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Comment by amalcon | Hacker News Reader

Looks like they're using instant runoff voting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant_runoff_voting

Boo. IRV sucks (probably as much or more than plurality). Approval voting FTW. See http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/. Noice how Approval and Condorcet voting produce the same pictures (aside from Approval having a little fuzzier edges).

Boo. Approval sucks. Schulze method for the long haul. Majority criterion is fairly important, yeah? Approval (aka restricted range voting) fails that.

On a side note, I've been working on a JSON web service to calculate election winners in various systems. Feedback would be sweet. http://vote.cognitivesandbox.com

IMHO, Schulze is too complicated for the average voter. People need to understand the voting system. I don't deny that it's theoretically better.

I heartily disagree that people need to understand the voting system. Ideally, people should just be thinking about ranking the candidates. If the way that the votes are counted will affect the way they vote, that means that strategic voting is a prominent part of the system.

Granted, strategic voting is theoretically unavoidable without introducing other degeneracies. But on a quantitative scale, its effect and its frequency are smaller under some voting systems than others.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrows_impossibility_theorem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibbard–Satterthwaite_theorem

People generally don't understand how their household appliances work. They only care about understanding the interface (e.g. open fridge door, put stuff in, stuff stays cool).

Interesting visualizations, but do the problems mentioned have any relevance for real elections? What happens if you move from two dimensions down to one, or up to many dimensions? While some of the pictures look ugly, does any IRV scenario actually result in a disastrous outcome -- ie a candidate with views far away from those of the electorate being able to win?

Approval voting seems like a worse idea in practice than in theory. I can easily imagine scenarios in which an unknown (and quite possibly incompetent or extremist) candidate with an attractive-sounding party name could garner enough votes to come out ahead (something like this recently happened with the Family First Party in several Australian elections).

That is a really fantastic visualization. It's amazing how much IRV produces inconsistent results.

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