I absolutely support ranked-choice voting as an improvement to the current system.
BUT, the proposed system is specifically Instant Run-Off Voting (IRV), which does not make a centrist third-party candidate likely to win. Because it removes whoever gets the least first-place votes, the only improvement it gives is that a third-party candidate doesn't spoil an election, because your second-place vote will still count.
(E.g. Nader wouldn't have taken votes from Gore, so Gore would have won instead of Bush.) But you're still stuck with one of the polarizing two-party candidates who will win.
Contrast this to the Borda Count [2], where points are assigned by rank. In this case, suppose about half of everyone votes first-place for an extreme liberal, and the other half vote first-place for an extreme conservative. But everyone votes second-place for a moderate centrist they can live with, and third-place for the opposite-party candidate they detest. With IRV, the centrist is ignored and one of the extremists will win. But with Borda, the centrist candidate will win.
So to really get away from the poisonous political polarization of our times, ranked choice is necessary, but it needs to be Borda or similar, not IRV. Still -- it's a start, and I'm grateful for that alone.
But also it gives voters the option to actually vote for whom they want to vote for instead of who they think will win. Big game changer and will fundamentally affect everything about the vote.
Big vision here is that it also shifts the discussion to how can we make the voting system better, just by implementing _something_ better.
I agree with you hugely that "it's a start, and I'm grateful for that alone". And we need to push this across the finish line, even though it isn't _perfect_. We just need _better_ right now, we need momentum.
For the specific case of IRV, consider an election like:
* 32% of people: Clinton, Sanders, Trump
* 33% of people: Sanders, Trump, Clinton
* 35% of people: Trump, Clinton, Sanders
Now, this is a terrible election and there's no clear winner because people's preferences point around in a circle. Under traditional voting Trump wins, while under IRV Clinton is eliminated and Sanders wins. But if a few people preferring Trump > Clinton > Sanders had instead voted just Clinton > Trump > Sanders we could have had:
* 32% of people: Clinton, Sanders, Trump
* 33% of people: Sanders, Trump, Clinton
* 32% of people: Trump, Clinton, Sanders
* 3% of people: Clinton, Trump, Sanders
Then Trump would have been eliminated first, with only 32% of the first place votes, and his second place votes would have gone to Clinton, making her win. So by voting for a candidate they liked less, these voters got an outcome they liked more.
I'm not at all a fan of G-S and the Arrow Theorem, since they make widely unrealistic assumptions about voting (e.g. Arrow's IIA is nonsense - intensity matters!).
G-S and Arrow damaged tremendously any attempt to look at electoral systems rationally by imposing a mathematical description which is simply irrelevant to actual concerns.
In your given example, the particular unrealistic assumption is the way it looks at voting. Voting is not an extended opinion poll. It is use of political power where each voter is given an equal amount. Therefore, there's no need to reduce "tactical voting" to a minimum (the useful requirements are far laxer than that).
The voters in your example did not "fail" or "cheat" by voting for a candidate they liked less. They compromised, and therefore got a better result for them. Arguably a voting system that pushes people into consensus and majority is actually desirable and not a flaw.
Aside, I do prefer Borda or Approval over IRV, but the better reasoning is just they are far simpler overall while preserving the actually important advantages.
Indeed. I'd be in favour of people who know Arrow's Theorum designing the voting system; but not because I care about tactical voting.
I rank the voting systems [Anarchy] -> [Dictatorship] -> [First Past the Post] -> [IRV] -> [Approval].
Anarchy is sort-of the base case. Dictatorship is better than anarchy because at least it is large-scale organisation and infrastructure might happen. FPTP is that and the dictatorship can't be truly unpopular (<35% general support). IRV adds in a really stabilising ability for 3rd parties to successfully build support with a slow rolling campaign - makes it really hard for major parties to move away from the centre because people have a powerful signal for what they want. Approval adds in a level of simplicity to IRV.
I like IRV for the same arguable reason you like tactical voting - a good system should really be a bit random in tight situations. 50.1% of the votes isn't really different from 49.9% and voting systems don't need to differentiate. In Australia (IRV) when we had our last really tight election a bloke got elected on a couple of hundred primary votes from the Australian Motoring Enthusiast party. His platform was basically that he liked souped-up fast cars. Nobody had ever heard of him. Dude was an excellent Senator, he read the legislation and thought about things. Big win for Australia, IMO. Better than some political swamp-creature elected on a tiny margin.
Nitpicking, but Ricky Muir (the car guy) was elected in the Senate, which does not really have instant runoff in the way described here. (For outsiders: our House of Representatives is IRV, our Senate is Proportional Representation which is like IRV but with multiple winners on each ballot)
Agree with you that electing a random citizen gave much better results than party slime.
The Old senate system cannot fairly be called STV in its effects not in the options available to voters. Above the line voting with no (voter controlled) preferences made in more like a list.
In addition to the simplicity issue, IRV can have a practical problem of legitimacy, when the elected official is everyone's 10th choice (I exaggerate for effect).
There are some arguments for allowing that, but I think the argument against is stronger - officials need legitimacy to serve effectively, otherwise we have a period of political instability which will end badly, and 10th choices won't practically have legitimacy. In Approval voting the preference order is a bit hidden so this doesn't happen. One of those cases where treating an election as if it's not an opinion poll at all is the better choice.
If the preferences have run off to 10th place; the first 9 choices are controversial enough they wouldn't have legitimacy either.
Look at America - the president has so gained so much legitimacy from FPTP that the House is trying to eject him from office. Voting system doesn't help with that much.
That is an argument like the Chinese claiming democracy wouldn't work because China is different. In theory it can't be instantly debunked, but in practice it seems to be a non-issue (compared to alternatives) when IRV is tried.
What's happening in America is not due to the election result, not anymore. That has more to do with the President's... temperament, and some very particular circumstances.
If it was just FPTP where he won more electors but less votes, he would have been seen as legitimate by now, just like Bush was.
I disagree. Polling in 2016 clearly showed Trump and Clinton were each individually the two least-liked nominees in their parties in modern presidential history. First-past-the-post and bitter primaries were largely responsible for the result-- over a third of voters remained at home on Election Day 2016. In some electoral systems, they even have an option to reject all nominees in these kinds of situations.
I thought about the general elections. As for the primaries:
* Clinton locked out nearly all of the viable opponents by using institutional control, the only one left was one sufficiently outside the Democratic party so she had a strong institutional advantage. No voting system could have fixed that.
* Trump actually had some popularity as a second choice among Republican primary voters, and we see that later on when only Cruz and Kasich were left. The other candidates' failure were more mundane - Not taking Trump seriously, op research failure, Trump being able to coordinate with Christi while the others were less able to coordinate, etc.
* The option to reject all nominees.. is interesting, but can lead to a 2nd/3rd ballot while the government is semi-paralyzed. It may not be a good idea to allow that.
> Clinton locked out nearly all of the viable opponents by using institutional control, the only one left was one sufficiently outside the Democratic party so she had a strong institutional advantage. No voting system could have fixed that.
Uh, yeah, simply not having voting superdelegates in the nominating contest (a reform to the candidate-selection voting system Democrats made in response to 2016) would have likely fixed (or at least mitigated) that, since the nominating contest was close even with the early superdelegate commitments and the effect that had on the perception of inevitability.
A general election direct (no electoral college) voting system like Bucklin or IRV, modified some that the same ballots, skipping votes for the winner, were tallied again by the same method to select the vice president, encouraging a party to bring it's two independently strongest candidates into the general election (and increasing the space for other parties or independent candidates) would absolutely both discourage that and limit the effect it would have on constraining viable general election choices.
(The same system internally to the party for choosing the Presidential and Vice Presidential nominees also would fix it.)
The superdelegates went for Clinton because there wasn't any serious institutional D challenger (Sanders was an independent before), so Clinton had by default a huge advantage there. If there was a serious internal D challenger, the picture would have been far more equal.
IRV can make the contest more fair than the previous voting system, but it can't make candidates run...
> The superdelegates went for Clinton because there wasn't any serious institutional D challenger
No, that's s almost exactly backwards. A key way Clinton locked out other traditional candidates was to secure an unusually large number of superdelegate commitments extremely early, needle other candidates would normally commit to the race.
> IRV can make the contest more fair than the previous voting system, but it can't make candidates run...
Yes, it can. Running in a Presidential primary (and the same is true of many other races) is an investment of time and resources people make—or avoid—in part because of the perceived prospects for success factors like a competitor having a substantial share of the total available vote sewed up before you decide, or a voting system that naturally narrows the field people will actively consider during the campaign do, very much, effect who decides to run.
Literally the point of IRV, Approval Voting and so forth is allowing viable 3rd parties not endorsed by the official channels of the major parties. They fix precisely this sort of problem. Democrats could have voted for a different left-leaning candidate without advantaging the right wing of politics.
There wasn't a coordination issue between 100 small left-leaning candidates for the Clinton opponents to choose - in that scenario IRV/AV would have helped. In the real scenario, the problem was solved for them by having only 1 option...
The candidate who is everyone's 10th choice can't win. To make it through the first exclusion the candidate has to be more people's first choice than at least one other candidate.
The legitimacy argument of IRV is that the winning candidate needed to accrue 50%+1 of first-and-subsequent choice votes, so they are at least the preferred winner over the second-place candidate by a majority of the electorate.
I did exaggerate (and said I did), but my point was that IRV makes it very obvious when a candidate loses badly on 1st order preferences but wins based on subsequent choices.
That can be argued as an IRV benefit over other systems (the winner knows s/he's on thin ice! The winner does have 50%+1 overall!), but the other way to see it is that the winner would be hobbled and would have difficulty governing effectively, and a voting system that emphasizes the ranking a bit less might have had the same result but with the winner having more legitimacy following the election.
Ricky Muir was not elected on IRV. He was elected on an exhaustive flexible list. Voting above the line without (voter controlled) preferences in the old system, which is what got him elected, has none of the characteristics of IRV, and was basically like a strange list that required all candidates to be on all lists.
Independence of irrelevant alternatives (IIA) says that adding another option shouldn't change a voter's (or the election result's) relative preferences among all other options.
"The table's waiter comes by and says their desert options are blueberry pie and vanilla ice cream. You order the pie. Then the waiter comes back and says, we also have chocolate cake. 'In that case, I'll have the ice cream!'"
I don't see what this has to do with intensity?
Arrow's theorem does assume that intensity doesn't matter, but this isn't IIA but is rather the unnamed predicate that voters express their preferences by ranking candidates with no ties allowed, rather than an approval voting scheme, or a "on a scale of 1-10" scheme.
Your example only looks irrational when one looks only at the overall preference list and furthermore thinks that the only important result is the winner. i.e. when looking at elections as an extended opinion poll and applying a purely mathematical logic ignoring politics, just like the Arrow Theorem does.
If a voter went for chocolate cake despite polls showing that this may cause blueberry pie to lose the election, maybe the voter does not care that much for blueberry pie over vanilla ice cream, or the voter really really cares for cake far more than the other choice - both of these are intensity issues and the election method de facto taking them into account is not irrational.
Maybe the cake was the only nut free option, and some voters deciding for the cake despite not having nut allergy themselves and despite losing convince the restaurant to offer more nut free foods later.
99% of the 'irrelevant choice' cases actually have some political logic like the above behind them which Arrow theorem just blithely ignores. The 1% are usually some attempt to mislead the voters (say by running a hopeless candidate with a similar name to another in order to siphon off votes), and should be handled by the electoral commission.
One thing to consider is that because gaming the vote is harder to understand, it may have less of an impact. People can easily understand that voting for 3rd party candidate is not voting for a candidate that actually has a chance. Fewer people will be able to understand the second example you give, meaning it will have less impact on people gaming their votes.
But you also have to consider that most people don't understand it because it's currently not relevant to them. If the system was put in place, I would imagine people who hear a lot more about that strategy.
This is a good point I think. If this system were adopted, all it would take is a small number of activist people to understand how to game the system, then post a bunch of YouTube videos explaining to all their acolytes how they can join in and game the system.
The lived experience of IRV is that this does not happen.
There are probably a few reasons for this. Firstly, the situations where tactical voting can be of benefit tend to arise only rarely. Secondly, when these situations do arise, it is not usually apparent in advance of the election. Thirdly, even when such a situation arises and it is reasonably forseeable in advance of the election, it is easy for the tactical voting to backfire and hinder the candidates chances rather than helping them, if the vote shares/exclusion order aren't as predicted.
It's been used for single-member constituencies at the Federal level in Australia for 100 years, and in the various States for at least 50 years. French Presidential elections have been using run-off elections for even longer, and those are in theory open to the same kinds of tactical voting in the early rounds as IRV.
Every single voting system has some element of fault. Very few voting systems are close to "perfect representation" and they tend to be more math heavy, in a way that would lead to distrust from the average voter.
IRV might have some corner cases, such as the one you listed, where strategic voting is beneficial for some. IRV reduces that element drastically, and encourages positive voting and true representation to a much larger degree.
IRV failing to capture voter preferences is not a "corner case". It is absolutely unclear that IRV is better at all than FPTP. See a set of voting simulations with candidates and distributions here for different voting methods:
Alarmingly, IRV is the worst voting system of all just by eyeballing these simulations. The charts it produces are bizarre, and it tends to select for extremists and/or candidates that do not capture the voter's preferences!
The only good takeaway from IRV picking up steam is that maybe it puts us on the path towards something like approval voting, which is much harder to game, and is much easier for voters to understand (I doubt more than 1 out of 10 people could explain how IRV works).
As someone who voted in the 2009 election I disagree that IRV actually spoiled the election, people - when voting in an IRV system, need to comprehend that they don't need to rank all candidates and doing an exhaustive ranking is a tactical decision to vote against an ultimate candidate.
That "spoilage" ended up being less about IRV and more about the fact that Bob Kiss was someone a lot of people ranked without good knowledge of him was more at issue, along with his personal character. Don't forget that he wasn't some 5th place follower who managed to pick up protest votes, he was the 2nd place candidate in the primary round.
I just wanted to add, the fact that IRV was repealed over this removal from office was a travesty and the result of shady politics - please understand this is a terrible case study.
IRV picking up steam might also have negative effects towards people's general opinion of alternative voting systems once they see all the strange outcomes it can have.
But I think that the positives attention around it brings outweigh the negatives. The first (recent) overhaul to a voting system is more difficult than subsequent changes.
> VSE is expressed as a percentage. A voting method which could read voters minds and always pick the candidate that would lead to the highest average happiness would have a VSE of 100%. A method which picked a candidate completely at random would have a VSE of 0%. In theory, VSEs down to negative 100% would be possible if a voting method did worse than a random pick
If VSE is going to be a percentage, it should be a percentage of the maximum happiness -- that is, the total happiness if everyone got their first choice, not the total happiness that is the highest any candidate can actually achieve. I say this mostly because it's much easier to calculate.
But more fundamentally, there is no reason to expect the worst-case candidate to be equally as bad as the best-case candidate is good. It's a huge mistake to rank systems on a scale from +100% to -100% where the units on the positive and negative "halves" of the scale are different!
And it's also a mistake to define 0% as whatever sortition achieves. It's trivial to construct a pathological system in which 0% VSE is equal to 100% VSE. (Everyone is equally un/happy with all candidates.) This should be impossible.
You have 100 candidates. For 99 of those candidates, the entire electorate agrees that any one of these interchangeable guys would do a fine job. Nobody prefers any of them to any other.
The last candidate is Mao Zedong. Under his leadership, the country's industrial and agricultural bases will be systematically destroyed, anyone who owns a rental property will be executed, and tens of millions of people will starve to death for no reason.
The electorate agrees that Mao is an undesirable choice.
So: any method that can't pick Mao achieves a VSE of 100%.
Sortition, by definition, achieves a VSE of 0%. But it's still pretty good -- there's a 99% chance of selecting one of the good guys, and a 1% chance of epic, country-shattering disaster.
A method that is guaranteed to select Mao has a VSE of, I assume, -100%. But it is much, much worse than sortition (the notional midpoint, 0%), while the VSE of 100% is only moderately better than sortition.
That is very interesting and I hadn't seen it before. IRV still does better than plurality by quite a bit, although it doesn't do well compared to the rest. As the chart shows, one of the biggest outliers is 100% honest voting with plurality.
I hadn't heard of 3-2-1 voting before but that is interesting. Maybe it would be one of the best. I generally prefer ranking to scoring (I'm not sure how much better someone prefers a candidate should really be part of the process) but the simpler tallying and presentation of results is nice. I also like that in the "scenereo type" breakdown the easy case gets the best results, condorcet cycles get the worst results, and the rest are in the middle (all with little effect of strategy). It seems like the right distribution to me, but none of the other methods measured get that distribution. IMO a ranked preference is usually much easier to determine how to vote (although it can still be an issue when some candidates are much closer than others), although I guess the limited effect of strategic voting should hopefully mean that it usualy doesn't make much difference exactly how you vote. OTOH, at least the names of the options should be changed; it is the rare race where I could describe any of the candidates as anything other than "bad".
IMO, proportional representation would be a much better change of voting system rather than just changing the method. Voting for one person is almost always going to leave lots of people unrepresented.
Very often when there are more than two candidates, none of them have a majority of supporters. In fact, sometimes that's true even with two or even one candidate...
What election are you thinking of where majority of votes didn’t win?
Because if you say 2016 / electoral college, I’ll have to remind you that the winner had a fairly vast majority. If you are thinking Canada or some ranked system, iirc they still elect by majority.
“No majority no win” is a great recipe for tyranny of the majority and why we have representative democracies, isn’t it?
The winner of the 2016 election received the majority of the votes cast in the electoral college by Presidential electors
Those electors voting for the winner were themselves, however, elected by only a minority of those voting for Presidential electors in elections which misleading had the name of Presidential candidates but not electors on the ballots.
I wasn't arguing the facts of the system. I wasn't even stating a preference (though, yes, I'm upset at the outcome). I was responding to a thread where:
1. Person states preference that majority wins
2. Person states that majority did win
3. I demonstrate that majority did not win
4. Person #2 says majority won EC
5. I point out that it was plainly obvious that person #1 would prefer a majority of the popular vote win
Canada uses FPTP voting and it has highly skewed the last few elections, sadly there was an expectation that the last federal election would result in election reform but that never materialized.
The fundamental reason for this: IRV doesn't care what your preferences are other than your top choice, until your top choice is eliminated.
Until choice A is eliminated, votes for A>B>C and votes for A>C>B are treated identically, and neither one will affect whether B or C gets eliminated first.
Better systems take all preferences into account from the beginning.
When voters are all arranged on a single primary axis it doesn't happen, but when voters care about multiple axes at once (ex: socially liberal / conservative + economically liberal / conservative) it's relatively common.
This particular case was brought up previously, but as a participant I'd like to mention that this election actually went quite well, the candidate with the second most primary round votes ended up winning. I believe it's often cited and discussed because the election was repealed and the candidate thrown out of office, which was hugely frustrating... the voting system was scrapped because the electorate selected a bad candidate.
Let me draw a parallel, let's say that Trump is impeached - when he's impeached should we all say "Oh hey, well that democracy thing... what a dumpster fire - let's go back to a monarchy!". No, we shouldn't, but high amounts of pressure from the dominant parties were deployed and caused a voting system to be repealed just because someone elected by it was removed from office.
Seriously, the BTV election is a terrible case example, it was intensely tainted by lobbied interests and used as an excuse to regress voting rights.
A (Constitutional) Monarchy is better _because_ it has no legitimacy. The purpose of the Monarch is not to Rule but only to provide a Figurehead, a living Symbol of their country.
That's what Liz is for and she's really good at it.
If the US had an elected Figurehead president, Trump would have been a perfectly functional drop-in. Likes gaudy things, talks bullshit, eats too much fast food - symbol of America, works for me.
The problem is that the US combines the Figurehead role with Executive leadership. That's crazy, there aren't going to be many suitable candidates for either role, and now you're asking the electorate to vote for a single individual to do both, no surprises the results aren't good.
It's obvious that these cycles can exist when the things referred to have labels like "A, B, C" or "carrot, potato, lettuce", but how often do they occur for political candidates like the ones described above?
I'm willing to buy that IRV is objectively not suitable for picking meals, but that in practice it is suitable for picking presidential candidates -- or that it's always inferior. Seems like an empirical question, not a theoretical one.
Thanks! I'm just going to quote here because the footnote was interesting:
> A summary of 37 individual studies, covering a total of 265 real-world elections, large and small, found 25 instances of a Condorcet paradox, for a total likelihood of 9.4%[14]:325 (and this may be a high estimate, since cases of the paradox are more likely to be reported on than cases without).[13]:47
> 13: ""most election results do not correspond to anything like any of DC, IC, IAC or MC ... empirical studies ... indicate that some of the most common paradoxes are relatively unlikely to be observed in actual elections. ... it is easily concluded that Condorcet’s Paradox should very rarely be observed in any real elections on a small number of candidates with large electorates, as long as voters’ preferences reflect any reasonable degree of group mutual coherence"
I think I have to file this one under "it's complicated, must dig more".
Yep, it is flawed and, conversely, can be gamed with unintuitive choices. Yet, it is an improvement nonetheless just because fewer people get an outcome they liked less.
i know very little about the various methods of voting and wanted to learn something about it here. while i’m not a republican (i’m independent) it’s very hard to take you seriously when your post reads of anti-trump. if people really want voting reform the reason needs to be something other than stopping trump. otherwise it seems like an attempt to game the system and i’m less likely to vote for reforms. granted it looks like you tried to make it neutral but the last paragraph kinda ruined it
Voting tactically will give a false impression of endorsement. If all the third party voters voted for Hillary, it would send a hugely wrong message about what the people actually want.
> We just need _better_ right now, we need momentum.
Agreed. But we shouldn't be relying on local governments to provide that momentum. I think the people in the best position to legitimize improved voting systems are the pollsters. If they allowed the people they poll to rank or rate all the candidates, in the Democratic primary for example, for whom they have an opinion, then I'm pretty sure the political media (always desperate to fill air-time right?) would start reporting how the candidates would be fairing under different voting systems (that more accurately reflect their inherent popularity). Once these voting systems become familiar in their media, I think the public would be much more ready to accept them at the ballot box.
Totally with you on supoorting ranked-choice voting. It seems like a clear and obvious upgrade over what we're doing now in ways that can be mathematically verified.
Question though - why prefer the Bourda Count over a Condorcet method[1] like the Schulze method[2]?
I recently went down the voting method rabbit-hole when recreationally overengineering the procedure for selecting a fun offsite activity for my team. I picked the Schulze method basically because it satisfies more[3] of the formal criteria that seemed important, including the Condorcet criterion, which seems especially important.
The Bourda Count method doesn't[4] seem to satisfy the Condorcet criterion, so it's possible that a candidate that would win every head to head match up would lose the election. Also, like most (all?) methods that allocate variable numbers of points to candidates, it's subject to tactical voting[5], i.e. it might be rational not to allocate any points to your second place candidate in order to maximize the margin between your first place and second place candidates, even if you prefer your second place candidate to several others.
Every “Game Form” (which is like a “Game” in the Game Theory sense, except instead of having the results be utilities for each outcome, it just has labels for the outcomes) which is “straightforward” (meaning, for each participant, what utility that participant alone assigns to each outcome label (not depending on the utilities anyone else assigns) is sufficient to determine what choices they should make to maximize their expected utility) must be either a simple vote between exactly two options (as in, everyone votes for one of the two, and an outcome label happens if it gets enough votes), or dictatorial (a single person picks an outcome), or a probability mixture of games of that form (for example, pick a random voter’s ballot, and pick whoever they picked. Or, another example, pick a random pair of candidates, and hold a vote between the two).
That is to say : any deterministic voting system with more than 2 candidates, and where no voter is a dictator, is subject to tactical voting.
This is Gibbard's 1978 theorem.
Though, I wonder,
are there game forms which are not “straightforward” but which are a Pareto improvement (in the sense of “regardless of their assignment of utilities to the possible outcomes, every voter’s expected utility is at least as high as it would in the alternate option) over game forms that are straightforward?
I think probably yes?
If each voter puts their utilities, and then the system computes each voter’s utility under random ballot voting, and then checks whether any probability distribution over candidates would result in a strict Pareto improvement on the expected utilities of the voters, and if there is, pucks one, and if not, defaults to the distribution from “pick a randomly selected voter’s first choice”,
Well, we know that this wouldn’t be a straightforward game form, because it isn’t (equivalent to) the form required by Gibbard’s theorem,
So, strategic misrepresentation of one’s (normalized vNM) utilities must be sometimes useful in it (because if it were not, then one would only need to put the same utilities each time, making it a straightforward game),
but perhaps the degree of misrepresentation that could be useful would always be small enough that it would never select an option as being a Pareto improvement of the reported utilities from the random ballot method, unless it was also an actual Pareto improvement over it, using the true utility assignments?
Another thing that I think is relevant is the "revelation principle", which says that any "social choice function" that can be implemented by some mechanism, can be implemented by a truthful social choice mechanism.
But it seems clear that the thing that I proposed as being an improvement on random ballot can't count as a mechanism which implements a "social choice function", because there can't be an equivalent mechanism which is truthful (... well, I assume that no probability mix of pairwise votes and random ballot stuff is equivalent to the thing I described. Can't see how it could be.).
And I think the reason why is that the thing that I described (or, any fully specified version of it) would have to have multiple Nash equilibria.
So, for it to make sense to call it a Pareto improvement, I think would need to have that _all_ of the Nash equilibria would be Pareto improvements on the thing.
I am now less confident than I was that such an improvement exists.
One way to think about the Borda is that it gives you the least hated candidate, instead of the most liked.
From Wikipedia: The Borda count is intended to elect broadly-acceptable options or candidates, rather than those preferred by a majority, and so is often described as a consensus-based voting system rather than a majoritarian one.
Unless you are careful, partisan voters will likely vote their candidate maximum and other candidates minimum - this is called bullet voting on Wikipedia.
Non-partisan voters will likely vote genuinely.
Since bullet voting is the dominant strategy, the election essentially reduces to First Past the Post and contains all the bad (majoritarian) incentives that FPTP does.
Most people aren't completely partisan, when given multiple palatable choices. This is less relevant in the US, with its two-party system, but is quite relevant outside of it.
My concern is that if even a small number of people bullet vote, other people will see that their votes have less impact and adjust accordingly, in a self-perpetuating cycle.
Exactly. And (since all voting methods are flawed in some direction), the question is what do you prioritize in elections: the will of the majority, or the "acceptable" choice of even more people.
Personally, I think Borda is terrible.
Let's suppose the 2016 election was: Clinton, Trump, some milquetoast Republican like Jeb Bush, and someone everyone hated, bringing to total to 4.
Suppose 73% of the population were fanatical Clinton fans. However, they didn't want Trump to win, so they voted Jeb #2, even though they'd much rather he didn't win. The 27% of Trump voters also listed Jeb #2.
Jeb would win, in this case, even though he was a distant second choice for 73% of the population.
(100 * 3 points > 73 * 4 points).
Even worse would be if there were 5 or 6 candidates. Now every Clinton #1 vote is worth 6, and every Jeb #2 vote is worth 5. Jeb would win even if 83% of the voters were fanatical Clinton fans.
There's no way to distinguish your second vote as "this person is also great" vs "this person is the least worst alternative." The only way to not let your far-distant second choice win is to not vote for them at all, or recruit extra candidates as shields for your preferred candidate. But then we're bringing in strategic voting and all sorts of other messiness.
This seems perfect for the US, and they could even pitch it as such. Although you do start to open the game theory floodgate once you veer beyond dead simple voting systems, which could turn into a gerrymandering game if not carefully restricted.
I missed your choice because I can't ever remember how to spell Schulze so I always look it up by Path Vote (my post beneath mentions both names after I found the Wikipeida article again).
Condorcet isn't particularly hard to explain. Easier to explain than IRV anyway. Call it "Instant Round Robin" - if one candidate would beat every other candidate head-to-head, then that candidate should win.
The annoying part about Condorcet enthusiasts is that they insist on lumping the uncommon "tie-breaking" methods (i.e. when there is the rare loop) in with the above general definition. That's when people start talking about Schulz, Ranked-Pairs, etc etc. I personally think a loop is valuable and shouldn't be tie-breaked - it's an indication that the voters are not ready to decide and that there should be another round of debate among the finalists before revoting.
In my opinion, the main flaw with Condorcet is that it is possible to have a Condorcet Winner that does not have the "approval" of a majority of voters.
>another round of debate among the finalists before revoting
What do you do if revoting doesn't break the deadlock? Also, just in general, I think a lot of people don't want a system that involves potential revoting.
> Call it "Instant Round Robin" - if one candidate would beat every other candidate head-to-head, then that candidate should win.
And 90% of peoples eyes just glazed over, all to fix some almost entirely theoretical flaws with IRV, that's why condorcet isn't better in the real world.
90% of which people, the people that are enamored by "count up all first place votes, then find the person in last place, then go look at everyone's ballots and remove that person from everyone's ballots, and then count up all first place votes again, and then repeat that process until you're left with one person and then that candidate should win"?
If you're number 1 choice is knocked out you're vote goes to you're number 2 choice, if they're knocked out it goes to number 3... It's not about understanding the intricacies of how the count works but understanding what their individual vote will be doing. When it comes to what you're individual vote is doing Condorcet is much more of a black box.
I don't think Borda count is an acceptable alternative. It's vulnerable to the teaming problem; elections would turn into contests of which party can nominate the most candidates.
The simplest alternative you can actually get people behind and that doesn't have serious problems is probably approval voting. (For those unfamiliar: Just vote for any number of candidates, most votes wins.) It's simple, it works well, it doesn't really have glaring flaws like vote-splitting or teaming. There are various ways it's still not ideal, but if you want something for people to rally behind, I think its simplicity makes it the best candidate for that.
> I don't think Borda count is an acceptable alternative. It's vulnerable to the teaming problem; elections would turn into contests of which party can nominate the most candidates.
Isn't the simple solution there to limit the number of candidates a party can put forward? Forcing the party to try and be united about who they want representing an area?
OK, let's say we institute this cap. The obvious thing to do then is to spawn off officially-separate parties that can nominate more candidates for you. You could outlaw that, I suppose, but now we're getting into the area of things you need a judge to adjudicate, and, well... yeah.
Anyway yeah you see where I'm going with this. When I say "party", that's shorthand -- I'm not talking about literal party organizations. The teaming problem is just that having a bunch of candidates that are similar to each other increases the chance that one of them will win; it's the opposite of the vote-splitting problem, where having similar candidates decreases the chance that any of them will win. This problem doesn't require a formal party organization in order to manifest; strategic nomination is still possible.
Ideally one wants a voting system that is "cloneproof", i.e., has neither of these problems. (IRV is cloneproof, actually, but it has other glaring problems -- most notably its lack of monotonicity.)
Would that force them to be united? Putting some kind of rule in place might just force parties to balkanize. The barrier to candidate proliferation might be the ability to raise funds. Would a party get more out of one candidate, or two candidates with half the money?
IRV produces a direct improvement in the politics in that it promotes coalition-building among minor candidates to defeat better-equipped competition: "vote for me and for this guy too".
That means that instead of everyone running alone and mudslinging each other, which gives voters little narrative to work with(which in turn tends to lead towards the incumbents and partisan votes winning) there's more time and space going towards specific issues and platforms that consensus can be built around.
As a voting system there are certainly better ones in terms of the vote itself, but having experienced the change I now think that the impact on consensus-building is an worthy criterion too.
Exactly. Toxic two-party politics is a direct result of FPTP voting, not a reason to dismiss IRV
Preferential voting, including IRV, effects change to toxic politics by encouraging a greater number parties, and encouraging them to work together and form coalitions to build strength through consensus and common ground.
If your goal is to give outsider candidates who can't get as many votes as mainstream candidates the win, then no, IRV isn't going to work. But if your goal is to break the Duverger's Law spoilering problem a bit, to give third parties a chance to build up from small rather than their current direction of starting with President of the United States, IRV is good.
I've been living with IRV in Minneapolis for a couple of elections now, and what it's led to so far is tolerable, non-radical mayors. The most recent race was particularly interesting, as it took like five rounds to get a winner. I didn't vote for him, but he's been a much better mayor than I expected.
I came here to post this. I don't understand why Approval Voting and Score Voting don't get more love. The UX is easily understandable as we have been trained to thumbs-up and X/Y star ratings on everything from yelp and netflix. A simplified version in the form of the old pick one UX could be provided for voters who don't understand the new mechanism.
They both seem strictly better than what we have and yet I never hear anything about them. They even solve Arrow's Impossibility Paradox and have the confidence of Arrow himself.
FairVote has a lock on the "we need to change our voting system: this is the best alternative" message, and from what I can tell are dogmatically opposed to cardinal systems in general.
There's also a history of bickering and personal attacks between different voting reform activists, including people in leadership positions.
The various ordinal voting advocates (Equal Vote, CES, etc.) really need help on the messaging and movement-building front. A lot of lay people struggle to "get" the abstract framing these issues are often presented in. It comes easy to computer programmers and mathematicians because we're relentlessly trained to think abstractly about algorithmic tradeoffs and emergent limits of systems.
But a lot of people just don't see why this issue is important. It just seems like an obscure focus.
Fargo ND recently adopted approval voting (it was approved by voters by a wide margin), and there's a campaign to get an approval voting ballot measure in St. Louis.
The Center for Election Science seems to be the main advocacy group that's pushing approval voting. They're a much smaller organization than fairvote.org, but they seem to be getting more funding and gaining momentum.
Range voting is arguably the general case of approval voting and it has the same problem: candidates have no incentive to be honest about how the voting system works and most will campaign on "just mark 1" or "just give me the max score" in order to convert back to a FPTP.
This is not a hypothetical concern, something like this has already occurred in Australian politics. Queensland switched from exhaustive preferential (IRV where all candidates must be ranked) to optional preferential (1-n candidates may be ranked) and then ran "just vote 1" as their campaign slogan. In doing so they obliterated the centre-right and further-right parties that traditionally operate as a coalition in Parliament.
Relying on voters to be aware of the mathematics of a voting system and on candidates to represent those honestly is problematic. IRV is simple to explain, works well enough and can be efficiently hand-counted.
So, your argument is that because this system has a feature that allows it to revert back to exactly what we have now, but also gives options so that more informed voters can better indicate their preference, and is otherwise strictly better, we shouldn't do it and stick with what we have?
Arguments against IRV do not apply to SV/RV or AV. IRV and FPTP fall prey to shenanigans via Arrow's Impossibility Theorem because they require candidates to be ranked relative to one another (or you just pick the best one as in FPTP). Once they do not need to be ranked (as in two candidates can get the same vote from a given voter), then none of the Arrow problems apply.
SV and AV are also simple to explain, work well and can be hand-counted. And they don't have the huge problem that IRV and other ranked voting mechanisms have.
& how can IRV be hand-counted? It is the most difficult system listed here to compute and most difficult to explain to voters why the outcome happened.
No it is not "very easy". IRV is not summable, so a two-way communication is needed between every round. The San Francisco city elections page once explained this as follows: “Due to the requirement that all ballots must be centrally tallied in City Hall and not at the polling places, the Department of Elections has not set a date for releasing any preliminary results using the ranked-choice voting method.”
So you either have the communication between every round (which is essentially re-counting) or you physically take all the ballots to a central counting location, which introduces delays and chain of custody issue.
So while there are more important reasons to prefer Score Voting and Approval Voting (better outcomes, better resistance to strategy, etc.), complexity is certainly not a non-issue.
First preferences are summable and it is usually clear, on the night of the election, who has won the majority in Parliament. This is called the "indicative count".
As for chain of custody, again, Australia has solved this problem. Every box is numbered, every seal on the box is numbered. All of them are signed out by electoral officials, witnessed by at least two scrutineers from different candidates. When the boxes are opened this process is repeated.
Do you know how many times ballot boxes have gone missing in an Australian election? Once. In a century. Once. For which the High Court voided the election because there was a minute but non-zero chance that the outcome would've been affected. It was re-run from scratch.
IRV has potentially multiple vote transfer steps and passes whereas all the other mechanisms are a single pass sum. IRV is easily the most complex to both compute and understand compared to the other alternatives (AV/SV/FPTP).
Furthermore, doesn't Australia use it only for House elections where you don't have to compute across a particularly large population?
Australia uses it both for House and Senate elections. Millions of votes cast in a day. Indicative count on the night.
My tone is dismissive because I am tired of being told IRV is "too complex" or "won't work". Because it's simple and it has scaled flawlessly for decades. You just need to believe the experience of other countries is more valid than a theory.
The AU senate is STV, no? And even then, the largest polity is NSW with only 8M people. 12 US states are more populous than this.
But, I'm with you that IRV is workable (there's ample evidence) and better than the abomination that FPTP is. I guess my point is that AV/SV address these concerns through their simplicity (I find both of them less complex than IRV in both voter UX and result computation) and also that they avoid the unintuitive problems mentioned in the OP ncase link, which can potentially be even worse than the problems of FPTP simply because they are hard for even educated voters to wrap their heads around, whereas the problems of FPTP (vote splitting) are easier to explain (but still bad. this isn't a defense of fptp).
Range voting is an abomination. It's the perfect example of a system ranked as good by Arrow Theorem logic which horribly fails most actual requirements for a voting system - unlike Approval Voting, which despite the tactical voting non-issue is practically reasonable.
[Some practical requirements for/questions about a voting method:
* Does it always have a winner?
* Can the resulting winner always enjoy public legitimacy?
* Is the voting system simple enough for the public to understand?
* Can it map to useful public choices?
* Is it susceptible to cheating?
* Does it bias towards the center or not? (Note that some people might prefer biasing and some not).
* Can voters signal to politicians they must change course?
]
Score Voting is objectively the best of the commonly proposed voting methods, with any mixture of strategic or honest voters.
http://scorevoting.net/BayRegsFig.html
It is objectively one of the simplest voting methods based on summability, rates of spoiled ballots, speed it takes the average voter to complete a ballot, etc.
However it is called, there are many reasons for why it is so bad, but they all boil to one point: it's asking voters for information they do not have while ignoring the human realities of the vote. As we code monkeys say: GIGO.
99% of humanity doesn't have a 'Score' for politicians* , but the reality of the vote is that whatever choice the voter has, the voter can push effectively by giving min/max scores - or at least is very likely to think it can be helpful, and feel guilty when they don't do it - imagine losing an election because you merely gave your preferred candidate an 8!
A Range Voting election where everyone gives min/max scores de facto may look mathematically identical to Approval Voting, but it is far worse in reality.
That's because voters will then convince themselves their choice is deserved - their politician is a 10 and the other is a 0, an enemy. The problem in other words is that voters will mostly not partially abstain, but be pushed into a false polarization beyond what is useful for society. Psychology, not math.
There are other points, but this message is long enough. TL;DR: "Score" voting is the triumph of mathematically optimized voting methods that ignores too many human considerations.
But look, I am willing to go half way: Approval voting is a perfectly good method and I can accept Borda. Both are strictly better than the current method even according to the weird measurement "The Center for Range Voting" uses. Approval can even be seen as a (sane) version of RV, so there's no reason at all for the center to object.
* Oh, and the 1% who actually has a score? That's almost worse, because these scores are nearly always the compilation of single issue organizations which tend towards the extremes and never look at circumstances.
Borda count may be the only ranked choice voting system worse than Instant Runoff. The simulations here are more compelling than any mathematical argument I could make. http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/
Approval voting is my preferred system, both for its intuitive appeal and quality of outcomes, but I'll settle for any change at all.
If you look at the IRV plots boundary by boundary instead of as a whole, you see that most of the boundaries are in the same places as they are for other methods, but the boundary for whichever candidate is in the center can become chaotic. If you look at borda however, all of the boundaries shift, and they all shift in ways that favor candidates toward the center of the distribution.
This says to me that Borda would not intuitively match people's ideas of what an election would do far more often, while IRV would have chaotic results mainly in exceptional cases.
Agreed. Let’s not allow perfect to be the enemy of the better.
After not making any significant changes to voting in over 200 years (besides expanding it to more people, thank goodness) in the USA, taking one step towards a better future is gigantic. Once we take that first step, future steps will be easier (even if they’ll still be difficult at first).
I can’t wait for RCV, any flavor, to come to more cities and states.
P.S. if you’re in Massachusetts and feel strongly about ranked choice voting, come join me helping out https://voterchoice2020.org/
If Nader takes enough votes from Gore, then Gore will have the fewest first place votes and get eliminated first.
Then Nader has to go up against Bush and it all comes down to who the Gore voters put as their second choice. It may only take a small percentage of them putting Bush second for Bush to win. https://youtu.be/JtKAScORevQ
Was this election spoiled? By Nader or by Gore? You can argue the semantics of what "spoiler" means, but to me it's clear that IRV doesn't handle this situation well.
It is safe to vote for a third-party only if they can't win. When three-way elections get close, you have to be more careful.
This hypothetical is so far from the 2000 election as to be unrecognisable. If I'd written "If Nader takes enough votes from Bush..." it would be about as realistic.
In any case, if Gore preferences flow to Bush over Nader, that's because those voters are expressing their preference for Bush over Nader. That's not spoiling: it's literally the entire point of providing a full ranking, is so that nobody's vote is ever discarded and so that any winning candidate must have accumulated an absolute majority.
> a third-party candidate doesn't spoil an election, because your second-place vote will still count. (E.g. Nader wouldn't have taken votes from Gore, so Gore would have won instead of Bush.)
I was just trying to point out that this isn't always true. Instant Runoff Voting can eliminate the centrist, the best compromise candidate, first.
If we adopt IRV and third-parties grow, then we move into territory where IRV gets some elections obviously wrong. It has happened.
> Was this election spoiled? By Nader or by Gore? You can argue the semantics of what "spoiler" means, but to me it's clear that IRV doesn't handle this situation well.
In that scenario more people preferred Bush to Nader, all the bush supporters plus a few Gore supporters. So no it wasn't spoiled at all, the most popular candidate won and the system worked.
It seems you think the goal is to elect the centerist candidate or something?
Score voting is approval voting, except that you are allowed to make the tactical error of assigning a score between the two extremes. This is always a tactical error, de facto the same as flipping a carefully biased coin for each candidate.
To be honest, I do personally think score voting comes the closest to what is truly most democratic and accurate, even better than Borda.
I hesitate to recommend it, however, because I'm not entirely convinced it's intuitive enough for the average voter to understand and apply properly. I'm also afraid it's too open to criticism of seeming overly "subjective", though I personally don't think it is.
I would be very, very, very happy to have evidence that my fears are unfounded, however.
The one thing I find iffy about score voting (or range voting) is that there's a decent chance people will just score everyone 5~8. This would give more voting power to people that deliberately only use 0 and 10.
So I'd advocate approval voting. Just vote for the options that you find acceptable, the option with the highest acceptance rate wins.
> there's a decent chance people will just score everyone 5~8
That sounds incredibly unlikely to me. I don't think I know anyone who would rank both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton as a 7. To the contrary, it seems like people will almost always put either 0 or 10, making it not much different from approval voting.
That is a rather extreme example, but still I don't think many people will actually fill in a 0, plenty of 2s and 3s maybe.
Besides, like you said, if everyone always puts either 0 or 10 then it's the same thing as approval voting anyway so it can't hurt to just use approval voting.
A downside of score voting (aka range voting) is that people are likely to have less influence if they vote honestly.
If we image the 2016 election replayed under range voting, I can easily imagine a lot of Clinton voters rating her 6/10 or whatever, and most of the Trump voters rating him 10/10. Even if you have a lot more voters that prefer Clinton, Trump still wins. An advantage of approval voting in that scenario is that it forces everyone to take an extreme position, yes or no, which is what a strategic voter would do. So, you'd have strategic voters and honest voters voting the same way and having the same amount of influence.
Those who dilute their approval across potential winning candidates are under-represented relative anyone with an extreme view who would apply a dis-proportionate approval level to their smaller (maybe singular) set of approved candidates.
The approval or not of a given candidate might best depend on who supports them _at all_ out of the entire population, over any position in the rankings. That would mathematically simplify to ignoring rank order, considering all rank voting sets as approval tracks, and always eliminating whoever had the least votes until a single winner is left.
However that poorly reflects the preference of selecting the most desired winner, which is why other slightly more complicated algorithms were designed.
I get your concerns, but this IS an instance where I think progress over perfection is key.
The mere idea of changing a voting process is a big hurdle, and if it is shown that "yeah, we can do that" and that FPTP is not the only voting system in history, we have achieved a victory.
And as others have said, IRV is a huge win by allowing people to vote "FOR" something, rather than strategically vote against something.
So, even if the third parties rarely break out, it would more accurately poll the public's sympathies.
> the proposed system is specifically Instant Run-Off Voting (IRV), which does not make a centrist third-party candidate likely to win.
I agree with you that it's not as nice as something like Borda count, but I think I only agree with you that it wouldn't help a centrist third-party candidates chances if we assume, for the sake of argument, that switching from first-past-the-post to IRV wouldn't change who voters pick as their top candidate.
And that seems like a very difficult assumption to support, because the typical public discussion around third party candidates makes it explicit that people habitually choose to vote for someone other than their top choice in first-past-the-post elections.
I can speak somewhat from experience here. Some of my local elections use (non-instant) runoff voting, and my decisionmaking process in the first round of those elections is markedly different from the one I use in elections without a runoff. For starters, it doesn't typically involve having to hold my nose while I fill out the ballot.
A third party running against two polarizing candidates is a pathological case (as are two polarizing candidates alone).
IRV gets better when there are more candidates, because they can form alliances and trade preferences. It goes further than that by /encouraging/ new candidates too because they can align themselves with other candidates and band together against competition.
FPTP voting doesn’t encourage new candidates, because they’re competing against the big two. That’s why American politics sucks so much, both in its staleness and how the opponents treat each other.
But IRV still does allow you to throw your vote away. Once third parties become competitive, the best strategy in IRV regresses back to "your first choice vote should be whichever of the two most viable candidates you prefer".
IRV solves the problem of people irrationally throwing their votes away on candidates who have no chance of winning, but it absolutely still allows competitive third-party candidates to spoil an election. This is not just theoretical, it happened in Burlington in their 2009 mayoral election, which subsequently resulted in IRV being repealed there.
I feel that the reason IRV was repealed in Burlington, was because an independent won, which was not palatable to either the Democrat, or the Republican political machines.
The system worked exactly as intended, the people who usually hold power felt threatened by it, and engaged their political machinery to restore that power.
I don't live in Burlington so I may not have as much background on this as a native would, but my impression is that the Burlington election showed that strategic voting it's still a problem with IRV, contrary to what its supporters generally claim. The Republican voters would have preferred that the Democrat won over the Progressive, and they could have caused that outcome by dishonestly ranking the Democrat higher on their ballots. Thus, the purported benefit of IRV of allowing you to honestly vote for your favorite candidate first while still taking your second choice into account was discredited.
The problem with that kind of strategy is that you may be giving away the election to the Democrat.
You don't actually know, at the time that you cast your ballot, how everyone else will vote. This kind of strategic voting is difficult to reason through, and incredibly likely to backfire.
Regardless of whether anyone actually votes strategically in practice though, it seems pretty understandable that people would feel disillusioned when they see an outcome like this. Most IRV supporters say "you can honestly rank your preferences among all candidates without worrying about throwing away your vote"...and then the Republicans in that election ranked their preferences honestly, and it turns out they threw away their votes.
As you point out, it's harder to predict whether you're throwing away your vote because it's harder to reason through the effects, but I think that's just going to make even people unhappier with IRV and generate even worse election outcomes. At least in FPTP you can usually tell what the best strategy is in advance, so if you throw away your vote you only have yourself to blame.
As a former Burlington resident that participated in that election this whole case study is a travesty - the baby was thrown out with the bath water.
Essentially what happened is that the person who was the 2nd most popular in the first round ended up overtaking the Democrat, so it wasn't a wild swing or anything... but after that happened the winner turned out to be a terrible person who was removed from office, then the two major parties lobbied to get IRV thrown out with the bad mayor and managed to get the majority on board.
As I've mentioned elsewhere, it's essentially like looking at Nixon/Clinton/ye favorite impeachment person and saying... "Welp, we're impeaching Nixon, so I guess this Democracy thing is a bust, I wonder if George II would be willing to take us back."
The two major parties warped what was just a bad candidate into a reason to regress the voting system because it allowed non-two party candidates to win easily (they still can win because 802 is serious about quality over party - hence the republican governor, and socialist senator/former mayor of BTV)
In this election, the spoiler candidate was the Republican. If the Republican hadn't run, the Democrat would've beaten the Progressive, and the majority of voters would've preferred that outcome (including the majority of Republican voters who assumedly thought that their honest rankings would be properly reflected in the election result).
It's a confusing example because we're used to spoiler candidates coming from third parties, but the politics in Vermont are a little bit unusual.
IRV isn't perfect, but it's a huge improvement over the current state of affairs.
I would point out that the "won't elect a centrist" perspective might be a bit of an American perspective and a perspective that might change with IRV.
For example, let's look at Canada. You have approximately from right to left, Conservative, Liberal, NDP, and Green. There are districts where the Conservative party won with around 30-40% of the vote while left-of-center parties gained 60%+. I'm guessing that most people that voted Green would prefer a Liberal candidate to a Conservative one. Similar for NDP voters. In that case, votes would have been transferred toward a more centrist party.
I think in the US there's also the trap of the primary system. Primaries often have extremely low turnout compared to the electorate and so finding an energetic base can swing a primary in a way that it can't swing a general election. Many people who are more centrist don't vote in primaries.
Frankly, you might just be underestimating how many centrist voters there are in general elections compared to primaries. Even as the Democrats have lots of great candidates, Biden is still topping the polls so far.
IRV certainly isn't perfect, but it's an incredible improvement, easy to explain, easy to trust, etc. It might not end up with the candidate that is the most acceptable by some weighting system, but it does favor people with broad appeal.
Honestly, if we got rid of the primary process and had a hypothetical general election that was Trump, Romney, Biden, and Warren, I think it's very likely that Romney or Biden would win. I think the big issue drawing parties away from the center is partly that primaries are decided by the small number of people who show up to them. If there was one general election with many candidates, it would likely be a different story.
Heck, if the Republican primaries had been IRV, Trump likely wouldn't have been the candidate. Even if he was popular on the extreme, more centrist votes would have coalesced around someone else.
IRV is simple and trustworthy. Borda, frankly, seems difficult to explain and trust. Ok, let's say that I have 4 Democrats and 1 far-right Republican with a uniform distribution of the 50% of democratic votes for the democrats. With 10,000 voters, the Republican gets 5,000 points. Each Democrat gets 1,250 * 1 + 1,250 * 0.8 + 1,250 * 0.6 + 1,250 * 0.4 which is only 3,500 points. The Republican wins a landslide victory despite an evenly split electorate. Or do you force people to list all candidates?
Heck, let's go with Bush, Gore, and Nader. Let's say Bush gets 48%, Gore gets 37%, and Nader gets 15% (and assume that Nader voters aren't going to vote Bush). With IRV, it's easy. 13% protest-vote for Nader and Gore gets elected once their votes transfer. With Borda, it's more complicated. Bush gets 48% of the points and then Gore gets .37 * 1 + .15 * .67 which is only 47% of the points. Bush wins - but that's not what the public wanted to happen. They thought they could vote for Nader first without hurting Gore!
IRV does have tactical voting considerations, but they seem really simple to understand and trust by comparison.
IRV isn't perfect, but replacing a voting system requires something that people easily understand and trust. People easily understand the implications of ranking and eliminating the bottom person, redistributing those votes. They understand how it eliminates spoilers and lets them vote for who they want in the order they want. A points based system is a lot harder for people to understand and trust. Again, IRV isn't perfect, but if we're going to have change, it has to be easy for people to understand and accept. Personally, I prefer single-transferrable-vote and multi-seat constituencies, but that requires radical change to our system. IRV is a simple change that people intuitively understand, accept, and that so many people have wanted for decades now.
IRV isn't perfect, but it's a huge improvement over the current state of affairs.
I disagree. In theory, yes it's an improvement, but it still doesn't eliminate the spoiler effect, and in practice it's much harder to understand why it produces the election results that it generates.
I think most people who study this topic would agree that approval voting is better than IRV. Many people then go on to say "but at least IRV is better than FPTP". My concern is that IRV is effectively worse than FPTP, because it may poison people's enthusiasm for alternative voting systems when they see the strange outcomes it sometimes yields.
I don't think my fear is just theoretical either, as this has already happened before when the 2009 Burlington IRV election produced a strange outcome, and they subsequently switched back to FPTP.
I'm concerned as you are. I've come to believe that IRV in a world of Cambridge Analytica spinoffs could be even more dangerous than FPTP. Not only would strategic voting be possible (using algorithms to target swing-voters), it'd be almost impossible to detect, and nearly impossible to do general audience journalism about.
Intuitively, I'd expect ordinal methods to be much harder to game, but I'm not even convinced this is the case. I've done some research trying to dig into this question, but a lot of the distributed-systems-game-theory-economic-math is hard for me to understand, and isn't focused on the messy problem of consensus between humans as much as it is on the problem of consensus between computer-like agents.
In a world of Cambridge Analytica spinoffs, I believe this is an extremely important issue, and that FairVote's take is outdated.
> which does not make a centrist third-party candidate likely to win.
The goal to ranked-choice voting schemes isn't to promote centrism, it's to eliminate the possibility of electing candidates without majority support due to factional vote splitting.
As far as fixing polarization of factions within the electorate, that's not something an election scheme is going to be able to do at all. Modern Fox viewers and vegan college students are simply never going to see eye-to-eye, and that has nothing to do with what choices they're presented with every year in November.
I highly recommend CES's video on voting methods that highlights the non-monotonicity of IRV [1]. I would prefer the adoption of simpler models that can be implemented and understood by voters easily, such as approval or score voting.
In your thought experiment, the entire country is extreme one way or another. If this country used the Borda method, it seems like a moderate would win every time, despite the fact that there are no moderates in the entire country. Under IRV, the country would probably regularly rotate between extremes, which seems to correspond more closely to the actual makeup of the electorate. If a country is mostly moderate, it should have a moderate government. If a country is polarized, both sides should be represented in government.
This is especially pronounced if we suppose that the "moderate" party isn't just the middle of two extremes, but actually has some distinctive characteristics of its own. For instance, imagine that there's a liberal party, a conservative party, and a single-issue party that advocates for the interests of farmers. Supposing a split like you proposed, with the farmer party as the "moderate centrists" it seems like the government would perpetually dedicate most of its money and energy towards agriculture, even though no voters particularly cared about that issue.
It really seems like your preference for Borda is based on your own preference for moderate politics, not on any desire to faithfully represent the electorate.
> So to really get away from the poisonous political polarization of our times, ranked choice is necessary, but it needs to be Borda or similar, not IRV.
You are definitely better off, but none of these solve polarisation issue. All deliver the tyranny of the majority.
In the current system we generally elect one person per electorate. If you have 4 polarised groups, the split is 40%, 30%, 20% and 10%, and they are roughly evenly distributed among the electorates, then most of the people elected will be from the 40% group simply because they will win most electorates. The 40% will run the place, the other 60% will get very little say in what happens.
This doesn't change much if you use one of the other voting systems. Lets 30% and 20% groups mostly agree with each other. It's true that with First Past Post the place is run by the 40%'s. But if with one of the others the only change is it the place will likely run by a coalition of the 30% + 20% because they are the only ones that will be elected. So yes the people in power change - but again 50% the people get no say in parliament. We are a whole 10% getter off. Whoopee.
One way to get a balance is to have bigger electorates and have 10 people elected from each. Since 10 are elected from each the likely outcome is 4 of the 40%'s, 3 of the 30%'s and so on. Since none have a majority in parliament, they all have to compromise to get what they want. And that nice outcome happens regardless of which of these voting systems you use.
I think all this focus on voting systems distracts from the real issue - tyranny of the majority.
While I agree with you in principal, in the context of the state of NY, and especially within NYC, ranked choice voting will do nothing more than hand the results of every future election to those who control the political machine.
Think of it this way, in 2018, a top 2 primary in NY-14th district could very well have resulted in both AOC and Crowley, just like it did in the case of various districts in states like California and Washington which have top two primaries, but unlike in AOC's case, the incumbent largely pulled in those who would otherwise be Republican voters.
This same exact story would've played out in the Queens DA race as well. In the democratic primary, there were 3 candidates who could be in some ways marked as left, center and right. The left and center candidates both got around 40% of the vote +- 100 votes, but the right leaning candidate got around 15% of the vote. If there was a second round of voting among this block of voters, the center candidate would've likely done much better in said second round.
The issue you describe is really only likely to happen, when you have something like 10+ competitive candidates, when you have two candidates pulling 30-45% of the votes each, this being a problem becomes way less likely.
> So to really get away from the poisonous political polarization of our times, ranked choice is necessary, but it needs to be Borda or similar, not IRV.
All these fancy vote counting methods will only give you some scattered "third party" (actually more like independent, no party) candidates here and there. They will not give you a multi-party system. Only proportional voting can do that.
Maybe it takes time for people to adjust. In SF it’s netted dissatisfaction in many voters in my neighborhood.
People are treating it like a trifecta rather than most favorite to least favorite of top three. So you end up with people few people had as their main favorite. And do it’s very underwhelming, at least first go round.
Borda seems to assume every voter ranks every single candidate. That seems pretty impractical -- it's asking way too much of voters, unless the total number of candidates is somehow limited to ~5 (and even 5 would be pushing it IMO). Am I missing an obvious workaround to avoid voters essentially needing to rank every single candidate for their ballot to be considered valid?
Edit: Wikipedia has a discussion on this issue [1], and none of the solutions seem great. The obvious one (giving unmarked candidates the lowest number of points) devolves into anyone being strategic only ranking their single favorite candidate as #1, which is the current system.
If I understand your example, then one of the extreme candidates would actually have a super-majority of first-place votes, right? I'm not sure elevating the centrist there is the right move. I mean, it sounds like a pleasant outcome, but at some point you have to accept the will of the voters.
Condorcet [0] is widely recognized as the best voting system to address voting issues raised by Arrow's impossibility theorem [1]. No voting system is perfect, but Condorcet gets as close as possible.
I prefer the Schulze (path voting/winner) method, and I don't care if the most moderate candidate wins, I care that voters are able to express their desires and if a centralist candidate happens to be the overall best choice that's fine; I just disagree that it's always the best option to fully compromise.
I don't see why it should be taken for a given moral good that a third party cannot spoil an election (Ranked Choice doesn't actually prevent that, at any rate, it just lessens the effect near the midpoint). If your political values are that a multiparty system is better than a binary choice, the risk of an upstart candidate being a spoiler gives him and by extension potential voters more bargaining power.
> the risk of an upstart candidate being a spoiler gives him and by extension potential voters more bargaining power.
bargaining power how? if you have a situation like this:
- 55% of people vote left
- 45% of people vote right
The left party has a clear but narrow majority. Now a third party, further to the left enters the race! Say they can pull 15% of the vote, largely from the left (quite popular!)
- 15% of people vote farther-left
- 40% of people vote center-left
- 45% of people vote right
now the election likely to be won by the right-wing party - even though 55% of voters still favour a left-of-center result. Voters feel pressured to vote for the center-left party, despite having farther-left views, because they don't want the right wing party to win. Under first-past-the-post systems, there is no bargaining power short of "I will drop out of the race if you do x" which does not seem to happen much
If they are unable to pull enough support to "spoil" the election result, they are considered a "throwaway vote" and marginalized. No power at all.
Because they don't have to win in order to have power: they can extract concessions from one of the stronger candidates in exchange for dropping out and possibly endorsing him. In Ranked Choice, especially with IRV, third party candidates can be more easily ignored if their 1st choice votes will be assimilated.
In your example, under Ranked Choice, the 15% who really wanted far left policies can be safely ignored after the primary. In traditional voting, the majoritarian center left now has to take their concerns seriously if they don't want to lose the whole thing.
> they can extract concessions from one of the stronger candidates in exchange for dropping out
While technically true, I can't think of a single example of this happening outside of the US two-party system. I.e. you'll see democrats stepping down during the primaries but it's not like Ralph Nader offered to pull out if Gore adopted various policies.
> the 15% who really wanted far left policies can be safely ignored after the primary
The idea is that you wouldn't need to have a "primary" - you could have multiple parties running candidates in the ACTUAL election. The whole reason for the primaries is to get the in-fighting out of the way so you can run a single candidate - because under FPTP anything other than running a single candidate is suicide. With Ranked Choice you could have multiple candidates on the left and right - and people could vote for a first and second choice.
E.g. in 2016 both bernie and hillary could have run. as long as people picked both as part of their ranked choice there would be no negative consequences and people would be free to choose whomever they believed in the most without worrying about their perceived "electability".
RCV mostly helps with #1. No more spoiler effect enables 3rd parties to slowly, incrementally build awareness, socialization, support. At the bottom of the pyramid (locally). To eventually mount challenges to higher offices.
Think of politics as a marathon (or maybe a horde invasion), with elections being periodic opinion polls.
> BUT, the proposed system is specifically Instant Run-Off Voting (IRV), which does not make a centrist third-party candidate likely to win
Perhaps not the third party candidate, but what about a same-party candidate that garners votes? Perhaps for example, lots of democrats would have selected Bernie as their number one choice last time around, then Hillary, then Trump. Perhaps Bernie would have had a better chance in that situation.
Then again, I'm not sure this suggested system in NYC would even allow you to select someone who is not the nominee of a party without a write-in.
Is "the middle-of-the-road candidate wins" necessarily a feature when you're in a political environment that's been generally dragged far to the right of the rest of the world by decades of big business donating to right-wing candidates? Most "centrist" Dems feel more like the Repubs of my youth these days.
Often (but not always) when people talk about a party or politician or political position being right or left, they are talking about its relative position compared to the distribution at hand.
Or, I guess sometimes they also might mean, like, some ambiguous combination of an idea of an objective left/right axis, along with the idea of a relative axis?
Regardless, people generally agree that, currently in the US, that the Democratic Party is “to the left of” the Republican Party. As such, for the purpose of practical communication, it is often useful to understand what people are talking about in terms of this way of distinguishing between the two.
I think the confusion here is mostly coming out of comparing US stances to globally expressed stances - both US parties are pretty right leaning on the global scale, but within the US left is democrat and right is republican - while people at the more extreme ends of the spectrum complain that, on the right, the republicans are too liberal and, on the left, democrats are too conservative.
The sort of interesting thing is it's really hard to be objective about this, if you were to measure where parties have stood on minority representation over history both parties today are astronomically to the left of any parties in the 1800s. I think the main thing we can sort of examine is where policies lie in relative comparison to the voting base and under that measure I'd expect that we have far more conservative and corporate representation today from both parties than the people voting - in a large part due to the political corruption existent in our system.
Family planning services, including the education, comprehensive medical and social services necessary to permit individuals freely to determine and achieve the number and spacing of their children, should be available to all, regardless of sex, age, marital status, economic group or ethnic origin, and should be administered in a non-coercive and non-discriminatory manner.
Your second paragraph is closer, though in fact most people don't think about it at that level. They typically don't know or understand that the position is relative to the current distribution. When they say "democrats are on the left" they mean it in an absolute sense, and both the duopoly parties play that ambiguity up to their collective advantage.
The kind of voting system proposed isn't likely to change that.
> But you're still stuck with one of the polarizing two-party candidates who will win.
In New York City most people just vote for the candidate that most closely matches their own ethnicity / gender, so none of the candidates have any reason to run especially polarizing campaigns.
Every time the topic of IRV comes up, people immediately wonk out and start debating the pros/cons of Borda, Condorcet and other alternatives to IRV. Even worse, they start intricately detailing all the ways in which IRV is "bad", relative to other voting systems that they prefer. And then people respond to them with with a long list of reasons as to why their proposed voting system is also bad, and actually worse than IRV. Finally, someone brings up the Arrow impossibility theorem and proves that all voting systems are fundamentally flawed in some way.
Can we put our wonk-hats away for a second though and acknowledge something: IRV may not be perfect, but it is heaps better than the current system. Every time we get into a IRV-Borda-Condorcet debate, everyone else tunes out, decides that it's best to just leave things well alone, and nothing ever changes.
Are there other voting systems that are better than IRV? Probably. But at this point, IRV is the most credible challenger to the status quo. It is simple, easy to understand, the average joe is open to it, and it has considerable momentum. Instead of tearing it down because it isn't perfect, can we just throw our weight behind it and help it make it a dent in the dysfunctional status quo. Once that happens, we can wonk out as much as we want, and debate what voting system to use in a referendum to determine the ideal voting-system for future elections. But it would be great if we could just focus for now on getting something done.
British Columbia recently had a referendum on our provincial voting system.
The first time we did this, we lost, 60 to 40. 60 on the reform side btw, we needed a super majority.
We did another referendum on it it, we lost 50 50.
We did it again, this time giving a bunch of options for voting preferences, but first asked "fptp, yes or no?". We lost 60 to 40, 60 against.
I am in agreement with the lesson you're talking about. I'll take basically anything over FPTP.
I wish we had learned that lesson 10 years ago. Because at this junction, BC is sick of the question being asked, and we're basically stuck with this poisonous voting system forever.
A strange coincidence, the party that promised to reform Canada's federal election but deliberately pulled out on the results of the worlds strangest online poll, just got back in to power last day.
So not only is reform on it's own nearly impossible, it seems impossible to ask reform of people whom got in to power with FPTP.
The people debating the merits of the various voting systems really need to open their eyes to how thoroughly stuck they are with the worst choice.
Ouf that BC referendum, I've never seen a more poorly worded referendum in my life. As someone passionate about good representation I had to google around to actually comprehend what Rural-Urban PR was. Additionally I know that some of the more progressive folks I know voted no on the referendum because all the options ended with a disclaimer of "This is all advisory and the actual implementation will be determined later" which they interpreted as "We'll actually end up deciding this by committee behind closed doors".
Both of the leading parties lobby so strong against any PR that we just need to switch over to IRV to clear out the incumbent power base.
That's actually thanks to single-member-electorates.
As long as you have single memeber electorates, you can have one party narrowly win a whole lot while another party wins crushing landslides in fewer. In the Canadian election the Conservatives 'wasted' a lot of votes running up the popular vote scoreboard in Alberta and Saskatchewan.
I agree, but arguably switching to multi-member districts entails replacing FPTP. (Another way of looking at it is that closed party-list PR, single non-transferable vote and/or multiple non-transferable vote are generalisations of FPTP to multi-member districts. The non-transferable vote systems have a lot of disadvantages.)
True, but given that the vast majority of canadians voted for progressive candidates (green, ndp, and liberal) it's unlikely the conservatives would do better under a more fair voting system... in fact a lot of the seats they have are the result of more vote splitting on the left than the right.
Edit: i crunched the numbers.
If you pool the green + lib + ndp votes from this election, conservatives end up with only 69 seats. The reality probably wouldn't be that bad for them, since some large percentage of Liberal voters would pick Conservatives as their second choice over the NDP or Greens... but it gives you a lower bounds. i.e. they would be somewhere between where they are now and 69 seats.
That's a fair point, but it's worth noting that FPTP risks vote spitting and handing power to the wrong party. Perhaps they cancelled out in this case, but these problems often don't cancel out. These problems reduce voters' equality, power and choice, even where they do cancel out in terms of election winners.
Totally agree. I'm very much in favour of using almost ANY system other than FPTP. I'm only arguing that calling the conservatives the "party with the most votes" is a distortion of reality enabled by FPTP. They have the most votes of any single party, but their _ideas_ have far fewer votes than progressive ideas.
FPTP systematically underrepresents left-of-centre voters in legislative elections, due to their concentration in urban areas and due to their votes dividing between parties.
"Just got back into power" after telling people to vote strategically to ensure the Conservatives (which only have support of 1/3 of the electorate) wouldn't get into power.
Basically this was Trudeau scrapping electoral reform, thus making it possible for Conservatives to have a majority again. Then asking real progressives to vote Trudeau, because otherwise they may split the "left" vote. And it worked for Trudeau, but damn it's cynical.
I seriously don't get the obsession with using a referendum to change the electoral system. Who came up with that idea? Better to change it, and then maybe seek endorsement after a couple of terms.
The point of a referendum is to stop change, not to get good, publicly endorsed change.
This sounds exactly like the "electability" arguments for candidates, which is kind of ironic. "Don't vote for Ms. Borda! She might be better but doesn't have a chance. Mr. IRV is the only one who's electable, so hold your nose and vote for IRV!" Nope, doesn't sound any better when it's about voting systems than when it's about candidates. Maybe we shouldn't be all FPTP about which system should replace FPTP.
Unfortunately, the likely way we will choose voting system is FPTP, so we MUST vite strategically. It'll be wat easier to get Borda or whatever once you have a non-FPTP voting system
For me, my main schismatic infighting is that "approval voting" ballots might not forward-compatible with ranked systems (IRV, Condorcet, etc.)
In other words, if we're going to go through the trouble of upgrading ballots and machines and voter-training, let's at least do so in a way that doesn't close the door on that other universe of possible schemes due to a minor technical limitation.
There's no need for voting machines, at all. As shown in Scotland, it's perfectly practical to hold an STV election with voters ranking candidates by writing numbers on their ballot papers. This can be adapted straightforwardly to approval voting, IRV, etc.
Also, Scottish voters use four different multi-winner voting systems, showing that even the problem of voter education isn't insurmountable.
Without diluting the abusive level of control the two parties have over the system no change to how you count votes will matter. simply put, the two parties do everything they can to prevent competition including hiding behind dishonest campaign reform proposals to "protect us" where in fact they want to only protect themselves. if anything all campaign reform efforts should only apply to those who hold office, not those who seek to unseat them.
from in office politicians having unlimited access to US Mail and nearly unfettered access to media the ability of other parties making a real challenge is near nil. so watch carefully for the tweaks to any proposed changes to voting, redistricting, or reform, because you can guarantee if you read between the lines it all boils down to protecting the two parties
> IRV may not be perfect, but it is heaps better than the current system.
This is probably not true. If you look at Voter Satisfaction Efficiency [1] if people are voting tactically then IRV actually does worse than the current system.
Approval voting is much more robust, and does very well even when people vote tactically.
That result is a rather strange anomaly. As far as I can tell it's not explained. Given that the system of ranking this is based on a simulation of agents, it may be unwise to jump to any conclusions about what "strategic voting" looks like here.
Shortly after the 2016 election I did some research into election and social choice theory. First-past-the-post is clearly the worst system possible. But ranked-choice also has strange artifacts where voting for your actual favorite as your first-rank choice means they might have a lower chance of winning.
A much simpler method in my opinion is approval voting: the ballot instructs, "Who do you think would perform the duties of the office to your approval? Check all names that apply." Then whoever gets the most checkmarks in aggregate is the winner. No spoiler effect, easily-understood vote tallying system, and reflects true approval in the population of voters. It can be adapted to multi-seat races just by taking the top n winners.
Ka-Ping Yee simulated elections using a number of recognized methods for counting votes[1]. I believe that the best system will be one which is easily-understood at the ballot box and behaves as similarly to the Condorcet method as possible. According to these simulations, it appears that approval voting is the best.
No election method will meet all the requirements for an ideal one[2] so it comes down to which conditions you want to enforce and which are less important. IMO, monotonicity is very important while the later-no-harm criterion can be interpreted as a compromise which is necessary for strategic voting.
This algorithmic instability isn't merely of academic interest, it was encountered in the 2009 election for Burlington's mayor [0]. Note that IRV advocates don't see this sort of discontinuity to be a problem [1]. Perhaps we need something like Star Voting [2], which seems to be an improvement over range [3] or approval [4] voting. Star Voting is rather new and could use analysis, like Ka-Ping Yee's and Nicky Case's efforts.
I always recommend this pair of videos when discussing STAR voting vs other alternative systems. The first video is an easy-to-follow explanation of how spoiler effects can happen in both plurality voting and IRV [1]. In the second [2], the guy who created Star voting applies Ka-Ping Yee's methods to Star voting and animates it side-by-side with alternative systems to show its performance.
Interesting, this must be relatively new. They introduce a slight modification to IRV that mitigates its artifacts. But you can see even in the video that some remain.
I'm not sure if or why people might feel more satisfied casting their votes as a partial ranking versus as a binary approval. But it seems like STAR works great for the former group, approval for the latter.
Star voting (along with Borda) introduces intensity of preference, which introduces extra concern when we're talking about democratic elections.
For instance - in a 99-voter election, say that 50 voters prefer A, and 49 prefer B. But the A supporters are lukewarm in their support, while B supporters are really passionate. Who should win? For democratic elections, that answer always needs to be A.
STAR has a 2-phase mechanism. The 1st phase, by intensity, is used to determine the finalists. In the 2nd phase -- the actual vote -- it is one person one vote, regardless of intensity. By your example, STAR poses no problem -- both A & B would be the finalists by intensity. Then, A would be chosen by majority. Anyway, it's examples like this that could use some analysis & help visualization.
addendum: if a candidate has broad, but shallow support, they'd not make it in FPTP nor in RCV. Even so, it'd be great if we could have visualization tools /w STAR voting included so that we could point to specific examples and have fun arguments about them. Perhaps there are some very weird discontinuities in STAR voting as well.
Yeah, I know, but is it possible for a candidate with broad shallow support to be boxed out of the top two? There's no pure reason to have a cutoff point there, it's arbitrary.
Was going to say exactly this. STAR is basically approval with the added metric of approval amount, which I personally think is important, and has the benefit of being similar to something people already understand (star ratings for products/services).
I feel logically the amount would just be embedded in people's vote of approval. Since score is the average anyways. Most people would probably approve of all 3+ amount, and won't approve of who they would have scored 3 or less.
It gets weird making the 0s and 5s, and the 1s and 4s fight I feel. Since those are just ultra polarized candidates.
It depends what we want to optimize for, but I think most people would agree that we want to avoid having a very large number of absolutely discontent voters. So I think a system which either makes the least hated candidate win (even if no ones favorite), or makes an overwhelming favorite win, is what we'd want. That way we minimize the number of people who are absolutely disgruntled.
> It depends what we want to optimize for, but I think most people would agree that we want to avoid having a very large number of absolutely discontent voters. So I think a system which either makes the least hated candidate win (even if no ones favorite), or makes an overwhelming favorite win, is what we'd want. That way we minimize the number of people who are absolutely disgruntled.
If the least hated candidate wins, I worry that they would lack the mandate to get anything done. I'm not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing.
I'm not sure why that would be the case. Why would they face any more opposition than any other candidate being elected would to put in place their electoral promesses?
In fact, I'd expect less opposition, since more people approved of their proposed platform.
As someone who did some academic research on the subject, I second this. Approval voting is the one which makes most sense, as it is a method which lies on the pareto curve of "optimal" voting methods. On top of that, it is also easy to be understood by the laypeople and easy to perform the counting (so we do not need to resort to "SPOF" machinal counting).
Oh fantastic, I hadn't realized Nicky Case did a post on this too!
The chart at the bottom demonstrating the range of "Bayesian regret" caught my eye when I first started looking into all of this 3 years ago. It roughly measures aggregate societal satisfaction with respect to the result of the election versus their own preferences. Strategic ballots in approval voting reduce to FPTP -- there's not really much room for a concerted effort to sway an election one way or another, since this strategy will be shared by large swaths of each candidate's voter base and so is roughly negligible. And people will feel that "their voice is heard" which I strongly encourage as political engagement is contingent on feeling like it's worth it.
As a casual observer, I wonder why ranked-choice captured the mind share when people who are passionate about voting systems seem to universally prefer approval. Maybe there's something about voting for multiple candidates that just doesn't sit right with people?
In my experience, when you ask people to do approval voting, they seem to rank the candidates then try to figure out where to put the cutoff between the approvable candidates and non. The system doesn't give any guidelines on where the cutoff goes, so people recoil because they feel like they're doing it wrong. The fact that people can set arbitrary cutoffs and it'll work out in aggregate is pretty surprising.
This may be too cynical, but I have to wonder if it's because of its flaws that the two parties in power are allowing RCV to gain ground. RCV eliminates the spoiler effect for non-competitive third-party candidates, but conveniently fails to do so when third parties start to become threatening.
Approval voting, on the other hand, always allows people to show support to a third-party candidate without risking throwing away their vote....
In my mind it's something a little more subtle but to the same effect. I think that ordinal and cardinal voting systems attract/repel people with different psychological tendencies, probably not unlike the tendencies described here, related to tolerance for uncertainty: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3092984/.
Ordinal systems impose a strict rank on peoples' choices, whereas cardinal systems allow people to settle on superpositions of choices, to explicitly give up control.
To me, being forced to order my choices is an unfair imposition. I want to be able to say "I'd be okay with fish or vegan food, someone else who cares more should make the final call". I don't want Rob Richie telling me that I should vote for fish over vegan food because I happen to really like fish. In doing that, I'd be alienating my vegan friend, and because I'm totally up for eating vegan food, I find it unacceptable to be pressured into ranking one over the other. This is the very dynamic that creates splitting, and I'm offended by it.
Being forced to rank my choices is unnatural to me, but I've heard ordinal voting advocates claim that ranking choices is natural and intuitive to everyone/most people, even after sharing my position that it feels funny. Go figure.
I'd expect ordinal voting advocates to be more likely to agree with statements like "everyone has a favorite color".
A good ranked choice system like Schulze, avoids that issue.
You can give multiple people the same rank, to express no preference between them. So you could have two or more choices you don't want to express an opinion between both marked 1, then perhaps the lesser but still acceptable candidates marked 2, the unacceptable candidates as 3, and extremely unacceptable candidates as 4.
Meanwhile, somebody else can come along and rank all the candidates with a unique number if they prefer.
In Schulze, all the numbering is doing is expressing who you would pick in a one-on-one race any pair of candidates.
Ranking candidates the same (tied), simply means you would have left that question blank on a traditional FPTP ballot because you don't care which of the two wins, either because you find them equally good/bad or you feel they sufficiently close that you would prefer to let those who care more decide.
For example, I don't own a home, or have kids, so i will usually leave school property tax levy questions blank. I may have some super slight preference one way or another, but I'm mostly unaffected, so I will let those who actually care about this decide.
Maybe I'm just projecting, but I think the expressiveness of being able to rank candidates appeals to the same type of informed voters who would advocate for electoral reform.
One reason is constitutionality. The "One man, one vote" principal likely has to be upheld for a voting system used in the US to be ruled as constitutional.
I don't think it's obvious that FPTP is the worst. It has the advantage that it forces coalitions of voters to figure out their bargain before the election rather than after. The party that can eliminate factional infighting will stand a better chance at winning elections than two sets of people with substantial overlap but who are still trying to beat on each other.
That is part of what was at stake in the 2016 US Presidential election. Both sides were deeply divided, but one side decided to pull behind its candidate despite that, and the other one was still at odds with itself. The third candidate wasn't on the ballot, but his supporters were still carping from the sidelines. That would have been even louder had he actually been on the ballot. It's possible that some alternative system would have brought out enough additional voters to put one or the other over the top*, but it seems at least as likely that they'd develop even more bad blood in public.
You could explain to them that an approval or second choice for their semi-aligned opponent would leave them better off, but the longer they continued to fight, the more likely they'd just consider each other enemies rather than friends. Either way, their opponents who came behind their candidate would have an easier time attacking both at once.
My point isn't that the alternative systems are bad, but that in the end every election has exactly one winner, and that winner will always represent a coalition since people never see exactly eye to eye. They have to work out the rules of that compromise at some point, and the advantage of FPTP is that they get to do so among themselves rather than mixing it in with the broader contest. Those who do so will find themselves at an advantage regardless of the system.
[0] And yeah, that's made even more complex by the weird double-aggregation system they have going on, but that's a somewhat separate issue.
I completely agree that this is better than nothing and some sort or ranking would be good, and that IRV is not great. But
Borda count is vulnerable to very bad tactical voting. People will put candidates who "can't win" above people who they like better but don't want to win. And when this goes wrong you'll have people elected who no one wants. See this chart, showing that fully tactical Borda is abysmal :http://electionscience.github.io/vse-sim/vse.html (from http://electionscience.github.io/vse-sim/VSE/)
If we're going to do rankings we should use something that meets the Condorcet criterion, but overall I think Approval is probably the best for its simplicity.
2nded for Approval. While it may be suboptimal at capturing preferences, it has the advantages of being easy to count, and easy to explain: whoever gets the most votes wins, end of story. Most importantly, effectively nothing changes for those who want to vote a straight major-party ticket.
I used to think this, and then I tried describing it to a room full of educated people -- some with advanced degrees -- and persuading them it was better than plurality for the system we were setting up for a nonprofit board.
It's certainly possible I was the point of failure, but everyone kept getting concerned about each person having multiple votes
"Like, what if someone cheats and gives all their votes to one person?"
"You can't do that, it's approval voting, you can cast one approval vote for each candidate"
"But that means each person can vote for multiple candidates!"
"Yes. Every person uses their ballot to indicate which candidates they find acceptable."
"But what if I like one candidate more than all the others?"
"Then you can either vote for them and everyone else you think would be OK, or just vote for them."
"But what if someone else votes for all the people I don't like."
"How is that different from people voting for a candidate you don't like now?"
"Well, they can only pick one candidate I don't like now."
I understand no voting system is perfect, but I was not expecting this one to be such a hard sell.
Interesting, I wouldn't have expected that either. I wonder if the "some people get more votes" concern disappears if reframed from "vote for you who approve", to "vote yes or no for each candidate". In a 7-candidate race, it's not that one person casts 1 vote, and another casts 4; both cast 7 votes (1-6 vs 4-3).
I suspect we're so conditioned to treating votes as exclusionary/zero-sum, the mere idea of one person ticking multiple boxes can easily trigger instincts for fairness / cheater detection.
I like the frame! Would love to have thought of that then, my intuition is also that it has a lot of potential to carry the idea, likely better than my various diagrams of tally marks.
This makes me wonder if the relative complexity of IRV makes it paradoxically easier to sell. People tuning out the details and deciding based on stories of past elections that could've been different, plus their impressions of the advocates.
I think Range Voting is easier to pitch. You vote each candidate on a 5-star basis similar to your ride sharing and delivery apps. As a bonus it collects more fine-gained data per voter.
The solution for having minority representation is to use some sort of proportional representation with a multiple-winner system. But, in elections that can only have one winner (i.e. for president, governor, mayor, etc...) there's no way around the risk that a majority of people have bad opinions. That's not a problem with the voting system, but with the electorate.
Or you do what parliamentary systems do and have the executive position be chosen by the elected representatives, and try to set it up so that minority representation still has to be taken into account to "form a government" as the Brits say.
This is a problem with democracy in general; while constitutional constraints theoretically limit the damage the majority can do, in practice "the fox guards the henhouse" with regard to reifying those constraints.
One can easily envision scenarios where the milquetoast centrists defeat stronger positions that would otherwise have won in a two-party, lesser-evil scenario; on the other hand, it could just as easily break the other direction.
I'd argue that incentives towards consensus building are net wins for minority voters (in all senses of the word), because it puts the maximum number of voters in play for each candidate. Right now, there is a very real sense in which Texas Democrats and California Republicans have very poor representation; 49% may as well round to zero. (Proportional representation is also worthy of consideration here.) Putting those votes in play for third parties and independents makes candidates more responsive to the whole electorate rather than chasing a small number of swing voters.
Even if I manage to gain 70% support of voters, it will all be for naught if my opponent opens an even bigger tent at 75%. It shifts us away from thinking of politics as a zero-sum game.
Approval voting is too similar to FPTP. Enough voters will continue to mark a single box that you're not better off in practical terms. Major candidates will aim to muddy the waters because they won't want "leakage" to third parties.
Even if 70% of people Bullet vote Approval still has a very high Voter Satisfaction Efficiency. Its simplicity makes it very robust to tactical voting.
VSE is based on simulation and gee whiz, seems to favour those awfully enthusiastic range voter folks who assume we're all going to do some calculus in the voting booth.
IRV has actually been used. Thousands of times. At multi-mega-votes scale.
For what it's worth the people behind VSE primarily advocate for Approval Voting: its very simple while performing almost as well as much more complex systems
I agree, IRV actually provides psychological reinforcement for ranking all the candidates - I'd rather voters over vote than under vote... and we can assume a lot of poor voters since voter education (and general education) is a serious issue in the US.
The proximate problem in US elections is the spoiler effect, and Approval solves that as effectively as any other system. We won't have to have endless debates about whether Nader voters "would have" voted for Gore. We'll know for sure.
People's votes aren't spoiled because they will always approve of their preferred candidate and the singular mainstream candidate. Because of this, one of the two mainstream ones will always win. So there's basically zero chance of the non mainstream candidate to win, even if a majority of people would pick them as their #1 choice.
> People's votes aren't spoiled because they will always approve of their preferred candidate and the singular mainstream candidate. Because of this, one of the two mainstream ones will always win.
This is demonstrably untrue.
Minor parties are represented in every legislature in Australia, including in single-member lower house electorates.
In California, the governor recently vetoed legislation that would have allowed most cities to use ranked-choice voting. His explanation is a bit odd:
> Ranked choice is an experiment that has been tried in several charter cities in California. Where it has been implemented, I am concerned that it has often led to voter confusion, and that the promise that ranked choice voting leads to greater democracy is not necessarily fulfilled.
Newsom's own San Francisco is one of the places that has used ranked-choice voting, and I've not once heard of voter confusion. So the explanation seems rather disingenuous.
I worked as a poll worker in San Francisco during the 2016 elections. I answered so many questions about ranked choice voting that I got tired of it by the end of the day. I would guess that more than 50% of voters were somewhat confused. Some of them were so confused that they botched the ballot twice, and had to return to the desk to pick up new ballots. Other times, the voter thought they had filled it out correctly only to have it rejected at the voting machine. These problems definitely increased queue times and size of the waiting line.
Newsom may have other motives but I don't think his explanation is disingenuous.
Do you have any sense for whether the confusion was related to ranked choice itself, or a poorly laid out ballot?
When rolling out ranked choice, I would expect to need lots of additional messaging before and during polling so nobody is surprised. And also a complete re-evaluation of the ballot's layout to ensure it's usable. I have no idea if either of those happened in CA.
Edit - looking at TimJRobinson's post below, if that's how CA cities laid out their ballots, I'm not surprised there were many errors. That sea of bubbles is hard to read and very easy to apply a pen mark in the wrong place. At minimum, the bubbles themselves should be filled with the number which they represent.
I think this is because how it's implemented. In the USA I've mostly seen it implemented as a grid of bubbles because it's better for machines to process, and I found it pretty confusing at first (see https://www.fairvote.org/rcv_ballot_design), imagine this for 20+ candidates like Queensland often has.
I think the Australian system of writing the numbers in boxes is way easier to follow, though I don't know what happens if you fill them in wrong.
The ideal solution IMO is a touch screen machine with a list of candidates, you drag and drop your order of preference, then when you're done it prints out a paper ballot which you can double check is correct then drop in the ballot box.
It just a better democracy because it's more representative.
It's solves the "wasted vote" problem people have with democracy and why many democracies result in a two party system. This way it ensures your vote is counted and multiple parties exist.
Actually, that's a form of Proportional Representation. What's being adopted by NY still results in one winner, not a percentage of seats awarded based on the percentage of votes a party got.
Instant Runoff Voting is essentially STV in the degenerate case of single seat constituencies rather than multi-member ones. So you're both right! It is in some sense the same system, but it plays very differently in that the results are majoritarian rather than proportional.
Generally, I think it's accepted that IRV is a good choice for multi-member elections. But for these kinds of US single-winner elections, that's where its flaws come out.
Although instant run-off and other ranked or "preferential" voting models are an improvement over plurality, we should be advocating for better and simpler models such as approval voting or score voting. Approval and score voting are cardinal methods that do not require that the voter order their preferences. Preferential models such as IRV require a strict preference order be specified by the voter and are much more complicated.
My go-to resource for voting reform is the Center for Election Science [1].
Perhaps the worst feature of IRV is that it's non-monotonic, meaning that in some cases, voting your sincere preference can actually hurt your preferred candidate. See the linked part of the video in [2].
Certainly a small step in the right direction. But what's really needed to give voters their voice is Proportional Representation. That's were the legislative houses are made up of parties given the percentage of seats based on the percentage of votes they received.
Ranked choice voting still results in a "first past the post" system, where significant portions of the voters (up to 49.999...%) get no voice at all.
Germany has a system where part is determined by the votes percentage but then there are also some seats that can be won by winning a district. I think this works pretty well.
In general the US needs a system where if you a certain number of votes you get some level of representation. For example it’s real bad that Perot won 20% in the 90s but these votes got zero representation. .
The House should have more seats anyway. We only have 435 because of the Apportionment Act; the Constitution allows for no more than one Rep per 30,000 people.
Which would mean we should have up to something like 11,000 representatives given our current population. Clearly something is wrong when the average representative:constituent ratio is 1:700,000! It was originally 1:34,000.
11K is perhaps far too many to be manageable, but 435 is clearly far too few.
Edit: the 14th amendment may have changed this math before the 1911 Apportionment bill fixed it at 435, but 1:700K is still far too high.
If each state sends representatives according to proportional voting, we would quickly see other parties gaining some seats.
Those other parties will probably grow and even gain seats in the senate. At some point you won't need the support of all parties to break a fillibuster.
I agree, and re-reading my post, I don't see where I implied otherwise. In fact, I actually specifically said it would apply to the legislative houses. Just posting this as confirmation in case anyone else got the impression you did.
My comment was because of what the article is about: "mayor, public advocate, comptroller, borough president and members of the City Council, starting in 2021"
Maybe you could do PR for City Council, but the other positions are single person positions. I thought your comment was related to the article, which is why I replied like I did.
Also, however... PR has its flaws... it makes the party the unit you are voting for, not the person. Maybe you like one party member but not another; with PR, you can't make that choice, the party does.
M–M voting preserves individual districts, but it eliminates the effects of gerrymandering by using extra seats to make up for any discrepancy between the proportion of districts a party won vs the number of votes. Gerrymandering is, of course, a huge problem in the US, and M–M voting offers a way to kill two birds with one stone, so to speak.
Ranked Choice Voting is sometimes called Instant Runoff Voting when used in a single-winner election. But it can be used in multi-winner elections.
If it's used for a multi-winner election, it gives results that are proportional in representation. For instance, this is how it's used in the city council elections in Cambridge, MA. Sometimes it's referred to as "Single Transferable Vote" when used for multi-winner elections.
"Ranked Choice Voting" is an umbrella term that refers to the ranked ballots, round-by-round elimination of candidates, etc.
For any polisci folks out there, does ranked choice voting still encourage a bipartisan system, or does it theoretically encourage more parties to specialize to single-issue parties where voters essentially rank their issues on the ballot, as opposed to voting all-or-nothing for a party that supports their #1 issue but none others?
Yes it encourages bipartisan voting. It encourages 3rd party voting only when you know the 3rd party will be eliminated before the two major parties, otherwise you risk your lesser-of-two-evils choice being eliminated instead. IRV for single winner elections is nearly as awful as first past the post.
Last time I brought up condorcet someone pointed out it has problems too, but they're not as bad. Switching all rep voting to multi winner, rather than one winner per district, solves some of the election problems (and makes gerrymandering a lot less significant), and for single winner like president or governor the ultimate solution is range voting which ends up strategically collapsing to approval voting. So basically people who want to can range vote, but practically everyone will vote Yes/max for all candidates they can stomach and no/0 for candidates they can't.
That seems simple but the obvious effect is that good 3rd parties can be voted for without "wasting" your vote. Therefore a few good third parties would flourish and start winning city and state elections, not just in crazy districts or once in a blue moon, but regularly whenever Reps/Dems have lost touch.
Thanks for the explanation! Do you have any info on how electing multiple winners works out in practice? Seems like it essentially shifts the complexity of disagreement from the ballot box to the halls of legislature... does it end up with more positive compromise to get things done, or more gridlock and stalemates? Do initiatives take more or less time to enact? Any effects on approval ratings?
My locality uses ranked-choice voting for its city elections. It also uses paper ballots. While I believe philosophically that this is a far more representative way of voting, the ballot was laid out as a giant matrix of circles to fill in. It was pretty daunting, even for me. I could see that ballot leading to serious issues for the voting rights of the elderly. It's vital that the right type of ballot is chosen for this to really work.
I almost feel that ranked-choice voting would need to go hand-in-hand with a switch to electronic voting machines (for a more clear and dynamic UI), which I'm philosophically against and comes with its own host of usability issues and problems with disenfranchisement. Hard to find a satisfying middle ground on this one. Has anyone come across a more reasonable paper ballot for this type of voting?
In Australia we write the rank number in boxes, I'm unsure what happens if you double up a number or the OCR machine can't figure out what it is.
The ideal solution IMO is a touch screen machine with a list of candidates, you drag and drop your order of preference, then when you're done it prints out a paper ballot which you can double check is correct then drop in the ballot box.
For single member electorates, the count is done by hand. On the night, they quickly allocate ballots to their first preference, and then they allocate them according to which of the two most likely winners is on top. (Usually, that means whoever came first and second last time, even if a repeat isn't all that likely, but with a powerful enough justification they sometimes make a different choice.) The full count is done by hand starting on Monday at the earliest. It may have to wait up to two weeks if it's close - government is formed on the basis of the unofficial, indicative counts.
OCR is mostly used for multmember electorates which aren't a problem in the US due to being prohibited by federal law (when they were used, it was block voting not proportional, so very badly antidemocratic). In that case, when the machines confidence is low, it gets done by hand.
Even if we insist on preserving traditional hand-counting of counting paper ballots, for good or ill, couldn't we use electronic voting machines to fill out paper ballots?
Some usability testing by FairVote suggests that the most usable ranked ballot design usable with existing scanning machines looks like this: https://i.imgur.com/oiBMZ22.jpg
It's possible to hold an election in which voters write numbers on the ballot papers, next to the candidates' names. The votes can still be counted by computer; that's how Scotland holds elections under Single Transferable Vote.
My concern with ranked choice voting is that it doesn't reduce the problem of splitting, it just obscures it from human view. My hunch is that data analysis methods will still be just as capable of manipulating RCV as they are FPTP. It'll just be harder to detect and reason about. Ordinal voting systems have certain game theoretical properties in common.
I'm a huge fan of non-ranked (cardinal) voting systems, as they don't force people to order their choices. Forcing people to order their choices filters out information about peoples' preferences and therefore distorts them.
My favorite voting systems are approval voting and STAR voting.
IRV does reduce the problem of vote splitting: if a candidate would win, but is then split into two or more “clones” such that all voters rank these clones in adjacent positions, then a clone still wins the election. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independence_of_clones_criteri...
Almost any change to first-past-the-post will be an improvement. To really give it teeth, we need a binding none-of-the-above-are-acceptable (NOTA) option. Anyone who loses to NOTA is not eligible for the runoff.
The real power of this is if you combine it with open primaries.
If you're in a competitive district, ranked choice allows you to prefer a less traditional candidate with no penalty, instead of worrying that you'll give away the election.
If you're not in a competitive district, open primaries mean that instead of voting for the candidate from the party you prefer (who is destined to lose no matter what), you can vote for whichever candidate you feel more comfortable with and have an impact.
With both, the more primary seats you allow in your open primary, and given ranked choice voting, the more likely you are to elect a candidate who genuinely lies somewhere near the middle of the spectrum of the electorate, instead of lying at the extreme of whichever party is in the majority of the electorate.
In case anyone here wants a quick primer on the differences between voting systems, or just something easy to hand to friends and relatives who don't have time for deep study, Politics in the Animal Kingdom by CGP Grey is a great start.
At least one of the videos has already been mentioned, but here's the whole series:
Third parties are not centrists, they are usually sponsored by some big brother. There’s a party that’s an arm of big labor unions, and at one point a billionaire had his own party.
IMO third candidates are almost always bad in the US system. We’re not a parliamentary system and I’ve never seen a third candidate who didn’t benefit the incumbent.
They can't be, game-theoretically, in our present voting ecosystem. The very premise is to capture voting preferences more accurately, such that broad consensus moderates become possible, and the spoiler effect is eliminated.
General elections usually aren't competitive in NYC, but this change also applies to primaries and public advocate, which can be very competitive.
This year, Jumaane Williams won the (non-major-party) Public Advocate position with 33% of the vote, against 16 others. The last time there was a mayoral election without an incumbent, De Blasio won with 41% against 8 others.
This has been used in San Francisco for city/county elections for a while now, and was recently updated to allow up to ten rankings for each office. I really wish it were used for other single-representative offices (governor, etc.).
I came here to see nerding out of epic proportions on voting schemes. Was not dissapointed.
Obviously - it's a tremendously difficult subject - and one that will not be easy to convince the general public on.
Moving away from FPTP is necessary - but how to make it happen? Given that any party in power - got there because of FPTP. they have strong incentive to keep it...
Ranked Choice Voting or Instant Run-Off voting could save the Union. It can crush bicameralism at the root, I really hope we can apply it on the state-level one day for Representatives. Districts and re-districting are more or less Jokes in today's world, due to Gerrymandering. The person in Charge of the whole left half of Colorado has the same number of people as the person in charge of a set of towns on the eastern ridge. It's not like you can appease such a wide area. Now, on the other hand, if all the representatives were accountable to all state regions, you could call any one of them and start getting progress on state issues. You could even ask them to work together. Would this help or harm? Hard to say. I think it would definitely help.
Completely disagree, instant run off voting almost universally protects the status quo, as it forces people to compromise their beliefs and vote for someone either to the right or the left of where they personally stand, leaving significant levels of disapproval in the legislature.
What we need is to eliminate the concept of districts within one of the houses for a bicameral state legislature, and instead you'd vote for a party slate. The current system where you vote for both legislatures by varying districts doesn't do anything to improve government and only makes things less democratic.
How does instant voting force you to vote for someone not perfectly aligned? You rank your choices from #1 to #10 or whatever. Wouldn't you agree that that's a finer grain filter than my #1 choice or bust? Voting for a party that has a ranked list of candidates is a nice idea, but that's what they use in Germany right? and I don't see it working all that well. Can you point out where this works well or better?
Here is a place where mathematicians miss the human psychology of run-off elections. It's true that in terms of the math, ranked choice voting is the same as having multiple run-off elections, but in reality, there is a practical difference. Many people have a first choice candidate that they study and get to know. They rarely know much about their second choice, or their third choice. If there was a run-off election between an opponent and their second choice candidate, people would suddenly pay much more attention to their second choice candidate. Their preferences might shift.
For practical reasons, I'd favor run off elections instead of ranked choice.
I've been thinking a lot about electoral reform after the Canadian elections yesterday.
I've been feeling really disillusioned about the likelihood of abolishing first-past-the-post because of the current incentive structures, but is changing the way we vote municipally maybe the beginning of the answer?
The barrier to get getting municipal electoral reform might be lower because of the general lower stakes, shorter terms, and because it's a more direct form of democracy.
If voters are used to voting with IRV municipally, get to understand it better as a result, and perhaps like the outcomes better, it might be easier to get a critical mass of the population to demand reform.
It is depressing how many discussions of voting systems in the US are (a) always being theorised from first principles instead of referring to a century of experience over thousands of elections at all scales from local to national, (b) focus on one (1) mayoral election as "proof" that IRV is "worse" and (c) assume that all counting methods are equal in terms of the logistics of actually counting the ballots.
As an Australian living in the USA it drives me fairly bonkers.
Changing the voting system in America will have little effect on the party system. However, the adoption of non-partisan runoffs like in Louisiana and California will have a great effect on the people who are chosen.
The current duopoly exists despite the voting system. Look at Canada and the UK, which have thriving national third parties and regional additional parites. And consider that NZ switched to MMP and Australia switched to IRV because of third party upsets. Canadians don't really worry if a vote for the NDP is a wasted vote - they vote NDP, and maybe their candidate gets up or maybe not.
The duopoly exists because various states basically have laws requiring it - granting special privileges like ballot access or membership of the state gerrymandering commission to the too two parties. There may also be a contribution from the fact that electoral districts have vastly too many voters.
Non-partisan runoffs increase the chances of a meaningful choice on voting day. IRV merely lets you vote for someone who won't get in. NPRV won't change the duopoly because that's required by law. But if you get a choice between the moderate Strawberry Pie party candidate and the extreme Strawberry Pie party candidate, you can get a good result from that.
Instant Run-Off may not be the ultimate voting system, but it is a incontrovertible step-improvement vs. First Past the Post.
The idea of marshaling your entirepopulation, and then discarding everything except their selection of the least-worst candidate is ... laughable or tragic? Comical, maybe?
Respect for basic thermodynamics demands that, at least, you discover your citizens' true ranking of preference, and respect that.
This system has been used in Australia longer than I have been alive so it should not be difficult for New Yorkers, and should be an improvement.
Another improvement would be multi-candidate districts (which would also be constitutional for federal elections except, of course, {vice,}president. In that case use not only the first but first n preferences.
I agree, but note that proportional representation with ranked-choice voting and multi-member districts doesn't require a different number of preferences or votes per voter. It simply involves transferring each voter's one vote if their first preference is eliminated and a fraction of it if their first preference is elected, and then repeating with second and subsequent preferences until all vacancies are filled.
one thing I think about a lot is that Australia has the sort of voting system that voting system nerds here in the US dream about. yet their political situation seems to be about as dysfunctional as ours.
of course first past the post is a pretty bad system and it would be good to replace it, but I don’t think it will make a huge difference to the overall political climate.
Australian chiming in. I think it depends on what you mean by dysfunction - the Australian electorate seems fairly evenly split between the two major parties, while adding some minor parties thanks to IRV (in the House of Representatives) and proportional voting (in our Senate). This has created a sequence of minority governments - where neither party has a majority in either chamber - or slim majorities in the lower house (where our Executive / Prime Minister is chosen from).
That does create some gridlock and there’s no clear mandate for a change of direction.
I think that’s still a fair ways removed from some of the major-party obstruction (specifically the GOP, and specifically Mitch McConnell leading the US Senate) which defines current US politics from the outside.
I think IRV is a good thing for promoting a wider array of voices in politics, but I don’t suspect it will do much to prevent inherent checks-and-balances from becoming partisan roadblocks to policy.
The wider range of voices in the upper houses is due to multi-member electorates, not preferential voting per se.
Australia's hung parliaments are historical aberrations; I expect that the historical pattern of clear lower house majorities to resume over time. The economics of bloc formation and ordinary logistics create constant pressure on any party. It's possible that Labor will be replaced by the Greens, or that they will form a permanent coalition like the Liberals/National/LNP/CLP chimera. But that will still be a de facto 2-party system.
I've thought about a voting mechanism where you'd get 100 'points' that you can divy up... you can also convert points to 'negative' points.
Say for example you had:
Sanders,
Warren,
Gabbard,
Biden
and you despise biden... but like the other two...
you could do something like :
Sanders: 50
Warren: 20
Gabbard: 10
Biden: -20
Then you'd add up all the scores, the negative 20 you gave Biden would cancel out a 20 someone else gave him in a positive sense.
This would probably need to be electronic to auto-calculate things as I'm sure many people might end up doling out 110% or 90% if they don't do the math right.
Could also have a button to auto-divvy if you have no preference, or auto-divvy by party if no preference as long as they're a democrat, etc.... I've not researched all the voting theories out there, but I'm curious if this type of system would work or not?
I'm not sure if IRV/ranked choice will work better, but I know what we have now is a major failure, so I'm excited that we're at least testing and willing to break things to get a system that works for more people.
In NYC, this is a democrat protection scheme.
In a few elections, one republican runs against a field of democrats. There's some concern that the Republican might win against a splintered field of Democrats -- can't recall it ever happening, but the Republicans, who are a small minority, are forever hopeful.
That's a feature, not a bug. Fair minority representation requires multi-member districts. I understand democracy as implying majority rule, and where there is only one winner, that should have majority support.
There should be multi-member districts where possible to avoid one-party domination, but in cases where there can be only one winner, isn't it democratic to allow a party with majority support to win?
Kind of depends if you believe that representation depends on people vs party. The party apparatus is controlled in a not-particularly democratic way, which strongly affects who gets on the ballot, and historically it was possible to win a major election with about 2% of the population of the district voting for you.
There was another proposal a few years ago to make local elections non-partisan.
Random ballot elections are the most representative.
California has an open primary, first two past the pole approach.
In practice this has driven a big move to the center. Two democrats past the pole first? The more moderate one wins. Two republicans? Again, more moderate one wins in general.
IRV with highly partisan primaries is still a losing game. Go to an open IRV process and you have gold.
• easier to participate in than IRV (IRV means lots of spoiled ballots)
• easier to understand the overall behaviour of (with IRV, the overall behaviour of the system is nearly incomprehensible)
• cheaper to implement than IRV (you can even keep using existing paper ballots!)
• able to eliminate the spoiler effect, which IRV does not
• able to reveal a reasonable measure of total support for each candidate (e.g. for analysis and news reporting), which IRV cannot
Ranked ballots also introduce bias. IRV means 5–10% spoiled ballots instead of ~1%, and guess where those spoiled ballots are? Disproportionately in poorer communities: https://www.yes2repeal.org/spoiled-ballots
For single-winner elections, approval is an excellent method, and in my opinion the best way to escape dysfunctional two-party control.
I am working on an application[1] and library[2] to create smalls polls using (so far) 8 different voting systems (approbation, borda, instant-runoff, kemeny, majority, minimax, schulze, two-round-runoff). Feel free to play with it, but it is still unstable, and I drop the database often times.
Condorcet.vote[3] is the only similar application that I know, it lets you use 14 different methods!
Can someone comment on whether this really does what we want it to do?
I recall reading that a similar system in Australia (or New Zealand or somewhere) didn’t enable third party candidates at all, which was explain because of something something math.
Ranked choice voting systems are still ordinal voting systems, just like first past the post. Which means it's still susceptible to similar kinds of strategic voting as the current system. Although it obscures them from being usable via common sense, I don't think it prevents algorithms with lots of data from exploiting them.
First Past the Post isn't actually an ordinal system. "Ordinal" is simply a synonym of "ranked choice". Arrow's impossibility theorem isn't relevant to FPTP, but that doesn't make it a satisfactory system.
> (It does reduce to an ordinal system in a two-choice election though!)
Yes. There was recently a two-choice election in the UK for the leader of a party that has ordinal voting as one of its policies. Amusingly, voters still ranked their choices rather than treating the election as FPTP.
That depends on the criteria, which could be "the candidate that most people accept/approve" (my personal preference), "the candidate that the most people will choose over all others", or something else.
The biggest benefit, and the biggest reason it will never happen, is that it would break the "two party system". There are many people who have an interest in keeping that alive.
Voting should be abolished; it's a relic of slow communications and travel times, and the voting mechanism has been gamed to hell and back by political rent-seekers.
We could either move to a participative legislative model like Wikipedia for legal code, or just get rid of legislative terms and require all legislators to attend district assemblies once per month or quarter where agendas can be discussed and legislators confirmed or replaced.
I'd just like to point out that representative democracy can coexist with other forms of decision making. For example, the revising chamber of a bicameral legislature could be populated by sortition, and there could be direct democratic voting in referendums on policies rather than on people. (Switzerland does the latter.) Strictly speaking, I think the other forms of decision making I have in mind still involve voting, just not voting for representatives.
Also, most developed countries have legislative elections that are more resistant to gaming than those in the US, UK and Canada are. (Switzerland is also one that has has an electoral system more resistant to gaming.)
The issue with the Canadian elections is simply the existence of districts. All this would do is make it safer to risk a vote for NDP, Greens, or Bloc, which would likely still result in worse results because Canada doesn't really have a coalition system the way other countries do.
Huge numbers of Canadians, on both "sides" of the (false) spectrum, voted for a less preferred (or even undesirable) candidate, because otherwise their vote would have been "wasted".
A vote for a preferred (but unlikely to win) candidate is effectively a vote against your 2nd-best strategic candidate (the one you'd prefer to win, if your ideal candidate can't achieve victory).
Basically, every time a voter dislikes one of the 2 leading candidates -- they are forced to not vote for their preferred candidate.
It is unacceptable and disrepectful to the voters -- but no "incumbent" party will ever propose or vote for "electoral reform" because it directly affects the likelihood that they will win re-election.
Even if you're a Liberal supporter, the last thing that you wanted to see last night was another Liberal majority. [1]
Their handling of scandals (Pre-black-face, which was a side-show) was absolutely atrocious, and they could absolutely get away with it, by closing ranks in Parliament. It's one of the big reasons for why the Cons gained 4 percentage points in the popular vote since 2015.
Another four years of an untouchable majority, and they would have stolen everything not nailed down, completely destroyed their public image, only to waltz into the polls, and find to their dismay that this results in another Con government.
Proportionate representation would give Canadian politics the kick in the direction it needs, but unfortunately, the Liberals went back on their promises of electoral reform, once they realized that it would cost them seats.
[1] Edit: It should be noted that Canada has a track record of reasonably functioning minority governments - so government will continue to be able to reasonably... Govern. What it won't be able to continue with, is closing is eyes and ears, to all kinds of cabinet impropriety.
Bloc is harder to categorize given it is a party mostly to promote one province's preferred policies. In general, their positions are fairly left wing because Quebec itself is quite left, but has a few oddball positions that skew right.
The utter contempt for Alberta (well, basically everything east of Ontario) was received loud and clear by western Canada yesterday.
Instant Run-Off voting is an absolutely necessary next step, but wouldn't have helped in this election; the non-Liberal vote already achieved about 80% (80%!) of the vote. A new non-leftist party (People's Party of Canada) got essentially shut out due to strategic voting; it would have been interesting to see the actual interest in a more "libertarian" party, but we'll never know -- that data is lost when citizens are forced to either vote strategicially or throw away their vote to an undesirable opponent.
#WEXIT is exploding; Alberta secession has a serious chance of being considered and voted on.
I can't comment on your statements regarding the attitude and feelings of western Canada (I am one of those Ontario peeps), but the numbers I saw put the non-Liberal vote at 67% (the liberals got 33% of the vote).
According to the current stats (all polls reporting) from https://enr.elections.ca/National.aspx?lang=e: the vote split between the top 2 ranked candidates (conservative vs. most popular leftist) was only 77.53%; sorry, my mistake. That includes the one riding that was won by the NDP.
Of course, popular vote percentages don't matter in elections; this illustrates, however, the level of generalizied disappointment with the powers-that-be making decisions against the best interests of the Alberta.
Very interesting this morning, is the extreme levels of contempt and dismissiveness being heaped upon any Albertan who dares to support the idea of separation; see #WEXIT. It's both embarrassing and potentially explosive.
Fortunately, Albertans have a long history of nodding quietly at derision and then going and doing something unexpected. We'll see what happens.
Alberta is ~12% of Canada's population, and has so far had an incredibly disproportionate impact on pulling national politics in its direction.
No national economic decision seems to be made, without figuring out what kind of compensation Alberta needs to receive, to bring it onboard.
BC, on the other hand, is the truly federally-ignored province. It's often not clear if it is considered to have any purpose, other then being a stopping point on the way to China.
The secession of BC would probably be in its provincial interests. The secession of Alberta into a land-locked petro-state would be an unmitigated disaster.
100,000 out of work while Ottawa porks eastern elite businesses, slapped in the face regarding shipping Alberta oil east, while the east actually imports Saudi blood-crude...
Albertans think everyone's super-classy, though! So, I'm sure it'll be no problem. Wait, while we're talking, let us write Ottawa that transfer cheque...
Nobody thinks its a great idea; westerners have traditionally been staunchly patriotic. But at some point, you leave the party where everyone hates you and laughs at you...
Hey, just wanted to say that I thought you were talking about the national numbers. Looking at the Alberta numbers (which is what you seemed to have meant) your original statement was basically true.
I agree with you that IRV is confusing, especially because it is non-monotonic (meaning it can actually help you to vote insincerely). Considerably better and easier would be approval voting, where you simply vote in approval of as many candidates as you want.
Just change the ballot from saying "vote for one" to say "vote for as as many as you like."
I'm quite familiar with Instant Runoff Voting (“Ranked Choice Voting” is a bad name that attempts to usurp the entire space of ranked-choice methods, of which it is very nearly the worst) and, whether intentional or not, the loser-elimination step makes it needlessly chaotic and produces worse outcomes than dropping that step and simply choosing first (and, if tied there, farthest).past the election quota without loser-elimination.
I agree on the naming. I wasn't actually referring to IRV, I meant ranked choice in general as I assumed the OP did (I may well have been wrong on that). I assumed as much because all ranked choice systems are "confusing" compared to plurality systems.
I'm not sure what you're suggesting by dropping the elimination step. Without the elimination step it is just first past the post. First past the post does not produce better outcomes.
I do agree that IRV isn't great though. Although you can do better in single seat constituencies, it's probably more viable to move to multi-seat constituencies.
What system(s) do you recommend for single-winner elections? What about Coombs' method or Condorcet systems?
I'm quite fond of IRV, partly because it isn't plurality voting and it's what you get when you reduce the number of winners to one under STV. Maybe the Schulze method and Schulze STV are the optimal choices.
> What system(s) do you recommend for single-winner elections? What about Coombs' method or Condorcet systems?
Condorcet systems are, IMO, analytically ideal (that is, any system that guarantees it chooses the Condorcet winner of one exists or a member of the Smith set otherwise is.) They aren't administratively ideal, though; particularly, they aren't straightforward to tally and sum (neither is IRV, really!). For that reason, I like Bucklin despite the fact that it is not analytically ideal in results.
Do you know of a proportional form of Bucklin voting? What do you think of the Borda count and the Quota Borda system? I believe they're straightforward to tally and sum (at least the single-winner form), and that between them they're suitable for both single-winner and multi-winner elections.
I wonder how important summability is. If voters submit paper ballots, why can't election officials scan them locally and electronically transmit them to a central location for machine counting? Couldn't that make non-summable Condorcet systems work?
> Do you know of a proportional form of Bucklin voting?
Since Bucklin is essentially IRV with the same thresholds and no loser-elimination, the natural proportional generalization would be essentially STV without loser elimination (you'd keep STV’s winner elimination, of course)—and you could, as for STV, use either the Hare or Droop quota.
> I wonder how important summability is. If voters submit paper ballots, why can't election officials scan them locally and electronically transmit them to a central location for machine counting? Couldn't that make non-summable Condorcet systems work?
Sure, they can function in the ideal case; it's harder to audit the results and because the relation between any kind of subset counts or other signals and the ultimate results is somewhat opaque, it's harder to even establish rules as to when you need to do a partial or full independent confirmation. This becomes a concern if you have worries about either internal corruption or external attacks on election integrity. Ballots that can be manually canvassed in public and simply aggregated leave less room to hide shenanigans.
If this were in place in 2013, it may have flipped the mayoral primary to Thompson, since he and Quinn combined had more votes than de Blasio, and both were more aligned with the centrist "machine" faction than de Blasio was.
There was also some form of proportional voting in place in the '30s and '40s when LaGuardia was mayor. It greatly weakened the Tammany Hall machine and brought independent voices into the city council for the first time. Then the Communist Party won a couple of council seats. Aghast, the majority quickly amended the charter to go back to FPTP in single member districts...and Tammany sprang back into dominance.
Many American cities had similar experiments with PR around the same time, and most of them "failed" for similar reasons, so for a time the only place in America with proportional representation was Cambridge, Mass., where of course the Communists would win a majority on the council regardless of what voting system they used. :P
I think it was just for the council, and mayoral races were always FPTP.
Fusion voting is the odd practice in New York State of allowing one party to endorse another party's candidate. For instance, in last year's election for governor, Cuomo ran on the Democratic, Working Families, Independence, and Women's Equality Party lines, while Molinaro was the Republican, Conservative, and Reform Party candidate. https://www.elections.ny.gov/NYSBOE/elections/2018/general/2...
Can someone walk me through this system? I'm thinking of the Presidential election of 1992, in which the plurality winner of popular votes (not majority winner), Bill Clinton, beat Bush & Perot. The final numbers were:
Clinton: 43%
Bush: 37%
Perot: 19%
I've always felt that the will of the people was that a conservative should be elected, whereas a minority of the population actually voted for Clinton. Under our system, of course, Clinton was the clear winner with 370 Electoral votes, but given the controversy surrounding the 2016 results, it bears reexamination.
With ranked voting, it stands to reason that most people would vote along ideological lines; most conservatives would rank Bush #1 and Perot as #2 or vice versa, while liberals would rank Clinton as #1. In this scenario, would Clinton still have won? Or would the ranked approach have awarded the Presidency to one of the conservative candidates? If the will of the people was that a conservative be President, then a parliamentary system would reflect that more accurately than our winner-takes-all approach.
In the scenario you describe, with 37% voting Bush 1 and Perot 2, and 19% voting Perot 1 and Bush 2, Perot would be eliminated and Bush would win in the final round of counting with 56%. (Other candidates receiving 1% of first prerefences between them would be eliminated before Perot.)
Then again, I suppose that not everyone voting for Perot would have had Bush as their #2 choice. Plus, a number of Bush supporters didn't like/trust Perot, especially after he backed out, then reversed himself and restarted his spoiler campaign.
Yes. In reality it might have been more complicated than I suggested. And maybe I read more into your comment than I should have. I do think IRV would have been an improvement over FPTP in the elections featuring Perot and Nader, though.
But, doesn't this permit a situation where a Democrat that wants to maintain the estabishment will go through the Democratic party, and someone that does not (who might identity mostly as a Democrat) can go outside and still participate in the primary?
There is still the problem with money and power corrupting the message (and the two party system wants to keep that power in place).
But, at least it provides options for alternative candidates if they are feel their integrity is worth more than party loyalty?
FPTP might be the worst, but IRV is a close second. Just like FPTP it gives significant artificial advantage to a certain kind of party. Specifically, IRV tends to elect a party that is most people's second-choice party.
You might think that's good because such a party will have to be more centrist than what FPTP is likely to elect, but centrist doesn't necessarily mean good. If there is no competitive pressure for a party to be good, it will not be good, centrist or not. It will be centrist but will become just as corrupt as the parties we have today, if not more.
That's because this centrist party will not actually face the higher level of political competition you'd expect from a non-FPTP system. It will get second-choice votes it needs for a win very reliably, because both right wing and left wing voters would rather take this centrist party they don't like than allow the other wing that they hate to win.
So with IRV you can easily end up with the same centrist party winning the election over and over and over again.
---
Since we just had elections in Canada, fun fact: the last time around our future prime minister, leader of a centrist party, promised an election reform if elected. After his party was elected, he revealed that he only wanted IRV, and would not have anything else. Now you know why.
yes, but maybe we shouldn’t let perfect or better be the enemy of what is actually needed (to paraphrase alan kay)
iow, what are the actual problems we are trying to solve, and what is the election system that is actually needed to solve it
the potential problem of choosing something “a little better” is that we could get stuck in another local minima, where further reform (that is needed) doesn’t happen because the new current system is “good enough”
You are correct, if you gauge things scientifically (on measurable outcomes) our system is, well, the best. There are always forces to make it more complicated, especially in the voting area.
BUT, the proposed system is specifically Instant Run-Off Voting (IRV), which does not make a centrist third-party candidate likely to win. Because it removes whoever gets the least first-place votes, the only improvement it gives is that a third-party candidate doesn't spoil an election, because your second-place vote will still count. (E.g. Nader wouldn't have taken votes from Gore, so Gore would have won instead of Bush.) But you're still stuck with one of the polarizing two-party candidates who will win.
Contrast this to the Borda Count [2], where points are assigned by rank. In this case, suppose about half of everyone votes first-place for an extreme liberal, and the other half vote first-place for an extreme conservative. But everyone votes second-place for a moderate centrist they can live with, and third-place for the opposite-party candidate they detest. With IRV, the centrist is ignored and one of the extremists will win. But with Borda, the centrist candidate will win.
So to really get away from the poisonous political polarization of our times, ranked choice is necessary, but it needs to be Borda or similar, not IRV. Still -- it's a start, and I'm grateful for that alone.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borda_count