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My understanding is that calculating ranked choice isn’t the easiest thing to do. In Australia we have a national electoral commission (AEC) who runs the proce

My understanding is that calculating ranked choice isn’t the easiest thing to do. In Australia we have a national electoral commission (AEC) who runs the process, have perfected this over decades. So much so that they also run the elections for Registered Organisations (unions) [0]. The story is similar in our state elections where our electoral commissions are so we’ll regarded you can hire them to run elections for your company [1]. This is all to say, trust in the process and the fairness and accuracy of the outcome are paramount to democracy. And that we’ve been doing ranked choice for decades, it works—don’t write it off because there’s teething issues. I can see merits to the US approach of having thousands of effectively independent elections being run (for a county for example), and the Australian approach where it’s run nationally by a capable independent commission that holds itself to a very high standard. Stories like this one, where a county is trialling a different election process, are important to share and appreciate—not because they stuffed up, but because they fixed it. It’s one of those counterintuitive times where admitting failure/fault should build trust. Democracy is slow on purpose. Statistics get us results on election day, but they don’t change the outcome even when they’re wrong. To borrow some jargon, I think it’s more important democracy is observable than it is fast. Ranked choice voting is, to my knowledge, the most representative process to elect. No vote is wasted. You don’t have to game theory your choice of the lesser of two evils, you rank who you prefer. It captures your opinion, not the shadow groupthink choices. This is all to say, keep going it is worth it. [0] https://www.aec.gov.au/ieb/ https://www.aec.gov.au/ieb/ [1] https://www.vec.vic.gov.au/voting/types-of-elections/other-elections https://www.vec.vic.gov.au/voting/types-of-elections/other-e...

dataflow 4y ago
> You don’t have to game theory your choice of the lesser of two evils, you rank who you prefer You "have" [1] to game-theory your choice no matter what the voting system is. Ranked-choice is apparently believed [2] to be less susceptible to tactical voting than some other systems, though. (Not sure if this is quantitative or qualitative.) > IRV may incentivize forms of tactical voting (such as compromising) when voters have sufficient information about other voters' preferences, such as from accurate pre-election polling. FairVote mentions that monotonicity failure can lead to situations where "having more voters rank [a] candidate first, can cause [the candidate] to switch from being a winner to being a loser." [1] https://homepage.cs.uiowa.edu/~dwjones/voting/4980.2020/projects/zhang.pdf https://homepage.cs.uiowa.edu/~dwjones/voting/4980.2020/proj... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting#Tactical_voting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting#Tactical...
- eru 4y ago
  Yes, at best a voting system can make it so that your naive intuition is pretty close to your best tactical voting. Approval voting and range voting come pretty close. However, your first link only seems to critique deterministic voting systems. It's fairly easy to sidestep these critiques (especially Arrow's theorem) with a probabilistic systems: Eg this variant of sortition: every voter chooses a preferred candidate on their ballot, and we draw n ballots at random to fill up parliament. (Pick whatever system you prefer for resolving one candidate getting picked multiple times, eg give them extra voting power in parliament, or pick the voter's next choice on the ballot etc.) If you can find a way to vote 'tactically' in this scheme, please let me know. I believe it's fair in some sense, and free of the pathologies outlined in your links. You are always better off voting for the candidate you prefer. (I specifically mention using this scheme to fill up parliament with a few hundred people in it. If you want to pick a single position, like a president, the low of large numbers won't kick in, and you might have a greater variance than you'd like from your voting system. But even for picking a president, a randomised system can still avoid the pathologies mentioned.)
  - thaumasiotes 4y ago
    > Pick whatever system you prefer for resolving one candidate getting picked multiple times, eg give them extra voting power in parliament That is a really interesting idea.
    - vintermann 4y ago
      But it quickly shows another problem: share of votes in parliament, is not equal to share of power in parliament. Picture a body where there's 4 members. A has a voting power of 12. B and C have a voting power of 8 each. D has a voting power of 3. It's easy to see that once A, B and C have cast their yes/no vote, the issue will be decided no matter how D votes. D has a share in "voting weight", but no power at all. We can say this for sure without knowing anything about the ideology of the participants.
      - 4y ago
killingtime74 4y ago
Another great feature of the Australian system is compulsory voting, which has made our politicians less extreme.
- 082349872349872 4y ago
  > which has made our politicians less extreme OTOH, if only Murdoch had been happier at home, he might not have felt the need to metastasise?
  - ggm 4y ago
    News Ltd were unable to prevent a Labor victory this last federal election here in Australia. I have hopes they won't be able to thwart the coming UK general election either.
    - SturgeonsLaw 4y ago
      They are now coming up against the Millennial and Gen Z tide, a demographic that is both overwhelmingly left leaning, and largely eschews the type of media where Murdoch is prominent. I don't want to count my chickens before they hatch, but I dare say the peak of Murdoch's influence may be somewhere behind us.
      - ggm 4y ago
        If the historical drift right with age is true (I've never believed so, but it's a popular theory) they could return to influence. That's the main fear.
        te_chris 4y ago
        Good timing: https://www.ft.com/content/c361e372-769e-45cd-a063-f5c0a7767cf4 https://www.ft.com/content/c361e372-769e-45cd-a063-f5c0a7767...
        Sakos 4y ago
godelski 4y ago
> My understanding is that calculating ranked choice isn’t the easiest thing to do. It really isn't easy. There's an outer for loop that adds significant complexity because you need to do a reduce sum and pop the argmin each time. The more complex the system is, the easier for mistakes. There are plenty of voting systems (see Cardinal Voting) that don't have this computational penalties and can simply be argmax(reduce_sum(votes)). > Ranked choice voting is, to my knowledge, the most representative process to elect. No vote is wasted. I highly encourage you to look into more voting systems then. Especially because there are many versions of "ranked choice" voting. I should note that Australia's system is slightly different than what many American states are doing despite them looking the same. There are also Condorcet voting systems (which are ranked/ordinal) and are far more representative. But many people advocate for cardinal systems because you get the same properties as ranked (and some more like handling a strong spoiler -- there are strong and weak spoilers btw) but are far more computationally efficient. The common ranked systems aren't that great on that representation front but as far as ordinal systems are concerned they are computationally simple. Definitions: - Ordinal voting: systems where candidates are ordered or ranked in comparison to other candidates. - Cardinal voting: systems where candidates are assigned a score or preference value independent of other candidates.
- tromp 4y ago
  Cardinal voting is a lot more expressive than ordinal. For example, with 3 candidates, the following 3 cardinal votes A:35% B:33% C:32% A:99% B: 1% C:0% A:51% B:49% C:0% all reduce to the same ranking but express rather different relative preferences. Btw, in this example scores are normalized to add up to 100%, but should still be considered independent of other candidates.
  - godelski 4y ago
    So what we should actually discuss more is how preferences are embedded. The problem with ordinal systems are that exactly the same but with cardinal systems they aren't. I don't think a percentage system is a good way for expressing the advantage because people are going to be used to more discrete systems like a 5 star rating system. Here's a better example: Suppose there are three candidates, A, B, C, and D. We have a strong preference for A, we like B and C equally, and strongly dislike D. How do we express these? - Ordinal: A > B > C > D - Cardinal (5 points): A:5, B:3, C:3, D: 0 We can see the embedding issue here pretty clearly. In an ordinal system there cannot be a means for us to express that we have no strong preference of B over C. We also can't express how much we like C over D because we're forced to place them equidistant from one another. This is a big problem because in the ordinal system we say that our preference of B over C is identical to our preference of C over D. There is a clear advantage here to cardinal systems that have a lot of downstream effects that lead to cardinal systems passing the favorite betrayer criteria -- aka strong spoiler -- (ordinal fails) and is why these systems are monotonic (ordinal systems aren't). I argue strongly in favor of cardinal systems but I often find that people are strongly invested in ordinal systems. Unfortunately fair vote has done a great job at advocating for RCV and people get passionate about things they are not passionate about learning about. But I need to note that there are downsides to cardinal systems too. Voting systems are over constrained and so it really depends on what criteria you are optimizing for. If we strictly want the best VSE over everything else, there's ordinal systems that out perform cardinals. There is nuance here that we need to recognize and be aware of in these discussions, especially when passion is abound. We'll also see if Clay shows up. If it stays on the front page long enough he'll probably see it (hi Clay ;) He's the real expert here.
scaredginger 4y ago
To start off with, I think our elections are some of the best in the world and ranked-choice voting is a good system to use in that it's simple enough to explain and to work at scale, and still gives fair outcomes. However, I don't particularly like the way we talk about it. I've heard a lot of people say things like, "You can't waste your vote." This is frankly untrue and there were even examples in the last election where certain voters could have voted strategically (e.g. by not making their favourite candidate their first preference).
- DimmieMan 4y ago
  Example seats? I’m curious to see how this edge case played out. Generally if you put someone above your ‘2 party preferred’ candidate either your vote flows down or it was irrelevant. Was it razor thin on first preference then the bottom 2 or 3 crackpots sealing the deal? This is the only way I can think of that’wasted vote’ happening.
  - scaredginger 4y ago
    Nah, let's say there are 3 candidates: A, B and C. A wins a plurality of first preference votes. Otherwise, voters are split between B and C. We assume that if a candidate places C as their first preference, they will place B as their second preference, and vice-versa. In this scenario, whoever gets more first preference votes out of B and C will win the election since the other will place third and get knocked out of the race, so anybody who placed A as their first preference didn't get to express whether they'd prefer B or C. If it wasn't obvious, A: LNP B/C: Labor/Greens https://www.abc.net.au/news/elections/federal/2022/guide/bris https://www.abc.net.au/news/elections/federal/2022/guide/bri...
    - lotsofpulp 4y ago
      Is it known that B/C voters strategically voted to knock out A?
      - scaredginger 4y ago
Taniwha 4y ago
here in NZ we use STV (Single Transferable Voting) for some local elections - it's one of the fairest systems around, especially for electing multiple representative (or at large) wards - but it is complex because it passes fractions of a vote around (if only a portion of your single vote is used to elect someone high on your list the rest is passed on down your list). So it's very fair, all of your vote always gets used .... but complex - to the point that the law (these days a regulation) specifies the floating point precision (9 digits) https://www.legislation.govt.nz/regulation/public/2001/0145/latest/whole.html#DLM57125 https://www.legislation.govt.nz/regulation/public/2001/0145/...
heavenlyblue 4y ago
I find it ridiculously amusing how practically every Australian I meet considers their voting system to be perfect. Voting in Australia is basically the NHS of the UK.
- ojkelly 4y ago
  I wouldn’t proclaim its perfect. But I think it’s a system we are all generally pretty proud of. It may have something to do with the fact that everyone has to vote, so you either learn how it works or try to dodge it. As in, it’s your responsibility as a citizen, not your right. We also had the decade of Prime Ministers, where it was reasonably for you not to know who the current prime minster was. Amusingly the UK recently had a go at this as well, with about the same results.
tomjen3 4y ago
The problem is that it forces people to vote for the lesser evil as well. Sure you can vote for your loved party, but if that only gets two votes then your ballot gets counted for your second choice anyway. We need a system where you’re vote counts against everyone you don’t list.
dragonwriter 4y ago
> Ranked choice voting is, to my knowledge, the most representative process to elect. It is not. “Ranked Choice Voting”, as a commonly used name for the specific ranked ballots method also known as “Alternative Vote”, “Instant Runoff Vote”, and a couple other names, is not “the most representative process” by any measure. It’s not even part of the best class of ranked-ballots single-winner methods (Condorcet methods), and single-winner elections of any kind are less representative than systems which provide proportional representation through the use of multimember constituencies (whether candidate-centered systems like Single Transferrable Vote in multimember districts, or whole-legislative-body systems like Party List PR.) The name is even chosen to avoid consideration of competing ranked-ballots systems by creating the impression that it is the system for elections with ranked ballots. > No vote is wasted. Plenty of wasted votes in RCV/IRV/AV.

dataflow 4y ago

> You don’t have to game theory your choice of the lesser of two evils, you rank who you prefer You "have" [1] to game-theory your choice no matter what the voting system is. Ranked-choice is apparently believed [2] to be less susceptible to tactical voting than some other systems, though. (Not sure if this is quantitative or qualitative.) > IRV may incentivize forms of tactical voting (such as compromising) when voters have sufficient information about other voters' preferences, such as from accurate pre-election polling. FairVote mentions that monotonicity failure can lead to situations where "having more voters rank [a] candidate first, can cause [the candidate] to switch from being a winner to being a loser." [1] https://homepage.cs.uiowa.edu/~dwjones/voting/4980.2020/projects/zhang.pdf https://homepage.cs.uiowa.edu/~dwjones/voting/4980.2020/proj... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting#Tactical_voting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting#Tactical...

eru 4y ago
Yes, at best a voting system can make it so that your naive intuition is pretty close to your best tactical voting. Approval voting and range voting come pretty close. However, your first link only seems to critique deterministic voting systems. It's fairly easy to sidestep these critiques (especially Arrow's theorem) with a probabilistic systems: Eg this variant of sortition: every voter chooses a preferred candidate on their ballot, and we draw n ballots at random to fill up parliament. (Pick whatever system you prefer for resolving one candidate getting picked multiple times, eg give them extra voting power in parliament, or pick the voter's next choice on the ballot etc.) If you can find a way to vote 'tactically' in this scheme, please let me know. I believe it's fair in some sense, and free of the pathologies outlined in your links. You are always better off voting for the candidate you prefer. (I specifically mention using this scheme to fill up parliament with a few hundred people in it. If you want to pick a single position, like a president, the low of large numbers won't kick in, and you might have a greater variance than you'd like from your voting system. But even for picking a president, a randomised system can still avoid the pathologies mentioned.)
- thaumasiotes 4y ago
  > Pick whatever system you prefer for resolving one candidate getting picked multiple times, eg give them extra voting power in parliament That is a really interesting idea.
  - vintermann 4y ago
    But it quickly shows another problem: share of votes in parliament, is not equal to share of power in parliament. Picture a body where there's 4 members. A has a voting power of 12. B and C have a voting power of 8 each. D has a voting power of 3. It's easy to see that once A, B and C have cast their yes/no vote, the issue will be decided no matter how D votes. D has a share in "voting weight", but no power at all. We can say this for sure without knowing anything about the ideology of the participants.
    - 4y ago

killingtime74 4y ago

Another great feature of the Australian system is compulsory voting, which has made our politicians less extreme.

082349872349872 4y ago
> which has made our politicians less extreme OTOH, if only Murdoch had been happier at home, he might not have felt the need to metastasise?
- ggm 4y ago
  News Ltd were unable to prevent a Labor victory this last federal election here in Australia. I have hopes they won't be able to thwart the coming UK general election either.
  - SturgeonsLaw 4y ago
    They are now coming up against the Millennial and Gen Z tide, a demographic that is both overwhelmingly left leaning, and largely eschews the type of media where Murdoch is prominent. I don't want to count my chickens before they hatch, but I dare say the peak of Murdoch's influence may be somewhere behind us.
    - ggm 4y ago
      If the historical drift right with age is true (I've never believed so, but it's a popular theory) they could return to influence. That's the main fear.
      - te_chris 4y ago
        Good timing: https://www.ft.com/content/c361e372-769e-45cd-a063-f5c0a7767cf4 https://www.ft.com/content/c361e372-769e-45cd-a063-f5c0a7767...
      - Sakos 4y ago

godelski 4y ago

> My understanding is that calculating ranked choice isn’t the easiest thing to do. It really isn't easy. There's an outer for loop that adds significant complexity because you need to do a reduce sum and pop the argmin each time. The more complex the system is, the easier for mistakes. There are plenty of voting systems (see Cardinal Voting) that don't have this computational penalties and can simply be argmax(reduce_sum(votes)). > Ranked choice voting is, to my knowledge, the most representative process to elect. No vote is wasted. I highly encourage you to look into more voting systems then. Especially because there are many versions of "ranked choice" voting. I should note that Australia's system is slightly different than what many American states are doing despite them looking the same. There are also Condorcet voting systems (which are ranked/ordinal) and are far more representative. But many people advocate for cardinal systems because you get the same properties as ranked (and some more like handling a strong spoiler -- there are strong and weak spoilers btw) but are far more computationally efficient. The common ranked systems aren't that great on that representation front but as far as ordinal systems are concerned they are computationally simple. Definitions: - Ordinal voting: systems where candidates are ordered or ranked in comparison to other candidates. - Cardinal voting: systems where candidates are assigned a score or preference value independent of other candidates.

tromp 4y ago
Cardinal voting is a lot more expressive than ordinal. For example, with 3 candidates, the following 3 cardinal votes A:35% B:33% C:32% A:99% B: 1% C:0% A:51% B:49% C:0% all reduce to the same ranking but express rather different relative preferences. Btw, in this example scores are normalized to add up to 100%, but should still be considered independent of other candidates.
- godelski 4y ago
  So what we should actually discuss more is how preferences are embedded. The problem with ordinal systems are that exactly the same but with cardinal systems they aren't. I don't think a percentage system is a good way for expressing the advantage because people are going to be used to more discrete systems like a 5 star rating system. Here's a better example: Suppose there are three candidates, A, B, C, and D. We have a strong preference for A, we like B and C equally, and strongly dislike D. How do we express these? - Ordinal: A > B > C > D - Cardinal (5 points): A:5, B:3, C:3, D: 0 We can see the embedding issue here pretty clearly. In an ordinal system there cannot be a means for us to express that we have no strong preference of B over C. We also can't express how much we like C over D because we're forced to place them equidistant from one another. This is a big problem because in the ordinal system we say that our preference of B over C is identical to our preference of C over D. There is a clear advantage here to cardinal systems that have a lot of downstream effects that lead to cardinal systems passing the favorite betrayer criteria -- aka strong spoiler -- (ordinal fails) and is why these systems are monotonic (ordinal systems aren't). I argue strongly in favor of cardinal systems but I often find that people are strongly invested in ordinal systems. Unfortunately fair vote has done a great job at advocating for RCV and people get passionate about things they are not passionate about learning about. But I need to note that there are downsides to cardinal systems too. Voting systems are over constrained and so it really depends on what criteria you are optimizing for. If we strictly want the best VSE over everything else, there's ordinal systems that out perform cardinals. There is nuance here that we need to recognize and be aware of in these discussions, especially when passion is abound. We'll also see if Clay shows up. If it stays on the front page long enough he'll probably see it (hi Clay ;) He's the real expert here.

scaredginger 4y ago

To start off with, I think our elections are some of the best in the world and ranked-choice voting is a good system to use in that it's simple enough to explain and to work at scale, and still gives fair outcomes. However, I don't particularly like the way we talk about it. I've heard a lot of people say things like, "You can't waste your vote." This is frankly untrue and there were even examples in the last election where certain voters could have voted strategically (e.g. by not making their favourite candidate their first preference).

DimmieMan 4y ago
Example seats? I’m curious to see how this edge case played out. Generally if you put someone above your ‘2 party preferred’ candidate either your vote flows down or it was irrelevant. Was it razor thin on first preference then the bottom 2 or 3 crackpots sealing the deal? This is the only way I can think of that’wasted vote’ happening.
- scaredginger 4y ago
  Nah, let's say there are 3 candidates: A, B and C. A wins a plurality of first preference votes. Otherwise, voters are split between B and C. We assume that if a candidate places C as their first preference, they will place B as their second preference, and vice-versa. In this scenario, whoever gets more first preference votes out of B and C will win the election since the other will place third and get knocked out of the race, so anybody who placed A as their first preference didn't get to express whether they'd prefer B or C. If it wasn't obvious, A: LNP B/C: Labor/Greens https://www.abc.net.au/news/elections/federal/2022/guide/bris https://www.abc.net.au/news/elections/federal/2022/guide/bri...
  - lotsofpulp 4y ago
    Is it known that B/C voters strategically voted to knock out A?
    - scaredginger 4y ago

Taniwha 4y ago

here in NZ we use STV (Single Transferable Voting) for some local elections - it's one of the fairest systems around, especially for electing multiple representative (or at large) wards - but it is complex because it passes fractions of a vote around (if only a portion of your single vote is used to elect someone high on your list the rest is passed on down your list). So it's very fair, all of your vote always gets used .... but complex - to the point that the law (these days a regulation) specifies the floating point precision (9 digits) https://www.legislation.govt.nz/regulation/public/2001/0145/latest/whole.html#DLM57125 https://www.legislation.govt.nz/regulation/public/2001/0145/...

heavenlyblue 4y ago

I find it ridiculously amusing how practically every Australian I meet considers their voting system to be perfect. Voting in Australia is basically the NHS of the UK.

ojkelly 4y ago
I wouldn’t proclaim its perfect. But I think it’s a system we are all generally pretty proud of. It may have something to do with the fact that everyone has to vote, so you either learn how it works or try to dodge it. As in, it’s your responsibility as a citizen, not your right. We also had the decade of Prime Ministers, where it was reasonably for you not to know who the current prime minster was. Amusingly the UK recently had a go at this as well, with about the same results.

tomjen3 4y ago

The problem is that it forces people to vote for the lesser evil as well. Sure you can vote for your loved party, but if that only gets two votes then your ballot gets counted for your second choice anyway. We need a system where you’re vote counts against everyone you don’t list.

dragonwriter 4y ago

> Ranked choice voting is, to my knowledge, the most representative process to elect. It is not. “Ranked Choice Voting”, as a commonly used name for the specific ranked ballots method also known as “Alternative Vote”, “Instant Runoff Vote”, and a couple other names, is not “the most representative process” by any measure. It’s not even part of the best class of ranked-ballots single-winner methods (Condorcet methods), and single-winner elections of any kind are less representative than systems which provide proportional representation through the use of multimember constituencies (whether candidate-centered systems like Single Transferrable Vote in multimember districts, or whole-legislative-body systems like Party List PR.) The name is even chosen to avoid consideration of competing ranked-ballots systems by creating the impression that it is the system for elections with ranked ballots. > No vote is wasted. Plenty of wasted votes in RCV/IRV/AV.