Hacker News Reader

Comment by blurbleblurble | Hacker News Reader

It will only survive if its lawmakers restore the robustness of the electoral process. Seriously, why is gerrymandering even a thing right now? How is that normal? Not to mention the highly manipulable first-past-the-post voting system. It's no wonder that primitive AI was so able to obliterate the last election. Our human collective decision making processes are thoroughly busted and nobody seems to care to fix them.

Amazon and Netflix get score voting for their products, yet we can't even get measly, pathetic IRV?

Imagine if Amazon had to use IRV or FPTP to determine "the best products"... It'd go out of business pretty quick!

View on HN

I would love score voting.

But given the potentially higher cost of implementation, I would be very happy with approval voting (score of 0 or 1), which would be compatible with most existing ballots. "You may vote for zero or more of the following candidates."

Approval voting, as with score, breaks the stranglehold of two-party rule, allows for rather than discourages policy overlap among parties (breaking down polarization), and increases voter satisfaction.

Approval voting seems to be the best system if you have tactical voting. In simulations, the improvement from plurality voting to approval voting, is about the same as the improvement from monarchy to plurality voting: http://rangevoting.org/

It's also so simple. It's incredible we don't have this already.

It's good, but Score Voting is better.

The problem with approval voting is that it does not give voters a mechanism by which to indicate partial approval. If there is a centrist candidate which many voters only slightly support, there would still be a media horse race over whether or not voters will interpret partial approval to mean 'do not approve' or 'approve' on election day, with a final result that may be unnecessarily surprising to participants. There are also examples on the wikipedia page of some organizations trying range-2 approval voting and abandoning it.

Range-3 seems like the minimum range desirable. It would allow voters to indicate whether they disapprove, were neutral toward, or approve of a candidate. The only historical adoption of range-3 I am aware of is the electoral council of the Republic of Venice, and I believed they used it as a constant component in their electoral process for selecting the Doge without abandoning it.

The costs of switching to something even better like range-5 may also be over-estimated. Range-5 seems like it would work with existing optical scan ballots. The cost of acquisition for range voting tabulatation code on the state level would also ideally be fairly low due to the simplicity of the preference aggregation method in range voting in comparison to IRV, and Maine is already undertaking a switch to the later.

Like I said, I would love score voting (range voting). Its my preference for precisely the reason you state: it provides the expressiveness to show partial support. And it does so without the constraints of IRV or ranked voting. To my mind, score is the "superset" voting model.

However, approval is something that could be installed with relatively low cost and low effort. And it is nearly immediately understood by anyone. Score voting requires a tiny bit more education (although it too is easy to understand; and I suspect most voters would get the hang of it after a couple elections).

I would be disappointed with IRV/ranked because it seems the most difficult to understand, requires rework of ballots, and disallows equal scoring (thereby reducing expressiveness). It would be a shame to squander voting reform momentum to end up with IRV.

> It would be a shame to squander voting reform momentum to end up with IRV.

I feel an incredible sense of urgency about this, but am not sure how to go about acting on it. It's hard to convince people that this is part of the root of the problem. Most folks I talk to see the voting system as some kind of technicality, and don't understand that it's actually on a foundational level.

It seems like range/score voting could use a big marketing and education overhaul. Fairvote is not helping the situation.

It doesn't really matter, it still does vastly better than plurality voting. I tried simulations where every individual automatically approved of the top 50% of candidates. It still got good results. Similar if everyone voted for the top 30% of candidates they liked, or any other arbitrary percentage.

Using more ranges is silly. There's no reason to ever give a candidate less than maximum vote, if you want to give them a chance at winning. If you don't, then there's no reason to give them anything above 0.

More range -> greater expressivity -> better voting system

There is no reason to give your favorite candidate less than max score, and no reason to give your least favorite candidate more than 0 score, but the middle does serve a purpose. Scoring other candidates in the middle is to boost their chances of winning against your less-favored candidates at the cost of boosting their chances of winning against your more-favored candidates.

There are some variants, such as Range2Runoff, which beats Range often in simulations. I hear that it is much better than pure Range when there are many strategic voters.

Have you ever noticed how star rating systems are completely useless? People either rate 5 stars or 1 star, and very rarely in between. Most places have switched to simple like/dislike based systems. E.g. reddit or youtube.

And that's when people have no incentive to lie...

Score ratings are not as useful when the scales are poorly defined, as many internet scoring systems are. Many internet scoring systems want you to measure quality to some universal standard that should apply to all things past and present in the same way. A range voting election asks you to measure quality relative only to the options you are presented with.

Here's a hypothetical example involving 3 different shampoos. All 3 work. One smells bad. One smells decent. One smells great.

If I were to review these on Amazon, I would likely give them 3, 4, 5 stars respectively. All 3 of them worked, but I have a preference. I could imagine a theoretically worse shampoo that didn't work, or even worse, made all my hair fall out. Such a shampoo would be worth a rating of 0 stars. I don't give my least favorite shampoo I actually used 0 stars because I can imagine that in the future I may come across something worse, and it doesn't seem correct to put a functional product on the same level as a harmful one.

If I were to vote (using a score system) for which one of these 3 shampoos I would like my workplace to stock, then it is much simpler. 0, 2, 5 stars for each option, respectively. I don't have to worry about a hypothetical worse 4th option in the future skewing my results now. If a future election is held with that worse, 4th option, then I can give it a 0 and adjust my previous 0 and 2 star ratings accordingly.

(US centric response)

I'm not sure if this was a rhetorical question...but the answer is that districts are drawn by the ruling party in order to assure its continued dominance. The incentives for these legislators are totally different from Amazon's.

A very interesting example happened in Georgia in the 1990s. The Republicans and the Black Caucus (who are mostly Democrats) worked together to pack black voters into a few concentrated districts. This resulted in both more black Democratic legislators and more Republican legislators.

Hence districts should be determined not manually, but through a certain rule that is agreed by both parties Nationally

I completely agree! But it is a very difficult problem because the job security of so many individual members of Congress depends on gerrymandering. Obama and former attorney general Eric Holder are working on an initiative related to this, though.

It's interesting that in a thread about how ai's are a threat to democracy people are suggesting replacing a human process with an algorithm.

Not necessarily replacing, but restricting. Algorithms would be difficult to implement perfectly, but putting geometric restrictions on district boundaries would be fairly easy and still allow human flexibility in specifying the lines. Also independent third party commissions do a better job than state legislatures.

Minimising the ratio of area to perimeter, ideally with some allowance for naturally 'crinkly' boundaries like coastlines, would be a great start.

[1] says there is already software to do this, and [2] gives a terrible example of a district in Pennsylvania.

[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/politics/gerrym...

[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/03/01/this-...

Maximizing?

Minimising!

Oops. It's late here.

And first past the post ensures that only 2 parties are ever heard and all the rest utterly ignored, just as you just did.

Why do other parties not get a say?

So you propose moving the politicization of boundary drawing to the rule making process for the rules which govern the drawing of boundaries. After all, your goal hasn't changed, only the point at which you bring in the human factor which is pulling for one side or the other.

Unfortunately, as soon as you lay down some guideline, and perhaps a purely rational one, that puts one side or the other at a loss, you'll have objections to the rule.

I hate to say it, but I don't think your process solves anything and actually just adds complexity to the process. It probably makes matters worse.

> why is gerrymandering even a thing right now

Until recently, we haven't had a precise way to define it:

"The challenge for reformers, however, is that the courts need a judicial standard, which is different from a mere scientific standard. A judicial standard must be judicially discernible — it has to be derived from a specific right given in the Constitution. It also has to be judicially manageable — it needs to provide courts with clear guidance on how to rule." [1]

This judicial standard is what is being proposed to the Court in an ongoing case concerning Washington. (It derives from Equal Protection and the First Amendment.)

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/02/0...

Don't they use sales numbers as one of their primary sorting factors?

That's popularity, just like FPTP.

Sales numbers are more like approval voting, because you can buy more than one thing in the same category, but you can't vote for two people for president.

Say I'm a photographer, but due to Alt-Amazon's draconian policies, I can choose one and only one camera. And not only that, I can purchase one and only one lens! What do I pick? Compact or fullblown setup?

That's FPTP.

But most photographers have at least a couple options to shoot with, depending on the needs of the situation.

And the star rating system is classic score voting.

> How is that normal?

Lately, normal seems to have become the exception.

normalized is the normal I was going for, like a fish in the water. I.e. the water is polluted with active levels of synthetic estrogens and the fish know nothing different.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com