America’s Hidden Duopoly
freakonomics.com
freakonomics.com
It only takes one sentence to describe: "Vote for everyone you approve of."
It also gracefully handles incomplete information—if you don't know about someone, just don't vote for them.
But I can already tell you by the complexity of what that article is trying to show that most people won't understand it and won't care.
When I vote, it's in part to declare what I want and what I believe in. I generally don't like Democrats and I don't like Republicans. If I want to vote for the Green Party candidate, then I want to vote for the Green Party candidate and make it known that that's who I want to win. I don't want to be stating that I equally approve of both the Green Party candidate and the Democratic candidate since that doesn't accurately represent my opinion.
Given that the Green Party candidate is not going to win, I generally vastly prefer the Democratic candidate to the Republican candidate, even if I don't like the Democratic candidate one bit.
I don't want to vote in a way in which my statement is that I equally prefer the Democratic candidate to Green Party candidate. I want to vote in a way that states, "I want the Green Party candidate to win. And if I can't have that, I'll reluctantly settle for the Democratic candidate over the Republican candidate."
Voting in a way in which one's desires are clearly indicated is what most people would want, I imagine, even if it has some counterintuitive results at times.
Also, at least on a cursory reading, it seems that the author of the article has a bias towards "moderate" candidates winning. Who says that I want a moderate candidate to win? I want some serious progressive change!
The posit is that the spoiler effect is bad: Fielding an additional extreme candidate on one side should not be helpful to the other side.
So with Instant Runoff elections, the majority gets their wish. The Green Candidate wins.
With Approval Voting, 60% of the people vote the Green Party Candidate, 40% of the people vote for the Republican Party Candidate, and 100% of the people vote for the Democratic Candidate. The Democratic candidate wins.
I don't see how this is a win for Approval Voting. The candidate that wins is a candidate that no one really wanted.
Well, clearly my example is rather contrived, but I suspect (perhaps out of ignorance) that any situation in which Instant Runoff would cause counter-intuitive results is also rather unlikely.
I'll definitely have to look at your reference, though. I do find such issues very interesting
This is a pervasive logical fallacy, we call the "expressiveness fallacy". https://sites.google.com/a/electology.org/www/expressiveness
In short, you could allow partial approvals (1/4, 1/3, etc.), or mathematically equivalent ratings on a 0-N scale. But Approval Voting behaves almost as well in aggregate. http://scorevoting.net/BayRegsFig.html
And IRV/RCV will maintain two-party duopoly. https://asitoughttobe.com/2010/07/18/score-voting/
Voting theory is highly counterintuitive.
It is not exactly counterintuitive that aggregated orderings have problems - the problems relate to the fact that ordering cannot be averaged and ties are not allowed. The latter problem also happens in the oldest score system called Bucklin voting.
Approval voting is essentially 0-1 score voting system with ties.
I don't particularly like to argue over semantics, but this is not a "logical fallacy". It may be some sort of fallacy, but it's not a logical one.
Preferential voting. If your sincere choice (ie Greens) didn't win, your vote goes toward the second choice until a candidate gets clear majority.
Proportional voting, people can vote for their sincere choice and there's a pool of 10 representatives. That means each candidate needs at least 10% of vote. If over 10% people in the state for Greens but rest vote for Democrats/Republicans. Thats 1 Greens and 9 Democrats/Republicans.
In USA, it is not possible to have a sincere choice. Also known as the illusion of choice.
Keep in mind that our system has changed a great deal already (e.g. women and non-whites being allowed to vote), the politicians at the time benefitted greatly from how things were set up before, but those changes were still accomplished. We shouldn't give up on the idea of reform just because politicians would resist it.
Elected officials are initially largely irrelevant, changes to the voting system will start with state-level voter initiatives.
Pretty much everything worth doing to voting systems aside from (1) replacing or reforming the electoral college, and (2) moving away from mandatory single-member districts in the House of Representatives, can be done entirely there in many states without elected officials being involved except in their ministerial role in certifying the results and implementing the dictated policies.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4FXLQoLDBA
The video was created by the Equal Vote Coalition. They also have some good information on their site.
I'd probably check off both, personally, because I don't care. See, the system works!
Approval voting would encourage people to NOT vote for people they would accept, for fear that it would hurt their favorite.
That naturally leads to the same ability to discern support for compromise candidates as ranked choice. Each individual voter can't express that but the population as a whole will.
You wind up with an arguably more benign form of strategic voting: preference deals.
The point here is that approval voting, range voting etc work better than IRV under a number of ideal conditions.
But political parties have no incentive to cooperate with the ideal conditions. They want to beat the other party.
It doesn't matter. Voters will do what's in THEIR best interest, regardless of what their favorite party wants. E.g. Ralph Nader wanted his supporters to vote for him, but 90% told pollsters they voted for someone else, mostly Gore.
I repeat: voters do what's in their own best interest.
With Approval Voting, that often means voting for your favorite PLUS one or more other candidates who are more electable.
In a large 2014 exit poll including Approval Voting, the result of the Maine gubernatorial race was completely REVERSED. http://scorevoting.net/Maine2014Exit
Sure, the Democrat didn't want his supporters also voting for the independent. But they DID IT ANYWAY, because they didn't want the Republican.
There is a reason that experts in game theory generally favor Approval Voting and/or Score Voting, such as outlined in the 2008 book "Gaming the Vote" by William Poundstone.
I disagree with this somewhat, and the reason is because some ballots have an option to vote for one party across the board, and people do that. Parties choose their candidates, therefore parties are telling people, who have the option of voting on their favorite color, who to vote for.
If you align yourself with one of the two big parties in the US, you're almost always going to vote for whatever they tell you to (of course there are exceptions, but I'm speaking generally). Generally people believe the party they like is acting in their best interest (because why else would they like it), and now we've come full circle. Ralph was not a member of one of the two major political parties.
That said, I agree with the rest of your comment.
Requiring exhaustive (or even second-level) ranking has been ruled unconstitutional (at the state level) in a couple of US states when forms of Bucklin voting were used; which makes any method that relies on compulsory multiple ranking (rather than accepting truncated rankings) more difficult to implement.
Which isn't a fundamental problem, but it's something to be tactically aware of.
(I have thought this before about other things I have come across. Universal healthcare, and taxes to pay for it, come to mind)
Because IRV (“ranked choice voting”) may be the worst non-malicious use known of ranked choice ballots, but approval allows even less information about preferences to be expressed and does so in a way where the honest marking of ballots isn't even clear.
Plus, once you get people using ranked ballots, debate over better counting procedure is possible without disrupting how people cast ballots. Approval is a worse method from which any improvement is more disruptive.
1. You need to support transitional back-ends for certain users (e.g. instant runoffs)
2. You strongly want to avoid a "new system" that cannot be replaced and has no room for expansion.
___
Any voting system able to handle ranked-preference voting can trivially be "dumbed down" for a certain set of customers who want approval-voting -- it's almost as simple as mapping integers to booleans.
In contrast, if everything is built assuming inputs are boolean values for each item in a set, your system is crippled. You either have to hope that everybody loves approval-voting, or admit defeat and switch it back to the old (i.e. current) stupid system of "pick one".
You can convert ordinal ranks to scores directly meaning the set exactly same as number of candidates. By that, each median score represents median ordering in a ranked ballot. You may lose certain properties that are relevant in case of direct ties but nobody really cares about that in big constituencies.
Heck, you can also keep counts of each score in case the dominant is needed for a tie breaker.
Approval voting is a score system with a binary score.
Rules are simple: in case of rank scores, candidate with lowest median rank wins, if there is a tie candidate with higher count of low scores wins. This converts IRV or other ranked system to Bucklin vote.
In case of approval scores, replace lowest with highest.
Under ranking voting systems (such as AV) is is obvous how to vote. You do it in this in this order: Candidate-A, Candidate-C, Candidate-B.
Under scoring systems, where you give each candidate a score (say 10 for the best to 0 for the worst), it is also reasonably simple for to vote: Candidate-A 10, Candidate-B 0, Candidate-C somewhere in between. But here again there are problems? If I give C a high score, he is more likely to beat B (which I want) but also more likely to beat A (which I don't want). So that's an incentive for dishonest voting.
This would allow voters more freedom of expression than the current system, while being simpler than ranked voting. I understand that it could conceivably (and probably frequently would) result in the winner being the person with the smaller negative number of votes. But at least then they couldn't claim a "mandate for change" based on a broad support of the populace.
Either way it doesn't incentivize dishonesty, and it doesn't cause weird squeeze-outs of the middle candidate the way IRV does.
I can see how that's less clear cut to a voter, though.
Obviously I vote for the last one and don’t vote for Satan, but do I vote for the middle one?
The whole point of alternative vote systems is to be able to both designate your preferred candidate while also being able to specify your tertiary preferences so you can both vote for who you want to win while also not sabotaging your ability to vote against those you don't want to win.
Approval only lets you avoid the spoiler effect.
You can do it, but what does it get you?
Instant runoff is not monotonic: there are times when the best strategy is to vote your favored candidate second and your second choice first so that the second choice can push out your least favored candidate.
* Get a 5 sided die.
* Rank each candidate from 0-5.
* For each candidate roll the die and vote for them if your roll is less than or equal to your rank.
I very much dislike approval voting because the way to make people the happiest is to turn it into stochastic STAR.
http://scorevoting.net/RVstrat6.html
The evidence overwhelmingly shows that Approval Voting works well, arriving at outcomes that represent the will of the people.
Thus using the standard strategy I mentioned is the most accurate way to convey your preferences. If you want them to appear as honest as possible, you just treat all candidates as equally likely to win, such that the formula simplifies down to your approval threshold being "average utility of all candidates".
People tend to approve of candidates they know of. Likewise they tend to not approve candidates they do not know of or they dislike for any number of reasons.
So these marks are not drawn from random distribution at all.
- Ballot expressiveness
- Strategic voting (which distorts sincere information)
- Tabulation efficiency (e.g. IRV has more data on the ballot, but destroys a lot of it due to inefficient tabulation)
You are making a common fallacy outlined here. https://sites.google.com/a/electology.org/www/expressiveness
When you look at total combined information throughput, Approval Voting does exceptionally well. http://scorevoting.net/BayRegsFig.html
There's literally no difference. It's up to you to make your choice.
It's much simpler in a plurality system. First, I decide if I want to make a statement or a difference. If I want to make a statement, I vote for the candidate I like best and that's it. If I want to make a difference, I choose the candidate I prefer from the two major parties. In the unlikely event that I like them both equally, I can either keep looking until I find a reason to prefer one, or I can abstain knowing that either one is equally good (or bad). Note, I'm not saying this is good, just that it's simple.
The problem with instant runoff voting is that you can actually be harming your preferred candidate by ranking them ahead of the middle candidate.
In my example, the decision of whether to “approve” of the horrible candidate has enormous stakes.
Edit: I wasn't asking you to explain it to me; I was asking how you break it down for the average person so that they don't need to keep depending on the election officials to disambiguate every case.
You recon “approve” is exclusive? Write down the one you would have voted for in FPTP.
Had trouble deciding which of three to vote for? List all three.
Someone’s borderline? Go with your gut. Or your head, whichever.
Do you want to increase some candidates' total tallies? Then "approve" of them on your ballot.
(Seriously, if we get anything at all other than first-past-the-post in my lifetime, I'll be happy.)
VERY Roughly: Eliminate the weakest candidates until there's a winner.
Only this method is a formal mathematical twist on that to make it computationally easier for computers to process while yielding the same result.
In previous posts I've wanted two additions to this method, but I'm modifying the second after thinking about it.
* None of the Above / No Confidence (same, this wins == new vote all old candidates banned)
* Allow for a single preference list but don't require all candidates ranked.
I can’t see this majority criterion as an absolute good.
This is an unavoidable vulnerability in any scheme that doesn't involve an exhaustive and exlusive ranking.
In approval voting, the strategy to maximize the influence of your vote is to vote for half of the candidates, or at least half of the candidates who are likely to win. (Well, except that arguably in nearly all election schemes, the instrumentally rational strategy is to stay home and do something productive, like baking a pie, having sex, or writing some software; this is why voting is obligatory in nearly all functioning democracies.)
I do like approval voting as well, for the same mentioned reasons, but I worry that after a few elections people would start voting strategically, and then it could take another few decades to change the voting system again.
The more important part isn't ranked choice or approval voting anyway - both are single-winner voting systems which are far from ideal for elections involving Congress/Parliaments and local legislature. It's much preferable to have a proportional representation voting system for those.
What does “approve of multiple candidates” even mean?
Preferring one candidate over another has a clear meaning. Approval does not; as well as meaning honest, uninfluenced ballots are going to vary from voter to voter even with the same actual assessment of candidates, that makes it a lot easier for voters to be manipulated by influencers as to the right way to map preferences to ballot markings.
Approval is good for open-ballot voting on, e.g, where to go to lunch (where “approve” means “commit to attend if the option is chosen”.) It's a poor choice for public, secret-ballot elections.
http://scorevoting.net/BayRegsFig.html
And this is true regardless of whether there is any objective "meaning" to the votes.
In mathematical terms, approving the candidate means you prefer that candidate to the expected utility of the winner.
I genuinely can’t comprehend the problem you’re raising. Even if it can’t solve Arrows Impossibly Theorem, and even though I’m leaning towards technocracy rather than democracy anyway, it doesn’t seem worse than the current systems.
If it doesn't, then your ballots have no consistent meaning and any process for aggregating them produces garbage output in terms of aggregating social preference.
Consistency of meaning of ballot markings and the resolution process being sensible in terms of that meaning are the most critical minimal standards for a voting system. Otherwise, voting is a farce and distraction, not a serious way of guaranteeing that government is accountable.
It's still consistent in that in any case, the candidates you're approving of are all preferable (for you) to all of the candidates you're not.
There's no ambiguity.
I'll be an anecdote here, from 2016. I voted for Sanders in the Democratic primary. I voted for Johnson in the general election, but had I been in a battleground state where Clinton had a chance I'd have voted for her.
Did how she was doing in the pre-election polling and exit polls determine whether or not she was my favorite candidate? Of course not. Would my single vote for her to try to avoid electing Trump have looked any different from a devout partisan Democrat's vote for the same office if I had voted for her? No, not at all. What FPTP almost convinced me to do is to VOTE FOR SOMEONE WHO WAS NOT MY FIRST CHOICE.
That's the problem, you see. If I'm tempted to vote for someone I really didn't care for rather than who I prefer because of the mechanics of the counting, that dilutes my voting power. I wanted to vote for Johnson. If I could have ranked the general, it would have been Johnson, Clinton, Stein, Trump. If I could have voted Approve/Disapprove, it would have been Johnson and Clinton approve and the others disapprove. If it was Approve, Neutral, Disapprove for each I'd have either voted J+C, S, T or J, C+S, T.
The last thing I want is to have to choose between my candidate of preference and some tolerable major party candidate based upon who else is running.
Perhaps, but the question was why people seeking to replace FPTP advocate IRV instead of Approval, so pointing out FPTP has the same problem being pointed to in Approval when compared to IRV is missing the point.
The last few ranks in ranked choice voting go unused or are randomly filled, except that making an explicit ranking of a least favorite candidate requires ranking them all. The first few ranks also may well be random, as the first two or three candidates may all be equally acceptable to a voter. On a ballot with city council for a ward, council members at large, mayor, county board, county chair/county judge, school board, sheriff, constable, state House, state Senate, governor, lieutenant governor, comptroller, secretary of state, land office commissioner, agriculture commissioner, several judges, school board members, US House, US Senate, President, and more that's a lot of ranking and a lot of time to do so. It may no better support the voter's will than Approval after all the effort by the voter and effort to update the counting process. However, some people may well have a strong opinion on where each candidate in a seven-way race belongs in a list.
Approval/Disapproval or Net Approval voting, especially with a neutral option, solves that problem of having to support candidates you don't care about higher or lower relative to other candidates that neither RCV / IRV nor FPTP solves. In FPTP, you can choose just one and either Approval or RCV solves that. In Approval you can denote clearly that you approve of any number of candidates, without your first four choices being arbitrarily ranked. You can disapprove of any number as well, without your last choice of disapproval getting ranked right behind your choice for winning the office.
That isn't a reason to choose a system that maximizes the degree to which that problem is preserved.
This isn't a hypothetical. Queensland introduced "optional" preferential voting and one of the majors promptly campaigned on "Just Vote 1" in order to wedge the opposing coalition.
What Queensland uses, (which they call) Preferential voting, is IRV (instant-runoff voting). That's not approval voting.
It might initially seem like IRV's ranking (A>B>C>D>E) would be a better voting system than Approval Voting (where voters simply say A-yes, B-yes, others-no). Relative rankings seem at first glance to express more information. But it turns out that the way you have to count relative rankings either leads to pathological consequences for 3rd parties (see IRV), just like winner-takes-all voting, or the counting method becomes complex and byzantine in corner cases (see Condorcet). It's all explained on rangevoting.org
Most real and proposed balloting methods (other than range/score voting) are preferential, they differ in the restrictions on he expressed preferences; IRV (and lots of other systems), as usually defined, relies on a fully-ranked forced-preference (no ties) ballot. Approval has an implicitly fully-ranked two-preference-rank ballot with unlimited ties, FPTP (whether plurality or majority/runoff) has an implicitly fully-ranked two-preference-rank ballot with ties allowed only in the second rank.
> Relative rankings seem to express more information
They do, there is no “seem". They also do so more consistently. Forced preferences can have the reverse problem of forced ties, though (which is abstractly a point in favor of unforced ranking ballots, but there's less work done on resolution procedures for them.)
> but it turns out that the way you have to count relative rankings either leads to pathological consequences for 3rd parties (see IRV), just like winner-takes-all voting, or the counting method becomes complex and byzantine in corner cases (see Condorcet).
Bucklin is simpler to count than IRV and doesn't have it's pathological effects; the main concrete criticism I've seen is that if truncation is allowed rather than forced-preference, and if the no-majority fallback is highest-vote-total-on-last-round, it may encourage truncation and devolve to plurality. (But a similar charge of incentive to bullet-vote is made against approval.)
I am reminded of Justice Scalia's testimony regarding "gridlock"
Combine FPTP with the electoral college system and you get arguably absurd presidential outcomes like we saw in 2016, where the winning candidate can receive less votes than the runner up and still win. Huge majorities on minority shares are often found in FPTP systems, because anyone who didn’t vote for the winning candidate might as well have not voted. It can also create the opposite outcomes, minority seat shares in the legislature on majority vote shares.
It’s just a plain bad voting system if you believe the legislature should at least vaguely reflect the wishes of voters.
Of course, the underlying problem with those situations is that minorities are ignored via the tyranny of the majority. So if you think the presidential outcome was absurd because Hillary received the majority of votes you're arguing that in just this particular election ignoring the minority, and going solely by majority vote, would have been a good thing. You can't pick and choose like that.
Combining FPTP with the electoral college did what it was supposed to, it compensated for the tyranny of the majority.
How is this tautology helpful at all? Why would we want this definition of what the most desirable candidate is?
In the UK for example, it's pretty common to win your seat with just 40% or less of the vote. The desires of 60% or more of the electorate in that constituency is simply ignored - a majority can vote for someone else entirely, hardly a reflection of the electorate's desire.
> I think you're overstating it when you say that it leads to situations where anyone who didn't vote for the winning candidate might as well have not voted.
I'm really not. The outcome remains the EXACT SAME if everyone who voted for a losing candidate stays at home. This isn't really my opinion - it's a widely known limitation of FPTP electoral systems.
That is, if you know that policy A is preferred over B by 95% of the citizens of the USA (an incredible supermajority), that gives you no information about whether A or B will be implemented by the government. Has no predictive value. But if I provide the additional information that B is preferred over A by a majority of US elites, then now you can predict whether A or B will be implemented: B will be implemented, most likely.
That situation is the current state of affairs in the US, and it shouldn't be. The system is broken.
Or, more accurately; what is the true purpose to the state and how well does it fulfill that purpose?
If you assume that the purpose to the state is to carefully and thoughtfully use the resources and powers granted to it by the public to serve the public then, yes, the system is utterly broken. It's so completely and fundamentally broken that it is not salvageable.
However if the purpose of the state is use the political power granted to it to advance the interests of people who are politically connected to the state... then it works very very very well.
In fact what people call 'corruption' is fundamental to how politics is able to function in the first place!
Get rid of the 'corruption' and get 'money out of politics' then you eliminate the purpose, reason, and forces that caused the state to come into existence.
Any time you attempt to exercise political power to enact any sort of change to the country you must give the powerful people of your country a reason to go along with you. Whether your goal is to eliminate poverty, save the environment, or make your brother a billionaire... you must first convince the key individuals go along with your program.
And powerful and wealthy don't work for free.
And how this works in a country like the USA is by having the state gain significant control over markets so they can use regulation and policy to benefit people who play along and punish those companies that resist.
Money and power go hand in hand. You can't have big government without big corporations. You can't have big corporations without big governments.
These groups are not opposing forces, the state does not balance out the 'greed' or 'excesses' of market capitalism. Instead it is the nature of the state to feed into these negative effects and exploit them. Big business and Big government are complementary.
So, yes, if the purpose of the state is to exploit the wealth of the country for the purposes of the politically elite within and without the state... then it works extremely well.
Not broken one bit.
>>the purpose to the state is to carefully and thoughtfully use the resources and powers granted to it by the public to serve the public
not an accurate representation? Services are at an all-time high, while today is the best year to have been born vs. any in history.
Parliaments which have proportional lower houses tend to be a mess. Executive government needs at least some stability, so single-member electorates for the lower house and multi-member electorates for the upper house is a reasonable compromise.
> Parliaments which have proportional lower houses tend to be a mess.
If by “be a mess” you mean have higher public participation in elections, higher public satisfaction with government, and lower rate of cabinet turnover...you're right.
> Executive government needs at least some stability,
Proportional systems have greater stability; while coalitions may change more frequent than in FPTP systems, there is less frequent total turnover in membership in either the governing coalition in Parliament or the Cabinet itself in proportional systems. This is sometimes masked by the fact that the same language of government “falling” being used for partial and total turnover.
Citation needed. There are many European countries where very diverse lower houses work fine.
Clay Shirky discusses this argument in https://medium.com/@cshirky/theres-no-such-thing-as-a-protes...
Argentina is a case-study with Peronism. Since the return of democracy, no party has yet to finish a term but the peronists.
The US is having lockup trouble with two parties, but that's historically unusual.
Part of the problem is also that most governments have flawed establishing documents that make it possible for legislatures to put innumerable barriers up against a propositioned bill. It should be much easier to force a proposal to vote and that should always be public record. Politicians love being able to kept their intentions "in committee" forever or on a divided floor where nobody ever calls for cloture. Having a firm record of actionable legislative motions is the last thing anyone wants when they expect a lifelong career on a house floor.
There are a handful for Germany, and they generally form coalitions.
Pragmatists should vote for the realistic option that benefits us the most, but that's not how most people work. People aren't really rational actors. If you continuously prove to the public that real reform is a stupid dream and that they must play the game and take the shitty carrot instead of the incredibly shitty stick, they rebel--even if it's not in their best interest. It's not reasonable to point out that they shouldn't do this. Of course they shouldn't, but they always will.
For authoritarians, they see options 1: and 2: from the first paragraph switched around relative to progressives. They aren't the same at all--not even a little--yet still there isn't really any meaningful choice to be made. There is only a vicious, cynical threat. Vote for what your region's culture considers least evil or watch as Armageddon devours you and your loved ones.
The constant near-perfect tie races are suspicious as hell. Haven't you ever noticed that? It's always 51-49 or somewhere thereabouts after the electoral college, gerrymandering and all the other forms of sophistry obfuscate the direct vote tallies--which always differ far more. Always. Also notice the incumbency rate compared to approval ratings. Incumbency is nearly perfect, even though approval is always sub-20%. Often it's far lower than 20%. This should obviously be impossible in pure democracy, but it should also be incredibly rare in our representative republic. But it's the rule, not the exception. In my opinion this is a smoking gun that just can't be dismissed.
This is rigged. Not the same way that crude authoritarian regimes fake their elections, with blatant but effective mafia tactics. This is structurally rigged. This is a hateful ploy that is designed to make real reform impossible, or at least slow enough for existing power structures to readjust and maintain full ownership of new trends, and furthermore to make us grateful for the barest minimum of political functioning: simply that we aren't living under a violent totalitarian state.
Both sides are certainly not the same. But the structure within which both sides operate is not designed with the best interests of the American people or the world in mind. I don't think it's some shadowy conspiracy that was masterminded by a single agent, it's just a ludicrously shitty system that naturally evolved out of our country and was taken advantage of by various opportunists. Our market style makes that very easy and very rewarding. Or at least it was at the outset, before power structures ossified and became strongly entrenched.
At some point the discussion is going to have to evolve past IRV.
One thing to remember - ranked choice voting is just the UI/UX. It doesn't mean you have to count it IRV style. The IRV zealots know this, which is why they re-branded it to name it "Ranked Choice Voting". It's a weak method.
And Condorcet is not complicated. If one candidate would beat all others head to head, that candidate wins. It's only the tiebreaking methods that are complicated, and ties (loops; smith sets) are rare in large elections. Much rarer than additional-round Instant Runoff scenarios.
There was a long discussion just a week ago here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18391757) on voting variants.
- no campaigning or special interest ads a week before voting
- only public funding and named individual small donations for public servant campaigns: no PACs, no super-PACs, no huge check fundraisers and no dark-money SIGs.
- nationally-unified, same-day voting, no prior registration required
- nationally-unified, three prior weeks of voting-by-mail
- media blackout on counts until all final results are in
- overturn Citizens' United (by amendment via state legislatures)
- eliminate the primary
- end the Electoral College
- free & open source tech unified, national e-voting system, open for all to audit
- public blockchain for permanent results
- printed receipt with barcode of hash saved in the blockchain
- ranked choice voting (as it provides an instant run-off should the favorite be disqualified, die or resign; also provides N picks for boards, vice positions and directors)
I also feel, as the supreme court does, that Citizens United is a free speech issue. You should listen to this podcast about it to get some perspective: https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/citizens-united
In a beautiful piece of irony, if it hadn't been for Michael Moore shamelessly using his corporation to produce political speech, the Citizens United court case might not have been successful.
That doesn't mean it ISN'T broken, that proves that it is. Correct, it is a selective evolution that works the way selective evolution works. But it doesn't cross the threshold of egalitarian representative democracy where the representatives get to express the will of the people they represent, which is what the masses of people it represents mean by "its broken".
Criticisms like Porter's aren't even wrong. They're not even talking about politics as practiced in the USA. At best, they're kibitzing about folk notions of democracy.
Everyone should run for office at least once. Give stump speeches. Earn endorsements. GOTV. Cold call strangers for cash. Wrestle over policy. Build coalitions. Etc.
People should still criticize, make demands.
I'm just saying that once you've played the game, everyone's behaviour will make perfect sense. And then you'll see where reform is needed, desirable, useful.
Source: Election integrity activist, ran for office.
I love Diet Coke, I'm a Coke person for sure. But I have to admit that Pepsi is winning the business wars, not because of their beverage business, but because of all their other investments. Pepsi used to own KFC, Taco Bell, and Pizza Hut (later spun off into Yum! brands), and they still own Frito Lay chips. Coke I don't think has been as good about diversifying their income stream.
To take this to the political sphere, the way to win a Duopoly is to cheat and outsmart your opponent. I'd say the republicans are winning this one though, with the electoral college, citizens united, and the way they are playing for votes with fear and hatred.
Now to be sure, I'm a democrat, and I don't like what is going on, but even I have to admire an evil genius and how they manage to somehow hold on. It's finding ways around your opponent, not trying to attack them head on. I think if we changed the voting system to a ranked choice system, this would be a big way to swing things back toward the democrats.
I'm still always freaked out by people that vote green, and you can see how blue + green > red, but red is still the plurality. Ranked voting would really change this. Even I want to vote green, but am worried that I will affect the spread. Being able to bring in new blood with low risk of going with the worst option would be a huge improvement.
Coca Cola definitely has a diverse brand set of income streams including Minute Made, Nature's Own, Odwalla, and Vitamin Water
This, to me, is a much more interesting issue than assessing the different ways of counting ballots like ranked choice or approval voting, which seem more like a dry mathematical exercise in tweaking some technical process that we don't fully understand to begin with.
There was this interview I heard on C-Span with Sue Myrick where they asked her about this lack of bipartisanship in Washington. She said that it's simply because politicians no longer relocate there, but just fly in on Monday and fly back out on Friday. So their spouses don't get together anymore for social events, and their kids don't play on the same baseball teams anymore. They don't socialize in any meaningful way with the other representatives.
If representatives are anything like normal people, then I'd wager the revocation of the Fairness Doctrine in 1985 had something to do with it, too. The news media does a pretty good job conditioning people into hating the other party.
The New Deal and Civil Rights Act were earthshaking bills that broke the existing partisan alignment and caused a realignment around them; they didn't happen often before, the two of them happening without a few decades was essentially unprecedented in US history.
Bemoaning that things like that don't happen anymore is...odd.
And, yes, the period of realignment that started with the New Deal, was just seeming to settle out before being reignited with the Civil Rights Act, and was largely complete by the mid-1990s, when the few surviving conservative Democratic holdouts finally jumped ship in the wake of the 1994 election had more other “bipartisan” legislation than was normal before or since, because the national parties and the major national ideological factions were out of alignment.
https://ballot-access.org/2018/11/06/fargo-north-dakota-vote...
Depending on that to fix problems with the two dominant parties is like seeing an infection and doing nothing to treat it until gangrene sets in and you have to cut off their leg (and give them a robotic prosthetic that you hope will be better than their real leg).
It can and does happen, there's even a term for it, iirc: electoral realignment. But it hasn't happened recently, despite a clear sense by everyone that our political system is broken and stupid. Ross Perot tried to incite one in '92 and look what happened.
Does that mean we fairly unanimously agree that non-partisan primaries are a good thing? Those are something that could be passed state by state via ballot measure.
To paraphrase the late Gore Vidal, "We have one political party, the property party, with two wings."
Here's the full quote:
“There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party … and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat. Republicans are a bit stupider, more rigid, more doctrinaire in their laissez-faire capitalism than the Democrats, who are cuter, prettier, a bit more corrupt — until recently … and more willing than the Republicans to make small adjustments when the poor, the black, the anti-imperialists get out of hand. But, essentially, there is no difference between the two parties.”
― Gore Vidal
Worse, in this context it seems to suggest that you should bargain with neither side and instead seek some new power dynamic. That would be a recipe for disappointment, especially when I think an engaged citizenry can make real (albeit slow) progress by bargaining with the major political parties.
Changing the voting system doesn't actually solve that, either.
So, what were the ratings for the 2018 election show?
(In past years they barely cleared 30% of voters. QED?)
It's frustrating to see the Republican party actively sabotage government, then turn around and use it as proof the government doesn't work. All the while gerrymandering their way into house seats.
> 1. Non-partisan, single-ballot primaries.
Seems reasonable by itself, but it won't scale to more than a few parties.
> 2. Instant-runoff voting, (commonly known as IRV, but in the article/transcript they call it Ranked-choice voting).
No. Absolutely not. IRV is awful.
The good options are range voting (which collapses in the pathological case to simple approval voting, which isn't too bad itself). Or, if you're willing to live with some compromises, one of the Condorcet variants. The problem with the Condorcet voting system family is that it's more complex, less intuitive, and doesn't nicely aggregate: to break ties/loops you have to have granular voting data. The complexity means that when someone doesn't like the voting outcome, FOX or CNN can find some talking head to say "voting system is unfair! election stolen!" nonsense, and get traction because most people wouldn't understand Condorcet or why it works the way it does.
> 3. Non-biased non-gerrymandered redistricting.
Sure, but this needs to be defined strictly, with each voting district bounded by significant geographical features (rivers, mountains), and when geo features aren't available as boundaries, the boundary must be within a certain percentage of a convex hull. In other words, severely constraining the volume of concave points. Nothing like (-1,-1) to (-1, 1) to (1, 1) to (-0.5, 0), to (1, -1). That -0.5, 0 takes a big pacman-like bite out of the square volume, so it wouldn't be permitted. There are actual districts like that, or more like a blocky-letter-C or a blocky-letter-L shape, and it's absurd.
When the electorate's preferences is a statistical tie, it doesn't matter who wins, as long as one party isn't forcing all the tiebreaks to go their way.
I wish this was more front and center in these types of discussions. Imagine a race between Alice and Bob. Alice gets 9,500 votes, Bob 9,521 votes. But—due to some controversial rules—10 of Alice's and 40 of Bob's votes are invalidated. Alice wins.
This is not a scandal or a problem. The original vote totals were a tie. The new vote totals are also a tie. Essentially a coin flip determined the winner.
For purposes of determining who won, 49%===51%. If a candidate is truly wanted by the electorate, then they need to do better than 50% +1 anyway.
if (highest voted candidate has more than 50%) {
That candidate is winner
} else {
use 2nd picks of voters for least voted candidate
IRV() // recursive
}Here's a summary: https://rangevoting.org/IrvPathologySurvey.html
For anyone interested in gerrymandering and related issues, I've found this to be a nice resource: https://sites.duke.edu/quantifyinggerrymandering . (In full disclosure, I know some of the people responsible for this but am not involved in the work.)