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I don't see a problem in the Alaska election. Perhaps I'm missing something? I posted this in a previous discussion but I'll repost because I'm keen to hear oth

I don't see a problem in the Alaska election. Perhaps I'm missing something? I posted this in a previous discussion but I'll repost because I'm keen to hear other perspectives. From https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-democrats-win-in-alaska-tells-us-about-november/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-democrats-win-in-a... > 40 percent of voters had chosen Peltola as their first choice, 31 percent had chosen Palin and 29 percent had chosen Republican businessman Nick Begich III. Under the rules of ranked choice voting, Begich — as the candidate with the fewest first-choice votes — was then eliminated, and his votes were redistributed to whomever his voters ranked second. > Unsurprisingly, most of Begich’s votes (50 percent) went to his fellow Republican, Palin. But an impressive 29 percent went to Peltola, and 21 percent were “exhausted,” meaning there was no second-choice pick, and the votes were essentially thrown out. That combination was enough for Peltola to win. While Palin gained more votes from the redistribution than Peltola did, Peltola was starting from a higher total, and receiving 29 percent of Begich’s votes was enough to keep her ahead of Palin. In the end, Peltola received 51 percent of the votes counted in the final round, while Palin received 49 percent. Sounds fair to me. Some of Begich’s voters expressed a “Begich or nobody” preference. Many Begich voters expressed a “Peltola over Palin” preference. It’s not clear to me why pairwise preferences are meaningful, they don’t encode nuances like the above. The objection about the spoiler effect is confusing to me. I see that there are certain situations where ex post, you get some weird outcomes where _hypothetically_ ranking your preferred candidate lower would have helped your candidate. But I don't think it's possible to identify these cases ex ante, and I don't see how they can in practice affect anyone's voting strategy. (Though maybe it's enough to get bad press like https://electionscience.org/commentary-analysis/rcv-fools-palin-voters-into-electing-a-progressive-democrat/ https://electionscience.org/commentary-analysis/rcv-fools-pa...?) I think you can spin these technical narratives like "you threw your votes away because, if there had been a head-to-head it would have gone differently". But taking a simple explanation of what happened like the above, it's hard for me to see why the result is actively unfair.

ClayShentrup 4y ago
the big problem is that begich was by far the most preferred candidate, but didn't win. and palin voters would have been better off to rank begich in 1st place. the whole thing is a mess.
bena 4y ago
Especially since Begich only wins the Condorcet because he's preferable to Palin to Democrats. In a primary system, Begich doesn't even get to the general. So it becomes Palin against Peltola. Begich can only win in a head to head matchup in a general election against any single candidate. He cannot beat the field, because he is consistently someone's second choice in the overall field.
- josephcsible 4y ago
  You make it sound like being the consistent second choice means he doesn't deserve to win, when the opposite is true. Consider a hypothetical country in which 33% of the population is religion X, 33% is religion Y, and 34% is religion Z. Candidate 1 wants the country to be a religion X theocracy, candidate 2 wants the country to be a religion Y theocracy, candidate 3 wants the country to be a religion Z theocracy, and candidate 4 wants the country to have freedom of religion. (Assume all voters would love a theocracy of their own religion, be okay with freedom of religion, and hate a theocracy of a different religion.) Do you want an election system where candidate 3 wins instead of candidate 4?
  - bena 4y ago
    Assuming absurd scenarios can get you any result you want. Because in your scenario, all of those people have to prefer gaining their religious theocracy to such the degree that they're willing to lose practicing their religion at all to get it. It's reductio ad absurdum.
- supreme_loquat 4y ago
  Beating everyone head to head is beating the field. The reason Begich wasn't picked by RCV is because he didn't have enough first choice votes. The problem with your analysis is that you are placing more value on a person's first choice than is warranted. You are assuming people care so much about their first choice winning that their lower choices are essentially irrelevant as long as their first choice is in the race. However, this is not necessarily the case. For example, what if someone liked their first two choices equally (or perhaps close to equal), but was forced by the ballot to rank one ahead of the other? That is a very different situation than if the voters did in fact have a very strong preference for their favorite over their second favorite, which is the situation you are assuming. Neither of these situations can be assumed from the data presented on a ranked/ordinal ballot. With a cardinal ballot such as score or STAR, your argument could potentially hold water because we can glean the nuanced preferences from people's ballots. eg if someone ranked Palin 5, Begich 4, and Peltota 0, that's a very different story from Palin 5, Begich 1, Peltota 0, even though both of those ballots would look identical if they were squished into a ranked ballot format. The second case would support your argument pretty solidly since the voter didn't like Begich much at all, just a smidgen better than Peltota. For the opposite scenario, consider if this race had been done with a 5 point score/STAR ballot where 40% voters give Palin 5, Begich 4, and Peltota 0, 40% voters give Peltota 5, Begich 4, and Palin 0, and 20% voters give Begich 5. It would be inexcusable not to elect Begich. Even though Begich was not the first choice for 80% of the population, an election like that would indicate such extremely strong support for him that you'll probably be inclined to point out that such an election would never happen in reality and I'm giving a contrived example. Which you're right, I'm not saying this is a likely scenario, I'm simply trying to illustrate how a compromise candidate could in fact be very strong, but RCV will still eliminate them if they don't have enough first choice votes. Placing a premium on people's first choice votes as RCV does is both unwarranted given the data represented on the ballots as well as harmful due to the issues it causes with monotonicity, not electing the Condorcet winner, etc. If we want to insist on ranked ballots, we should be using a Condorcet method to count them.
ensignavenger 4y ago
What is most interesting to me is the number of exhausted votes. Did those folks not pick a second candidate because they did not want to support either choice as a second, or did they not know how the voting system worked? It sounds like the real problem here is education, which will be a challenge with any different voting system, and some a lot more so. It will probably be better the next time around.
- password4321 4y ago
  ‘Sarah Palin Instructed Supporters Not to Rank Candidates’ https://news.yahoo.com/sarah-palin-instructed-supporters-not-152202621.html https://news.yahoo.com/sarah-palin-instructed-supporters-not... Apparently some were instructed not to make a second choice.
crazygringo 4y ago
> I see that there are certain situations where ex post, you get some weird outcomes where _hypothetically_ ranking your preferred candidate lower would have helped your candidate. It's not even that strong -- it's outcomes where ranking your second-most preferred candidate above your preferred one will help get that second-most preferred candidate elected, as opposed to a third one you detest -- if you know your most preferred candidate won't be elected. Which makes sense, of course. But it's also "cheating" to manipulate the system if those aren't your actual preferences, and it wouldn't even work in practice because you'd have to know how everyone voted in the first place to know if it was worth it. You're right, it seems fair to me too in this instance.
- ClayShentrup 4y ago
  Of course it works in practice. You just vote for the stronger lesser evil candidate, for the same reason my aunt voted for Biden even though she preferred Warren. This is called compromise strategy. The opposite strategy would be like if Trump supporters voted for Warren to advance the weaker candidate against their guy. The same strategy works in any kind of runoff method including instant runoff voting.
  - BuyMyBitcoins 4y ago
    What you mentioned is something closed primaries are designed to counteract.
    - fdsjgfklsfd 4y ago
      Closed primaries are the reason we have a polarized two-party system.
      - BuyMyBitcoins 4y ago
        States with open primaries suffer from the same polarization. I think the root cause of a polarized two party system goes much deeper than that.
NickM 4y ago
It's not nearly as complex as you're making it out to be. Palin was the spoiler candidate in Alaska. If Palin hadn't run, Begich would have won. Additionally, if Palin > Begich > Peltola voters had "dishonestly" voted Begich > Palin > Peltola, Begich would have won and those voters would have gotten a better outcome for themselves. By honestly ranking their preferences, they threw away their say in the outcome. Now don't get me wrong, as a Democrat there is a part of me that is happy Peltola won, but this was clearly a pretty messed up outcome given that Begich was the condorcet winner and that Alaska is a very red state. Republicans are right to be upset about the way this election played out. Now obviously FPTP also has the possibility of spoiler candidates, but at least in that case it's pretty easy to understand the situations in which you might be throwing away your vote. Do you think most of those Palin voters had any idea that they could have elected Begich by voting strategically? Complex, opaque voting systems like this are super bad for democracy IMO.
- autoexec 4y ago
  > By honestly ranking their preferences, they threw away their say in the outcome. When Begich came out as the loser, every one of the votes he got went to the voter's #2 choice which was either Palin or Peltola (and a surprising 29% of Begich voters had Peltola as their #2 choice!) The only people who "threw away their say in the outcome" are the ones who didn't rank their preferences. They basically opted out of having a vote if their one chosen candidate didn't win by not making a #2 choice. It's very clear with ranked choice voting when you might be throwing away your vote, it happens only when you don't specify who your vote should go to if your first pick doesn't have enough supporters. Every single person who selected a #1 and #2 choice had a say in the outcome of that election.
  - dane-pgp 4y ago
    > it happens only when you don't specify who your vote should go to if your first pick doesn't have enough supporters And your second pick, and your third pick... right? A big reason for electoral reform is to encourage a wider range of candidates to run, which means voters may be faced with having to come up with a total ordering across a dozen different options. You seem to be saying that voters who aren't informed enough about their relative preferences for all available candidates, deserve to have their votes thrown away, or at least that voters who can remember an ordering for a list of a dozen names should be given more electoral power than their fellow citizens who cannot manage that feat. That's maybe not the biggest distortion and potential unfairness in the US right now (with the electoral college and partisan gerrymandering being two aspects that courts openly accept, not to mention other more insidious methods of disenfranchisement) but I think that reform advocates need to be careful not to support the equivalent of "literacy" tests, which have a disturbing past.

ClayShentrup 4y ago

the big problem is that begich was by far the most preferred candidate, but didn't win. and palin voters would have been better off to rank begich in 1st place. the whole thing is a mess.

bena 4y ago

Especially since Begich only wins the Condorcet because he's preferable to Palin to Democrats. In a primary system, Begich doesn't even get to the general. So it becomes Palin against Peltola. Begich can only win in a head to head matchup in a general election against any single candidate. He cannot beat the field, because he is consistently someone's second choice in the overall field.

josephcsible 4y ago
You make it sound like being the consistent second choice means he doesn't deserve to win, when the opposite is true. Consider a hypothetical country in which 33% of the population is religion X, 33% is religion Y, and 34% is religion Z. Candidate 1 wants the country to be a religion X theocracy, candidate 2 wants the country to be a religion Y theocracy, candidate 3 wants the country to be a religion Z theocracy, and candidate 4 wants the country to have freedom of religion. (Assume all voters would love a theocracy of their own religion, be okay with freedom of religion, and hate a theocracy of a different religion.) Do you want an election system where candidate 3 wins instead of candidate 4?
- bena 4y ago
  Assuming absurd scenarios can get you any result you want. Because in your scenario, all of those people have to prefer gaining their religious theocracy to such the degree that they're willing to lose practicing their religion at all to get it. It's reductio ad absurdum.
supreme_loquat 4y ago
Beating everyone head to head is beating the field. The reason Begich wasn't picked by RCV is because he didn't have enough first choice votes. The problem with your analysis is that you are placing more value on a person's first choice than is warranted. You are assuming people care so much about their first choice winning that their lower choices are essentially irrelevant as long as their first choice is in the race. However, this is not necessarily the case. For example, what if someone liked their first two choices equally (or perhaps close to equal), but was forced by the ballot to rank one ahead of the other? That is a very different situation than if the voters did in fact have a very strong preference for their favorite over their second favorite, which is the situation you are assuming. Neither of these situations can be assumed from the data presented on a ranked/ordinal ballot. With a cardinal ballot such as score or STAR, your argument could potentially hold water because we can glean the nuanced preferences from people's ballots. eg if someone ranked Palin 5, Begich 4, and Peltota 0, that's a very different story from Palin 5, Begich 1, Peltota 0, even though both of those ballots would look identical if they were squished into a ranked ballot format. The second case would support your argument pretty solidly since the voter didn't like Begich much at all, just a smidgen better than Peltota. For the opposite scenario, consider if this race had been done with a 5 point score/STAR ballot where 40% voters give Palin 5, Begich 4, and Peltota 0, 40% voters give Peltota 5, Begich 4, and Palin 0, and 20% voters give Begich 5. It would be inexcusable not to elect Begich. Even though Begich was not the first choice for 80% of the population, an election like that would indicate such extremely strong support for him that you'll probably be inclined to point out that such an election would never happen in reality and I'm giving a contrived example. Which you're right, I'm not saying this is a likely scenario, I'm simply trying to illustrate how a compromise candidate could in fact be very strong, but RCV will still eliminate them if they don't have enough first choice votes. Placing a premium on people's first choice votes as RCV does is both unwarranted given the data represented on the ballots as well as harmful due to the issues it causes with monotonicity, not electing the Condorcet winner, etc. If we want to insist on ranked ballots, we should be using a Condorcet method to count them.

ensignavenger 4y ago

What is most interesting to me is the number of exhausted votes. Did those folks not pick a second candidate because they did not want to support either choice as a second, or did they not know how the voting system worked? It sounds like the real problem here is education, which will be a challenge with any different voting system, and some a lot more so. It will probably be better the next time around.

password4321 4y ago
‘Sarah Palin Instructed Supporters Not to Rank Candidates’ https://news.yahoo.com/sarah-palin-instructed-supporters-not-152202621.html https://news.yahoo.com/sarah-palin-instructed-supporters-not... Apparently some were instructed not to make a second choice.

crazygringo 4y ago

> I see that there are certain situations where ex post, you get some weird outcomes where _hypothetically_ ranking your preferred candidate lower would have helped your candidate. It's not even that strong -- it's outcomes where ranking your second-most preferred candidate above your preferred one will help get that second-most preferred candidate elected, as opposed to a third one you detest -- if you know your most preferred candidate won't be elected. Which makes sense, of course. But it's also "cheating" to manipulate the system if those aren't your actual preferences, and it wouldn't even work in practice because you'd have to know how everyone voted in the first place to know if it was worth it. You're right, it seems fair to me too in this instance.

ClayShentrup 4y ago
Of course it works in practice. You just vote for the stronger lesser evil candidate, for the same reason my aunt voted for Biden even though she preferred Warren. This is called compromise strategy. The opposite strategy would be like if Trump supporters voted for Warren to advance the weaker candidate against their guy. The same strategy works in any kind of runoff method including instant runoff voting.
- BuyMyBitcoins 4y ago
  What you mentioned is something closed primaries are designed to counteract.
  - fdsjgfklsfd 4y ago
    Closed primaries are the reason we have a polarized two-party system.
    - BuyMyBitcoins 4y ago
      States with open primaries suffer from the same polarization. I think the root cause of a polarized two party system goes much deeper than that.

NickM 4y ago

It's not nearly as complex as you're making it out to be. Palin was the spoiler candidate in Alaska. If Palin hadn't run, Begich would have won. Additionally, if Palin > Begich > Peltola voters had "dishonestly" voted Begich > Palin > Peltola, Begich would have won and those voters would have gotten a better outcome for themselves. By honestly ranking their preferences, they threw away their say in the outcome. Now don't get me wrong, as a Democrat there is a part of me that is happy Peltola won, but this was clearly a pretty messed up outcome given that Begich was the condorcet winner and that Alaska is a very red state. Republicans are right to be upset about the way this election played out. Now obviously FPTP also has the possibility of spoiler candidates, but at least in that case it's pretty easy to understand the situations in which you might be throwing away your vote. Do you think most of those Palin voters had any idea that they could have elected Begich by voting strategically? Complex, opaque voting systems like this are super bad for democracy IMO.

autoexec 4y ago
> By honestly ranking their preferences, they threw away their say in the outcome. When Begich came out as the loser, every one of the votes he got went to the voter's #2 choice which was either Palin or Peltola (and a surprising 29% of Begich voters had Peltola as their #2 choice!) The only people who "threw away their say in the outcome" are the ones who didn't rank their preferences. They basically opted out of having a vote if their one chosen candidate didn't win by not making a #2 choice. It's very clear with ranked choice voting when you might be throwing away your vote, it happens only when you don't specify who your vote should go to if your first pick doesn't have enough supporters. Every single person who selected a #1 and #2 choice had a say in the outcome of that election.
- dane-pgp 4y ago
  > it happens only when you don't specify who your vote should go to if your first pick doesn't have enough supporters And your second pick, and your third pick... right? A big reason for electoral reform is to encourage a wider range of candidates to run, which means voters may be faced with having to come up with a total ordering across a dozen different options. You seem to be saying that voters who aren't informed enough about their relative preferences for all available candidates, deserve to have their votes thrown away, or at least that voters who can remember an ordering for a list of a dozen names should be given more electoral power than their fellow citizens who cannot manage that feat. That's maybe not the biggest distortion and potential unfairness in the US right now (with the electoral college and partisan gerrymandering being two aspects that courts openly accept, not to mention other more insidious methods of disenfranchisement) but I think that reform advocates need to be careful not to support the equivalent of "literacy" tests, which have a disturbing past.