear to a newbie that the voters don't have to go back and vote again.
- tadmilbourn 4y ago
  On #1 -- It could be, but trying to stay narrowly focused. There are some great services out there like OpaVote that do a wide array of voting options and calculation methods. On #2 -- That's a great point. And one that hopefully people start to better understand by using RankedVote and seeing all the "Rounds" happen at once. But, yeah, for many it's a new term. How would you make it more clear?
  - SamBam 4y ago
    #2: At the very least I'd throw the word "automatically" into either step 2 or 3.
    - tadmilbourn 4y ago
      Thanks for the nudge! Great to have fresh eyes on these things and love your thinking. I added an "automatically" to step 3. More importantly, I changed "Voters rank." to "Voters rank once" in the headline of that section. P.S. Gotta love Webflow for making changes like this super quick.
metayrnc 4y ago
If I am not mistaken SurveyMonkey also has the option to create ranked-choice questions, no?
- tadmilbourn 4y ago
  It allows you to ask the "ranking question" BUT it doesn't do the ranked-choice calculation with the results. So, in theory, you can use it to collect the votes, but you'll need to do the calculations by hand. I actually wrote an article on this exact thing as a bit of an SEO play: https://www.rankedvote.co/guides/applying-ranked-choice-voting/how-to-calculate-ranked-choice-voting-with-surveymonkey-and-microsoft-excel https://www.rankedvote.co/guides/applying-ranked-choice-voti...
charlesetc 4y ago
"How Ranked-Choice Voting elects extremists" https://psephomancy.medium.com/how-ranked-choice-voting-elects-extremists-fa101b7ffb8e https://psephomancy.medium.com/how-ranked-choice-voting-elec... This article recommends instead a STAR voting system which is still simple to implement and understand while not electing extremists in some cases. I would be sad to see NYC and others turn to ranked choice without considering all the alternatives.
- mkoubaa 4y ago
  This is quite reductive and ridiculous, people don't measure their difference from a candidate on a single axis and vote for the person with the smallest distance.
  - charlesetc 4y ago
    Don't they? Isn't that axis just "how much they like the candidate"?
    - mkoubaa 4y ago
      The point being made about extremism hinges on the axis being "ideological left/right" rather than "how much I like the candidate"
    - godelski 4y ago
      No, it is how much they like a candidate on a certain topic and then they consider all topics, which are weighted. But also the distance measurement of voting systems aren't in reality a single axis. So this doesn't really matter anyways because it is already accounted for.
  - mnomitch 4y ago
    I am generally an RCV fan, but I think you're writing off this critique a bit too quickly. Even with multiple axes the critique is still correct right? And I think (far from an expert) that there's decent evidence to support hotelling's law and median voter theorem.
bhauer 4y ago
Ranking the voting systems: STAR Voting > Approval Voting > Ranked Choice Voting > Plurality ("pick only one") voting. Ranked Choice Voting is marginally better than plurality voting, but it has problems. The chief defect with Ranked Choice Voting is its non-monotonicity, whereby increasing your support for your genuine favorite can actually hurt their odds of winning. This may be what happened in Alaska [1]. STAR Voting is a slight modification to Score Voting, where you simply score each candidate and are not forced to rank them. You are given the discretion to give multiple candidates the same score if you so choose. STAR is highly expressive and simple to count: just sum the scores. Approval Voting is appealing because of its simplicity. Both ballots and how they are counted would require only superficial changes versus plurality, such as changing the prompt from "Vote for only one" to "Vote for as many as you like." Approval has a good balance of utility and simplicity. If we are going to invest time and effort into achieving voting reform, it would be a shame to spend that effort on RCV rather than superior alternatives. [1] https://electionscience.org/commentary-analysis/rcv-fools-palin-voters-into-electing-a-progressive-democrat/ https://electionscience.org/commentary-analysis/rcv-fools-pa...
- scythe 4y ago
  Regarding the Score/Approval/STAR trio, I always felt that there was a clear fourth possibility missing from the list, so I invented it: https://pastebin.com/PCgSaBS8 https://pastebin.com/PCgSaBS8 Still, I'm not much of a political campaigner, so it hasn't gone very far.
  - dane-pgp 4y ago
    That's a clever system, thanks for sharing it. What I appreciate most about it, though, is the explicit goal of "being easier to count by hand", which I think many advocates of voting-reform overlook. You even say "by sorting ballots into each of thirteen piles corresponding to the thirteen possible rankings of three candidates", which shows you've actually thought through what the process would look like for the people doing the counting. When people are proposing voting systems, they really need to consider that their process is being carried out in an adversarial environment, where different groups have incentives to cheat, or accuse the voting system of producing the "wrong" result (e.g. due to the unintuitive outcome, or the complex tactical thinking needed to optimally fill in the ballot), or claim that voting machines were running backdoored firmware (which is a destabilizing claim whether it is in fact true or false). That last point is perhaps the most important. I think that as time goes on, the pressure to automate the counting process and give instant election results (or worse, do the elections online) is only going to grow, and any voting reform which (if done manually) slows down the counting process, or for any other reason in practice requires people to trust machines that are selected and maintained by officials from one political party, is going to do even more harm to democracy than FPTP does.
zackmorris 4y ago
Could something like this be used with polling to show a discrepancy between election outcomes and what voters want? For example, for a presidential election in the US we have the electoral college results and the popular vote (which often differ). It would be nice to also have a ranked-choice result to compare against. Especially when it comes time to consider a revote or when courts become involved with elections (a sign the electoral process has failed in some way). I suspect that election results would differ from ranked-choice polling to such a degree that it would become apparent how elections are manipulated by parties, the media, incumbents, etc etc etc: https://journalistsresource.org/politics-and-government/the-influence-of-elites-interest-groups-and-average-voters-on-american-politics/ https://journalistsresource.org/politics-and-government/the-... Economic elites drive nearly all policy change in the US through campaign contributions and lobbying (highly correlated), while response to the average citizen's preferences is flat across the political spectrum (no correlation). IMHO this mismatch is driven nearly entirely by election results being uncorrelated with voters' preferences. Then the vitriol against outcomes is used by the parties to keep us divided so that much-needed legislation can be simply politicized to stop it. Once support approaches 50/50, it dies in committee. There were 395 bills that died via division this way in the Senate as of 2020: https://americanindependent.com/mitch-mcconnell-block-bills-house-democrats-senate-republicans-gop-fox-news/ https://americanindependent.com/mitch-mcconnell-block-bills-... I tried to cite the most independent article I could find, but they all mention key politicians. Please don't let names muddy the waters, as the motivation behind divisive politics is the constant here.
- tadmilbourn 4y ago
  I found The Politics Industry by Katherine Gehl super enlightening and well-researched on this very idea (https://www.amazon.com/Politics-Industry-Political-Innovation-Democracy/dp/1633699234 https://www.amazon.com/Politics-Industry-Political-Innovatio...). The basic premise is that the current "market dynamics" of Politics (when viewed like any other industry) actively disincentivizes results. Painting with a somewhat broad brush, it doesn't making sense for a politician to make progress on immigration reform because that lessens its saliency for raising money and turning out the base. The solution proposed is a combination of "Final-Five" open primaries with ranked-choice voting in the general election. This is what just happened in Alaska and is on the ballot in Nevada in November. Which reminds me...if you're a Nevada voter, vote YES on ballot question 3!
gamegoblin 4y ago
I used to be a hardcore pro-RCV supporter (I liked Yang, and Yang made RCV one of his main issues, outside UBI), but I've become a little more jaded in the last few years. Empirically, it seems like RCV-IRV (RCV from here on) not much better than Plurality. For example, look at all the countries and cities with RCV and without. It's not at all clear to me that those with RCV are much better than those without. Both NZ and Australia are dominated by a large center-left and center-right party coalition. Sounds familiar. NZ has a housing crisis that is even worse than San Francisco. Australia is under the thumb of the mineral extraction industry. All sounds familiar. (Obviously NZ and Australia beat the US on some metrics, e.g. single payer healthcare if that's your thing, but there are plenty of European countries that have equivalent or better systems without RCV) There are hundreds of US cities with RCV. None of them are obviously better than those without. They still have all the same fights about zoning and bike lanes and public parking that other cities have. I'd still prefer RCV over Plurality, but I don't really think it's the panacea some of its supporters thing it is.
- clolege 4y ago
  I recently asked Fairvote volunteers which cities/countries they point to as RCV done “right”. All of the places I’m familiar with have poor reputations for their politics (SF, Australia) or have had problems with it (NY’s democratic primary, Alaska). All they could come up with is statistics that more women and people of color are elected with RCV, and there is not enough evidence yet that Approval voting will do the same.
  - obelos 4y ago
    Those studies also don't demonstrate any causality, only correlation. It seems not unlikely that districts willing to try an experimental voting method also are more interested in running diverse candidates.
- godelski 4y ago
  You might want to look into cardinal methods (I have a longer post above). They are not vulnerable to the strong spoiler effect (when you like two candidates a lot they can end up splitting the vote in RCV). The most popular ones are STAR and Approval. They're both trivial to implement, infinitely scalable, and trivial to understand the tallying process (all while providing high VSE).
c7b 4y ago
Feature suggestion: the system automatically tells you when you have a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet_paradox situation and offers to decide the outcome based on a coin flip instead. Only half joking there, the amount of negative results about ranked-choice voting in social choice theory is quite amazing. I'm not sure whether I'd place it on the efficiency frontier of the 'complex but has desirable properties' versus 'easy to understand but far from perfect' trade-off.
- dane-pgp 4y ago
  While we're offering troll feature suggestions, I have another: Add a calculation for how many person-hours such a ballot would have taken if carried out by hand (based on scientifically validated assumptions about how long one person takes to sort through a stack of N votes). This would also let you give a figure for how much money had been saved by people entrusting their democratic process to an inscrutable and unaccountable online system, and therefore the size of the financial incentive to do so.
- DominikPeters 4y ago
  In case there is no Condorcet winner, there is actually a more principled way to randomize over alternatives than just choosing each with the same probability, known as maximal lotteries (e.g., https://pub.dss.in.tum.de/brandt-research/fishburn_slides.pdf https://pub.dss.in.tum.de/brandt-research/fishburn_slides.pd...).
  - creata 4y ago
    I love this idea: it feels very parsimonious, and it's optimal (in a very narrow sense) by definition. I can't find much criticism of it, though, aside from: https://groups.google.com/g/electionscience/c/wT1_hN38b8s https://groups.google.com/g/electionscience/c/wT1_hN38b8s
  - c7b 4y ago
    very cool, thank you
cphoover 4y ago
I feel like drag and drop sorting would be more user-friendly
- tadmilbourn 4y ago
  That is an option! You can choose between the "Grid" ballot type which simulates what's used on real-world paper ballots. There's also "Drag and Drop" which works particularly well on mobile touch devices. People just drag their most preferred to the top! Try it on this demo: https://app.rankedvote.co/decisions/4973/Family-Movie-Night/4961/vote https://app.rankedvote.co/decisions/4973/Family-Movie-Night/...
ajl666 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
tunesmith 4y ago
Would you consider a variation where the Condorcet Winner is awarded the win if the Condorcet Winner exists, and where in the cases there isn't a Condorcet Winner, IRV is applied to the Smith Set?
charleslmunger 4y ago
Not all ranked choice methods are identical - if you're interested in this topic, check out https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-2026611/latest.pdf https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-2026611/latest.pdf
FireInsight 4y ago
Since many people are talking about STAR voting, also check out this site https://star.vote/ https://star.vote/ I've found it works pretty well.
alphabet9000 4y ago
consider making .h04_h1.hero min-height 174px - otherwise the 'get started' button jumps around
- tadmilbourn 4y ago
  What device/browser are you on where it's hopping around? I've been manually testing across devices so that the "typing text animation" stays stable. 174px actually creates a bit more height than I desire on mobile safari/iphone. But knowing what you browser you were on will help me troubleshoot.
AtNightWeCode 4y ago
What is the science behind this? Is it not obvious that most people want to pick a single alternative? And for precision. If you force people into ranking. Is it not obvious that the effort that goes into picking the top alternative is much higher than for let us say the fifth option. Basically, adding noise that may skew the results.
zeristor 4y ago
This YouTube video "Simulating alternate voting systems" by Primer seems apposite: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhO6jfHPFQU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhO6jfHPFQU
- smellymonkey329 4y ago
  Apposite ~ relavant "apt in the circumstances or in relation to something."
brianolson 4y ago
Oh hey, I made one too. https://betterpolls.com/ https://betterpolls.com/ Focus on Condorcet ("Virtual Round Robin") counting. De-duping by requiring a google or facebook login (or anonymous with a crappy hacky captcha).
Dan42 4y ago
I'm glad there's plenty of people here mentioning the Condorcet Winner. Because that's the one and only voting property that I can't compromise on. If there is a Condorcet Winner, a voting system that doesn't choose it is useless. But it's not like IRV has to be entirely thrown out. As some have suggested, it would be just fine to use a hybrid system like "pick Condorcet Winner if it exists, use [IRV/STAR/etc] otherwise". I'd like more people to talk about Ranked Pairs / Tideman. It satisfies a ridiculous number of voting criteria, even more than Schulze, but with the huge advantage that it's explainable to a layperson. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranked_pairs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranked_pairs
RosanaAnaDana 4y ago
The tracking/ sign on nag is an instant barrier to use. No thanks.
ClayShentrup 4y ago
Approval voting is much better. https://www.electionscience.org/library/approval-voting-versus-irv/ https://www.electionscience.org/library/approval-voting-vers...
TedGetschman 4y ago
Any MaxVoting method which is any voting method where all voters can freely rate all candidates and all of that information is used to determine a winner (Approval, STAR, Majority Judgement, Division Free, Vote 321, etc.) pushes candidates toward the majority opinion platform, the single political platform that best represents that group of voters at that time. Min voting methods which is any voting method that forces voters to pick only one candidate (plurality, ranked choice voting) favors either the left or right political power position, traditionally held by Republicans and Democrats. Alaska's special election resulted in a race between a Democrat and a Republican where the winner received about 50% of the vote. How did that change anything? RCV is just plurality with a 50% threshold. San Francisco had that until it switched to RCV so it could stop paying for the live run offs. For ending division, MaxVoting methods--any MaxVoting method--will work. It should be up to the people of that area which one they want instead of being imposed from the outside by experts. CommonSenseforUnitingAmerica.org

220 points by tadmilbourn 4y ago

tadmilbourn 4y ago

Hi HN! I’ve been running RankedVote as a solo founder for over a year and have had great success (and luck) with it being used to educate voters in New York City and Alaska. Bill de Blasio even ate a piece of pepperoni pizza as the result of one contest held on RankedVote. BUT…what I’m looking for at this stage are use cases outside of direct voter education where RankedVote can be applied. By crossing over into everyday uses, RankedVote can better promote ranked-choice voting to people who are unaware of it. Recently, I’ve seen it used for anything from mascot naming contests, to monthly book club selections, to scrum prioritization, to deciding what character should be included in a new version of a video game. Question to the HN Community: Where would you use ranked-choice voting in your life (or at work) to make decisions?

WORMS_EAT_WORMS 4y ago
Really well done and congrats! I think the market specifically for “Ranked-Choice Voting” is probably way smaller than the need for “easy/better/awesome polling and survey tools”. Just keep that in mind as you grow and good luck with everything
- tadmilbourn 4y ago
  Thanks for the kind words! And, you're exactly right. The online world of people specifically interested in tools for ranked-choice voting is quite small. The question I'm trying to answer is what use cases does ranked-choice voting work better than other existing survey/polling options? That way, someone could be looking for a solution to that specific problem. Right now, most of RankedVote's users are already aware of RCV and then try to apply that in some scenario at work where a simple voting tool would have been the alternative.
  - clairity 4y ago
    ranked choice is a primitive form of conjoint analysis, so that might be an avenue for exploration. marketers aren't always statistically rigorous in how they poll and analyze markets (which is one of the reasons product management rose in prominence, because of the promise of more analytic rigor). even simple versions of conjoint can be an informative tool in the toolbox, but the studies and the existing tools are expensive. i don't know for sure that there is a big enough market there for VC, but i'm sure a good marketer could make a nice business out of it.
clolege 4y ago
Distributed chess games. One team uses ranked choice, the other uses approval. Seattle will be voting to adopt one of the two for city primaries next month, and it would be sweet way to pit the two systems against each other.
mritchie712 4y ago
"What feature should we build next?" Could be a good one. I don't know that it's actually a good thing to ask of your users, but I could definitely see people thinking it's a good thing to ask.
burkaman 4y ago
What should we get for our team lunch today?
- tadmilbourn 4y ago
  Early on, I saw these relatively big spikes of traffic every week day in the early afternoon. Turns out it was a school that was voting on what game to play at recess. Similar idea.
goodpoint 4y ago
Please support Condorcet voting.
specialist 4y ago
I've used misc voting systems in product development. Approval voting for bug triage. Ranked Choice Voting for prioritization (eg features, reqs). Roman Eval (thumbs up or down) for acceptance testing and hiring candidates. Using democracy at work is super light weight and fully transparent. Helped a lot with accountability. Initially I had to be the heavy, coercing the team to honor their own votes. Over time, as people grokked it, teams would self-enforce. aka Empowerment. Just to reiterate about administrative burden, quickly voting on stuff greatly reduced time spent nursing the misc bug tracking and project management tools. A huge win.
nerpderp82 4y ago
How about on HN, you only have 10 article upvotes a day, use them wisely.

endisneigh 4y ago

though I think the app looks great. I’ve never seen the point of ranked choice. Approval voting seems faster to vote, easier to implement and explain

tadmilbourn 4y ago
Thanks! And both approval and RCV are steps in the right direction. For whatever reason, RCV has been implemented more broadly (but still just a tiny fraction of the US). I've been very encouraged by the results in Alaska after the special election that just happened there in August. 85% found it simple. 73% ranked multiple candidates. And the election workers implementing it had a flawless go of it. Some data from one of the groups that helped educate voters: https://alaskansforbetterelections.com/polling-shows-alaskan-voters-understand-ranked-choice-voting/ https://alaskansforbetterelections.com/polling-shows-alaskan...
- dane-pgp 4y ago
  > 85% found it simple. 73% ranked multiple candidates. But what's conspicuously absent from these statistics is how happy the voters are with the outcome (compared to a counterfactual world where the election had been carried out under FPTP and a potentially different candidate won). Sadly it was an outcome which allowed Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) to make the argument[0] that: > 60% of Alaska voters voted for a Republican, but thanks to a convoluted process and ballot exhaustion — which disenfranchises voters — a Democrat ‘won.’ This is exactly the sort of well-poisoning that supporters of other voting reforms are afraid of. [0] https://www.independentsentinel.com/60-of-voters-cast-ballots-for-republicans-a-democrat-won-in-alaska/ https://www.independentsentinel.com/60-of-voters-cast-ballot...
  - creata 4y ago
    If the problem was ballot exhaustion, couldn't that have been solved by doing what Australia does, i.e. asking voters to rank all the candidates? That doesn't seem like a problem with instant runoff voting itself.
4y ago

mnomitch 4y ago

Hi! I actually made a similar site for my own purposes - https://poller.io https://poller.io - and I've been using it with friends for a while. One interesting finding. I was expecting that Instant Runoff would be the method we all preferred. I also included plurality winner, Borda Count and the Condorcet winner (if there was one) in the list of results. After using this with friends for decisions, I realized that a lot of choices that did very well in borda count were getting eliminated in the IRV. If you have a lot of options in the poll, there's a good chance that an option that will make the majority happy gets eliminated because it has very few first place votes. Academically, I knew this was a possibility, but in practice it happened a ton. This made us change to borda counts as our method of choice for things (and then we promised to not game the system). But... if there's a Condorcet Winner, we always go with that. I also thought that having a borda count as the method of eliminating the "last place" choice in each IRV round would be kinda nifty. This still lets people game the system though, and is kind of a gross hack. Just letting you know our experience in case it is helpful for future options on polls! Good luck!

tadmilbourn 4y ago
Thanks! And I hadn't come across Poller before. Pretty cool. FYI - RankedVote actually uses a type of Borda Count as its tiebreaking mechanism. Not quite what you're saying, but is better than picking a name out of a hat! You bring up a lot of interesting points on what people feel happy with after voting. None of these systems is perfect. Each can be picked apart in various ways. That's why I tend to frame things in terms of "does this move things forward from the status quo?"
- mnomitch 4y ago
  Oh interesting. If you don't mind me asking, what is the tie breaking mechanism? And totally agreed on the framing. Also, prepare yourself for the feedback of "we should have a runoff election with the top two" and then people completely rejecting the concept that you've already done the runoff. :)
  - tadmilbourn 4y ago

SamBam 4y ago

A question and a comment: 1. Would it be straightforward to add other voting systems? The easiest one to add would be approval voting ("Check off any option you'd support"). This has very similar benefits to ranked voting, and is more appropriate in many situations. 2. Your description of "How Ranked-Choice Voting Works" describes the "first round" and then the "next round" and "repeat until a winner is found." While those of us who understand RCV understand that these rounds are automatically built into the system, I think it's never made clear to a newbie that the voters don't have to go back and vote again.

tadmilbourn 4y ago
On #1 -- It could be, but trying to stay narrowly focused. There are some great services out there like OpaVote that do a wide array of voting options and calculation methods. On #2 -- That's a great point. And one that hopefully people start to better understand by using RankedVote and seeing all the "Rounds" happen at once. But, yeah, for many it's a new term. How would you make it more clear?
- SamBam 4y ago
  #2: At the very least I'd throw the word "automatically" into either step 2 or 3.
  - tadmilbourn 4y ago
    Thanks for the nudge! Great to have fresh eyes on these things and love your thinking. I added an "automatically" to step 3. More importantly, I changed "Voters rank." to "Voters rank once" in the headline of that section. P.S. Gotta love Webflow for making changes like this super quick.

metayrnc 4y ago

If I am not mistaken SurveyMonkey also has the option to create ranked-choice questions, no?

tadmilbourn 4y ago
It allows you to ask the "ranking question" BUT it doesn't do the ranked-choice calculation with the results. So, in theory, you can use it to collect the votes, but you'll need to do the calculations by hand. I actually wrote an article on this exact thing as a bit of an SEO play: https://www.rankedvote.co/guides/applying-ranked-choice-voting/how-to-calculate-ranked-choice-voting-with-surveymonkey-and-microsoft-excel https://www.rankedvote.co/guides/applying-ranked-choice-voti...

charlesetc 4y ago

"How Ranked-Choice Voting elects extremists" https://psephomancy.medium.com/how-ranked-choice-voting-elects-extremists-fa101b7ffb8e https://psephomancy.medium.com/how-ranked-choice-voting-elec... This article recommends instead a STAR voting system which is still simple to implement and understand while not electing extremists in some cases. I would be sad to see NYC and others turn to ranked choice without considering all the alternatives.

mkoubaa 4y ago
This is quite reductive and ridiculous, people don't measure their difference from a candidate on a single axis and vote for the person with the smallest distance.
- charlesetc 4y ago
  Don't they? Isn't that axis just "how much they like the candidate"?
  - mkoubaa 4y ago
    The point being made about extremism hinges on the axis being "ideological left/right" rather than "how much I like the candidate"
  - godelski 4y ago
    No, it is how much they like a candidate on a certain topic and then they consider all topics, which are weighted. But also the distance measurement of voting systems aren't in reality a single axis. So this doesn't really matter anyways because it is already accounted for.
- mnomitch 4y ago
  I am generally an RCV fan, but I think you're writing off this critique a bit too quickly. Even with multiple axes the critique is still correct right? And I think (far from an expert) that there's decent evidence to support hotelling's law and median voter theorem.

bhauer 4y ago

Ranking the voting systems: STAR Voting > Approval Voting > Ranked Choice Voting > Plurality ("pick only one") voting. Ranked Choice Voting is marginally better than plurality voting, but it has problems. The chief defect with Ranked Choice Voting is its non-monotonicity, whereby increasing your support for your genuine favorite can actually hurt their odds of winning. This may be what happened in Alaska [1]. STAR Voting is a slight modification to Score Voting, where you simply score each candidate and are not forced to rank them. You are given the discretion to give multiple candidates the same score if you so choose. STAR is highly expressive and simple to count: just sum the scores. Approval Voting is appealing because of its simplicity. Both ballots and how they are counted would require only superficial changes versus plurality, such as changing the prompt from "Vote for only one" to "Vote for as many as you like." Approval has a good balance of utility and simplicity. If we are going to invest time and effort into achieving voting reform, it would be a shame to spend that effort on RCV rather than superior alternatives. [1] https://electionscience.org/commentary-analysis/rcv-fools-palin-voters-into-electing-a-progressive-democrat/ https://electionscience.org/commentary-analysis/rcv-fools-pa...

scythe 4y ago
Regarding the Score/Approval/STAR trio, I always felt that there was a clear fourth possibility missing from the list, so I invented it: https://pastebin.com/PCgSaBS8 https://pastebin.com/PCgSaBS8 Still, I'm not much of a political campaigner, so it hasn't gone very far.
- dane-pgp 4y ago
  That's a clever system, thanks for sharing it. What I appreciate most about it, though, is the explicit goal of "being easier to count by hand", which I think many advocates of voting-reform overlook. You even say "by sorting ballots into each of thirteen piles corresponding to the thirteen possible rankings of three candidates", which shows you've actually thought through what the process would look like for the people doing the counting. When people are proposing voting systems, they really need to consider that their process is being carried out in an adversarial environment, where different groups have incentives to cheat, or accuse the voting system of producing the "wrong" result (e.g. due to the unintuitive outcome, or the complex tactical thinking needed to optimally fill in the ballot), or claim that voting machines were running backdoored firmware (which is a destabilizing claim whether it is in fact true or false). That last point is perhaps the most important. I think that as time goes on, the pressure to automate the counting process and give instant election results (or worse, do the elections online) is only going to grow, and any voting reform which (if done manually) slows down the counting process, or for any other reason in practice requires people to trust machines that are selected and maintained by officials from one political party, is going to do even more harm to democracy than FPTP does.

zackmorris 4y ago

Could something like this be used with polling to show a discrepancy between election outcomes and what voters want? For example, for a presidential election in the US we have the electoral college results and the popular vote (which often differ). It would be nice to also have a ranked-choice result to compare against. Especially when it comes time to consider a revote or when courts become involved with elections (a sign the electoral process has failed in some way). I suspect that election results would differ from ranked-choice polling to such a degree that it would become apparent how elections are manipulated by parties, the media, incumbents, etc etc etc: https://journalistsresource.org/politics-and-government/the-influence-of-elites-interest-groups-and-average-voters-on-american-politics/ https://journalistsresource.org/politics-and-government/the-... Economic elites drive nearly all policy change in the US through campaign contributions and lobbying (highly correlated), while response to the average citizen's preferences is flat across the political spectrum (no correlation). IMHO this mismatch is driven nearly entirely by election results being uncorrelated with voters' preferences. Then the vitriol against outcomes is used by the parties to keep us divided so that much-needed legislation can be simply politicized to stop it. Once support approaches 50/50, it dies in committee. There were 395 bills that died via division this way in the Senate as of 2020: https://americanindependent.com/mitch-mcconnell-block-bills-house-democrats-senate-republicans-gop-fox-news/ https://americanindependent.com/mitch-mcconnell-block-bills-... I tried to cite the most independent article I could find, but they all mention key politicians. Please don't let names muddy the waters, as the motivation behind divisive politics is the constant here.

tadmilbourn 4y ago
I found The Politics Industry by Katherine Gehl super enlightening and well-researched on this very idea (https://www.amazon.com/Politics-Industry-Political-Innovation-Democracy/dp/1633699234 https://www.amazon.com/Politics-Industry-Political-Innovatio...). The basic premise is that the current "market dynamics" of Politics (when viewed like any other industry) actively disincentivizes results. Painting with a somewhat broad brush, it doesn't making sense for a politician to make progress on immigration reform because that lessens its saliency for raising money and turning out the base. The solution proposed is a combination of "Final-Five" open primaries with ranked-choice voting in the general election. This is what just happened in Alaska and is on the ballot in Nevada in November. Which reminds me...if you're a Nevada voter, vote YES on ballot question 3!

gamegoblin 4y ago

I used to be a hardcore pro-RCV supporter (I liked Yang, and Yang made RCV one of his main issues, outside UBI), but I've become a little more jaded in the last few years. Empirically, it seems like RCV-IRV (RCV from here on) not much better than Plurality. For example, look at all the countries and cities with RCV and without. It's not at all clear to me that those with RCV are much better than those without. Both NZ and Australia are dominated by a large center-left and center-right party coalition. Sounds familiar. NZ has a housing crisis that is even worse than San Francisco. Australia is under the thumb of the mineral extraction industry. All sounds familiar. (Obviously NZ and Australia beat the US on some metrics, e.g. single payer healthcare if that's your thing, but there are plenty of European countries that have equivalent or better systems without RCV) There are hundreds of US cities with RCV. None of them are obviously better than those without. They still have all the same fights about zoning and bike lanes and public parking that other cities have. I'd still prefer RCV over Plurality, but I don't really think it's the panacea some of its supporters thing it is.

clolege 4y ago
I recently asked Fairvote volunteers which cities/countries they point to as RCV done “right”. All of the places I’m familiar with have poor reputations for their politics (SF, Australia) or have had problems with it (NY’s democratic primary, Alaska). All they could come up with is statistics that more women and people of color are elected with RCV, and there is not enough evidence yet that Approval voting will do the same.
- obelos 4y ago
  Those studies also don't demonstrate any causality, only correlation. It seems not unlikely that districts willing to try an experimental voting method also are more interested in running diverse candidates.
godelski 4y ago
You might want to look into cardinal methods (I have a longer post above). They are not vulnerable to the strong spoiler effect (when you like two candidates a lot they can end up splitting the vote in RCV). The most popular ones are STAR and Approval. They're both trivial to implement, infinitely scalable, and trivial to understand the tallying process (all while providing high VSE).

c7b 4y ago

Feature suggestion: the system automatically tells you when you have a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet_paradox situation and offers to decide the outcome based on a coin flip instead. Only half joking there, the amount of negative results about ranked-choice voting in social choice theory is quite amazing. I'm not sure whether I'd place it on the efficiency frontier of the 'complex but has desirable properties' versus 'easy to understand but far from perfect' trade-off.

dane-pgp 4y ago
While we're offering troll feature suggestions, I have another: Add a calculation for how many person-hours such a ballot would have taken if carried out by hand (based on scientifically validated assumptions about how long one person takes to sort through a stack of N votes). This would also let you give a figure for how much money had been saved by people entrusting their democratic process to an inscrutable and unaccountable online system, and therefore the size of the financial incentive to do so.
DominikPeters 4y ago
In case there is no Condorcet winner, there is actually a more principled way to randomize over alternatives than just choosing each with the same probability, known as maximal lotteries (e.g., https://pub.dss.in.tum.de/brandt-research/fishburn_slides.pdf https://pub.dss.in.tum.de/brandt-research/fishburn_slides.pd...).
- creata 4y ago
  I love this idea: it feels very parsimonious, and it's optimal (in a very narrow sense) by definition. I can't find much criticism of it, though, aside from: https://groups.google.com/g/electionscience/c/wT1_hN38b8s https://groups.google.com/g/electionscience/c/wT1_hN38b8s
- c7b 4y ago
  very cool, thank you

cphoover 4y ago

I feel like drag and drop sorting would be more user-friendly

tadmilbourn 4y ago
That is an option! You can choose between the "Grid" ballot type which simulates what's used on real-world paper ballots. There's also "Drag and Drop" which works particularly well on mobile touch devices. People just drag their most preferred to the top! Try it on this demo: https://app.rankedvote.co/decisions/4973/Family-Movie-Night/4961/vote https://app.rankedvote.co/decisions/4973/Family-Movie-Night/...

ajl666 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

tunesmith 4y ago

Would you consider a variation where the Condorcet Winner is awarded the win if the Condorcet Winner exists, and where in the cases there isn't a Condorcet Winner, IRV is applied to the Smith Set?

charleslmunger 4y ago

Not all ranked choice methods are identical - if you're interested in this topic, check out https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-2026611/latest.pdf https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-2026611/latest.pdf

FireInsight 4y ago

Since many people are talking about STAR voting, also check out this site https://star.vote/ https://star.vote/ I've found it works pretty well.

alphabet9000 4y ago

consider making .h04_h1.hero min-height 174px - otherwise the 'get started' button jumps around

tadmilbourn 4y ago
What device/browser are you on where it's hopping around? I've been manually testing across devices so that the "typing text animation" stays stable. 174px actually creates a bit more height than I desire on mobile safari/iphone. But knowing what you browser you were on will help me troubleshoot.

AtNightWeCode 4y ago

What is the science behind this? Is it not obvious that most people want to pick a single alternative? And for precision. If you force people into ranking. Is it not obvious that the effort that goes into picking the top alternative is much higher than for let us say the fifth option. Basically, adding noise that may skew the results.

zeristor 4y ago

This YouTube video "Simulating alternate voting systems" by Primer seems apposite: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhO6jfHPFQU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhO6jfHPFQU

smellymonkey329 4y ago
Apposite ~ relavant "apt in the circumstances or in relation to something."

brianolson 4y ago

Oh hey, I made one too. https://betterpolls.com/ https://betterpolls.com/ Focus on Condorcet ("Virtual Round Robin") counting. De-duping by requiring a google or facebook login (or anonymous with a crappy hacky captcha).

Dan42 4y ago

I'm glad there's plenty of people here mentioning the Condorcet Winner. Because that's the one and only voting property that I can't compromise on. If there is a Condorcet Winner, a voting system that doesn't choose it is useless. But it's not like IRV has to be entirely thrown out. As some have suggested, it would be just fine to use a hybrid system like "pick Condorcet Winner if it exists, use [IRV/STAR/etc] otherwise". I'd like more people to talk about Ranked Pairs / Tideman. It satisfies a ridiculous number of voting criteria, even more than Schulze, but with the huge advantage that it's explainable to a layperson. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranked_pairs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranked_pairs

RosanaAnaDana 4y ago

The tracking/ sign on nag is an instant barrier to use. No thanks.

ClayShentrup 4y ago

Approval voting is much better. https://www.electionscience.org/library/approval-voting-versus-irv/ https://www.electionscience.org/library/approval-voting-vers...

TedGetschman 4y ago

Any MaxVoting method which is any voting method where all voters can freely rate all candidates and all of that information is used to determine a winner (Approval, STAR, Majority Judgement, Division Free, Vote 321, etc.) pushes candidates toward the majority opinion platform, the single political platform that best represents that group of voters at that time. Min voting methods which is any voting method that forces voters to pick only one candidate (plurality, ranked choice voting) favors either the left or right political power position, traditionally held by Republicans and Democrats. Alaska's special election resulted in a race between a Democrat and a Republican where the winner received about 50% of the vote. How did that change anything? RCV is just plurality with a 50% threshold. San Francisco had that until it switched to RCV so it could stop paying for the live run offs. For ending division, MaxVoting methods--any MaxVoting method--will work. It should be up to the people of that area which one they want instead of being imposed from the outside by experts. CommonSenseforUnitingAmerica.org