Instant runoff voting is the system we need
chuckgreenman.posthaven.com
chuckgreenman.posthaven.com
One property of IRV that makes it so questionable is its non-monotonicity. This means that you can help a candidate by ranking them lower, and hurt a candidate by ranking them higher. It is extremely easy to visualize how ill-behaved IRV is in the charts on this website:
Meanwhile, ranked pairs (a "condorcet" method) has the property that, if candidate A is more popular than all other candidates pairwise, then candidate A will always win. This is _not_ true in IRV.
If you're interested in falling down the rabbit hole of electoral systems, I recommend looking at this chart that compares their properties:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_electoral_system...
Perhaps the most important important property of a voting system is that it is easy to grok, so that people trust it. In particular, aggregates at the local level should combine simply with other districts to tally overall winners.You can tally IRV incrementally, it's just that ranking permutations are the units of aggregation. That's non-trivial. For this reason, I prefer approval voting.
Approval voting is simple enough, but is vulnerable to bullet voting: approving an additional candidate can make your first choice lose. This makes it unsuitable if your goal is to make third-party voting more viable, which seems to be the premise of the article.
And, particularly, there is very notable cultural variation, which means (ab initio at least; over time, one expects behavior modification efforts would be deployed around this), support from different cultural groups in a diverse polity will have different electoral value even when turnout is the same.
> Approval voting is simple enough,
But also has the same problem: concretely what “approval” means is unclear and will be subject to voter-to-voter variation even when the actual preferences are identical.
Only if you assume that compromising is fundamentally good. Do you believe the propensity is to compromise to get the best of the both worlds or the worst of the both worlds? I would point out, for example, that during the bush (II) administration, the only truly bipartisan, compromise initiatives were war in Iraq, No Child Left Behind, and Corporate Bailouts.
But, isn't that the whole point? ... that a compromise, perhaps centrist, candidate can emerge victorious?
Just a friendly note: this visualization means nothing without context, and is far from "obvious". Unfortunately, I'd place this in the category of "things that are obvious to people who already believe it". Is there a better way to go about explaining your idea?
To paraphrase, this is a simulation which places candidates and voters on a two-parameter preference space. This is useful because two dimensions are easy to visualize, but the same intuitions apply to higher-dimensional spaces.
Each point is colored to answer "which candidate wins when the popular opinion is normally distributed about this point?". That means the fractured visualization shows IRV's non-monotonicity, and how even when popular opinion is close to a centrist candidate (here in red) it might be that the voting system results in the election of an extreme candidate (green).
With IRV, though, I could see a situation where they are much more likely to win simply because, nowadays, Republicans' and Democrats' general level of mutual disdain is such that I wouldn't be surprised if it ends up being common for people who identify with one major party to rank the candidate from the other major party below every other candidate more-or-less out of spite.
This is a symptom of our current system. Anybody who has any ambition in politics will modify some of their positions to fit one of the major two parties. If running for another party wasn't a death sentence, you would see more competent candidates in those parties.
Which is worth doing because, regardless of what the ideal situation is, if it's associated with a spectacularly bad outcome in one of the earlier elections that uses it, that's going to be a big impediment to wider adoption.
So the minor parties (and independents) are eliminated first, and their preferences are distributed. Which usually means than one of the major party candidates scrapes over 50%, reflecting the minor party voters' basic preference for one of the major parties over the other.
In this (common) situation, I think IRV actually works really well.
The major parties still end up in government, but they see the first-preference percentages for the minor parties, and understand what policy positions are important to the electorate.
Edit: As much as everyone's trashing IRV as "horrible" I don't see a simple, worrisome case where it violates monotonicity; those seem limited to really pathological electorates where nothing will make them happy anyway.
It's terrible because the loser-elimination step that makes non-monotonicity an issue also makes it less straightforward to tabulate, not because non-monotonicity is an issue outside of edge cases.
Difficulty in tabulation affects speed of, certainty of, and confidence in results, as well as cost of implementation.
> Maybe I react differently from the typical voting system enthusiast?
Nope, especially on neglecting pragmatics like tabulation; that's practically a hallmark of voting system enthusiasts.
Which doesn't rise to the level of "that is so bad it must be stopped".
>> Maybe I react differently from the typical voting system enthusiast?
>Nope,
Kind of strange, since the entire reason for my confusion and joining this thread is because of enthusiasts' doom-and-gloom about the quality of the results themselves, and how they worry about the edge cases and I don't.
Are you invigorated by the cost fears? Because they seem like a sliver compared to the cost of Gore vs Bush.
If I can hurt my preferred candidates chances of winning by ranking them higher on my ballot then the voting system is broken.
Non-monotonicity solely on a few pathological edge cases where voter preferences are a nigh-intransitive clusterf—- is not a problem.
The reason there are not more examples like this one is that most governments don't release enough information about ballots in IRV elections.
But ... is there maybe a truncated explanation of the general dynamic there?
100 - A > C > B
100 - B > C > A
40 - C > A > B
10 - C > B > A
The problem is that the B > C > A don't get their second choice considered. Why does this matter? Look at it when you put the votes into pairs.
A vs B: 140 people think A > B. 110 think B > A.
A vs C: 100 people think A > C. 150 think C > A.
B vs C: 110 people think B > C. 140 think C > B.
The theoretical candidate was everyone's second preference. That sounds like quite a good compromise.
You rank 1) Indian 2) Chinese and 3) Italian
Your partner ranks 1) Gastropub 2) Chinese and 3) Steakhouse
you're going to get Chinese food, not because it exists on a line between each of your first choices, but because it is acceptable to each of you, if not preferred. It is a compromise by definition.
Chinese food isn't a compromise, a blend between Italian, Indian, Gatropub and Steakhouse food.
In Chinese food there isn't a little bit from every other choices. A candidate being chosen on virtue of a compromise by the numbers doesn't mean s/he aggregates some ideas from other candidates.
Hence my remark about that candidate being on a different spectrum from the others.
I am not saying he shouldn't be chosen or that people wouldn't be happy about it, I am saying that his ideas aren't a compromise from the other candidates' ideas.
How many axes can you chart a poltician's positions on?
Authoritarian<>Libertarian
Traditional Values <> Social Relational Values
Survival Values<>Self Expression Values
Interventionalist <> isolationist
That's just a few from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_spectrum
Say in the US 2016 election Sanders had run as a 3rd party. He was a liberal populist. He might well have been the second choice of both the Trump and Clinton voters, despite not being positioned between the two. He'd still have been the compromise candidate.
So let's talk 2016 presidential election
I'd imagine that a Trump Voter's ballot would look like the following if Sanders had run as an independent.
1) Trump 2) Sanders 3) Gary Johnson (Maybe with a flip on 2/3)
Clinton voters would be
1) Clinton 2) Sanders
Neither primary choice would be acceptable to the other. There would be some voters who preferred Sanders first.
Since then the second-tier candidates have done what you say about promoting each other: "vote for me and for X". If one loses, the other could win in the next round. IRV has a moderating influence on how candidates campaign. By making a bid for those later rounds viable, now everyone has an incentive to build strong coalitions before they even get into office.
Would another system work better? Maybe, but I still count it as an improvement over FPTP.
Now, arguably this is IRV functioning as designed, where the city's progressive wing could vote as a block without worrying about 2 candidates splitting the vote. It was very much non-intuitive, though, and a lot of London Breed supporters were quite pissed off. IRV allows you to "vote for a position" rather than "vote for a person", but many voters are still stuck in the "but....they got fewer votes!" mindset.
You meant after completing all the rounds of IRV, Mark Leno had more votes despite London Breed having more first place votes.
Which, yeah, is the whole point of IRV (and, with slight variations, most ranked ballots methods): a plurality winner that doesn't have broader support but ends up at the bottom of ballots not ranking them first shouldn't generally win over someone who has broader appeal just because the broad appeal splits first place support with another candidate.
> IRV allows you to "vote for a position" rather than "vote for a person", but many voters are still stuck in the "but....they got fewer votes!" mindset.
No, it lets you vote for a person, and also specify, “if not Alice, then my vote goes to Bob”. The winner in IRV is always the candidate with the most votes at the end of the process; reporting only first place votes as votes for the candidate is just wrong reporting of IRV counts.
Absolutely, it's more complex than a simple majority. But I think "bizarre" is unfair.
In practice, I think it helps to provide a diversity of representatives that more closely reflect the diversity of views in the electorate.
Because that kind of lesser-of-two-evils incrementalist attitude is inherent to the first-past-the-post system we have now.
Saying "we only ever eat meat, let's try eating an orange and see if we like it before we eat any of this lettuce" doesn't follow any actual logic. You might hate lettuce, you might hate oranges, but there's no specific factor that binds them together.
Also what sort of things would you factor into what you prefer? How important is each of them?
If my choice is between 1% of what I want, 2% of what I want or 99% of what I want, saying "why don't you just be happy with 2% since it's twice as good as the 1% you could have gotten" isn't the most logical point to make.
I care much more about getting a good voting system than I do improving our voting system, if that makes sense.
There's an impossibility theorem (Gibbard's) that states that for any non-dictatorial process for choosing among > 2 outcomes, there is no way to avoid tactical voting potentially swaying the results. The next-best alternative might be to make tactical voting so complex and error-prone that nobody bothers.
http://electology.github.io/vse-sim/VSE/ https://rangevoting.org/vsi.html
When it comes up in conversation (or I can work it into conversation), I push people to this - it has some great interactive visualizations
(AKA Schwartz Sequential dropping (SSD), cloneproof Schwartz sequential dropping (CSSD), the beatpath method, beatpath winner, path voting, and path winner)
The part that is most appealing to me is how this method eliminates the least performing options first, then proceeds to better pairs.
The only modifications necessary to "fix" it are to add in a "None of the Above" / "No Confidence" slot AND to require fully filled out rank lists.
If NotA wins then the entire election is re-run with all prior candidates eliminated as possibilities.
I implemented the Schulze method in a hobby project once, and the math is a rather simple digraph algorithm, which also gave me a lot of confidence that it's a well thought out voting method.
Compare that to to some of the other systems which often have complex mathematical descriptions which are hard for people to wrap their heads around.
Another thing is how big a deal is 'non-monotonicity' is it actually going to be something that will affect elections all the time, or is it something that's more minor than say turnout which honestly has no solution and on one side you have USA where turnout is low so the game is all about making sure your base turns out, or on the other side you have Australia where voting is mandatory so making sure people who don't care, don't vote at random is a big part of the game.
STAR is just score with a single automatic runoff. It gets everything you are talking about in terms of intuition, explanation… everything you like about IRV is present in STAR and basically everything wrong with IRV is fixed by STAR.
What it's missing compared to IRV is that you can't go, it's just like what people already do (runoffs), just in a single round.
In STAR, 5 points is simply "most points" i.e. most support. It doesn't mean something semantically. You can give up to 5 points, like if there's a race, you can push each candidate forward as much as 5 steps. The only thing it means is that you pushed them forward more than another candidate.
That's not that hard to get intuitively.
IRV is not what people already do but in a single round, it's much more complex than that. And whoever's 1st choice in IRV loses in the final round, they (and that could be as much as 49% of the voters!) never get any of their other preferences counted at all, unlike either STAR or our current two-round system.
Yes, so you import the well-known cultural variation in numeric rating systems without concrete semantics for rating levels into your voting system. That's a great idea.
More data on ballots is good only as long as it has a consistent meaning and is used in a way that is consistent with that meaning.
STAR (and other score voting systems) gather noise and pretend it is signal.
STAR Voting allows voters to rate all the candidates similar to how we rate books on Amazon
Ah yes, Amazon, that site with famously reliable and unbiased user reviews.
This is a terrible idea. It’s a bad voting system made worse by appeal to similarity with popular apps and websites, which themselves use a really bad voting system.
STAR voting is NOT like rating books on Amazon, it's just superficially similar.
At Amazon, if you don't like any of a bunch of books, none of them get 5 stars. With STAR voting, you award points not to mean anything, but only to decide how much ahead in the race you want to push each candidate versus the others. Whoever you want to win most, you push them ahead with all 5 available points. That's it.
Your reaction and misunderstanding does further my annoyance at the people explaining STAR using the Amazon analogy, and I think that bad comparison is harming support for what is truly an excellent voting system.
My issue with all of these point- and range-based voting systems is that when you see the results, you might want to tweak your scores.
Let’s say I’m range voting out of 10 and I give four candidates 1, 3, 8 and 10 points respectively. But the candidate I rated 3 wins, with the candidate I rated 8 a close second. Damn it! If I’d known that was going to happen, I would have voted 1, 1, 10, 10.
So with extra information, range voting boils down to approval voting, and I think it all ultimately becomes ranked voting. It’s hard to imagine any scenario where I would want to change my rankings, even if I have information about the results. If I like both candidates A and B, but A slightly more, I’ll always put them at the top of my list and in that order.
Now, it’s true that in IRV there are scenarios where I can get a better result for myself by voting for candidate ranks in a different order; but those are rare (I think) and definitely unintuitive. In the example above, if B were a real long shot candidate, it might be worth ranking them above A in case B gets eliminated early. But it’s unlikely to make a big difference because, you know, B is a long shot. And that’s just IRV; other ranked voting systems are much more robust.
This is the EXACT reason STAR voting was invented. Unlike plain score, STAR has a runoff where it compares your preference of the top two and puts your full vote to your preference.
So, this is like an exact case study of why STAR is worthwhile. STAR proposes 0-5, but we can stick with 1-10 for this case. You vote 1, 3, 8, 10 and the top two candidates are the ones you voted 3 and 8. With STAR, it doesn't matter that your 3 candidate got a total score higher than your 8 candidate, your vote in the runoff goes to your 8 because that's rated higher. If more voters rated that candidate higher, they win even if their plain score total was lower.
Thus, you don't have to exaggerate all your scores. In fact, you have an incentive not to, because if you just give ties, you risk abstaining in the runoff instead of having a say there.
I mean literally you just spelled out the most common critique of plain score voting which is itself THE argument for why we should use STAR instead.
I’m reading https://www.equal.vote/starvoting and I still don’t entirely follow. It’s lacking some detail I’d like to understand. For example, it looks like it is not a Condorcet method. That seems bad to me -- if you’re not electing the Condorcet winner, you need a very good explanation why; and I don’t trust an appeal to numerical ratings that each voter will interpret and use in different ways.
Aha, yes, Wikipedia has a clearer explanation and confirms that it is not Condorcet: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/STAR_voting
I do agree that it looks probably better than IRV, but I’m not yet convinced that it’s a really good system and is worth pushing as a good approach for real elections.
One short point: the primary problem with not electing Condorcet is that coordinated strategic majority could, in hindsight and for future elections, force the Condorcet by refusing to support later preferences. In STAR, that strategy is risky and unpredictable. If the Condorcet is a strong case, it will win STAR anyway. If it's an edge case, nobody knows in advance if it will be the true majority or just a bit less, so strategically zeroing all by the favorite is so risky in that edge case, most people won't do it (it could backfire for them to refuse to support their 2nd favorites if their hail-mary hope that they just might have a Condorcet turns out to be wrong). No strategies with STAR are reliable. The best outcomes come from just being honest.
Note: STAR doesn't use rank as a tie-breaker only. It can flat-out overrule a score difference with the 2nd-highest scoring candidate winning. It's not just for ties.
> I do agree that it looks probably better than IRV, but I’m not yet convinced that it’s a really good system
Well, since IRV gets pushed for real elections and STAR is better on a large number of factors, and both are better than FPTP…
You otherwise want to promote 3-2-1 https://wiki.electorama.com/wiki/3-2-1_voting or approval or maybe some good PR approach like PLACE voting https://medium.com/@jameson.quinn/place-voting-the-elevator-...
If you want to discuss this stuff more with other folks, https://forum.electionscience.org is the place to go, btw
You’re combining ranked voting with range voting.
Ranked voting is objective and clear (the Condorcet criterion is very compelling) but unfortunately incomplete (Arrow’s theorem, which in this case boils down to unresolvable three-way cycles.)
Range voting is more tractable (counting is easy, no awkward cycles) but subjective (no-one knows what the scores actually mean) and prey to tactical voting.
STAR starts with range voting (so you lose Condorcet) and adds cut-down ranked voting as a final step (only after some rank information has been discarded; and ranking isn’t a sound way to resolve ties).
It would be better to use ranked voting first, then range voting to resolve tie-breaks. That would make better use of the unique advantages of each voting style.
I still don't buy your assertion that no one knows what scores mean. That's no stronger of an argument than the opposing critique of ranking: nobody knows in a rank ballot whether it's a slight preference between two supported candidates or a huge difference between a liked and a hated (but maybe some other candidate is even worse) situation.
In both ranking and scoring, the ballot does not give a transparent view of the voters' beliefs. They only mean what they mean on the ballot, that there are relative scores or a ranked order. We can't and shouldn't assert that we can know more deeply what's behind those marks.
Condorcet is not a bad principle per se, but it's not the absolutely most desirable. If it were the only factor, nobody would accept IRV. And Condorcet means that a candidate who is 2nd choice of 100% of the voters, maybe even a strong 2nd choice (rankings don't carry that info) will always lose even in a case where all the other candidates are grossly polarizing and will lead to civil war. There are at least cases where a consensus is superior to Condorcet.
> It would be better to use ranked voting first, then range voting to resolve tie-breaks.
How does this proposed idea work? What actual system are you suggesting that would do this? EDIT: I see this referenced in your other post.
That's not correct, if there are 4 or more candidates.
If there were exactly 3 candidates the split would have to be something like 51-49, and then the candidate with 100% second place would come second. But it's arguable whether that's a bad result, and it seems like a very unlikely scenario anyway. Even 10% of people voting that candidate in first place would be enough for them to win it.
What I meant to express was that the 100% 2nd choice candidate will lose to Condorcet winner if there's 51% support for the Condorcet winner. I.e. majority support. That's true also for non-Condorcet systems. My point was that Condorcet systems are always also strict majoritarian, and there are reasonable arguments that majoritarianism can be undesireable (such as cases of polarizing slim-majority winner.
If, in a two-candidate election, one candidate gets more votes, should that election be the winner, even if the losing candidate has more passionate supporters?
In democratic elections that respect one-person/one-vote, the answer to that question is simply yes, because that is the definition of one-person/one-vote democracy. Even if there are 100 voters, and it's 51-49, and the 51 voters are lukewarm while the 49 voters are passionate, the candidate with 51 votes wins. No matter what.
The reason that matters is because it is actually fairly slippery to measure passion. If one person submits a 10 rating, and another submits a 7 rating, what does that mean? It could mean that one person is passionate and the other person is lukewarm. But it could also mean that one person is emphatic while the other person is meek. Or that one person is authoritarian and the other person is abused. The entire reason we have one-person/one-vote is to make sure that voters are treated equally, even if society is otherwise telling certain people that they are "less than".
And for those sorts of elections, Condorcet voting is basically perfect. All the flaws people attribute to "Condorcet methods" are only attributable to when there are multi-member Smith Sets.
Now there are other kinds of elections; elections where we don't follow the one-person/one-vote principle. Smaller electorates, non-governmental, self-governing organizations. In those cases, "consensus" is more possible without risking systemic abuse. And in those cases, it might be entirely appropriate to award the winner to the 49% candidate with more passionate support. In which case you would perhaps choose something other than Condorcet.
You should come to terms with the fact that whatever you mean is completely unintuitive to many/most of us, and that almost everyone will just this like they use Amazon. Whether or not the page says "it's like Amazon" or "it's not like Amazon".
The ballots are proposed as labeled "no support" to "most support".
It isn't entirely unlike Amazon, it's like Amazon if your standard for what's a 5, like "the best book" is "the best of THESE candidates". All people need to do to get the system is care about their impact on the outcome of the election in order to realize that 5 doesn't mean "love" or some other semantic thing, it just means the top of the options.
And if people just use it like Amazon and some give no candidate a 5, the system doesn't fall apart, it works pretty well anyway.
http://star.vote is not a controlled scientific survey or anything, but people overall seem to have no trouble using the full range.
In fact, in my anecdotal experience, even over years in the past when I told people about plain score voting and tried to get them not to use the full range (because I misunderstood that issue myself), many people insisted that they would use the full range anyway. A lot of people find it intuitive to give their favorite all the points they can.
But the real answer is that, yes, we need more studies and trials of all these things.
Intuiting what "giving one star more or less to a candidate" means is really difficult to understand as a voter. "If more voters had given Kodos four stars instead of three, he could have won" is a headache inducing explanation.
Approval voting is the only alternative to IRV or plurality voting that seems to match the level of intuitiveness of both the voting process and the tabulation process.
If IRV complexity and explanations were not a problem, we wouldn't see today's reality where IRV proponents themselves constantly make incorrect claims about it.
Not always (and not in the linked article here), but often people get the intuition that their 2nd choice will get counted when their 1st choice is eliminated, and then try to get them to understand why their 2nd choice was not counted (because their 2nd choice had already been eliminated) while someone else's 2nd choice was counted…
What happened in Burlington before they repealled IRV shows not only people getting intuitions about IRV wrong but people often don't even get what happened in Burlington because it seems so counter-intuitive. https://www.equal.vote/Burlington
And yet, that scenario is common enough. Burlington is just the case where all the ballot stats were released so we can study it.
The problem, though, is one of correctness, not complexity -- I would maintain that almost anyone could look at that election summary and understand why the conclusion that was reached was reached. And if they had had a traditional non-instant runoff election, the result would likely have been the same. It's hard to even explain why the outcome was "wrong" because the tabulation of the results is so intuitive.
> I seriously doubt that anyone would get a headache over "if people had given that losing candidate higher scores, they would have won". I don't even see how you can honestly claim that to be anything but completely intuitive to everyone.
The question for the intuition is "how many stars to I give this candidate". What does it mean to give them one more star? One person's four-star vote carries exactly as much weight as four people's one-star vote, which seems incredibly odd. An Amazon product with a hundred one star reviews is intuitively worse than one with 10 five star reviews.
Certainly not! In Burlington, people know the Republican can't win. So, like everyone in the current system, people would (and have both before and since IRV) vote strategically. So, the less-hardcore Republicans would vote Democrat in order to stop the Progressive.
In fact, if IRV had not been repealed, a good portion of the Republicans would betray their favorite and vote Dem as 1st choice (dishonestly) in the future in order to stop the Progressive from ever winning again.
Furthermore, when vote splitting happens in a current system, everyone readily gets why it was "wrong" and they adapt their strategies accordingly.
> What does it mean to give them one more star?
It means they are one more point ahead of the others.
> One person's four-star vote carries exactly as much weight as four people's one-star vote, which seems incredibly odd
The weight is relative, that's all that matters. As long as people understand the system, they can realize that they are throwing away part of their vote if they only put a 1-star and nothing else. Four people who put 1-star for candidate A might have put 5 stars for candidate B. They are influencing the race just as much as anyone else.
Here's what it means to be equal: Any voter can score the opposite of another voter and they will cancel out. Our votes can have equal weight if that's possible. That's not always possible in our current system or with IRV.
> An Amazon product with a hundred one star reviews is intuitively worse than one with 10 five star reviews.
If there were 110 voters, then every item is relative to that vote. There's 100 1-star votes for candidate A and 10 5-star votes for candidate B? That means candidate B got zeros (blanks are no points) from 100 candidates. A candidate with 100 zero-star votes and only 10 5-star votes is a worse option.
With FPTP voting, C would have won of the three candidates, and A would have placed last. If you removed A from the race, B would have won - and did!
Alternate voting systems are supposed to produce different results from plurality voting, and that's often unsettling the first time it happens.
That page makes the claim that IRV produced a bad result and that's why it was replaced. But at least the candidate with the 2nd-most 1st place votes won. If instead the Condorcet winner, A, had won, do they really think it would have been better? A got the _least_ 1st place votes of the three, who's to say there wouldn't have been an even larger backlash?
FPTP is even worse than IRV, except that people know how it is bad so they adapt accordingly.
Of course, it's speculation about the specific backlash, but the core issue in IRV is this (and it happens in the Burlington case):
ALL the voters whose 1st choice loses in the final round never get any of their other preferences counted and they lose their 1st choice. They get NOTHING, no say, totally screwed. They could be as much as 49% of voters. Now, WITHIN IRV, they can later learn (as people have learned about strategy in FPTP) that if they betray their favorite and vote for their lesser-evil choice as 1st, then they WILL swing the election to their lesser-evil instead of the greater evil.
By ignoring the preferences of some voters and counting others, the weighting is unequal and people will feel disenfranchised.
Maybe this older more thorough discussion of the Burlington case will help you understand: https://www.rangevoting.org/Burlington.html
The core point is that voters in IRV can get a preferable outcome via favorite betrayal (a dishonest strategy). Either they do use that strategy and we're back to the lesser-evil problems we have now, or they don't use that strategy and we're back to vote-splitting like we have now, where a candidate choosing to run can both lose and cause a worse outcome for their supporters.
Another way of seeing this could be that such voters had their 1st choice considered and given value all the way until the last round, whereas many other voters had their lesser choices considered in their previous rounds. The 1rst-choicers-all-the-way-till-the-end could be considered more favored than the latter voters I mentioned, who lost their favorite candidates earlier on in the process.
I'm not saying that this is a better interpretation of the situation you posit. I'm just using it to illustrate that it's hard, maybe impossible, to get away from subjective criteria when we consider the virtues of various voting systems.
by the way, Fargo North Dakota just adopted approval voting for their City elections tonight.
Within a strict ranked-ballot approach, the overall best tabulation is probably Ranked Pairs.
STAR has some similarities with Bucklin but does not have its problems. STAR's advantages are several and aren't directly just a forgone conclusion merely by showing what's wrong with IRV. STAR is much simpler to tabulate than Ranked Pairs and doesn't need to be tabulated at the highest level, it can be counted at precincts like FPTP.
If there were an objective way to measure actual utilities, score-based methods would be great (and economics and policy assessment would be much simpler, and...)
In STAR voting, you have up to 5 points to give to each candidate. You effectively get to push each candidate ahead in the race relative to the others by as many as 5 steps forward. There is NOTHING subjective about the meaning of points. They are just points. More points wins. They have no cultural signficance, no opinion, nothing subjective.
Yes, there's a mapping to a (typically 0-5) numerical rating like those popular in online review systems, which is a motivation for the forced acronym, and exactly the similarity that is viewed as making it particularly intuitive and accessible.
Cultural differences in how such rating systems are used for similar preferences have been studied considerably.
It's true that you can also view STAR as a limited bucket (and so forced-tie for any but the smallest candidate pool) ranked-ballot method, in which you force voters to arbitrarily select which intercandidate ranking preferences to suppress, and then do a completely wacky (from a ranked preference perspective) method of tallying the ballots.
It is indeed a form of ranking that allows ties and has a limited resolution. But the limited resolution does help with simplicity.
From a UI perspective, presenting a ranked ballot that allows ties is unfortunately complicated. That's what STAR actually could/should be though.
And the tallying method is fine, not wacky. In a sense, it's like Borda Count to get to two finalists and then IRV for the finalists. That avoids all the worst aspects of IRV (which are all symptoms of the way its multi-round elimination ignores the preferences of many voters while counting the preferences of others).
I disagree. Generally, unforced rankings (allowing full expression of preferences with optional ties) are simpler than forced rankings (with no ties) which in turn are simpler than limited bucket arrangements that force ties; “Between X and Y, do you prefer X, Y, or neither?” is the simplest question about voting preferences, and unforced preferences can be answered by answering that question alone; forced rankings may, as the name suggests, force the invention of an artificial preference in some cases, but limited buckets methods force deciding which preferences are most important and which to suppress. And limited buckets methods which apply something more than ordinal meanings to buckets,as STAR does, are most complicated.
> From a UI perspective, presenting a ranked ballot that allows ties is unfortunately complicated
Tallying unforced preference ballots is complicated, “number your preferences starting with ‘1’ for most preferred, ’2’ for next most, and so on, with equal preferences getting the same number” with a ballot with appropriate entry blanks isn't hard UI either in paper or machines.
Even if you want paper optical scan ballots, the main problem is the size of the ballot (which is a logistical problem when you've got multiple simultaneous races) more than the UI.
> And the tallying method is fine, not wacky.
Viewed as a preference ballot, giving non-ordinal meaning to rankings is wacky, since it is inventing information. The wacky description was in that specific “viewed as” context.
> In a sense, it's like Borda Count
I don't disagree with this characterization, though I view it as more of a condemnation than a defense.
> That avoids all the worst aspects of IRV (which are all symptoms of the way its multi-round elimination ignores the preferences of many voters while counting the preferences of others).
If you want to eliminate all the worst aspects of IRV, which you view as all due to ignoring preferences via loser elimination, the simple solution is just to drop loser elimination (giving Bucklin or a form of Majority Judgement, depending on where you use forced preferences or allow ties; classic Majority Judgement even uses limited buckets, though you can use a full unforced preference ballot, so if you really think the preference compression is justified by UI benefits, you can use exactly the same ballot as STAR, with a much more straightforward resolution procedure.)
This is certainly far simpler than STAR, whether or not you use the same ballot.
You are right in noticing that it's not exclusively an unforced ranking (which I agree is vastly superior to forced rankings!). So, in STAR, there's a different between 3 candidates scored as 5,1,0 versus 5,4,0. They count identically in the runoff stage (which is effectively the rank part of the system). But they count different in the score.
I'm not convinced that difference is necessary, valuable, or intuitive to people, but I'm not convinced it isn't. I think these things need more real-world case studies. I definitely think the distinction isn't fatal or anything. I see how it could have a positive impact on outcomes.
I don't agree that multi-round eliminations are simpler than STAR per se.
I'm certainly inclined to see 3-2-1 voting as a competitor with STAR for best overall system.
https://rangevoting.org/IrvExec.html
There are many examples of voters in real-world IRV elections _do_ rank their favorite candidates last, to help them win (the same problem plurality voting has, but worse, because there are multiple plurality runoff votes).
Mathematical models also agree – situations in which IRV produces bad results are extremely common. Something like 70% of possible situations where IRV and plurality voting produce different results, the IRV result is worse than the plurality result.
Approval voting and range voting are really the only voting systems I know of that are strictly better than plurality. They have their flaws, but per Arrow's Impossibility Theorem, there aren't any voting systems without flaws.
Huh? There isn't a clear-cut way of determining the best voting system, so how were they compare the two? That matters quite a lot.
There are situations where IRV get so complicated it is unpredictable, but living in Australia that does sometimes feel like a feature - if the polity expresses no strong consensus preference, random selection amongst candidates is not a bad idea.
> Approval voting and range voting are ... strictly better
Yeah, totally [0]. Approval voting looks like the one to use just in terms of doing what a voting system does.
Any system that lets neutrals and moderates in occasionally is better than plurality. And plurality is streaks ahead of having no choice at all.
The key point which is laboured a couple of times is that some seat results are different than plurality outcomes. But that is a feature of IRV, not a bug.
Had the election been run under plurality rules voters would of voted differently and this fact seems to of escaped the author of this website.
Voters who preferenced greens first, recognising a minor parties zero chance of winning under plurality would of instead cast votes according to two party preferred lineup, who mostly would ideologically align with labour. But under IRV they can vote for anyone they feel more closely represents them but still have meaningful input into a 2PP outcome.
Show me a critique of an IRV outcome where 2PP outcome violates Monotonicity and you'll have a real critique of IRV.
However, in close three-cornered races, tactical voting does sometimes come into play. The recent Wentworth by-election was an example of this: Liberal voters could have assisted their party to win the election by switching their first preference to the Labor candidate, because if the Labor candidate had beaten the eventual winner (Phelps, Independent) into second place, then Phelps' preferences would have been distributed and almost certainly given the win to the Liberal. Of course, this is a risky strategy, because if too many Liberal voters did this then they would have instead engineered a Labor win. And in reality, despite the possibility of tactical voting, the Condorcet winner Phelps won anyway.
An example where the Condorcet winner may not have won is the seat of Rockhampton in the 2017 Queensland State election. The primary votes had Labor in first, independent Margaret Strelow in second, One Nation in third and the LNP in fourth. However preferences from the LNP candidate pushed One Nation into second, which gave Labor the win on Strelow's preferences. It seems likely that Strelow would have beaten any of the other three head-to-head, though. And as previously mentioned, this sort of situation is notable for its rarity.
That doesn't affect the tactical voting possibility there - the possibility arose because the Liberal candidate's chances were greatly affected by which of the other two major contenders made it into the final runoff.
Similar issue for end-to-end auditable homomorphically encrypted voting systems. Yes, anyone can check the math in theory ... but not the typical voter.
> Compare that to to some of the other systems which often have complex mathematical descriptions which are hard for people to wrap their heads around.
> Another thing is how big a deal is 'non-monotonicity' is it actually going to be something that will affect elections all the time, or is it something that's more minor than say turnout which honestly has no solution and on one side you have USA where turnout is low so the game is all about making sure your base turns out, or on the other side you have Australia where voting is mandatory so making sure people who don't care, don't vote at random is a big part of the game.
> Runoffs are something people understand, IRV is conceptually similar and makes intuitive sense to people, it's very easy to explain to people, 'if nobody gets a majority, eliminate last place and redistribute their votes, repeat'.
Compare that to to some of the other systems which often have complex mathematical descriptions which are hard for people to wrap their heads around.
It's fascinating how a similar constraint arises in industry software engineer; more than fascinating
The weirdness comes in the strange tiebreaker methods if there's a "loop", but when you have a lot of voters, loops are rare.
(Condorcet proponents would probably get more mileage if they had a better conceptual split between methods that identify the Smith Set, and methods that seek to award single winners of multi-member Smith Sets - those "tiebreakers" are where all the problems happen, and none of those flaws are relevant in elections where there is a Condorcet Winner.)
Could anyone take a stab at explaining how this could happen? I looked at the linked site but it's over my head. The visualizations aren't doing anything for me.
It is a consequence of the loser-elimination step. You can avoid it by eliminating loser elimination, which gives the (unlimited ranks variant of) Bucklin (with ties and truncated ballots allowed, essentially Majority Judgement) voting system, which has its own pros and cons. I kind of lean towards unlimited ranks, ties-allowed Bucklin—count first-place votes, if you have a candidate with a majority of ballots cast, they win, if not add all candidates second place votes and see if you have a majority (of ballots, not counted votes which will now exceed ballots), etc., with a tie-breaking procedure if you get two majorities in the same round (bigger majority, either in current or subsequent rounds, random selection of the tie persists when ballot preferences are exhausted)—is my preferred simple ranked-choice system. Condorcet methods arguably choose a better winner in the case where they disagree, but are less simple.
My updated intuition now says that IRV means that as long as your top candidate is in first place, your other preferences are disregarded by the system. "My #2 was eliminated too early -- if I had known that my #1 would be eliminated in the end I would have ranked #2 higher".
Basically, I suggest pushing approval voting over other methods for realistic cases.
For example, if 40% believe in A and 60% believe in B, and there one candidate, X, standing on platform A, and two candidates, Y and Z, standing on minor variants of platform B, the votes split 30% for Y, 30% for Z, and X gets elected with 40%.
It is easy to see how the 2016 presidential election would have worked out if this assumption was realistic. Hillary 52%, Donald(Republican) 24%, Never-Trump(Republican) 24%. Hillary wins by a landslide, despite playing a sub-optimal electoral college game.
The assumption is very far from realistic. I next turn to whether the lack of realism matters.
Imagine a three way race, with two old established parties, A and B, and a new third party, C. Under first past the post voters who prefer C > B > A, vote B, to avoid letting A in. Meanwhile voters who prefer C > A > B vote A to avoid letting B in. Under first past the post (FPTP) it is very hard to start a new party.
We might frame the issue this way: who decides the fate of the third party candidate? Under FPTP the third party candidate loses and this decision was taken long ago, by men now dead, when they opted for FPTP. Under IRV the fate of the third party depends on today's voters. If they are voting C > B > A and C > A > B then the third party candidate stages an upset victory. If they are voting B > A > C and A > B > C then the third party candidate is humiliated and doesn't bother running again.
The argument for IRV over FPTP is that we prefer that the fate of the third party candidate be in the hands of the voters, rather than seeing the third party candidate lose automatically, by the game theory of FPTP.
The zesty link simplifies away the problem that IRV is intended to solve. But it doesn't argue that the problem is small; it cannot do that because every-one can see that the spoiler effect under FPTP is a big issue. Instead it refuses to mention the problem, simplifies it away, and hopes that nobody notices. That is derailing, not contributing.
However, a system similar enough to your example has been used for years by the Quakers, where each voter gives a score of +1, 0, or -1 to each option/candidate. The difference here is that you can give +1 to multiple candidates, and -1 to multiple candidates. Giving your opinion on one candidate in no way limits your ability to give opinion on other candidates.
You'll never be able to sell it to the general public, of course, but if you could do it for just one election I think you'd have everyone on board just from the results of it.
This is a much more interesting question to me, first because the candidates' positions are more mutable than the voters' opinions and second because as someone whose political opinions are often non-aligned with major parties, I really wish that there was an incentive for viable 3rd-party candidates to give a voice to my views. The ncase.me simulator linked elsewhere on this thread seems more useful:
Range/Score (and STAR, which is a variation) use numeric score rankings on a preset range, and some methods use a limited set of ranks rather than (allowing voters to use up to) as many as candidates (Approval can be viewed as two-rank system.)
I often wonder if we should just use Condorcet and if there isn’t a clear winner, declare the result a tie. (That would likely be vulnerable to a kind of DoS attack, though.)
The Smith set is as easy to explain as the Condorcet winner, and random selection is trivial, so random selection from the Smith set seems to be a simple Condorcet tiebreaker.
Hmm, there might be something in that...
The Smith set tie would occur more often, and in complex scenarios where it really isn’t clear that it actually is a dead heat.
But of course, random ballot has just one pesky undesirable property: the fact that it’s random.
So one option is to hold a runoff between the candidates in the Smith Set.
Another is crazier, but I haven't found a flaw yet. Basically introduce range/score voting on the ballot, but only use the scores if there is a multi-member Smith Set. That way you guarantee Condorcet compliance. And since the voters don't know if the ranges/scores will be used (and they probably won't), they don't have incentive to strategically score a less-desired candidate ahead of a more-desired candidate.
I just thought of a way to possibly make it more intuitive. Use ranked voting, with the addition of a “nobody below this line” item that you can add to your ranking anywhere you like. Then at the runoff stage, you use approval voting, with “nobody below here” determining which candidates you approve.
That gives you a nice easy-to-understand runoff, and is maybe even more understandable than normal ranked voting because you get to explicitly separate out the candidates you really can’t stomach. I suspect some people don’t like ranked voting because you’re expected to stack-rank lots of candidates you dislike.
But we're talking a lot of complexity to have both ranks and scores as separate marks. Super long ballot, will turn away most voters and seem really hard to process.
It sounds like you might appreciate 3-2-1 voting. https://wiki.electorama.com/wiki/3-2-1_voting
(The point of the above was to respect the Condorcet Criterion, and 3-2-1 voting does not meet that criterion.)
IRV has its flaws but they are minor in comparison to the voting system we have.
It's entirely possible (even within the confines of the US Constitution!) to virtually never do this. Elect the House of Representatives by statewide party list. Senate is hard because each state has two senators elected non-simultaneously; otherwise statewide STV would work. Since the President is already elected by the Electoral Congress, skip the popular Presidential election and select the Electoral Congress by sortition among all eligible registered voters in a state (similar to jury selection except without being able to arbitrarily send people home) and have them personally interview the candidates before voting their personal consciences.
I was unfamiliar with the ranked pairs system, and will study it more to understand it better. It looks promising as far as technical excellence, though I'm afraid it'd still be too hard to understand for the general populace in most (or all) countries.
One thing I suspect about range voting is that it seems to require strategic voting. A voter would still need to give a very favorable score to a majority party that's kind of aligned with their views, as opposed to giving them a lower score than a minority/third party he or she would prefer. One of the strongest appeals to me from IRV is the opportunity it provides for a minority party to unseat majority parties, which is appealing given the political stagnation experienced by many countries. I had also thought that it allowed voters to avoid strategic voting and express their true, individual voting preferences.
After reading IRV's description in http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/ , I realized that I had misunderstood one important detail. I had thought that the least popular candidates were eliminated first until only the top two candidates remained, and the one with most votes among them remained. I dislike that the "real" IRV (not the one that was in my head) first checks for a 50%-plus-one majority before eliminating the bottom candidates. That feels too much like the first-past-the-post system for my liking. I wonder if having successive rounds where the least-favorite first place candidate is eliminated would make most people's favorite candidates "bubble up" to the top, producing a final match between two highly-favored candidates. I wonder if such a system is closer to a Condorcet method than the real IRV...
Suppose that a candidate has a majority at the beginning. Then this continues to be the case as other candidates are eliminated. Thus, this majority candidate will be elected at the end. So this extra "if-clause" only speeds up computation, it does not change the voting rule.
Could you elaborate on why you think plurality is better than IRV?
It doesn’t matter. It ain’t gonna happen. Not because IRV or condorcet is or isn’t better, but simply because of the installed base. Getting literally everyone to a) understand the subtle differences and then b) agree to switch and c) agree to switch to the same system is impossible because literally every step of the process is itself impossible.
This is not me being pessimistic, this is me being realistic.
Humorously, a top down dictatorial approach would be the only way to “improve” (by some estimations) the current democratic implementation. You’d have to not care about democracy to upgrade democracy.
/s
Proof by contradiction, mate. It's not impossible, just hard. There's plenty of things that once we're said to be impossible, and the data agreed... until they happened. Everything had to have had a first time.
It passed, but -- perhaps not surprisingly -- many current, established politicians weren't happy. Maine's governor called it "the most horrific thing in the world" and the state legislature refused to fund implementation and voted to delay it until 2022.
So this year the the citizens of Maine voted again to confirm instant runoff voting, overruling the state legislature and vetoing their delay. It passed by an even bigger margin this time.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/06/maine-l...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_LePage#Drug-dealing_comme...
In any case, he's leaving office and leaving Maine, so who cares what he thinks?
So I say "can you list your choices in order of preference?" They almost always say that's acceptable. You can run IRV from that, but you can also run most any Condorcet variant. The only remaining part is to show the results in a fashion people understand, which is non-trivial but is also not what the "anything else is too hard" group was complaining about.
So don't say "ranked pair" or "STV"...say "order of preference", and you'll find people more willing to consider ideas. It's not EASY, but it's definitely EASIER.
We use FPTP in the UK because it directly correlates an MP with a constituency. Even if the candidate you didn't prefer wins, they are still your MP and have a duty to represent you.
We had a referendum on PR a few years ago (which was rejected) and its proponents kept banging on about it, then went very very quiet when UKIP got 4 million votes (more than the SNP and the Greens combined).
You had a vote on IRV, not for proportional representation. The Australian lower house is based on the same Westminster system but we use IRV.
A relatively unknown voting system is Direct Party and Representative Voting:
which basically involves giving voters two ballot papers at each election: one a simple "pick one" for the local candidate (counted like a normal FPTP election), and the other a "pick one" for the party that the voter prefers at the national level (if any). The proportions for these second ballots are used to adjust the "voting power" of the MPs or Representatives that were elected for each constituency / district by the first ballots. For example, each politician from an under-represented party could be given effectively two votes in the parliament / congress.
An even simpler approach (which is a variant of Mixed-member Proportional Representation) would be to use the same ballot papers (and constituencies) as now, and produce the same set of winners as a FPTP counting process produces, but add an extra 20% of representatives to parliament / congress to readjust the composition of that house to reflect the national vote totals. In particular, these extra representatives should come not from a party list (since those give parties the ability to give seats to unpopular candidates) but from the "best near-winners", that is, the candidates who did best in their elections without winning the plurality vote. Such a system is already implemented in Baden-Württemberg.
Both of these systems have a clear benefit over Ranked, Score, and even Approval voting, which is that the vote counting process involves putting each piece of paper into one of a few piles, once. There are no extra rounds, and the only information that needs to be communicated for collating is the number of votes for each candidate (which correlates well with the size of the respective piles).
#2 - Election administrators hate IRV. They'll oppose, sabotage it at every turn. We had a local trial run. As an observer, it'd be hard to argue the admins made an honest effort to make it succeed.
#3 - IRV is confusing to voters. Try explaining it to your parents.
Any changes to our voting systems should be incremental, deliberate. First with local races and then progressively up ballot. Give people time to adapt.
But I agree 100% with your final point: people need time to adapt, and be willing to do so. Changing the system to something people trust even less would be bad.
This is a feature, not a bug. The count should be done by hand. The multiple rounds increase the probability that shennanigans will be detected, whether by sheer weight of watching eyes or by numerical irregularities between rounds.
> Election administrators hate IRV. They'll oppose, sabotage it at every turn.
I don't see how to predict which one they will like.
> IRV is confusing to voters. Try explaining it to your parents.
My parents are in their 70s and have voted this way since before I was born. My paternal grandparents were voting this way before my parents were born. My maternal grandparents voted this way when they moved to Australia.
Tens of millions of Australians vote this way and have done so for about a century.
It does not seem statistically likely that somehow Australia has had an uninterrupted run of particular genius at a multi-decadal/multi-million-person scale that nobody else in the world can replicate ever again.
My jurisdiction often has 30+ contests. We had 22 belligerents for mayor 2 years ago. I think we had 12 for senator in our most recent primary. I dimly recall my county counts 450k ballots.
Commonwealth, state and local elections are held separately.
How many candidates for hotly contested races?
For Senate elections it is not uncommon for there to be literally hundreds of names on the ballot, which is why "above the line voting" is an option.
How many ballots are procssed?
For a Commonwealth and State elections, millions, with an indicative count (ie, whether there a clear winner on first preferences) made on the same night by tallying across hundreds or thousands of polling stations.
More to the point: it scales. The indicative count is easily parallelised to any level, since summation is a commutative operation.
I think your implication is that Australia doesn't do it at a large enough scale and that therefore, our experiences don't count. That isn't true. Commonwealth elections are comparable in scale and complexity to the operations of those run by the largest states in the USA to handle federal elections.
If you're handling large scale, complicated IRV elections with ease, than that should inform the efforts of our local proponents (eg fairvote.org).
People seem to get fixed on ranked choice voting versus plurality voting (the current system), and what we really need is a movement to change the voting method to something more accurate.
But it's puzzling to me why the discussion seems to highlight ranking rather than approval voting. The only argument I've really heard against it is that people would get confused and not realize they can vote for more than one person. But it seems to me in that case you've just re-implemented plurality voting, and people would figure it out well enough. Just put out a big public ad campaign. People would learn.
Oakland switched their mayoral election to IRV (maybe ten years ago?) and it was so misunderstood that even one of the candidates recommended that his supporters vote for him in every IRV rank position! (Or perhaps he just didn't want to recommend his supporters even think about the other candidates names?)
How?
"Just vote one". Or "just mark one". Or "100 points for us and 0 for anyone else". Etc etc. Enough voters will comply -- especially in voluntary systems which magnify the power of fringe voters -- that any advantages of non-ranking voting schemes will be neutralised.
Voting systems like approval voting, range voting and so on work if the options or candidates are prepared to behave uprightly. Outside of situations like a local club or professional organisation, they won't. They will meta-game. It happened in Queensland when they introduced "optional preferential" voting.
Because there is no consistent meaning to “approval”; this is generally a problem with limited-buckets systems in that they force artificially creating ties with no consistent meaning; if you have to have a single-winner system, it should be a ranked-ballot system without limited buckets that does something sensible with the rankings; IRV is about the worst, IMO, that meets that minimum standard.
* Vote for B and C. My vote for C is guarenteed to fail because I'm also giving a vote to B, which was likely to be better than them in the first place. There's no way C can win if everyone who votes for them also votes for B.
* Vote for C alone. This increases C's chance of beating B, but it means that if C doesn't win I now had no say in whether A or B won.
Politics isn't black and white. There isn't a set of candidates I'm ok with vs a set I am not. My preferences are a ranked list, and any system that doesn't let me express those preferences is, in my opinion, worse than IRV, even if it does produce some theoretically sub-optimal results in some weird edge cases.
EDIT:
> Maybe in practice people would only ever approve one candidate and the situation wouldn't change, but I think it's a least a good small step forward.
I didn't see that bit before. Yes sorry, if we're talking about in comparison to FPTP, I'm all for approval voting.
Really, we just need something better than first past the post.
FPTP < IRV < Kemeny–Young < Majority Judgment
Really, if anyone here hasn't looked at cardinal voting systems before, I strongly recommend reading some of the academic work in this area. There are a lot of strong considerations in favor that surprised me.
Basically if you have e.g. 100 seats in your house, you choose 100 ballots at random and whomever is voted for on those ballots are the representatives. It averages out to proportional representation, while still allowing geographically distributed candidates.
It also satisfies all of Arrow's criteria[1], which no deterministic system can.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theore...
Approval voting is deterministic and satisfies all of Arrow's criteria. Arrow's theorem doesn't apply to voting systems, such as approval voting, that are not ranked choice systems.
The core problem with most voting systems could be solved with more representatives and just straight proportional representation. In the range of 1 to 10k–100k. Then you do a parliamentary system with one primary chamber that does most of the law making and one secondary chamber that does some checks but is ultimately toothless. A supreme court that can make law, but tends to refer legislation back to the parliament. A clause to allow the primary legislator to override all but the most basic freedoms required for democracy to work like voting and a free press.
Essentially Canada, but with proportional representation and maybe double the number of MPs.
The problem with random ballots is that unserious people will will or vote for themselves and they're harder to do securely with straight paper ballots that is understandable to laypersons.
If you're going to randomly sample ballots just randomly sample voters and skip the line.
But, there is a much more nuanced flaw. It's very hard to be an informed voter. A few nights ago, my wife and I spent a lot of time researching most of the candidates on our ballot.
If every race had many candidates, than instant runoff would make being an informed voter much harder. (Granted, my ballot had many unopposed candidates, and in some cases where information wasn't easy to find, I just voted by party.)
IMO, a much simpler thing to start with is just making it easier to be an informed voter. When I lived in CA, I got a pamphlet with statements from all candidates. It was very easy to choose who to vote for in local elections. Where I live now, I just don't get this kind of information.
Following declared party, endorsements are a good signal. Some friends created https://www.readysetvote.org that serves that purpose. Type in your address, see all the candidates and their endorsements.
Alas, thus far it's just for King County WA.
However, it is a two-round election. A run-off is always necessary. But it can be made one-round via what I call rank-and-star: voters rank candidates by preference, and put a star next to the top N that they like. The two candidates with the most stars are then compared on rankings. It's pretty easy to prove this is mathematically equivalent to the two-round system, but it's not a ranked-choice method because the ballots (1-2-3) and (1-2-3) are different.
Interestingly, it might still be possible to satisfy both participation and monotonicity if you expand the run-off to three candidates and use minimax Condorcet for the final round. For three candidates, minimax = Schulze = ranked-pairs and they satisfy participation; for four or more candidates, no Condorcet method satisfies participation. However, doing this costs you the attractive simplicity of the method (but minimax Condorcet is simple to understand, relative to IRV or ranked-pairs).
Anyway, this puts me in the odd position of advocating a voting system nobody has ever heard of =p
What's needed isn't just IRV but STV - think IRV but districts grouped together and multiple winners. That way, you can actually get results that are proportional to the votes cast because the difference between a narrow win and a landslide changes who gets elected down the ticket.
Some systems do this randomly (randomly choose ballots and take the next preference), and some do this fractionally (e.g. transferred votes are worth whatever fraction wasn't needed to elect their previous choices). Overall, though, the point is that if your middle choice is eliminated, then either your vote wasn't enough, or a previous choice needed your support already.
That said, most systems 'skip' over previously elected candidates as well. Strictly speaking, doing that can mean ballots with a losing first candidate are more powerful than ballots where the first candidate is elected by a narrow margin[1]. That said, as per the wiki link, there's a solution (recalculate all instead of skipping previously elected) and tactical voting around that issue isn't seen in practice anyway.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Issues_affecting_the_single_tr...
STV = Single Transferable Vote
So I think the real issue is to open up the lower chambers to third parties, and that's best done through the use of Proportional Representation. IRV will not work at that level, because very few races are scrutinized by the public very much. Proportional Representation also eliminates Gerrymandering (or significantly reduces it depending on how it's implemented).
Once you've got a significant number of third parties in the lower chambers, whoever is head of state really doesn't matter that much. Since they'll have to work with pretty much everyone in the lower chambers to get anything done.
The upper house (eg Senate) in bicameral systems is a special case. I'm undecided if they should be abolished (7 states have more Senators than Representatives) or our state boundaries redrawn.
Puerto Rico also seems to want statehood, but there's no progress on getting it for them for various reasons I don't fully understand.
Redrawing state boundaries would either be politically impossible, or could only happen with a large enough national one-party supermajority that it would basically amount to gerrymandering anyway.
If you have a country with 60% A, 30% B and 10% C, then you might like to a parliament roughly representative of that. (A, B, and C could be anything - attitudes to same sex marriage, daylight saving - there are always many ABC sets.) If parliament consists people elected in geographic regions, and A, B and C are uniformly distributed over the regions than all voting systems here will give you a parliament consisting only of A's.
People here seem to enjoy pointing out some perverse outcomes for IRV, but the Arrow's impossibility theorem proves (and ncase.me beautifully demonstrates) all voting systems have perverse outcomes. Yet none are as bad as electing all A's to represent a diverse country and every one of them will do that if used the wrong way, which also happens to be the most common way they are used.
Back to the topic - IRV does have its downsides, but it's not perverse outcomes. Australia tries to use IRV everywhere. The Australia Federal Senate has a voting system that does fix the dictatorship of the majority and naturally they try to use IRV there too. If you ever have the unfortunate experience of voting in an Australian Senate election you'll see why IRV isn't so good in that situation. In fact it's so bad not even the Australian's can use it in its pure form. If you are wondering why, it leads asking the public to number 100 odd boxes in strictly consecutive order, on a 1m wide ballot paper that can't lie flat in the ballot box with writing so small they had to issue magnifying glasses so you could read the candidate names. https://www.abc.net.au/news/6870332
Which is, to be sure, not very well, but there's nothing special about the House that makes it work there better.
Approval voting: you can vote for any of the candidates you like, not just one.
Way simpler than IRV.
Score voting: give any or all candidates scores.
Easy explanation.
STAR: score the candidates, there's an auto-runoff where the two highest-score candidates get checked to see which is preferred by more voters.
At least as easy to explain as IRV, and much easier to actually understand overall, particularly in making sense of the results and following what happened.
There -- simple!
Way too complicated for 50% + 1 of the population
IRV (and any preferential voting system) is quite close to the voting system for any of the weekly elimination talent shows. You rank people in order, the last one gets knocked out, you try again - with the difference that this all happens at once.
Are we really saying that people are too dim to rank their choices in order of preference, or understand the voting system behind some of the most popular TV formats worldwide for the past decade?
https://www.maine.gov/sos/cec/elec/upcoming/MarkedBallotExam...
We have lots of choices of voting systems. If we only had a way to decide! I hope the irony is not lost on all you bikeshedders out there.
Quit bikeshedding. Start advocating for change. Start at the local level. Get your city or town to switch to the system of your choice. Don't just post on the internet about it.
IRV has the fundamental flaw in that it counts some voters' preferences and ignores others. It's an overly-complex and mediocre unequal system.
Check out https://www.equal.vote to understand what it means to have voting equality and how we can pursue systems that honor that.
EDIT: Oh, on one of the rounds the top candidate might become the bottom candidate, I see.
What happens if the candidate that gets removed is in the middle? I'm guessing nothing, since it "stops" at your first preference that's still in the race, ie your vote goes to the first person?
In practice here, even in such large contests the top 5 candidates normally end up with 90% of the vote and there's enough overlap between the parties (the further left parties transferring to centre left, the two centre right parties transferring to each other) that there's normally a clear leader by then, it's rare that e.g. a candidate with 48% gets eliminated in favour of a candidate with 49% in the last round.
No, it's not.
It's better than FPTP, but then if you threw a dart at a list of single-winner voting methods, you are nearly guaranteed to hit something better than FPTP.
Not only are there better single-winner methods, what we really need need is multiseat candidate-centered (i.e., not party list) proportional methods. STV, IRVs multiwinner cousin, isn't a bad choice here, though arguably not the best. (Degree of effective legislative proportionality is strongly linked to popular satisfaction with the resulting government across modern democracies, and single winner systems inherently produce poor proportionality and, thereby, poor satisfaction—the government fails to represent the electorate, and he electorate tends to dislike the goverment for that reason.)
Single winner systems maximize the distortion of representation due to districting (which is bad even when it isn't corruptly bad in single-member legislative district systems), and maximize the number of people that lack effective representation through voting.
Simply running IRV is easy enough. Understanding it and its ramifications is complex enough that even the majority of IRV advocates don't understand it.
- people need to believe it is fair.
- it should avoid lop sided results (one party always wins regardless of vote) yet should avoid excessive diffusion (i.e. you don't want to have only fragile coalitions of many small parties).
- others, all with the aim of clarity.
As there is no magic bullet people use combinations of different systems:
- Australian ballot (secret ballot) which most systems use these days; hard to enforce in USA because of first amendment.
- quasi-independent apportionment processes/committees (as used in CA, AZ et al)
- party lists (not used in USA) or party-plus-candidate (e.g. Germany)
- non-party systems (e.g. CA)
- multi-candidate districts (not used in the US)
- proportional representation (most democracies) or first-past-the-post (most dependents of Westminster). I'm a fan of the latter BTW.
- IRV
Mix, match, iterate until an overwhelming majority of people are satisfied.
But really, the question isn't whether pathologies are possible ever, the question is how likely they are. What systems have the best balance to be the most robust while still being practical? STAR Voting and 3-2-1 voting. Definitely not IRV. IRV's pathologies have high enough probability that they do and will continue to show up significantly.
Good starting reference from one of the leading voting theorists:
https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-best-single-winner-voting-...
I'm open to the idea that actually using median is superior. Could you expound on that?
If we could only get those pesky humans out of the loop...but we don't.
But I don't know what you mean about "picking one element" or understanding or believing. Both STAR and 3-2-1 are quite understandable, believable, and don't require weighing full sets of pairings. That weighing you describe sounds like how Ranked Pairs version of ranked-ballots is done.
But I chose that link in this case, despite its problems, because it more strongly emphasizes the complexities.
FairVote has engaged in really intellectually dishonest arguing, but the level of over-the-top reaction that the rangevoting site does in response comes across poorly and is regretful.
* None of the Above (NotA) / No Confidence **Note
* Requiring a fully ranked ballot (at least until after NotA)
I still prefer weakest looser elimination ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schulze_method ) and feel that the above tweaks would greatly improve many of corner cases.
The Wikipedia articles are sufficient to avoid watching the film.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088850/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brewster%27s_Millions_(1985_fi...
I'd prefer a variant I've not seen discussed elsewhere, but I'll call "Candidate-Delegated Instant Runoff Voting". Rather than allowing each voter to supply a unique 2nd, 3rd, etc choice, each candidate may select another candidate that's considered the "next choice" of 'their' voters, if the selecting candidate is eliminated. They'd have to irrevocably declare this "backup choice" before voting started.
That is: each voter still only selects a single candidate. But in the event that candidate is eliminated, there's a predictable, known-before-hand other candidate to whom their votes get re-assigned in the instant-runoff. There's greater predictability as to who will be helped by a certain vote, and the full result is calculable from the 1st tally of direct votes (or somewhat forecastable from an accurate pre-election poll of voters' top choices).
As such, also like IRV, it doesn’t totally end tendencies towards two major parties. Even fully proportionate representation systems often trend that way, and such coalitions aren’t all bad: they help sinplify choices, making the outsones of elections more gradual and predictable, and make it more likely some stable coalition that together represents a plausible majority can form a working government. But it still creates new competitiveness around the edges, that single-member plurality suppresses.
If they vote below the line, they fill out what exact preference they prefer.
This is a pragmatic compromise. The Senate elected on a proportional system, each party nominates up to 6 candidates and so their will frequently be hundreds of candidates to be numbered (the ballots are sometimes nicknamed "the tablecloths").
Voting in the House of Representatives does not have above the line voting, as it isn't a practical necessity.
or RRV (Reweighted Range Voting) for proportional representation.
> This is sometimes called a Condorcet cycle or just cycle and can be thought of as Candidate Rock beating Candidate Scissors, Candidate Scissors beating Candidate Paper, and Candidate Paper beating Candidate Rock.
In these parts (the UK) the same system is known as the Alternative Vote (AV) which is just as meaningless a name. But in defence of my fellow political scientists, there are a lot of different voting systems, many of which have alternatives, rankings, and runoffs, so unambiguous and useful names are hard to find.
“Ranked Choice Voting” is one of th names for the system, but since their are dozens (maybe hundreds) of voting systems which use identical ranked choice ballots with different resolution procedure, naming it “instant runoff” (since it uses ranked choice ballots to implement a variation of majority/runoff) is much more specific of name.
It would be interesting to know how different proposed system tackle this. [Iirc one of the more reasonable approaches seemed to be relaxing No. 3 to make strategic voting computationally hard].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibbard%E2%80%93Satterthwaite_...
Why not allow the vote to be private? Just give each representative a button and this goes to a simple counter that accumulates the total votes cast. It will be unhackable - a self contained system without connection to any network, and includes a 'vote once' latch to stop voting twice. We need to remove the representatives from all forms of bribery by this simple demonetization.
It's the single member constituency.
Also known as single member districts. This is what really ails your election system.
You can toy around with IRV, STV, AV, two round voting, etc etc etc but you will never really fix it. It seem that people think a "real fix" is a three party system. I call BS, you really need 6 to 8. That means multi member constituencies.
Once you go multi member you're very quickly arrive at party list proportional representation as your election system.
> Some publications even blame third party voters for Hillary Clinton's loss in 2016.
I don't think there is any plausible reason to believe Clinton would have won in 2016 if not for third-party candidates running. The math just doesn't add up.
In Michigan, Trump won by around 11k votes, and there were around 223k third party votes (172k Johnson, 51k Stein).
In Wisconsin, Trump won by 22k votes. Johnson got 107k there and Stein got 31k.
In Pennsylvania, Trump won by 46k. 147k went to Johnson and 50k to Stein.
I'd guess that almost all Stein voters would pick Clinton over Trump, so take Stein out of the race and in all three of those states Clinton wins that statewide vote unless the Stein voters decide to stay home. I'd guess that those who would vote for Stein would be sufficiently "anyone but Trump" to not stay home.
Those states are all winner-takes-all for the Electoral College, so that would do it. (Maine and Nebraska are the only states that split their electoral votes).
What would have happened without Johnson is a harder call. Trump and Clinton are both terrible from a Libertarian point of view. I'd expect Libertarian voters to be more likely to go Republican than Democrat if there is no Libertarian on the ballot most years, but Trump is so different from what had been mainstream Republicans before that I have no idea who the majority of Libertarians would have picked.
Also, I suspect that many of the Johnson voters were "never Trump" Republicans rather than Libertarians, who would agree with conservative writer and research fellow at the Cato Institute P.J. O'Rourke who said that Clinton lies about everything and is wrong on every issue, but he was endorsing her over Trump because she was wrong "within normal parameters".
I see absolutely no reason to believe that.
https://www.isidewith.com/candidate-guide/jill-stein-vs-hill...
https://www.isidewith.com/candidate-guide/jill-stein-vs-dona...
Also check them all out at ontheissues.org.
Stein was the Green Party candidate, and Trump was pretty much the anti-Green candidate. Clinton ranges from agreeing with the Green party to indifferent on most of their major issues.
Even where Trump and Stein agree, such as on getting rid of Obamacare, they are massively incompatible (Stein wants to get rid of it for a single-payer system, Trump for just letting the market work it out).
I don't know why IRV seems to be such an attractive nuisance. Please, skip IRV, just use approval voting.
Both are better than first past the post, but agreeing on an alternative is HARD.
The situation in Canada is instructive: the governing left-central Liberals promised to replace first past the post, but reneged on their promise when they realized that the committees studying the issue were going to come back with a Mixed Member Proportional recommendation which would hurt them and help the left-wing New Democratic Party, rather than the ranked ballot mechanism that would help them.
(That's speculation, of course. They gave some other BS reason for breaking the promise)
It doesn’t work for individual candidate positions like president, because you can’t have a non whole number percentage of a single candidate
Compare with how the system of the Netherlands works: a single country-wide electorate, and no threshold except for the number of votes needed for a seat. The outcome is numerous parties in parliament (i.e., far more democratic than the US) and coalition governments which must be formed or at least supported by parties that got a majority of the votes between them.
Especially with many parties, if parties A and B are reasonably similar, it's quite plausible to like party A's platform while preferring party B's presidential candidate. A separate presidential election accounts for that, allowing you to elect A for the house, and B for president.
Note that parties A and B are similar - I'd argue that they'd have to be, and that it's extraordinarily unlikely to get a president the ruling coalition is incapable of compromising with. This works out because overall, the vote for president should be ideologically similar to the votes for congress/parliament. (That working, of course, is contingent on some form of ranked voting for the president, rather than the FPTP system the US has now.)
All that said, I'm from Canada, and I don't really agree with the idea of a single person with large amounts of power, but that's my take if there must be one.
Specifically the president represents the executive branch, then you have the two houses, one that represents the people approximately proportionally, and one that gives 20x multipliers to the voting power of people from mostly empty states.
If not, do they compensate PEI for the senatorial clause?
The United States was never intended to be a strongly democratic place, at least at the national level. Presidents are elected by electors, who are divided among the states according to population, and directed by the state legislatures. Senators were originally chosen by state legislatures, and there are two per state. All federal judges are appointed.
That basically leaves the House of Representatives, who are selected by the people. And they have the most power over spending, which makes sense as a check on entrenched powers.
Over time, we've become more democratic either through amendments or convention. I'm not entirely convinced that's a good thing.
IRV is trying to help choose from the options on the democratic menu, but it doesn't solve the problem of what to put on the menu in the first place.
In California, right now voters are considering a proposition about dialysis treatment centers and what they can charge. If I vote yes (like the insurance companies would prefer) then I am apparently damning dialysis patients to the grave. If I vote no (like the private equity firms that own the centers would prefer) then I am allowing poor patients to be overcharged and subjected to unsanitary conditions. At least that's what the TV tells me.
It just seems like a bad idea to put every technical issue out for a vote. I think that's the logical conclusion of democracy and I don't think it's a good place to go. But it seems like all the new voting systems assume that it is what we all want.
And in the meantime, you're going to hit roadblock upon roadblock in trying to get a major disruptive system installed at the Federal election level.
You would have a much easier time getting the system to change from within the Democrat and Republican parties for the primary system, since those rules are set by the parties themselves and not by the states.
So long as the parties are open and accessible to anyone, I don't see a big problem. The parties themselves are composed of many smaller factions (greens, libertarians, evangelicals, etc, etc).
In any state with citizen initiatives, it involves less wrangling with esconced elites to change statewide rules than party internal rules. That's where the real big changes are likely to happen.
https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-best-single-winner-voting-... lays it out clearly.
STAR is on the ballot in Lane County, OR. We just might find out tonight or tomorrow that we'll see the first ever implementation of a more equal voting system.
IRV is not an equal system, it counts some people's preferences and discards others. https://www.equal.vote/star-vs-irv
Can you explain why you think that is the case?
We really don't, historically (for the last century or so) it's been pretty cut and dry between either Labour or Conservatives with the occasional coalition (always involving one of those two parties).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independence_of_clones_criteri...
It is very difficult for a 3rd voice to gain traction. A party which has attracted over 10% nationwide for the past 2 decades, Greens, has exactly 1 seat out of 150 under this system.
We've had this method of voting for a century but voters generally see it as a binary choice - Roughly 35-40% will vote for A and 35-40% will vote for B. Typically there will be up to 5-10 candidates on the ballot paper. So that 20-30% of the "neither of major 2" could be split 8 ways across a wide political spectrum. Inevitably, most outcomes fall back to the 2 majors.
Your statistic about the Greens, in particular, is true only for the House. The Greens hold 9 Senate seats out of 76, or approximately 11% of the Senate. Given that their national Senate vote was 8.7%, I think this is a pretty reasonable outcome.
Parliamentary system is merely the opposite of a presidential system and has nothing to do with voting methods.
Also: multi-member electorates, otherwise the system trends towards two parties exclusively.
Let's imagine a state had 100 representatives (to keep the numbers nice). And in this state 35% of the population most strongly identified as republican. 34% most strongly identified as democrat. 16% most strongly identified as green, and 15% most strongly identified as libertarian. And this state had a really good geographic mix of people, so everybody was completely evenly distributed. As a nice aside there you don't even need to worry about things like gerrymandering - any sample of any area will have an identical mix of people as any other area. That's good... right?
What would be the most reasonable result for the makeup of their representatives? What would we actually get? I think most of everybody would say the same thing for the most reasonable result. 35 republicans, 34 democrats, 16 greens, and 15 libertarians. Few would correctly answer what we'd actually get - 100 republicans. And in a nutshell, this is the real problem. District based plurality elections, be it first past the post or IRV will trend towards domination of two major parties. The only solution is proportional representation. You get 10% of the votes and if there's at least 10 seats then you're guaranteed to get at least one.
Proportional stands next to no chance of being implemented since it would require the current political establishment to sign their own [political] death warrants, but if we're going to change the electoral system I think we should at least look at solutions that would actually solve the problem.
If my candidate wins with a plurality and is stymied and sabotaged by a divided population with many people feeling totally unrepresented, that does not create a world I prefer. I want a society where as many people as possible feel included and trust the system. I don't want a situation where losers feel disenfranchised and interested in undermining democracy.
If my views are actually democratically popular, I will be okay with a fairer voting system. If I like that the current system is unfairly weighted in my favor, then it's still very short-sighted for me to defend that system.
Incidentally, I don't advocate for IRV, it's a flawed system. Much better options are STAR, 3-2-1, or approval voting.
I know I've "voted defensively" before, and I really don't like having to do it. I want to vote for those that I agree with, I don't want to vote against those who I disagree with.
It may seem like a small distinction, but if someone loves candidate A, but they are extremely unlikely to win, most will end up voting for B because they REALLY don't like C.
That leads to A never getting in office until they become more like B.
But with instant runoff, I'm free to know that I can vote for A first, and B second, and not worry that my support for A is implicit support for C.
It not a perfect system, but IMO it's a lot better than what we have now in the US.
Edit: another piece that I forgot to mention is that instant runoff can give more signals beyond the winners or losers. Currently you have no way outside of polling to understand what voters want, it leads to a vocal minority being able to control the narrative.
With instant runoff, the runners can easily see that even though candidate A didn't win, they did get a sizeable number of votes, and maybe next time B runs, they will incorporate some of A's ideas into their campaign.