Since some people here might interpret it as being presented as objective fact or some consensus opinion.

There are a lot of pros/cons to all of the richer voting systems, usually categorized as approval voting, ranked voting, and score voting, in terms of increasing information.

But there is absolutely no consensus that approval or score are better than ranked. (In my opinion, ranked comes out ahead, and I talk about why in another comment here.)

But most of all, ranked choice is what has the growing momentum, as a lot of reform organizations have concluded it's the best practical solution. But what's most important is that we adopt one of them, and it would be a shame to spend our effort squabbling over which alternative, than giving support to the one that has the most momentum and chance of succeeding now. We're really only even having this conversation now because of the success reform groups have had in promoting ranked voting.

I think the bigger shame would be to spend so much effort promoting RCV, only to have people become jaded and disillusioned with voting method reform in general when they realize RCVs many glaring problems.

The biggest problem with RCV IMO is that it looks like it eliminates the spoiler effect, but it really only eliminates it in simple cases where the third-party candidates are not competitive. This suddenly becomes very obvious and painful in cases like Burlington, 2009 or Alaska, 2022 where voters were told "RCV is great because you can vote honestly", only to realize post-election that this was entirely false, and that they threw away their votes and let the election go to a candidate they despise.

Trust is extremely important in political movements, and very easy to lose. I fear RCV is going to poison the well for any FPTP alternatives for a long time to come.

But all the voting methods have glaring problems, and every method is going to result in people complaining after their preferred candidate loses but would have won using another method.

RCV isn't going to poison the well any more than other systems. STAR voting and approval voting, for example, open themselves up to the criticism that voting itself becomes a subjective process, which could "poison the well" even more. When people have to worry about what it means to give a 3 vs a 4 to a candidate, or whether to approve 1 or 2 or 3 people?

Ranking candidates is an objectively accurate statement of preference (in contrast to STAR/approval which are subjective), and while instant runoff isn't perfect, it's easy to understand and doesn't result in absurd outcomes or people not understanding how to vote.

You can criticize RCV for sure, but if you want to defend another method, you have to show how its drawbacks aren't even worse.

I mean, I realize this is somewhat subjective, but "more people ranking a candidate first can cause them to lose" seems like a pretty absurd outcome to me.

I'm not saying approval voting is perfect either, sure it has flaws, but at least it doesn't violate the monotonicity criterion (or a variety of other important criteria that RCV fails to satisfy).

If approval voting reduces to bullet voting in heated contests, I don't see that as very bad: to put it crudely, it's just the cost of doing business with that particular voting method, but there's nothing to say the results are compromised as a result. What would be way, way more troubling for the general public is being able to say "but that candidate was the clear favorite, why did the runner-up get the seat?" after the votes are counted. RCV has real, provable problems that will (and have!) create social unrest and a skepticism of the election's results when something like the monotonicity criterion is violated, not to mention the spoiler effect is not completely eliminated under RCV.

Further I believe bounded rationality can be applied here and very many people would still take the approach of filling in more than one bubble even in "strategic" settings, because people aren't perfect rational utility-maximizing agents, and anyway I don't see an acute disadvantage of using approval voting if that's the biggest gripe people seem to have about it.

In short: think of elections in a more 21st-century-Nobel-winner sense, not in a rote 20th-century-econ-professor sense.

https://www.rangevoting.org/BulletVoting

From a voter perspective, monotonicity and favorite betrayer seem to be two of the most important factors when determining "absurd outcomes." At least in my opinion.

It sure does seem absurd, and so thankfully there's no case where RCV does that! :)

There seems to be a lot of misinformation thrown around about this, where people seem to be conflating different issues.

I'm not sure what your source is, but you might be misunderstanding the Favorite Betrayal Criterion... which seems counterintuitive at first but isn't really. There's a lot of noise made about the fact that moving a non-preferred candidate higher than your preferred candidate can help your preferred candidate to win... but it's actually because you're ranking your preferred candidate's main opponent even lower in the process. And also it's basically impossible to do strategically because you'd need to know how everybody else voted first.

End of story, there's nothing absurd about cadidate A winning, but if some people downranked candidate A from 2nd to 3rd rank, then that candidate would lose.

https://electionscience.org/library/monotonicity/ has examples of exactly that.

Score voting methods like star voting and approval voting are objectively superior.

https://electionscience.github.io/vse-sim/VSEbasic/

I’d love to see an actual paper of the methodology of VSE (the FAQ is less complete than I would like, but helpful in that it shows lots of problems – for instance, while the brief description claims VSE tests elections with “voters who cluster on issues in a realistic way”, none of the descriptions of the different voter models mentions any tie to any empirical research on how voters actually cluster, instead it simply models three different, apparently chosen because of intuitive/aesthetic appeal, empirically ungrounded, abstract ideals); there are several dimensions of it which seems quite subjective/arbitrary rather than objective, making its conclusions also arbitrary, and, worse, it seems to simply ignore known effects like cultural differences in applying rating systems without concrete grounding (which effects both score-based and limited-ranks systems, but not particularly forced-preference or vote-for-one systems.)

See the references on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_utility_efficiency

From https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-democrats-win-in-a...

> 40 percent of voters had chosen Peltola as their first choice, 31 percent had chosen Palin and 29 percent had chosen Republican businessman Nick Begich III. Under the rules of ranked choice voting, Begich — as the candidate with the fewest first-choice votes — was then eliminated, and his votes were redistributed to whomever his voters ranked second.

> Unsurprisingly, most of Begich’s votes (50 percent) went to his fellow Republican, Palin. But an impressive 29 percent went to Peltola, and 21 percent were “exhausted,” meaning there was no second-choice pick, and the votes were essentially thrown out. That combination was enough for Peltola to win. While Palin gained more votes from the redistribution than Peltola did, Peltola was starting from a higher total, and receiving 29 percent of Begich’s votes was enough to keep her ahead of Palin. In the end, Peltola received 51 percent of the votes counted in the final round, while Palin received 49 percent.

Sounds fair to me. Some of Begich’s voters expressed a “Begich or nobody” preference. Many Begich voters expressed a “Peltola over Palin” preference. It’s not clear to me why pairwise preferences are meaningful, they don’t encode nuances like the above.

The objection about the spoiler effect is confusing to me. I see that there are certain situations where ex post, you get some weird outcomes where _hypothetically_ ranking your preferred candidate lower would have helped your candidate. But I don't think it's possible to identify these cases ex ante, and I don't see how they can in practice affect anyone's voting strategy. (Though maybe it's enough to get bad press like https://electionscience.org/commentary-analysis/rcv-fools-pa...?)

I think you can spin these technical narratives like "you threw your votes away because, if there had been a head-to-head it would have gone differently". But taking a simple explanation of what happened like the above, it's hard for me to see why the result is actively unfair.

Now don't get me wrong, as a Democrat there is a part of me that is happy Peltola won, but this was clearly a pretty messed up outcome given that Begich was the condorcet winner and that Alaska is a very red state. Republicans are right to be upset about the way this election played out.

Now obviously FPTP also has the possibility of spoiler candidates, but at least in that case it's pretty easy to understand the situations in which you might be throwing away your vote. Do you think most of those Palin voters had any idea that they could have elected Begich by voting strategically? Complex, opaque voting systems like this are super bad for democracy IMO.

When Begich came out as the loser, every one of the votes he got went to the voter's #2 choice which was either Palin or Peltola (and a surprising 29% of Begich voters had Peltola as their #2 choice!)

The only people who "threw away their say in the outcome" are the ones who didn't rank their preferences. They basically opted out of having a vote if their one chosen candidate didn't win by not making a #2 choice.

It's very clear with ranked choice voting when you might be throwing away your vote, it happens only when you don't specify who your vote should go to if your first pick doesn't have enough supporters. Every single person who selected a #1 and #2 choice had a say in the outcome of that election.

And your second pick, and your third pick... right?

A big reason for electoral reform is to encourage a wider range of candidates to run, which means voters may be faced with having to come up with a total ordering across a dozen different options.

You seem to be saying that voters who aren't informed enough about their relative preferences for all available candidates, deserve to have their votes thrown away, or at least that voters who can remember an ordering for a list of a dozen names should be given more electoral power than their fellow citizens who cannot manage that feat.

That's maybe not the biggest distortion and potential unfairness in the US right now (with the electoral college and partisan gerrymandering being two aspects that courts openly accept, not to mention other more insidious methods of disenfranchisement) but I think that reform advocates need to be careful not to support the equivalent of "literacy" tests, which have a disturbing past.

Not at all, if we get to the point where people are having to choose between and rank 50+ different candidates I might agree there's a problem, but a handful of choices simply isn't. In the Alaska election they had just three to rank, since the primary weeded out the most unpopular others right away. There's also nothing to stop someone from bringing in a list of names and ranks compiled ahead of time. No need to keep your preferred ranking in your head. These days you could pull out your phone while in the voting booth, or have a small slip of paper in your wallet, purse, or pocket.

This might surprise you, but many many people aren't terribly informed about the candidates and still manage to cast a vote under our current system. This is especially true for local offices. That subset of the population can continue making poorly informed choices about a few more candidates than usual without much trouble.

I do appreciate that you're looking out for the rights of the illiterate voting population, but there's never been an easier time for illiterate people to get informed. Nearly half of the research into a particular candidate I do these days is in the form of youtube videos and radio interviews. It's admittedly slower than reading, but I do feel like I get a lot of information about a person by seeing and hearing them speak. Come voting day there are already poll workers prepared to assist illiterate voters with casting their vote as well and none of that will change under ranked choice voting.

You're completely right about the possibility of bringing a slip of paper, and I was probably over-estimating the scale of the burden there. I would like to point out, though, that we really don't want to normalize the idea of people bringing out their phones while in the voting booth, as that seems like a way to encourage vote buying or coercion (even though the victim/voter may have ways to circumvent this problem, and even though phones aren't the only way someone could take a camera into a voting booth).

> This might surprise you, but many many people aren't terribly informed about the candidates and still manage to cast a vote under our current system.

In fact that doesn't surprise me, as I was already aware of this fact, but I see it as an existing limitation of democracy that shouldn't be made any worse. The simpler and less ambiguous the question on the ballot paper, the more of an even playing field there is for all voters. I used to think that to maximize the chances of finding the optimal winner, an election should try to demand that voters enter as much information as possible on their ballot paper, but my view has completely changed on this. Even under FPTP, the election algorithm is being fed with thousands of bits of information, and the output only needs to be roughly 1 or 2 bits of information, so there is no harm in making the ballot papers as uninformative as voters are uninformed (as long as the algorithm encourages honest votes, and combines them fairly).

> there's never been an easier time for illiterate people to get informed.

I agree, but my reference to "literacy" tests was meant to convey the fact that supposed literacy tests have in practice been used as pretences to exclude voters who were likely to vote for a party other than the one administering the test. As such, my objection wasn't that illiteracy itself was a major problem, but that any unnecessarily complicated process could be seen as having a disenfranchising effect, which would undermine confidence in elections even if the effect were not significant, or be used as an argument to prevent the adoption of the reform before it was even used, either by people who genuinely care or by concern trolls. Anyway, for completeness, here is an example of a literacy test issued by the state of Louisiana:

https://www.ferris.edu/HTMLS/news/jimcrow/question/2012/pdfs...

People are used to casting ballots for their main choice, and if pressed I doubt most of the electorate would be able to describe the instant runoff process RCV enabled and you would be hard pressed to find a layman able to flesh out all the different scenarios of how their ballot would be counted in any particular close race.

Many voters don't have a preference for the people they vote for now. Many really do tend to fall back on voting for a party, and that option doesn't go away with RCV. I do suspect it'd be better (and easier) for each party to put forward only one candidate in each election, but as long as the list is narrowed down well enough by voting day it's not really a problem. In the Alaska election voters only had to rank three candidates which is perfectly reasonable.

> RCV ballots state that you can choose to vote for only one candidate.

And we should retain the option. Choosing one and refusing to rank the others is pretty much the same as voting against everyone else, or in the case where your one chosen candidate is removed, more like not voting at all. I don't have a problem with letting people make that choice although I have heard it argued that voting should be compulsory. I'm not sure if that'd require a rank for everyone under RCV or not.

> People are used to casting ballots for their main choice, and if pressed I doubt most of the electorate would be able to describe the instant runoff process RCV enabled and you would be hard pressed to find a layman able to flesh out all the different scenarios of how their ballot would be counted in any particular close race.

This is perhaps the biggest problem and it applies to literally any change we make to our voting system. We need to educate the public on how the new system works, or at the very least provide information so that the public is able to inform themselves. I can't speak to how well Alaska made an effort to inform their population about the new voting system, but I will say that there are some very good youtube videos that explain the idea behind RCV pretty well.

Following any change there is bound to be a little confusion, but with time and little effort on the part of the people I'm convinced we'll be just as comfortable with an improved voting system (RCV or not) as we are with the one we're stuck with presently.

You don't get to rank a bunch of choices and then claim your vote didn't get counted because every one of your choices didn't win the election. People who picked Palin as their #1 choice won against Begich. Their vote went to Palin exactly as they wanted. Palin lost, but the voter who put Palin first voted for the person they wanted and that vote was counted.

Voting for a losing candidate does not mean throwing your vote away or not having your vote counted.

A vote that is counted in the final contest of an election is not a vote "thrown away" even though the person they voted for lost. Voters have to be allowed to pick a candidate who ultimately doesn't have enough supporters to win an election. That's how elections work.

Palin voters didn't get their second choice preferences counted. If they had instead tactically/ insincerely ranked Begich first, he would have won by a 5% majority against Peltola. They were punished by voting sincerely for Palin.

Palin was a spoiler. People who voted for her threw away their vote, period.

If you want to argue that there should have only been one republican on the ballot to prevent a 'spoiler' you'd have to take that up with the republican party

But they forgot one crucial thing: people. Even within the party, there are members and candidates others can't stand. And if you're going to give people choices, you have to be prepared for them to make choices you don't agree with.

It seems possible that Palin lost due to voters incorrectly expressing their preferences by not putting a 2nd choice. If that is a routine thing, then it is indeed a problem with ranked choice voting in the real world, but it is NOT a structural flaw as you are claiming.

[1] https://electionscience.org/commentary-analysis/rcv-fools-pa...

[2] https://www.elections.alaska.gov/election-results/e/?id=22pr...

In a primary system, Begich doesn't even get to the general. So it becomes Palin against Peltola.

Begich can only win in a head to head matchup in a general election against any single candidate. He cannot beat the field, because he is consistently someone's second choice in the overall field.

With a cardinal ballot such as score or STAR, your argument could potentially hold water because we can glean the nuanced preferences from people's ballots. eg if someone ranked Palin 5, Begich 4, and Peltota 0, that's a very different story from Palin 5, Begich 1, Peltota 0, even though both of those ballots would look identical if they were squished into a ranked ballot format. The second case would support your argument pretty solidly since the voter didn't like Begich much at all, just a smidgen better than Peltota.

For the opposite scenario, consider if this race had been done with a 5 point score/STAR ballot where 40% voters give Palin 5, Begich 4, and Peltota 0, 40% voters give Peltota 5, Begich 4, and Palin 0, and 20% voters give Begich 5. It would be inexcusable not to elect Begich. Even though Begich was not the first choice for 80% of the population, an election like that would indicate such extremely strong support for him that you'll probably be inclined to point out that such an election would never happen in reality and I'm giving a contrived example. Which you're right, I'm not saying this is a likely scenario, I'm simply trying to illustrate how a compromise candidate could in fact be very strong, but RCV will still eliminate them if they don't have enough first choice votes. Placing a premium on people's first choice votes as RCV does is both unwarranted given the data represented on the ballots as well as harmful due to the issues it causes with monotonicity, not electing the Condorcet winner, etc.

If we want to insist on ranked ballots, we should be using a Condorcet method to count them.

Democratic second choice votes for Begich only exist because Democrats would prefer him to Palin. They don't want him so much as don't want her. And if they can't get Peltola, they much rather have Begich.

The only reason there's noise about Peltola's win and RCV is because she's a Democrat. Look at all the hubbub being thrown about trying to say Begich should have won. You'd rather the person who came in third in the general win. And don't think people wouldn't complain about that.

STAR is RCV/IRV with extra steps that doesn't scale.

There was a time, not too long ago, that both parties could accept losing an election. I'd like to see that come back.

> Peltola beat the field. In a FPTP system, she would have just won.

FPTP sucks and does not elect representative winners, that's exactly why we need to get rid of it. RCV is just iterated FPTP and as such, carries a lot of the same baggage and problems (while adding a lot of complexity and other new problems).

> He only wins when you eliminate all other choices except one opponent

No, this is exactly backwards. Begich is the only one in this race that can win without artificially eliminating someone (which is what RCV does by ignoring lots of information on the ballots). Peltota can only win by eliminating Begich as Begich wins in the head to head, in order to get this win lots of votes that voters expressed have to be discarded.

> Democratic second choice votes for Begich only exist because Democrats would prefer him to Palin. They don't want him so much as don't want her. And if they can't get Peltola, they much rather have Begich.

That's exactly the point, the voters farthest to the right prefer Begich to Peltota, the voters farthest to the left prefer Begich to Palin, and there's a few people in the middle who prefer Begich to both. Begich was the best candidate considering the whole field of preferences - admittedly a weak compromise candidate for some, but a strong compromise candidate for others and the first choice for many (and as I mentioned before, we can't know how many consider Begich a weak compromise vs a strong compromise candidate, anything you say about the sizes of those groups is just your personal speculation).

> The only reason there's noise about Peltola's win and RCV is because she's a Democrat. Look at all the hubbub being thrown about trying to say Begich should have won.

For some people, sure, but for those of us actually trying to push for positive change this has nothing to do with democrats or republicans. This has to do with RCV not electing the condorcet winner and having a non-monotonic election.

> You'd rather the person who came in third in the general win. And don't think people wouldn't complain about that.

Yes I would, if they win the head to head vs everyone else. You're still treating FPTP like some kind of gold standard. Sorry but that's not a good metric.

> STAR is RCV/IRV with extra steps that doesn't scale.

STAR has exactly 2 steps, a summation step and then a step to compare the top two winners. RCV is a whole iteration process and thus a lot more complex and a lot less scalable. STAR is also precinct summable, whereas RCV requires tallying in a central location which is another thing which makes RCV much less scalable.

You are trying to redefine "the field" to make it mean something not quite the same.

I'm not disagreeing that FPTP is bad. It forces us into these consolidated party situations. But the field is EVERYONE. At the same time. And you ask the voters, "Which one you like the most?" And that answer, in this case was Peltola. So Peltola beats the field. With a plurality, yes, but no one has a better plurality.

I'm not defending FPTP or treating it like a gold standard. But at the very least, the person who came in last in the general should not win the election. He's people's most second choice because for both groups where he is the second the second choice, it's only because they absolutely do not want the last person.

It's less, "He's a moderate I can live with" and more "At least he's not X". Where X is either a Democrat or Palin.

Republicans wanted a have your cake and eat it too moment. They were the ones who went with this process every step of the way until the second it gave them a result they didn't like. They kinda know that crazy wins primaries. But crazy also loses the general. So they tried to bank on getting Democrats to do the work for them. But the plan failed, because there were enough people that just like Peltola on her own.

RCV/IRV is fine. It's not perfect, but it's far better than FPTP and the results are rarely counter-intuitive.

STAR requires you to give a 0 to 5 to every candidate. The end result of the scores look a lot like RCV but with ties. Not to mention, every 0-n scale system devolves into essentially Y/N as people quickly glom onto the notion that they're the values that matter the most.

You can call STAR "two step" if you ignore the actual voting portion. That's the part that makes people work harder just to essentially rank their preferences.

Because in your scenario, all of those people have to prefer gaining their religious theocracy to such the degree that they're willing to lose practicing their religion at all to get it.

It's reductio ad absurdum.

It's not even that strong -- it's outcomes where ranking your second-most preferred candidate above your preferred one will help get that second-most preferred candidate elected, as opposed to a third one you detest -- if you know your most preferred candidate won't be elected.

Which makes sense, of course. But it's also "cheating" to manipulate the system if those aren't your actual preferences, and it wouldn't even work in practice because you'd have to know how everyone voted in the first place to know if it was worth it.

You're right, it seems fair to me too in this instance.

The opposite strategy would be like if Trump supporters voted for Warren to advance the weaker candidate against their guy.

The same strategy works in any kind of runoff method including instant runoff voting.

It sounds like the real problem here is education, which will be a challenge with any different voting system, and some a lot more so.

It will probably be better the next time around.

https://news.yahoo.com/sarah-palin-instructed-supporters-not...

Apparently some were instructed not to make a second choice.

Which, cynically, might be the reason it has achieved the level of adoption that it has so far. We at least have to consider the possibility that the current major parties will only (disingenuously) support reforms that will, in the long run, further entrench their duopoly.

Any fight against RCV is purely a republican fight against more equitable and realistic representation for americans. It's not hard to understand, as plenty of schoolkids use RCV every year for school and mock elections. It is strictly better than plurality voting in terms of getting more people elected that more people are at least a little happy with. It by and large results in a more represented public.

If, by some magic, we end up in a world where politics is a utopia and the extremely contrived "issues" with RCV finally are worth caring about, THEN we can move to replace it, which will be easier in an environment that allows more nuance to politics, like RCV does.

For now, RCV is an easy way to get a broadly better political system. It is currently only disliked by like 1000 turbonerds who spend their time making absurdly complicated voting systems to solve ever more contrived voting situations, situations that broadly aren't the problems currently facing the world, and every other opponent is a republican who either believes incorrect partisan rhetoric ("it's more than one vote!") or cynically understands how it will cause them to lose elections and for some reason think that's a bad thing.

Oh, republicans are already attacking it because of Alaska

https://washingtonmonthly.com/2022/09/06/sarah-palin-and-the...

It's also worth considering that the same parties who benefit from First Past The Post would be threatened by a change to literally any other system aside from FPTP or Ranked Choice Voting. Surely that comes into play when voting reform movements are funded. And surely that kind of "conspiracy talk" shouldn't be dismissed in an intellectual forum when there is a very clear path to how these reforms could directly affect very powerful parties.

Hello, I prefer RCV. Reasons:

- it is a stepping stone to proportional representation (achieved by adopting both RCV and multi-member districts), which is much more important than which single-winner voting system is chosen

- you need to be a fellow voting systems nerd to understand when you may want to vote tactically in RCV, so approximately zero people will vote insincerely

- it is really obvious that voting tactically is an option in approval voting, and so lots of people will vote insincerely and this will undermine the confidence in the voting system

- while single-winner RCV may not result in many more third-party winners (we need multi-winner RCV, i.e. proportional representation for that), it will change the kinds of winners for the two dominant parties, which is just as important. This point is always under appreciated.

- RCV has much more momentum behind it

I don't think this is true. Consider a hypothetical voter whose sincere party preference order is "Constitution > Libertarian > Republican > Green > Democrat > Socialist > Communist". It doesn't take very big of a logical leap to say "it basically always seems to be a Republican or Democrat who wins, so for my vote to count the most, I should vote Republican > Constitution > Libertarian > Green > Socialist > Communist > Democrat."

There are proportional methods for STAR and approval as well, there's no reason they couldn't be the stepping stones from this perspective

> you need to be a fellow voting systems nerd to understand when you may want to vote tactically in RCV, so approximately zero people will vote insincerely

Yet that doesn't try and stop people from duping voters into eg only ranking Palin, even though RCV is basically the only system where there is practically 0 reason to not rank additional candidates. Your point mostly makes sense but in practice I wouldn't expect high amounts of tactical voting in STAR either for similar reasons. And from another perspective - if someone were to eg bullet vote in STAR to help their first choice win, is that really tactical voting, or just an honest vote/admission that they care so much about their first choice that all other opponents are equally bad? In my opinion, being forced to grapple with compromise would be good for society.

> it is really obvious that voting tactically is an option in approval voting, and so lots of people will vote insincerely and this will undermine the confidence in the voting system

Possibly, although I think bullet voting is much less common than people think it would be. That said, people want to be able to express preferences so I think the best use of approval is in primaries where the top two candidates proceed to the general. Outside of that I'm kind of meh on approval, and if people have to choose between approval vs RCV or approval vs STAR, I expect RCV/STAR to win almost every time.

> while single-winner RCV may not result in many more third-party winners (we need multi-winner RCV, i.e. proportional representation for that), it will change the kinds of winners for the two dominant parties, which is just as important. This point is always under appreciated.

Will it? With RCV the two dominant parties no longer have to worry about the spoiler effect, so there is even less incentive to reach across the aisle and receive influence from a third party than before. Whereas before you might want to take some token talking points from a third party and siphon some votes from them, with RCV you might be able to assume you'll get those voter's 2nd choices for free.

Proportional approval voting is extremely confusing (and expensive) to compute the winner, people won’t accept a system that they don’t understand how it works.

> Yet that doesn't try and stop people from duping voters into eg only ranking Palin, even though RCV is basically the only system where there is practically 0 reason to not rank additional candidates.

It’s the first election where people used it so they will learn about that. Also some people might just want to vote for Palin and are indifferent after that. While I would fill out the entire ballot, most people won’t bother, and that’s fine.

> if someone were to eg bullet vote in STAR to help their first choice win, is that really tactical voting, or just an honest vote/admission that they care so much about their first choice that all other opponents are equally bad?

No it does not necessarily mean that, it could plausibly mean that they do have a second preference, but are afraid of giving them points so that they don’t overtake their first preference. Think of a Bernie, Hillary, Trump election where some Bernie voters don’t want to give high points to Hilary, even though they much prefer her to Trump, for fear of her beating Bernie. RCV allows them to confidently vote Bernie > Hillary > Trump and not worry about this problem.

> I think the best use of approval is in primaries where the top two candidates proceed to the general.

I think it would be best to ditch primaries completely and have everyone run in a multi-winner general election with RCV. So few people vote in primaries, so the highly engaged extremists influence the outcome for everyone in the general. Also why do I need to vote twice for the same position, it’s annoying. It would be nice to only need to vote in one election, the general.

> With RCV the two dominant parties no longer have to worry about the spoiler effect, so there is even less incentive to reach across the aisle and receive influence from a third party than before. Whereas before you might want to take some token talking points from a third party and siphon some votes from them, with RCV you might be able to assume you'll get those voter's 2nd choices for free.

It seems like you are talking about two things at once:

1. a major party moderating their position to get votes from the other major party

2. a major party taking a (more extreme?) position to get votes from a third party

When you say “reach across the aisle”, to me that means #1 above, i.e. Democrats and Republicans moderating their positions to appeal to the median voter. I agree that would be good and RCV does encourage that!

RCV doesn’t encourage #2, and I think that’s also a good thing.

I would love a robust multi-party system, but for that we really need proportional representation. Trying to get it with single-winner elections, no matter the system, isn’t a good approach.

Well that's the whole point I was making. In STAR if they really don't like Hillary but prefer her to Trump, they can vote Bernie 5, Hillary 1, Trump 0. Yes, they've very marginally increased the likelihood that Hillary reaches the runoff instead of Bernie, but in doing so they have ensured that in the runoff their vote will contribute to Bernie over Hillary or Hillary over Trump (depending who reaches the runoff). If they aren't willing to give up even one point on a 5 point scale in order to express that preference in the runoff, I'd argue that they have essentially admitted that their preference for Bernie to win is so strong that it overrides any of their other preferences. It's just an honest vote. It could perhaps be a miscalculated vote if they don't understand the implications of that kind of vote, but if they understand and still vote as such then it's honest.

If anything I consider this an advantage of STAR over RCV. Political polarization has gotten to a ridiculous point and we should be encouraging finding common ground. STAR helps facilitate this kind of dialog on a societal level while RCV implicitly tells people they can have their first choice without needing to find any common ground with other camps. In RCV there is not even the option to have your lower choices counted alongside your first choice in any given elimination round. STAR gives voters the ability to choose whether to compromise or not.

Using that as justification for why ranked choice should be adopted is circular reasoning.

Purely in theory, one would probably prefer a system where all voters have to rank all the candidates; in practice, however, all of voting, validating, counting, applying the rules, and understanding the rules is significantly more difficult than approval voting where a candidate's points is simply the number of times a voter has marked their name on the ballot. You can (generally or for more important decisions) amend approval voting with a quorum, minimum percentage of approval, or minimal distance between first and second places without damaging the system with too much complexity, something I cannot even fathom how to achieve with ranked choice.

I genuinely don't understand why people are so hardheadedly loyal to this one centuries-old poorly-designed voting system. Just because it's the first one they heard of? I don't get it.

You say pretty much any other proposal is better, plenty of other people say the other proposals mostly look even worse.

I don't understand why you ascribe this to "hardheaded loyalty" instead of people just genuinely disagreeing with you, and that they have good reasons for it. Honestly, from the tone of your comment it seems like you're the one who's unwilling to seriously consider the alternatives.

It's also a non-sensical claim, any voting system "ranking" depends on specifics of the electoral system. For example, larger multi-winner districts using some sort of proportional or Condorcet system are always better that any ranked or approval result in a single winner districts.

https://www.electionscience.org/library/approval-voting-vers...

There's nothing "objective" about it. Just because it's a number you can calculate doesn't make it the right number. Some people think it's a good metric for evaluating voting systems, but many others don't, and there isn't even remotely any kind of consensus that it's a good or even useful measure.

It's important that I say retrospectively. This was a house race with national coverage, tons of high-quality polling from pollsters with nothing better to do, and it was still absolutely not clear from that polling that Begich would do better than Palin in round 2, or that Palin was likely to beat Begich in round 1. If I had the opinions of those hypothetically strategic voters, and I were completely strategic, and completely tuned into that polling, I still would have voted honestly. The strategy was only apparent after the fact.

Thinking about "defense in depth" against this scenario, we'd be remiss not to mention Condorcet ranked choice voting methods, which always elect a Condorcet winner, and only resort to (game-able) elimination procedures if there isn't one. Not only would that have resulted in a better outcome in Alaska, it would have made the possibility of strategic voting much, much more remote, both because a strategic scenario would be much less likely, and because that strategic scenario would be much less visible before the election.

With score voting, strategies are always available and almost always obvious: just exaggerate your score differences between the most likely candidates. The fact that strategic dishonesty would have helped in Alaska is a fair criticism of IRV, but the real commonness of strategic scenarios in STAR and score are a more primary feature.

Arrow's theorem only applies to ranked systems. That said, cardinal systems are still susceptible to strategic voting (Gibbard's theorem)

When people think about strategic voting coming from a FPTP context, the strategy they're thinking of is putting in a dishonest vote for a non-preferred candidate because that provides a better chance at matching their preferences than an honest vote. This is not what Gibbard's theorem is about. Strategic voting in cardinal systems, for example, tends to look basically like dynamic range compression and at an individual level generally only "tiebreaks" between candidates that were otherwise fairly evenly matched, while the FPTP strategy of bullet voting a non-preferred candidate is just straight up bad for your preferences.

This still somewhat exists. For example, with score voting: preferences A>B>C but you really hate C, and he's leading in polls. It might be reasonable to "dishonestly" score B higher. This minimizes chances that C wins, and while it doesn't harm A it does decrease strength of your preference for A>B. "Dynamic range compression" is good way to put it, or maybe "ballot influence conservation": one ballot has fixed influence, and you can either spend it entirely on A/B>C or A>B/C, or any ratio in between.

Personally, this is a major factor in preferring approval over score vote, which requires someone who intuitively "feels", say, a 0.3/0.6/0.7 about candidates to either vote 0/0.75/1 to maximize their vote spread, or give more influence to people who do. Notice that this is not strategic in Gibbon's sense—it is always better to vote 0/0.75/1 than it is to vote 0.3/0.6/0.7—but it's probably more counterintuitive!

I would go further and be somewhat dismissive even of "Gibbard's theorem", since it only shows that an insincere vote can strategically produce a better outcome for a voter if they can identify what that that vote should be, and if they are one of the voters for whom such a strategy is available.

So it doesn't guarantee (as far as I'm aware) that even a single voter (under every possible cardinal voting system) will necessarily have enough information before or during the election to confidently pick some specific insincere vote that will increase their chances of getting the outcome they want.

Gibbard's theorem is even weaker than that. It only assures the constructibility of vote sets for which the right "final" votes to achieve a particular outcome are distinct. It does not guarantee that there are any insincere votes which perform better than a sincere vote!

Optimal strategic approval voting with a strict ordering is always a choice between sincere votes, in fact (since adding a vote for a strictly more preferred candidate never hurts your preferences, you can always find a sincere vote which performs better than an insincere strategic vote by additionally voting for all candidates more preferred than the least preferred candidate on the strategic vote).

STAR and Approval both have their own tactical voting problems. If you really like A, are meh about B, and dislike C, it’s clear you should rate A high / give A your approval and rate C low / do not give C your approval. But what about B? It has nothing to do with what you actually think about them, it has to do with what you think their odds of beating C and A are. You want B to do well enough to beat C, but not well enough to beat A. This adds too much distortion to people wanting to express their sincere preferences, which they can easily do in RCV: A > B > C

And, more importantly, RCV is a stepping stone to multi-member district STV proportional voting (plug for https://www.fixourhouse.org/), which is the golden goose; way more important to implement proportional representation than squabble about STAR vs RCV, and RCV gets us closer to proportional representation.

RCV actually literally has the exact same problem you're describing with voting strategically, it's just subtler and harder to understand. The problem is, if you rank A > B > C, then your subsequent preferences after A only matter if A gets eliminated. If A comes in second place, then your "B > C" preference has no impact, and C may be elected whereas if you "dishonestly" voted for B first you might have allowed B to win.

The point of ranking is not to have your vote redistributed many times, but rather for your #1 preference to go to your preferred candidate.

If your preferred candidate does not win, your vote gets a second chance (or more!) to get counted.

In the case your describing here, the only way that C wins, is that he gets more votes than A or B.

But that's not always the case; this is exactly the point I'm trying to make. The whole problem is that your vote only gets a second chance to be counted if your preferred candidate gets eliminated. If your preferred candidate loses because somebody else wins before your preferred candidate gets eliminated, then none of your later rankings affect the outcome whatsoever. This is why you can't actually vote honestly in IRV if you want your vote to count.

Let me try to illustrate this with an example:

Let’s imagine the US switched to RCV before the 2020 election, and Mitt Romney decides to run as an independent. Now let’s look at, say, West Virgina, which is a pretty red state, and went about 70% Trump 30% Biden in the 2020 election in real life

WV Democrats are still going to vote for Biden, and they’d probably prefer Romney over Trump, so let’s say they all vote in that order, but imagine roughly a third of Republican voters in West Virgina like Romney better than Trump, so we end up with this:

45% vote Trump, Romney, Biden; 25% vote Romney, Trump, Biden; 30% vote Biden, Romney, Trump

Romney gets eliminated first, his voters fall back to Trump, and Trump wins. The Democrats all wanted Romney over Trump, but Biden was never eliminated, so their second choice of Romney had no bearing on the outcome. But, what if they’d strategically voted for the “lesser of two evils”?

now we have: 45% vote Trump, Romney, Biden; 25% vote Romney, Trump, Biden; 30% vote Romney, Biden, Trump

Now Romney is a clear winner, he has the majority of first choice votes, so nobody’s second or third choice even matters. So basically in this example, Biden was a spoiler candidate for Romney, and all those Democrats are going to be super disillusioned when they realize that the “it fixes the spoiler effect" and "you can vote honestly” lines are both wrong, and they could’ve had a better outcome if they’d voted strategically, just like in the old system.

Approval doesn't have these problems; it's a clear win.

I'd argue that the algorithm is far more complex. It is `while no winner: pop(min(candidates)); reallocate(min(candidates))`. This while loop is quite a problem. Cardinal systems (except STAR) are `argmax(sum(candidates))`, which is actually identical to Plurality. The difference is that Plurality requires a one-hot vector. This algorithm is trivially parallelizable too. STAR doesn't require a while loop but is more complex because it does have 2 phases (which RCV is almost always going to be more than 2 phases given that while loop).

The trivializes of cardinal systems tallying algorithm makes statistical audits also trivial. I just can't imagine the mess we'd be in if what happened in Arizona happened with an ordinal method like RCV. It would be much easier to create a narrative of fraud.

Take the German system: there are district level elections, so that there is one person elected in each electoral district. These get half the nominal seats. Then the other half of parliament is filled up with candidates to match the proportional vote. The fill up is a bit complicated, especially if a party has a lot more directly elected folks than proportionally mandated, which leads to growth of parliament and discussions how that growth can be avoided. (Larger districts and only 1/3 directly elected or not every directly elected candidate really making it or not holding up the exact proportionality or whatever) But it combines the factors mostly fine and avoids many of the problems of the pure systems.

If you elect, oh, 5 people in each district then your proportionality is still granular to about 17% of the vote in the district (for single member districts it's granular to about 50%, of course). And your districts are 5x as large as single member districts are for the same number of representatives. What it does give you though is better electability for local independents.

With mixed-member proportional you can easily get down to couple-percent granularity while maintaining medium-size districts (typically twice as large as single-member).

In RCV it's safe to put your first choice first if either they're an overwhelming favorite to win, or they're so weak they're sure to get eliminated right away. If it's a close three-way election, you might cause your favorite candidate to lose by ranking them first. It's hard to develop any kind of intuition around how your vote will impact the race in these situations -- I think in the long run voters tend to learn that voting for third parties isn't safe, so two parties continue to dominate.

Could you explain that? I can't think of a situation where putting the candidate I want to win as #1 would cause them to lose. Ranking other close candidates as #2/#3 could cause my #1 to lose, but I don't think voting for someone as #1 alone would possibly harm them.

[0] https://electowiki.org/wiki/Favorite_betrayal_criterion

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33111242

(strategies exist for ALL voting systems. But not all strategies are equally as bad)

That's an important point. Also, just because a strategy exists in theory, doesn't mean that in practice any voter can confidently find that strategy (since they lack perfect information about how all the other voters intend to vote).

A is left, B is center, C is right leaning.

Polling shows that voters are leaning:

- 15% BAC

- 15% BCA

- 25% ABC

- 45% CBA

If everyone voted as they desired, then the instant runoff would be between B and C, with B winning with 55% of votes.

If a subset of C voters instead strategically vote ACB (6%), this would change the runoff to be between A & C, with C winning 60%.

These are post facto strategies though. You can only implement that strategy if you can guarantee all of that information. Which you can only do after the election.

The first problem is that polling is an estimate. If you are wrong by a couple of percentage points, the strategy fails. If the results come back 16 (BAC), 16 (BCA), 23 (ABC), 39 (CBA), 6 (ACB), B now has 32 first votes and A only has 29.

Next is getting the right number of people to comply. You could easily just mess it up and have either not enough or too many people cast the strategic ballot. If only 4% or less vote ACB, the plan doesn't work. If 11% or more vote ACB, A wins.

In the end, strategic voting is a bit like voter fraud, talked about way more than is actually done. And implied to be a much bigger problem than it ever could be.

Because the relevant fact here isn't that some CBA voters put A at the front (ACB). It's that they moved B from 2nd to 3rd. So of course, that lessens support for B, so B no longer wins.

People seem to present this as a flaw, when it's reflecting actual changes in voting. And this is basically impossible to do so strategically, because nobody has this level of accurate detail prior to the election.

That's a flawed characterization that keeps getting repeated.

As I explain in another comment below, in theory you could get your favorite candidate to win by further downranking the candidate who would otherwise win. One way of accomplishing that is to move other candidates up higher above your actual preferred candidate.

But in reality, there's no way to know what the exact precise vote breakdowns will be, so voting strategically (lying about your preferences) is impossible in a practical sense. There's no intuition to develop -- just vote your preferences.

To claim it is impossible in practice is to deny history.

[0] https://electowiki.org/wiki/Favorite_betrayal_criterion

[1] https://electionscience.org/library/monotonicity/

[2] https://electowiki.org/wiki/Monotonicity

The empiricval evidence in countries with long term ranked voting (Australia, say) is that bicameral party systems (only Democrats or Republicans have any realistic chance) wither and die, and smaller blocs have a better chance of survival and impact | influence in the House and Senate ..

Two parties "dominate" in Australia (or rather three parties, which are effectively two - the Nat-Liberals being an Rural-Urban conservative coalition of long standing) but nowhere near the degree to which two parties dominate in the USofA; more importantly minority opinions have gravitas and can sway the major vote - none of this bipolar US Dem-Rep deadlock.

And if it is not as simple as "Bob got the most votes, Bob won" it's going to get harder and harder to explain exactly what is going on, which is going to get people annoyed and angry.

As long as the result is the same as would have come from first past the post, nobody will care.

I'm not understanding your point. In cardinal systems a non rating is equivalent to a rating of zero. Just like in ordinal systems a non ranking is equivalent to ranking last place.

> And if it is not as simple as "Bob got the most votes, Bob won" it's going to get harder and harder to explain exactly what is going on

This makes it seem like you're in favor of cardinal methods actually. Tallying their votes is pretty trivial. You sum the scores of all candidates and then argmax the totals. I don't think people have a hard time understanding this. It is essentially the same as what happens with FPTP! I mean this is objectively a simpler algorithm than those used by even the simplest ordinal methods.

I agree that proportional representation is a huge deal, but I suspect we can do better than STV by changing what the election results mean. Currently in every system I know of we treat it as a binary choice; a candidate is either a member of the set of candidates who won, or they aren't.

A different way to do it is to allow every candidate who receives some minimum threshold level of support to be elected, but when voting on issues each elected person's influence is weighted by the level of support they received in the election.

This sort of system is compatible with FTPT, RCV, or approval-voting style ballots, but the differences matter less as long as you can say of the vast majority of voters (assuming an omniscient view -- privacy of votes would obscure the actual data) that that voter clearly has a representative in congress, and that voter delegated the same amount of influence to that representative as any other voter. (People who only voted for fringe candidates that don't meet the minimum threshold lose out, but that would probably be rare among people who actually pay attention to politics and aren't casting a protest vote.)

If this were enacted for the U.S. House of Representatives for example, the likely outcome would be that each state would have at least one Republican and at least one Democrat who would wield different amounts of power depending on how popular Republicans and Democrats are in that state. You'd also have Libertarians and Greens and Independents and whatever else. A state might have two representatives after one election and ten after another, and it wouldn't be a problem because influence is the same.

I vastly prefer score or approval voting over ranked-choice, but I also vastly prefer even ranked-choice over FPTP and will be voting accordingly here in Nevada. We can always adopt score or approval voting later.

I used to be vehemently opposed to RCV; I'm still against it. It's leagues better than FPTP and my hope is that it opens the door for improvements like STAR or anything that can satisfy the Condorcet criterion.

When you take all those factors together, I think it's overall worse.

Without tactical voting (and good information to support it) the first thing IRV does (along with most variations that in practice get the label "RCV", though of course this doesn't apply to all ranked methods) is to throw out the compromise candidate that everyone likes.

In the current situation, I am concerned that most people will prefer their particular flavor of theocracy to finding ways to get along (which they probably prefer to anyone else's flavor of theocracy). We already struggle with similar dynamics a bit, but it's the devil we know and I really don't want it magnified.

Essentially, any power-mad dictator and authoritarian regime has some variant of this argument. Yes, we love democracy and voting, but we definitely cannot let those kinds of people vote or get elected. You are just espousing the softer version still accepted in some countries of "yes, the voting system is not ideal but it gives our side an advantage for now, realpolitik always trumps democratic principles".

Getting a little more concrete:

Imagine a society split roughly evenly between 3 religions. Let's say 35% follow religion A, 30% follow religion B, 30% follow C, the remaining 5% belong to other religions or no religion. Approximately everyone with a religion (in our model; reality is more complicated but not sufficiently to make things inapplicable) prefers that society be organized as a theocracy according to their religion, would sufficiently accept secular tolerance, and violently opposes living under another religion's theocracy.

In this imaginary society, what is "the desire of the electorate"?

If everyone votes their honest maximal preference then the plurality says Theocracy A, which is violently opposed by 65% of the population! Picking secular tolerance over Theocracy A is not just something I (probably) prefer from the outside, but is actually preferred by the vast majority of the population over what IRV would pick!

Yes, there are games which can be played that increase the chances of some minority group in the second round, for example not listing secularism in the hope that it won't make it to the runoff. But it's a dangerous game of chicken for which the optimal strategy becomes apparent only after the results are tabulated. Alaska is a good example where even with excelent information and pooling data the Palin voters were stil unable to coordinate to skew the results. The existence of that risk is heaven and earth compared to an FPTP election which pretty much guarantees theocracy in your example.

Either I failed to communicate the situation I intended or one of us is very wrong about how IRV works.

Reducing the society to 20 people to simplify the proper language a little: We have 7 ballots that start "A;S;...", 6 ballots that start "B;S;...", 6 ballots that start "C;S;...", and one ballot that starts with "S". IRV considers the options in first place, sees that S is the least (only one person ranked it first), and eliminates that option. Which theocracy is picked will depend on things further down the list, but it will never be secularism. In the best case it will pick A, which would lose to S 13:7 in a head to head vote.

If we believe that "the appropriate compromise" between people with genuine disagreement will typically not be anyone's first choice, IRV specifically systematically excludes that appropriate compromise.

Yes, FPTP doesn't fare better here mechanically. The advantage of FPTP (which, to be clear, I still think is terrible) is that most voters understand that they need to vote strategically and understand how to do that. IRV is often sold on removing the need to vote strategically, and it does not do that, while making the correct strategic choice more complicated than "the better of the front runners".

The IRV case here is simply a cheaper way to organize a delayed runoff; voters are usually adept at understanding the implications of strategic voting, as long as it's framed correctly: in case your preferred option does not make it to the second round, would you still go to vote, and which would be your other choice? In Europe there is a long tradition for the two round delayed runoff, but it's certainly not presented to the voters as "you can chose anybody in the order of preference and it will be magically solved by the system".

Two round is in almost any case superior to FPTP, so if you can get it by simply tweaking the ballot paper and allowing second and third choices (IRV), it's an easy upgrade.

Approval voting might be closer to a Condorcet winner in some cases, but it's not a panacea to center squeeze because it's vulnerable to honest voting. What we see in practice is a tendency to function as FPTP, as all sides have an incentive to demonize the center and train their voters to mark a single option. So, in your example, the Sunni or Shia Muslims which can't stand themselves enough to approve each other but would still prefer islam in the second round (if secularism is not available), would lose the approval vote to a well disciplined contigent of Buddhists.

IRV solves that by not providing any help to competitors in the first round, and moving the "lesser evil" decision into the second round, encouraging more honest voting. Short of some Condorcet method (which will never be practical or intelligible by the average voter), IRV is an "acceptable compromise".

I'm failing to see how that's worse than FPTP, which in practice would also result in picking Theocracy A (because the 5% representing the Secular Tolerance Party would be one of those "third parties" which get blamed for spoilers under FPTP).

Well yeah, in this particular instance they do. That doesn't mean they always do. For example, with the commonly-used Tennessee capital election scenario (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting#Tennesse...), IRV would select Knoxville while FPTP would select Memphis - still not quite optimal for everyone (Nashville would probably be the ideal winner in a "perfect" electoral system), but good enough for the majority and a strict improvement over FPTP.

Contrived scenario for FPTP picking the Condorcet winner while IRV fails to:

Back to the "which theocracy, or do we just tolerance?" question, but now each religion has at least two candidates and secular tolerance has a bigger constituency.

    19% S, ...
    16% A1, A2, S, ...
    15% A2, A1, S, ...
    14% B1, B2, S, ...
    13% B2, B1, S, ...
    12% C1, C2, S, ...
    11% C2, C1, S, ...

I think that works out, FPTP makes the right choice for sort of the wrong reason while IRV makes the wrong choice. But I do think the much bigger concern is FPTP-with-strategic-voting behaving better (or at least no worse) than IRV-with-whatever-happens-in-practice.

This is referring to the monotonicity criterion[0]. The page has both toy examples and real world ones. It includes some hints about possible violations in Australia, but your voting system isn't very transparent so it is difficult to audit these situations.

As for vote splitting, I think it would be better to look at Favorite Betrayer[1][2]. Sometimes also called the strong spoiler effect. This is actually a big problem. It is why candidates like Bernie Sanders pledge to not run as independent after losing the primary. If you don't violate this condition such pledges are entirely unnecessary.

[0] https://electowiki.org/wiki/Monotonicity

[1] https://electowiki.org/wiki/Favorite_betrayal_criterion

[2] https://electionscience.org/library/the-spoiler-effect/

[0] https://electowiki.org/wiki/Monotonicity

I would imagine approval voting and other voting systems have this too (I'm not going to pretend to know how this would turn out for all of them) and I think that gets lost a bit when analyzing the systems.

[0] https://electionscience.github.io/vse-sim/

In other words - it treats elections as a one side game where voters pick strategy (voting methods/preferences) and the candidates are stable. But it is a two-sided game where politicians change opinions/policies based on system as well.

This isn't hypothetical -- you can look at the results in Seattle's City Attorney race, which strangely ended up electing a Republican to a citywide office for the first time in 20 years, and where the outcome under RCV would have been the same because the moderate candidate (the reasonably well-liked incumbent) didn't secure enough first-place votes, either in FPTP or in RCV-IRV.

If i look at my country's upper chamber, which is elected with two-round system, then it is quite the reverse. Extremist candidates rarely pass to second round and if they do, they are eliminated there.

Presumably, she knows that she will face little penalty for rebuffing Trump or McConnell on the issues they have for which the right position is unpopular - since there isn't much of a chance of her being dethroned by a right person.

I do take your point that the dynamics can be weird and aren't always "go to the median". And perhaps having a weird dynamic where the introduction of a different voting strategy or other party changes things dramatically - is not a good thing for trust.

Murkowski probably wins with RCV. The one D on the ballot, Chesbro, is a placeholder nobody expects to win, but her voters will surely rank Murkowski #2.

This is a weird way to say that representing the population is a bug.

Your example election would be a compelling argument if population preference was more of a multimodal distribution rather than closer to a unimodal distribution. Despite the US's current division, it is nowhere near as divided as your scenario.

The RCV people's main criticism of Approval is that it doesn't allow you to express different levels of support, and they aren't totally wrong (even though their preferred mechanism of IRV doesn't get them there, either).

I think (without data, happy to be proven wrong) that the US population is fairly strongly bimodal on most issues. Many issues that people care a lot about (for better or worse...) have two clear centers of gravity,

e.g. for gun control and abortion most people are in the orbit of a "mostly ban" or "mostly allow" group, with very few people falling into some nuanced middle ground.

If by "moderates" you mean "most liked" then I'm not sure what the problem is here. The point of voting is to find the most universally agreed upon ruler. You may call this unfair, but I would say that it is MORE unfair to give advantage to fringe groups rather than giving advantage to the masses. I thought the point of democracies was about having rule by the masses. If you think fringe groups should have the advantage I'd like to hear your argument.

I'm not sure what gave you the impression I think that. My comments clearly suggest that my view is that STAR > Approval-to-runoff > Approval > RCV-IRV > Plurality. My reasoning is that I place a very high value on the condorcet and favorite betrayal criteria.

As for the condorcet winner, that is quite hard actually. But if we consider a weak condorcet winner (where it is true 90+% of the time), that isn't as hard. I do think simplicity, transparency, and reduced vulnerability to strategy is a worthwhile trade-off for a strong condorcet winner. But of course, this is just my personal opinion and what's the preferred optima depends a lot on personal preferences.

We'll you'll be happy then! :)

Because this is commonly believed but actually totally untrue. There's an entire book about it, "Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America" by Morris P. Fiorina.

The upshot is basically that if you ask people binary yes/no questions (or binary left/right votes), the population appears divided, bimodal. But whenever you give a sliding scale in surveys, it becomes abundantly clear that the population is centrist -- unimodal. Even for gun control and abortion, the most hot-button issues.

SHOCKING! (I laughed a little too much at this comment)

But this is also why surveyists tend to ask the "strongly disagree, disagree, neutral, agree, strongly agree" questions. Because it can measure the temperature better. This is effectively a type of cardinal voting too. After all, voting theory is also known as "social choice theory."

But I definitely agree that in practice we find more normal like distributions in preference. Which is why I find it odd when commenters argue that other voting systems "give advantage" to "moderates" or "centrists" as if this is not in reality "gives 'advantage' to candidates that have low variance to the mean opinion." (aka, the most representative). Isn't that the goal of voting systems? To be the most representative?

You have those insisting that the population is divided and there just aren't that many centrists, and then you have those insisting that the population is centrist and there aren't that many extremists.

And they're always looking at the same exact bell curve, and then the first group decides the center is only an arbitrary 10% wide so most people are divided (45% on either side), and the second group decides that the center is an arbitrary 80% wide, so only a small number of people are extremist (10% on either side).

It's the same damn bell curve.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXCkxlqFd90

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/ENLIGHTENEDCENTRISM/top/?t=all

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/ENLIGHTENEDCENTRISM/comments/cw2bbh...

For example, say three fictitious candidates are running for dogcatcher, Bernie, Hillary, and Trump. Does your hardcore Bernie supporter friend believe that approving Hillary doesn't hurt Bernie? Will they choose not to approve centrist candidates, leading to extreme results in elections?

I'd actually argue that if approval was used Bernie would have won. One can vote Bernie honestly but also approve of Hillary as a safety. And this would have had a larger edge with Score or STAR. Bernie was quite popular and frankly a lot of people that also voted Trump also liked Bernie because he was an outsider.

No, that's the thing. Many people want to express their preference, and really really didn't want to "approve" of these two people at the same level. It's exactly the same with...

> Bernie was quite popular and frankly a lot of people that also voted Trump also liked Bernie because he was an outsider.

...where these people may have felt positively about Bernie, but they really really preferred Trump, and they would not have "approved" of Bernie if that meant putting him at the same level as Trump.

So now you have two groups of people who would have preferred Bernie as their 2nd place choice, but decide not to "approve" him in order to help their 1st place choices win. Supporters of approval voting just keep ignoring this dynamic of how real people vote in the real world.

There was a site posted to HN years back that mathematically analyzed a ton of these voting schemes, I cannot seem to find it on Google but it was some sort of hybrid scheme that apparently has the best overall outcomes.

Edit: Given some of the comments below, some good material on these voting systems...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13161396

https://ncase.me/ballot/

https://rangevoting.org/rangeVirv.html

http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/

I think this is a perfect case for the maxim "Let not the perfect be the enemy of the good". It seems IRV is sticking, and nobody has made Condorcet or Borda stick; let's go with IRV for now. Once we've abolished FPTP, and everyone is familiar with ranked systems, we can come back and argue for a better option.

As far as I'm concerned, IRV captures 99% of the utility of changing voting systems.

(All that said, I do like the work that https://electionscience.org is doing with Approval Voting, and if we can run experiments in local elections across the country with two new systems, I think that's also positive.)

Condorcet is just "if a candidate would beat all others head to head, then that candidate is the winner".

But the voting community insists on immediately jumping to all the crazy tie-breaking algorithms you need to implement if there is a "loop" (Smith Set).

My opinion has always been that those two concepts should be severed. All the "flaws" of Condorcet actually only apply to when tiebreakers are used. The flaws do not apply when there is a Condorcet Winner.

(The Smith Set isn't hard to understand either. It's just "these candidates beat all others head to head.")

And when there isn't a Condorcet Winner, that is actually valuable information. It means that the population was not ready to decide. It may warrant a later runoff, giving the population more opportunity to research the remaining Smith-Set candidates, and decide through additional debates or whatever else. As an alternative, people can always choose to apply any old method for the tiebreaker - even IRV! Condorcet-IRV (where IRV would only be applied to the Smith Set) strictly dominates IRV-only, in every way.

A cynical take would be that IRV has gotten traction in the US precisely because it does not seriously threaten the existing power structure. It might nibble away on a few edges, but if you look at all the countries and cities with IRV, they are not obviously better than those still stuck on FPTP.

You also cannot have meaningful estimates until all results from every district are in. How long it took in New York to get any results might leave people disillusioned and opposed to anything but FPTP.

Using Borda and Condorcet is also clearly a straw man, as AFAIK nobody is actually pushing for those in practice. The real runners seem to be IRV, Approval and STAR. Of those IRV is clearly the most compared to evaluate.

IMI they are all pretty simple and in an ideal world it wouldn't matter that much. However, we need to be highly aware that as soon as a major election gets won with anything but FPTP, we'll see the losing party "flood the zone with shit" to undermine the election results and the method. We've already seen the beginning of this after the election in Alaska. We need to keep it as simple as possible, otherwise the shit will drown everything else out.

This is always an interesting point to me. I often hear arguments that STAR and Approval are too difficult for the voters and far more complex (there's plenty of comments here suggesting that). While I disagree, that's a matter of opinion (I think both are trivial fwiw). But on the other hand, how votes are tallied is much harder to argue. Ordinal systems use a while loop where you pop an element each iteration and reallocate votes. Cardinal methods are sum then argmax. It is a joke to think that voters would understand Ordinal methods better than Cardinal methods with respect to how votes are tallied.

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

I do wonder if many people actually care to work through that step; in all of the public discourse around the Alaska vote, it's simply presented as a table with the reallocations already summed. For example, https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-democrats-win-in-a....

The general algorithm of "reallocate the votes from the candidate that is being eliminated" is conceptually simple, even if it's annoying to tabulate. I do stand by my claim that it would be very easy to build a website that can visualize this process without getting bogged down in the tabulation. See every site that's giving analysis on the Alaska results for examples.

I want to see actual UX studies on this; for example has anyone polled in Alaska to see whether people understand the result?

I agree that it isn't hard, but I'm glad we both agree it isn't trivial.

> I do wonder if many people actually care to work through that step

I don't think most people care to be honest. But I think what does matter is recount events. I often point to what happened in Arizona as a perfect example. It would be substantially easier to create a narrative that an election is rigged if the tallying is more complicated. Malicious people like to hide in complexity and will often oversimplify a complex topic. Because of this, I think one of the most important factors in creating a secure election is ensuring that the tallying system is simple. While malicious actors will always act maliciously, we can reduce their effectiveness through this simplicity.

It might have been "To Build a Better Ballot":

https://ncase.me/ballot/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13161396

Do you remember what was on it? I'll just drop a few links

https://electionscience.github.io/vse-sim/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4FXLQoLDBA

http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/

https://pastebin.com/PCgSaBS8

Still, I'm not much of a political campaigner, so it hasn't gone very far.

You even say "by sorting ballots into each of thirteen piles corresponding to the thirteen possible rankings of three candidates", which shows you've actually thought through what the process would look like for the people doing the counting.

When people are proposing voting systems, they really need to consider that their process is being carried out in an adversarial environment, where different groups have incentives to cheat, or accuse the voting system of producing the "wrong" result (e.g. due to the unintuitive outcome, or the complex tactical thinking needed to optimally fill in the ballot), or claim that voting machines were running backdoored firmware (which is a destabilizing claim whether it is in fact true or false).

That last point is perhaps the most important. I think that as time goes on, the pressure to automate the counting process and give instant election results (or worse, do the elections online) is only going to grow, and any voting reform which (if done manually) slows down the counting process, or for any other reason in practice requires people to trust machines that are selected and maintained by officials from one political party, is going to do even more harm to democracy than FPTP does.

Any kind of ranking is going to mean you need to know enough about each candidate to put them in some kind of order. Maybe OK if there are two candidates but much harder after that. Most people will rank their favorite on top and then just randomly rank the remainder.

Simple plurality or majority vote is easiest to understand and easiest for the voter. You vote for the one candidate you like the best. If the isn't a majority for one and that is required, you have a runoff between the top two.

That method is "Asset Voting", which works exactly like a plurality vote, except that once the totals for each candidate are known, the candidates are eliminated one by one (from least to most votes) and get to assign their vote counts to any remaining candidate.

If you agree with me and the parent post that voter confidence (including avoiding electronic counting machines) is the most important factor when evaluating possible alternatives to plurality (assuming the alternatives are no worse than plurality) then hopefully you will agree that Asset Voting is preferable to IRV/RCV.

That’s always been the issue, not that we don’t know of better result counting theories.

Even in the 2020s, the ballots are explained over and over, “Connect the horizontal line”, or “fill in the box completely” — it’s a binary input to capture the best information from the lowest denominator.

STAR would change the input from binary to an order N, and the number of mistakes or “that’s not what I intended” will happen.

The average HN reader probably can fill in boxes pretty good, but the outside world not so much. RCV is a decent compromise.

I do find how the math works out interesting. But I don’t find either disputes all that compelling.

The head to head polling is interesting… but that’s not how the election works. The fact that two systems would be different seems normal to me.

Folks who go to a ranked choice vote and pick just one, that’s their choice too. Same with people who don’t vote and so on.

Not to say the article is worthless, it is interesting, but I’m not sure I agree with the conclusions.

Basically, if people's stated preferences are ill-thought-out and/or manipulated, then even the perfect voting system that perfectly reflects the people's preferences will yield bad results. Voting reform in this case would be fixing the symptoms, not the disease. The disease, in my view, is that given the sheer complexity of the issues, the poor attention budget of people, the outsized influence of media, the impossibility of directly interacting with decision-makers, there's basically no way people can make an informed decision.

Personally I think we should ditch elections and just pick representatives purely at random, and then pay them to think about their preferences full time, discuss them with each other, directly interview candidates for executive positions, and so on. The basic idea is that I think collective decision making probably reaches an optimum around Dunbar's number and falls off precipitously beyond that.

If an article is going to sit there and make up votes that didn't occur, I can't really trust it.

Or in other words, it's not safe to vote honestly in a score voting system because you're throwing your voting influence away. The rational thing is to maximize all your votes to be 1 or 10 and nothing in between.

Approval voting is just that. Basically it avoids the problem by forcing everyone to vote tactically.

STAR voting approaches it differently, by using score voting to select the top two, and then doing a runoff with the votes maximized. (Under STAR there's a risk that you might have two extremist ideological clones that make it to the runoff.)

I think plain score voting could work reasonably well in a primary.

Indeed, you should use whole available range. But there's still incentive to differentiate more than max/min, because otherwise you don't get any influence to choose between other candidates. For example with candidates: A-best, B-lesser evil, C-evil; instead of scoring max/0/0 it would be more reasonable to vote max/something/0. Voting system cannot give you result reflecting your preferences if you don't provide them!

Maybe another way to look at this: there's only so much influence single ballot has, and you can spend it to either push A above B/C, or A/B above C. It's a tradeoff, but score voting allows you to dial in the ratio you want. Falling back to approval is strictly less expressive.

Can't you just scale everyone's votes to the same range?

I suppose you could even do an iterative process: rescale, remove the lowest-scoring candidate, rescale, remove the lowest-scoring candidate, and so on until there's a winner. That'd be like STAR but with multiple runoffs instead of one.

STAR is phase 1: sort(sum(candidates))[:2] (almost identical to score/approval/FPTP. We'd just take argmax instead of top two) and phase 2: eliminate other candidates, argmax(sum(candidates)) (identical to score/approval/FPTP).

On the other hand RCV is a multi-round system with a while loop. In practice it almost never has fewer than 2 rounds (requires overwhelming majority, which almost never happens with more than 3 candidates).

From an algorithms perspective RCV is more complex.

Perhaps, but people aren't computers.

It's admittedly difficult to score this objectively, but I find RCV much easier to understand.

RCV means: "I'd like this candidate, but if he can't win, I'll take this candidate instead." (And so on down the list of candidates.) Most people understand the concept of runoff elections. And, it's very very obvious that adding second and third choice candidates will never make your first choice less likely to win (on your individual ballot).

Under STAR, the effect of your ratings are less clear.

You're having a hard time figuring out "the effect of your vote" because the entire point is for you to not be able to game the system. Obviously no system is immune to strategies and there very much are some here. But they don't have huge effects on the whole election. I mean we don't want to violate the monotonicity criteria.

whereas with ranked voting methods, they'd still strategically rank the democrat in 1st place, crushing any hope for the greens.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtKAScORevQ

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtKAScORevQ

https://www.rangevoting.org/NESD

https://electionscience.github.io/vse-sim/VSEbasic/

consider a green party supporter who normally votes democrat. with score voting or approval voting, he also votes green (of course).

with ranked voting, he still ranks the democrat strategically in 1st place to avoid getting the republican, and that makes it impossible for third parties to grow. ranking is too vulnerable to strategy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtKAScORevQ

if enough people use honest scores, then score voting is better than approval voting even for the "honest suckers".

https://www.rangevoting.org/ShExpRes

Funny is that you ranked them and not scored them nor just say whether you approve them or not.

If you have to vote for these voting systems using approval voting, which ones would you approve?

STAR or score or approval = 5 IRV/RCV = 2 plurality = 0

how i'd approve them in a real election would be based on electability, which would be true with any voting method used in an actual contentious election.

I’m going to disagree. For essentially single-winner, public, candidate, secret ballot elections:

Any Condorcet method* > Bucklin Voting* (without limited # of ranks) > Instant Runoff Voting* > Majority-Runoff** > Plurality Voting** > Approval***, Score***, or STAR*** Voting (or any other *** system)

For public, secret ballot, legislative elections:

Mixed Member Proportional (MMP) using PR-STV* + Party List for leveling) > MMP using any single-member district system + Party List for leveling > Single Transferrable Vote (PR-STV)* > Party List PR (optionally, using STV to minimize wasted votes, but vote-for-one is close behind) > single-member districts with single winner systems in the order above (but, compared to the preceding proportional systems, all are close enough as to make no real difference) > any system using some or all multimember constituencies (including staggered elections in the same district for multiple seats in the same body) not described earlier in this list.

For public, secret ballot, chief executive + designated successor elections:

The single winner methods, in the order above, modified to use ranked ballots if they don’t already, in two rounds where the first elects the chief executive, then that winner is eliminated from all ballots, then a second counting of the ballots is done to chose the designated successor > The single winner methods, in the order above, separately for each office > The single winner methods, i the order above, for slates of pairs of one candidate for each office > Plurality voting** in a two round system (with normal, vote-for-one ballots), where after a chief is chosen on the first round, the successor is chosen by eliminating all ballots for the prior winner and taking the highest remaining vote count.

(methods with * are ranked ballots methods, methods with ** are vote-for-one methods commonly in use in the US, methods with *** are either artificially limited-ranks or more-detail-than-ranks methods, which for candidate elections have no clear, unique honest mapping from actual preferences to ballot markings; they are very good when their particular system of ballot markings maps to something concrete – e.g., for approval for selecting group activities in non-secret-ballot elections where approving is a commitment to participate if that option is selected or disapproval forfeits the right to participate, or, for score voting, where chosen score maps to a commitment of resources in the event the scored item is chosen.)

STAR voting is shown to outperform virtually all other methods with any mixture of honest or strategic voters.

https://electionscience.github.io/vse-sim/VSEbasic/

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33117670

If you only rank a single candidate, there's zero benefit, you're just throwing away the rest of your vote. It's not giving that candidate any extra influence, the way it would in approval voting.

"Vulnerable to bullet voting" is the same thing as "violating the later-no-harm principle," which means that some forms of ranked voting are vulnerable, while others aren't.

- Borda Count is vulnerable to bullet voting, for the same reason as Score (giving points to anyone other than your first choice makes it less likely that your first choice wins, because it increases the score of your second and third choice).

- Condorcet systems are vulnerable to bullet voting, because the ordering of your second and third choices can potentially change who the Condorcet winner is.

- Instant Runoff is "immune" to bullet voting because the ranking of choices beyond the highest non-eliminated choice are ignored. This is also directly responsible for it being vulnerable to the spoiler effect, which makes non-bullet-voting pointless (your top choice must also be the choice most likely to win the 1-1 fight at the end, which means the remainder of your choices are highly unlikely to win, so why bother?).

https://clayshentrup.medium.com/later-no-harm-72c44e145510

for instance, alaska just elected peltola even though begich was preferred to peltola by a large 5% margin. palin voters preferred begich to peltola 10-to-1. but IRV ignored their 2nd choices. therefore they would have been better off strategically ranking begich as their favorite.

whereas with approval voting, once they cast a strategic vote for begich, it's safe to approve palin (and anyone else they prefer to their lesser evil). this is, in a nutshell, why score voting and approval voting (rated, not ranked, methods) are so superior. this is social choice theory 101.

https://electionscience.org/commentary-analysis/rcv-fools-pa...

Suppose you REALLY like both candidates A and B. Then suppose that you really dislike candidate C.

Ranked:

A > B > C (A/B position determined by flipping a coin)

Ordinal:

A:5 B:5 C:0

What's interesting here is that the first (ranked) system tells us (embeds) that our preference for A over B is the same as our preference of B over C. But in the second case we are able to tell the system that we actually like both A and B equally and that the distance to C is much larger. Ranked does not capture how we don't like C and doesn't capture that we do like B. Because of this the ranked systems frequently fail the favorite betrayer criteria (RCV fails btw). In a realistic scenario this means that in a ranked system Bernie would spoil the election for Biden (or vise verse). Although Gary Johnson wouldn't be a spoiler in either Ordinal nor Cardinal I'd argue that a weak spoiler is less of a worry than a strong spoiler.

I will also argue that Ordinal methods are far simpler to calculate and do statistical verification on. Ranked systems require a while loop where we pop an element from our array each iteration and reallocate that element's votes until there is a singular winner. Cardinal systems on the other hand are simply an sum argmax. This sum argmax can be done in parallel and also makes it far easier to verify elections with random subsets of votes (a fairly common practice btw). The simplicity of the algorithm used to tally votes is extremely important and increases the transparency of the election.

At the end of the day, the two systems are

Ranked: "Put the candidates in order of preference"

Cardinal: "Rate each candidate from 0 to 5 stars"

People are very used to both types of questions. I see several arguments saying the latter is more complicated but this clearly isn't true or we'd have to change the vast majority of surveys.

I also want to state that there are no globally optimal voting systems. Yes, there are plenty of flaws in cardinal systems. But because no global optima exists we have to instead argue that the tradeoffs are worth it. There are some objectively better systems than others though. To play fair like this I will say that I believe that the above advantages are worth the slight reduction of VSE in a 100% honest election that you'd obtain from using either RP or Schultz style elections.