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> How long would it take to teach a member of the general public to evaluate IRV results? I'm puzzled by this. You can do it with pencil and paper in a few min

> How long would it take to teach a member of the general public to evaluate IRV results? I'm puzzled by this. You can do it with pencil and paper in a few minutes? It's simple addition. You can easily build a website that visualizes each step if you think addition is difficult for people. It's trivial to compute in a spreadsheet. > might leave people disillusioned This is speculative; if it is true, you can find evidence by talking to, e.g. Alaskan voters. (IOW, Citation Needed.) > clearly a straw man I'm simply painting a picture by recounting my experience of what happened in the last thread on HN where voting systems came up, not making a strong claim about these specific systems being the runners up. My point still stands if you substitute any other systems, in this thread for example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33111242 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33111242. The point I was making had nothing to do about the merits of those specific systems; the point was that a big technical can of worms gets opened, and the average voter has no interest in digging in to compare N solutions on M technical axes, Arrow's theorem, etc. This is what people mean when they say "alternate voting systems are complicated".

godelski 4y ago
> It's simple addition. Not quite. The tallying algorithm is `while (no candidate > 50% of votes): pop min(candidates), reallocate_votes(min(candidates))`. On the other hand cardinal methods are `argmax(sum(candidates))`. For comparison, FPTP is `argmax(sum(candidates))` too. The only difference is that FPTP is a one-hot vector. I'd argue that the average person intuitively understands cardinal methods without any training.
- ajmurmann 4y ago
  To add to the simplicity case: STAR and Approval voting are on essence how many online rating systems like IMDB, Yelp or Rotten Tomatoes work. Those seem very intuitive to users. (Edit: ignoring cases where those platforms hide votes etc)
- theptip 4y ago
  You're right, my bad. Computing `reallocate_votes()` is not as trivial as I suggested. I do wonder if many people actually care to work through that step; in all of the public discourse around the Alaska vote, it's simply presented as a table with the reallocations already summed. For example, https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-democrats-win-in-alaska-tells-us-about-november/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-democrats-win-in-a.... The general algorithm of "reallocate the votes from the candidate that is being eliminated" is conceptually simple, even if it's annoying to tabulate. I do stand by my claim that it would be very easy to build a website that can visualize this process without getting bogged down in the tabulation. See every site that's giving analysis on the Alaska results for examples. I want to see actual UX studies on this; for example has anyone polled in Alaska to see whether people understand the result?
  - godelski 4y ago
    > Computing `reallocate_votes()` is not as trivial as I suggested. I agree that it isn't hard, but I'm glad we both agree it isn't trivial. > I do wonder if many people actually care to work through that step I don't think most people care to be honest. But I think what does matter is recount events. I often point to what happened in Arizona as a perfect example. It would be substantially easier to create a narrative that an election is rigged if the tallying is more complicated. Malicious people like to hide in complexity and will often oversimplify a complex topic. Because of this, I think one of the most important factors in creating a secure election is ensuring that the tallying system is simple. While malicious actors will always act maliciously, we can reduce their effectiveness through this simplicity.

godelski 4y ago

> It's simple addition. Not quite. The tallying algorithm is `while (no candidate > 50% of votes): pop min(candidates), reallocate_votes(min(candidates))`. On the other hand cardinal methods are `argmax(sum(candidates))`. For comparison, FPTP is `argmax(sum(candidates))` too. The only difference is that FPTP is a one-hot vector. I'd argue that the average person intuitively understands cardinal methods without any training.

ajmurmann 4y ago
To add to the simplicity case: STAR and Approval voting are on essence how many online rating systems like IMDB, Yelp or Rotten Tomatoes work. Those seem very intuitive to users. (Edit: ignoring cases where those platforms hide votes etc)
theptip 4y ago
You're right, my bad. Computing `reallocate_votes()` is not as trivial as I suggested. I do wonder if many people actually care to work through that step; in all of the public discourse around the Alaska vote, it's simply presented as a table with the reallocations already summed. For example, https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-democrats-win-in-alaska-tells-us-about-november/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-democrats-win-in-a.... The general algorithm of "reallocate the votes from the candidate that is being eliminated" is conceptually simple, even if it's annoying to tabulate. I do stand by my claim that it would be very easy to build a website that can visualize this process without getting bogged down in the tabulation. See every site that's giving analysis on the Alaska results for examples. I want to see actual UX studies on this; for example has anyone polled in Alaska to see whether people understand the result?
- godelski 4y ago
  > Computing `reallocate_votes()` is not as trivial as I suggested. I agree that it isn't hard, but I'm glad we both agree it isn't trivial. > I do wonder if many people actually care to work through that step I don't think most people care to be honest. But I think what does matter is recount events. I often point to what happened in Arizona as a perfect example. It would be substantially easier to create a narrative that an election is rigged if the tallying is more complicated. Malicious people like to hide in complexity and will often oversimplify a complex topic. Because of this, I think one of the most important factors in creating a secure election is ensuring that the tallying system is simple. While malicious actors will always act maliciously, we can reduce their effectiveness through this simplicity.