4 ms·

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.
musingsole 4y ago
Isn't approval voting just a signified form of Ranked Choice Voting -- one without prioritization? So the strength of RCV would then be more built in tie-breaking.
- naniwaduni 4y ago
  No. Approval voting is actually a minimized score voting system, and although intuitively a two-point feels like this should convey less information, the way the aggregation rule works (straight addition—or specifically in the approval voting case, tallying), you're actually extracting significantly more information out of a set of approval votes than you would from a ranked choice vote. To put it another way: given a (sufficiently large) set of [0,1] score votes, you can generate a set of approval votes that give a very good estimate for the score voting results by mapping each score vote to an approval vote by randomly picking a number in [0,1) for each vote and marking options scored above that threshold. Handwaving a bit, this implies that at scale approval voting and arbitrary-precision score voting give the same results with pretty good probability. Now, score voting with arbitrary precision pretty clearly conveys more information than ranked choice! You can extract an RCV from a score vote directly, but this loses substantial information about how far apart the options were rated. Conversely, if you extract a score vote from an RCV, you ... well, you can get something like Borda count. For other RCV aggregation algorithms a score vote extraction is not quite as clean, but it's substantially less clear whether the information "lost" is real or an accidental artifact of the RCV itself. Certainly you can argue all day over the merits of Borda count and variants vs other IRV aggregation algorithms, but then score voting with arbitrary precision not only strictly dominates Borda count, but also is clearly conveying additional information about degree of preference on top of that which is obviously useful and not encoded in ranked choice votes at all! Bonus: a surprisingly large number of decisions are dominated by no more than three viable choices that are clearly preferred over all others. When selecting for among three options, there are seven unique approval votes (the all marked/unmarked votes, expressing no preference, are equivalent), and only six ranked unique choice votes. It should be pretty clear that RCV and approval don't convey equivalent information in this case!
  - ClayShentrup 4y ago
SV_BubbleTime 4y ago
> I’ve never seen the point of ranked choice. I'm waiting to see RCV pushed by someone's who ideology doesn't exactly benefit from it in their area. It's not a second place always wins, but I have seen a lot of examples of "My party will not win in my area, but it's kinda close, and RCV gives me a higher statistical probability of "my side" getting in". Maybe approval voting is better, I'm not sure how likely it is for unpopular candidates to win in close areas. If it suffers from the same issues as ranked choice or not. I'm tired of it all being game.
- SamBam 4y ago
  I'm for any form of multi-vote system (RCV, Approval, etc) because (1) they tend to more accurately reflect the will of the electorate, and (2) they may help to break the strangle-hold of a two party system in the US. The two-party system is so dominant in the US because of the first-past-the-post voting system. With such an election (even disregarding the financial power of the parties, or the role of the electoral college) third-party candidates never have a shot, because any intelligent voter knows that a vote for them is a spoiler for their second-favorite candidate. Multi-choice voting systems generally reduce or eliminate spoiler effects, which both allows a third party to build support, and reduces the chance that an election will go to a candidate with lower support simply because the other side had their vote split. Even when we're not talking about the two-party system, multi-vote systems better reflect the will of the people. My city has a ranked choice, multi-seat election for city council. All councilors are at-large, meaning you're voting a group of about ten of them in, and selecting from a pool of about 20 candidates. There's almost no other system that could accurately capture the majority of the people's positions.
adamredwoods 4y ago
Approval voting allows bullet voting, which is not ideal: https://fairvote.org/the_troubling_record_of_approval_voting_at_dartmouth/ https://fairvote.org/the_troubling_record_of_approval_voting...
- wnoise 4y ago
  (a) bullet voting isn't actually a problem https://www.rangevoting.org/BulletBugaboo.html https://www.rangevoting.org/BulletBugaboo.html (b) Approval voting only incentivizes bullet voting when that is very close to actually capturing the voter's intent. The strategic thing to do is vote approve on all those you like better than whoever you think the most likely candidate to win is.
crazygringo 4y ago
Because of 5 candidates, there are 3 I approve, and 2 I hate. But of the 3 I approve, I love one and only reluctantly accept the other two. People often have strong feelings about their top preference, and approval rating destroys that. And then in my example, the voter is tempted to approve just 1 in order to give them a better chance of winning. (Known as bullet voting.) It's much more intuitive and less cognitive load to rank options by preference than to decide on an arbitrary threshold of approval. You already know your ranking; you have to strategically decide on an approval cutoff. (Also, between the candidates you disapprove of, you still often think some would be better/worse than others, and want that to count too.)
- endisneigh 4y ago
  Even in your situation it doesn’t make sense to me to use ranked choice. Might as well use score voting so you can say how much more you prefer one candidate to another. All voting systems have drawbacks, but I think approval is best relative to effort and impact.
- naniwaduni 4y ago
  > And then in my example, the voter is tempted to approve just 1 in order to give them a better chance of winning. (Known as bullet voting.) This is fine. The probability with which a voter bullet votes vs votes three conveys the degree of preference for that candidates. This is not as informative as score voting on a wider range (because okay, degree of preference doesn't map perfectly linearly with probability of vote), but it's an perfectly adequate proxy. By comparison, ranked choice, despite feeling like it gives you the ability to choose relative ranks, doesn't actually convey more information because it says nothing about your degree of preference! "Candidate A is perfect in every way > Candidate B agrees with me on all policy decisions but is my ex > Candidate C literally wants to murder me" looks exactly the same on a ranked choice ballot as "Candidate A is perfect in every way > Candidate B literally wants to murder me > Candidate C literally wants to murder me and also kicked my dog". > It's much more intuitive and less cognitive load to rank options by preference than to decide on an arbitrary threshold of approval. You already know your ranking; you have to strategically decide on an approval cutoff. Spoken like someone who doesn't have intransitive preferences!
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

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.

musingsole 4y ago

Isn't approval voting just a signified form of Ranked Choice Voting -- one without prioritization? So the strength of RCV would then be more built in tie-breaking.

naniwaduni 4y ago
No. Approval voting is actually a minimized score voting system, and although intuitively a two-point feels like this should convey less information, the way the aggregation rule works (straight addition—or specifically in the approval voting case, tallying), you're actually extracting significantly more information out of a set of approval votes than you would from a ranked choice vote. To put it another way: given a (sufficiently large) set of [0,1] score votes, you can generate a set of approval votes that give a very good estimate for the score voting results by mapping each score vote to an approval vote by randomly picking a number in [0,1) for each vote and marking options scored above that threshold. Handwaving a bit, this implies that at scale approval voting and arbitrary-precision score voting give the same results with pretty good probability. Now, score voting with arbitrary precision pretty clearly conveys more information than ranked choice! You can extract an RCV from a score vote directly, but this loses substantial information about how far apart the options were rated. Conversely, if you extract a score vote from an RCV, you ... well, you can get something like Borda count. For other RCV aggregation algorithms a score vote extraction is not quite as clean, but it's substantially less clear whether the information "lost" is real or an accidental artifact of the RCV itself. Certainly you can argue all day over the merits of Borda count and variants vs other IRV aggregation algorithms, but then score voting with arbitrary precision not only strictly dominates Borda count, but also is clearly conveying additional information about degree of preference on top of that which is obviously useful and not encoded in ranked choice votes at all! Bonus: a surprisingly large number of decisions are dominated by no more than three viable choices that are clearly preferred over all others. When selecting for among three options, there are seven unique approval votes (the all marked/unmarked votes, expressing no preference, are equivalent), and only six ranked unique choice votes. It should be pretty clear that RCV and approval don't convey equivalent information in this case!
- ClayShentrup 4y ago

SV_BubbleTime 4y ago

> I’ve never seen the point of ranked choice. I'm waiting to see RCV pushed by someone's who ideology doesn't exactly benefit from it in their area. It's not a second place always wins, but I have seen a lot of examples of "My party will not win in my area, but it's kinda close, and RCV gives me a higher statistical probability of "my side" getting in". Maybe approval voting is better, I'm not sure how likely it is for unpopular candidates to win in close areas. If it suffers from the same issues as ranked choice or not. I'm tired of it all being game.

SamBam 4y ago
I'm for any form of multi-vote system (RCV, Approval, etc) because (1) they tend to more accurately reflect the will of the electorate, and (2) they may help to break the strangle-hold of a two party system in the US. The two-party system is so dominant in the US because of the first-past-the-post voting system. With such an election (even disregarding the financial power of the parties, or the role of the electoral college) third-party candidates never have a shot, because any intelligent voter knows that a vote for them is a spoiler for their second-favorite candidate. Multi-choice voting systems generally reduce or eliminate spoiler effects, which both allows a third party to build support, and reduces the chance that an election will go to a candidate with lower support simply because the other side had their vote split. Even when we're not talking about the two-party system, multi-vote systems better reflect the will of the people. My city has a ranked choice, multi-seat election for city council. All councilors are at-large, meaning you're voting a group of about ten of them in, and selecting from a pool of about 20 candidates. There's almost no other system that could accurately capture the majority of the people's positions.

adamredwoods 4y ago

Approval voting allows bullet voting, which is not ideal: https://fairvote.org/the_troubling_record_of_approval_voting_at_dartmouth/ https://fairvote.org/the_troubling_record_of_approval_voting...

wnoise 4y ago
(a) bullet voting isn't actually a problem https://www.rangevoting.org/BulletBugaboo.html https://www.rangevoting.org/BulletBugaboo.html (b) Approval voting only incentivizes bullet voting when that is very close to actually capturing the voter's intent. The strategic thing to do is vote approve on all those you like better than whoever you think the most likely candidate to win is.

crazygringo 4y ago

Because of 5 candidates, there are 3 I approve, and 2 I hate. But of the 3 I approve, I love one and only reluctantly accept the other two. People often have strong feelings about their top preference, and approval rating destroys that. And then in my example, the voter is tempted to approve just 1 in order to give them a better chance of winning. (Known as bullet voting.) It's much more intuitive and less cognitive load to rank options by preference than to decide on an arbitrary threshold of approval. You already know your ranking; you have to strategically decide on an approval cutoff. (Also, between the candidates you disapprove of, you still often think some would be better/worse than others, and want that to count too.)

endisneigh 4y ago
Even in your situation it doesn’t make sense to me to use ranked choice. Might as well use score voting so you can say how much more you prefer one candidate to another. All voting systems have drawbacks, but I think approval is best relative to effort and impact.
naniwaduni 4y ago
> And then in my example, the voter is tempted to approve just 1 in order to give them a better chance of winning. (Known as bullet voting.) This is fine. The probability with which a voter bullet votes vs votes three conveys the degree of preference for that candidates. This is not as informative as score voting on a wider range (because okay, degree of preference doesn't map perfectly linearly with probability of vote), but it's an perfectly adequate proxy. By comparison, ranked choice, despite feeling like it gives you the ability to choose relative ranks, doesn't actually convey more information because it says nothing about your degree of preference! "Candidate A is perfect in every way > Candidate B agrees with me on all policy decisions but is my ex > Candidate C literally wants to murder me" looks exactly the same on a ranked choice ballot as "Candidate A is perfect in every way > Candidate B literally wants to murder me > Candidate C literally wants to murder me and also kicked my dog". > It's much more intuitive and less cognitive load to rank options by preference than to decide on an arbitrary threshold of approval. You already know your ranking; you have to strategically decide on an approval cutoff. Spoken like someone who doesn't have intransitive preferences!

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]