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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, i

by 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.
  - autoexec 4y ago
    > 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 Not at all, if we get to the point where people are having to choose between and rank 50+ different candidates I might agree there's a problem, but a handful of choices simply isn't. In the Alaska election they had just three to rank, since the primary weeded out the most unpopular others right away. There's also nothing to stop someone from bringing in a list of names and ranks compiled ahead of time. No need to keep your preferred ranking in your head. These days you could pull out your phone while in the voting booth, or have a small slip of paper in your wallet, purse, or pocket. This might surprise you, but many many people aren't terribly informed about the candidates and still manage to cast a vote under our current system. This is especially true for local offices. That subset of the population can continue making poorly informed choices about a few more candidates than usual without much trouble. I do appreciate that you're looking out for the rights of the illiterate voting population, but there's never been an easier time for illiterate people to get informed. Nearly half of the research into a particular candidate I do these days is in the form of youtube videos and radio interviews. It's admittedly slower than reading, but I do feel like I get a lot of information about a person by seeing and hearing them speak. Come voting day there are already poll workers prepared to assist illiterate voters with casting their vote as well and none of that will change under ranked choice voting.
    - dane-pgp 4y ago
      > These days you could pull out your phone while in the voting booth, or have a small slip of paper in your wallet, purse, or pocket. You're completely right about the possibility of bringing a slip of paper, and I was probably over-estimating the scale of the burden there. I would like to point out, though, that we really don't want to normalize the idea of people bringing out their phones while in the voting booth, as that seems like a way to encourage vote buying or coercion (even though the victim/voter may have ways to circumvent this problem, and even though phones aren't the only way someone could take a camera into a voting booth). > This might surprise you, but many many people aren't terribly informed about the candidates and still manage to cast a vote under our current system. In fact that doesn't surprise me, as I was already aware of this fact, but I see it as an existing limitation of democracy that shouldn't be made any worse. The simpler and less ambiguous the question on the ballot paper, the more of an even playing field there is for all voters. I used to think that to maximize the chances of finding the optimal winner, an election should try to demand that voters enter as much information as possible on their ballot paper, but my view has completely changed on this. Even under FPTP, the election algorithm is being fed with thousands of bits of information, and the output only needs to be roughly 1 or 2 bits of information, so there is no harm in making the ballot papers as uninformative as voters are uninformed (as long as the algorithm encourages honest votes, and combines them fairly). > there's never been an easier time for illiterate people to get informed. I agree, but my reference to "literacy" tests was meant to convey the fact that supposed literacy tests have in practice been used as pretences to exclude voters who were likely to vote for a party other than the one administering the test. As such, my objection wasn't that illiteracy itself was a major problem, but that any unnecessarily complicated process could be seen as having a disenfranchising effect, which would undermine confidence in elections even if the effect were not significant, or be used as an argument to prevent the adoption of the reform before it was even used, either by people who genuinely care or by concern trolls. Anyway, for completeness, here is an example of a literacy test issued by the state of Louisiana: https://www.ferris.edu/HTMLS/news/jimcrow/question/2012/pdfs-docs/literacytest.pdf https://www.ferris.edu/HTMLS/news/jimcrow/question/2012/pdfs...
- ClayShentrup 4y ago
  This is simply wrong. Palin voters didn't get their second choice preferences counted. If they had instead tactically/ insincerely ranked Begich first, he would have won by a 5% majority against Peltola. They were punished by voting sincerely for Palin. Palin was a spoiler. People who voted for her threw away their vote, period.
  - autoexec 4y ago
    Voting for a losing candidate does not mean throwing your vote away or not having your vote counted. People who picked Palin as their #1 choice won against Begich. Their vote was counted and it went to Palin exactly as they wanted. If you want to argue that there should have only been one republican on the ballot to prevent a 'spoiler' you'd have to take that up with the republican party
    - bena 4y ago
      There it is, there's the thing they're really railing against. They wanted every Republican voter to vote for all of the Republicans, then all (or none) of the Democrats. Basically turning the ballot into RvD. But they forgot one crucial thing: people. Even within the party, there are members and candidates others can't stand. And if you're going to give people choices, you have to be prepared for them to make choices you don't agree with.
- josephcsible 4y ago
  The people who picked Begich as their first choice had their second choice counted, but the people who picked Palin as their first choice threw away their second choice. Had the latter's second choices not been thrown away, then Begich would have won.
  - autoexec 4y ago
    > The people who picked Palin as their first choice threw away their second choice. You don't get to rank a bunch of choices and then claim your vote didn't get counted because every one of your choices didn't win the election. People who picked Palin as their #1 choice won against Begich. Their vote went to Palin exactly as they wanted. Palin lost, but the voter who put Palin first voted for the person they wanted and that vote was counted. Voting for a losing candidate does not mean throwing your vote away or not having your vote counted.
    - fdsjgfklsfd 4y ago
      Yes, it does mean throwing your vote away under Hare RCV. People who ranked Begich second had their vote thrown away when he was eliminated.
      - autoexec 4y ago
        People who ranked Begich second still had the vote for their #1 pick counted. It doesn't matter who your #2 pick was if your number #1 pick is still in the race. That's the entire point of picking a #1 candidate. A vote that is counted in the final contest of an election is not a vote "thrown away" even though the person they voted for lost. Voters have to be allowed to pick a candidate who ultimately doesn't have enough supporters to win an election. That's how elections work.
- BuyMyBitcoins 4y ago
  I have a feeling the average voter doesn’t actually have a preference for more than one candidate, much less ranking all of them. The whole appeal of RCV is supposedly to help Third Parties, but that hasn’t really come to fruition. Many voters are partisan, and don’t feel like ranking a RINO/DINO as their second choice. RCV ballots state that you can choose to vote for only one candidate. People are used to casting ballots for their main choice, and if pressed I doubt most of the electorate would be able to describe the instant runoff process RCV enabled and you would be hard pressed to find a layman able to flesh out all the different scenarios of how their ballot would be counted in any particular close race.
  - autoexec 4y ago
    > I have a feeling the average voter doesn’t actually have a preference for more than one candidate Many voters don't have a preference for the people they vote for now. Many really do tend to fall back on voting for a party, and that option doesn't go away with RCV. I do suspect it'd be better (and easier) for each party to put forward only one candidate in each election, but as long as the list is narrowed down well enough by voting day it's not really a problem. In the Alaska election voters only had to rank three candidates which is perfectly reasonable. > RCV ballots state that you can choose to vote for only one candidate. And we should retain the option. Choosing one and refusing to rank the others is pretty much the same as voting against everyone else, or in the case where your one chosen candidate is removed, more like not voting at all. I don't have a problem with letting people make that choice although I have heard it argued that voting should be compulsory. I'm not sure if that'd require a rank for everyone under RCV or not. > People are used to casting ballots for their main choice, and if pressed I doubt most of the electorate would be able to describe the instant runoff process RCV enabled and you would be hard pressed to find a layman able to flesh out all the different scenarios of how their ballot would be counted in any particular close race. This is perhaps the biggest problem and it applies to literally any change we make to our voting system. We need to educate the public on how the new system works, or at the very least provide information so that the public is able to inform themselves. I can't speak to how well Alaska made an effort to inform their population about the new voting system, but I will say that there are some very good youtube videos that explain the idea behind RCV pretty well. Following any change there is bound to be a little confusion, but with time and little effort on the part of the people I'm convinced we'll be just as comfortable with an improved voting system (RCV or not) as we are with the one we're stuck with presently.
gfunk911 4y ago
Do we know for a fact the breakdown of 2nd choices on ballots where Palin was the first choice? If not, you are only speculating. It seems possible that Palin lost due to voters incorrectly expressing their preferences by not putting a 2nd choice. If that is a routine thing, then it is indeed a problem with ranked choice voting in the real world, but it is NOT a structural flaw as you are claiming.
- supreme_loquat 4y ago
  Yes, the cast vote record has been released, and Begich wins the head to head vs both Palin and Peltota. [1] is a nice writeup on the election (highly recommend the What's Interesting header if you don't have time for the whole thing) and [2] is a link to the released ballot data. [1] https://electionscience.org/commentary-analysis/rcv-fools-palin-voters-into-electing-a-progressive-democrat/ https://electionscience.org/commentary-analysis/rcv-fools-pa... [2] https://www.elections.alaska.gov/election-results/e/?id=22prim https://www.elections.alaska.gov/election-results/e/?id=22pr...

by NickM 4y ago

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.
- autoexec 4y ago
  > 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 Not at all, if we get to the point where people are having to choose between and rank 50+ different candidates I might agree there's a problem, but a handful of choices simply isn't. In the Alaska election they had just three to rank, since the primary weeded out the most unpopular others right away. There's also nothing to stop someone from bringing in a list of names and ranks compiled ahead of time. No need to keep your preferred ranking in your head. These days you could pull out your phone while in the voting booth, or have a small slip of paper in your wallet, purse, or pocket. This might surprise you, but many many people aren't terribly informed about the candidates and still manage to cast a vote under our current system. This is especially true for local offices. That subset of the population can continue making poorly informed choices about a few more candidates than usual without much trouble. I do appreciate that you're looking out for the rights of the illiterate voting population, but there's never been an easier time for illiterate people to get informed. Nearly half of the research into a particular candidate I do these days is in the form of youtube videos and radio interviews. It's admittedly slower than reading, but I do feel like I get a lot of information about a person by seeing and hearing them speak. Come voting day there are already poll workers prepared to assist illiterate voters with casting their vote as well and none of that will change under ranked choice voting.
  - dane-pgp 4y ago
    > These days you could pull out your phone while in the voting booth, or have a small slip of paper in your wallet, purse, or pocket. You're completely right about the possibility of bringing a slip of paper, and I was probably over-estimating the scale of the burden there. I would like to point out, though, that we really don't want to normalize the idea of people bringing out their phones while in the voting booth, as that seems like a way to encourage vote buying or coercion (even though the victim/voter may have ways to circumvent this problem, and even though phones aren't the only way someone could take a camera into a voting booth). > This might surprise you, but many many people aren't terribly informed about the candidates and still manage to cast a vote under our current system. In fact that doesn't surprise me, as I was already aware of this fact, but I see it as an existing limitation of democracy that shouldn't be made any worse. The simpler and less ambiguous the question on the ballot paper, the more of an even playing field there is for all voters. I used to think that to maximize the chances of finding the optimal winner, an election should try to demand that voters enter as much information as possible on their ballot paper, but my view has completely changed on this. Even under FPTP, the election algorithm is being fed with thousands of bits of information, and the output only needs to be roughly 1 or 2 bits of information, so there is no harm in making the ballot papers as uninformative as voters are uninformed (as long as the algorithm encourages honest votes, and combines them fairly). > there's never been an easier time for illiterate people to get informed. I agree, but my reference to "literacy" tests was meant to convey the fact that supposed literacy tests have in practice been used as pretences to exclude voters who were likely to vote for a party other than the one administering the test. As such, my objection wasn't that illiteracy itself was a major problem, but that any unnecessarily complicated process could be seen as having a disenfranchising effect, which would undermine confidence in elections even if the effect were not significant, or be used as an argument to prevent the adoption of the reform before it was even used, either by people who genuinely care or by concern trolls. Anyway, for completeness, here is an example of a literacy test issued by the state of Louisiana: https://www.ferris.edu/HTMLS/news/jimcrow/question/2012/pdfs-docs/literacytest.pdf https://www.ferris.edu/HTMLS/news/jimcrow/question/2012/pdfs...
ClayShentrup 4y ago
This is simply wrong. Palin voters didn't get their second choice preferences counted. If they had instead tactically/ insincerely ranked Begich first, he would have won by a 5% majority against Peltola. They were punished by voting sincerely for Palin. Palin was a spoiler. People who voted for her threw away their vote, period.
- autoexec 4y ago
  Voting for a losing candidate does not mean throwing your vote away or not having your vote counted. People who picked Palin as their #1 choice won against Begich. Their vote was counted and it went to Palin exactly as they wanted. If you want to argue that there should have only been one republican on the ballot to prevent a 'spoiler' you'd have to take that up with the republican party
  - bena 4y ago
    There it is, there's the thing they're really railing against. They wanted every Republican voter to vote for all of the Republicans, then all (or none) of the Democrats. Basically turning the ballot into RvD. But they forgot one crucial thing: people. Even within the party, there are members and candidates others can't stand. And if you're going to give people choices, you have to be prepared for them to make choices you don't agree with.
josephcsible 4y ago
The people who picked Begich as their first choice had their second choice counted, but the people who picked Palin as their first choice threw away their second choice. Had the latter's second choices not been thrown away, then Begich would have won.
- autoexec 4y ago
  > The people who picked Palin as their first choice threw away their second choice. You don't get to rank a bunch of choices and then claim your vote didn't get counted because every one of your choices didn't win the election. People who picked Palin as their #1 choice won against Begich. Their vote went to Palin exactly as they wanted. Palin lost, but the voter who put Palin first voted for the person they wanted and that vote was counted. Voting for a losing candidate does not mean throwing your vote away or not having your vote counted.
  - fdsjgfklsfd 4y ago
    Yes, it does mean throwing your vote away under Hare RCV. People who ranked Begich second had their vote thrown away when he was eliminated.
    - autoexec 4y ago
      People who ranked Begich second still had the vote for their #1 pick counted. It doesn't matter who your #2 pick was if your number #1 pick is still in the race. That's the entire point of picking a #1 candidate. A vote that is counted in the final contest of an election is not a vote "thrown away" even though the person they voted for lost. Voters have to be allowed to pick a candidate who ultimately doesn't have enough supporters to win an election. That's how elections work.
BuyMyBitcoins 4y ago
I have a feeling the average voter doesn’t actually have a preference for more than one candidate, much less ranking all of them. The whole appeal of RCV is supposedly to help Third Parties, but that hasn’t really come to fruition. Many voters are partisan, and don’t feel like ranking a RINO/DINO as their second choice. RCV ballots state that you can choose to vote for only one candidate. People are used to casting ballots for their main choice, and if pressed I doubt most of the electorate would be able to describe the instant runoff process RCV enabled and you would be hard pressed to find a layman able to flesh out all the different scenarios of how their ballot would be counted in any particular close race.
- autoexec 4y ago
  > I have a feeling the average voter doesn’t actually have a preference for more than one candidate Many voters don't have a preference for the people they vote for now. Many really do tend to fall back on voting for a party, and that option doesn't go away with RCV. I do suspect it'd be better (and easier) for each party to put forward only one candidate in each election, but as long as the list is narrowed down well enough by voting day it's not really a problem. In the Alaska election voters only had to rank three candidates which is perfectly reasonable. > RCV ballots state that you can choose to vote for only one candidate. And we should retain the option. Choosing one and refusing to rank the others is pretty much the same as voting against everyone else, or in the case where your one chosen candidate is removed, more like not voting at all. I don't have a problem with letting people make that choice although I have heard it argued that voting should be compulsory. I'm not sure if that'd require a rank for everyone under RCV or not. > People are used to casting ballots for their main choice, and if pressed I doubt most of the electorate would be able to describe the instant runoff process RCV enabled and you would be hard pressed to find a layman able to flesh out all the different scenarios of how their ballot would be counted in any particular close race. This is perhaps the biggest problem and it applies to literally any change we make to our voting system. We need to educate the public on how the new system works, or at the very least provide information so that the public is able to inform themselves. I can't speak to how well Alaska made an effort to inform their population about the new voting system, but I will say that there are some very good youtube videos that explain the idea behind RCV pretty well. Following any change there is bound to be a little confusion, but with time and little effort on the part of the people I'm convinced we'll be just as comfortable with an improved voting system (RCV or not) as we are with the one we're stuck with presently.

gfunk911 4y ago

Do we know for a fact the breakdown of 2nd choices on ballots where Palin was the first choice? If not, you are only speculating. It seems possible that Palin lost due to voters incorrectly expressing their preferences by not putting a 2nd choice. If that is a routine thing, then it is indeed a problem with ranked choice voting in the real world, but it is NOT a structural flaw as you are claiming.

supreme_loquat 4y ago
Yes, the cast vote record has been released, and Begich wins the head to head vs both Palin and Peltota. [1] is a nice writeup on the election (highly recommend the What's Interesting header if you don't have time for the whole thing) and [2] is a link to the released ballot data. [1] https://electionscience.org/commentary-analysis/rcv-fools-palin-voters-into-electing-a-progressive-democrat/ https://electionscience.org/commentary-analysis/rcv-fools-pa... [2] https://www.elections.alaska.gov/election-results/e/?id=22prim https://www.elections.alaska.gov/election-results/e/?id=22pr...