Approval Voting versus Instant Runoff Voting

Is there any real momentum for any kind of change at the US Federal level? Do politicians talk to you? What's the buzz?

The argument for "Ballot Simplicity" is misleading too

They seem to have tried to intentionally tried to create a much more complicated ballot paper for IRV

Here's a sample of an Australian IRV voting form:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/48/20...

Perhaps then each candidate should be marked with either a "0" or a "+". It is difficult to change either of these into the other without signs of tampering.

Unintentional spoilage and intentional tampering are two different things. There's nothing disingenuous about mentioning one of them but not the other.

It's true that, depending on the implementation, approval voting can be subject to tampering. But the key point there is "depending on the implementation". There are any number of anti-tampering measures that are compatible with approval. Other comments here have suggested some of them (such as using "0" vs "+" as marks). Others might rely on technological fixes (such as immediate ballot scans by multiple independent non-networked devices) or social ones (multiple witnesses during all stages of ballot collection and counting).

It may not be possible to be 100% certain of preventing every possibility of ballot-counting fraud, but it seems that >99.9% is possible, and that's basically good enough. In well-administered elections, spoilage is a much bigger problem. Thus, it's reasonable to focus on spoilage.

This is easily prevented by additionally marking the number of candidates chosen.

That's fixable by using voting machines to print the ballots. E.g. fill in the circles but also print the number of filled-in circles for each contest. Or, print only the selected candidate names.

In their example voting form there is a list of candidate names with a bubble next to each.

How can someone “fill in more bubbles for (their) candidate”?

Or just put in a number in a single column boxes like in Australia or Ireland.

this is a non-US problem - in India, we typically have a dozen candidates in every election constituency. IRV is not very practical.

Further, my jurisdiction's general election has 30+ contests. Ballot real estate is already scarce.

One mitigate is to split our plus-sized ballots into separate federal, state, and local, but no one is considering doing that. The primary argument against is ballot process (central count for vote-by-mail) is already complicated enough.

"I want to say I like A more than I like B"

You can convey this by only submitting a single choice on your ballot (a powerful tactic in AV). Conversely, you can vote everyone BUT the one you wish to harm. And by default you can vote NOTA. While it may be that Approval Voting is not the "perfect" answer, it is far better than most and comes with the added benefit of easy adoption/implementation and simple explanation.

While I would certainly be more happy in a world with either IRV or Condorcet method than FPTP, I think this argument against IRV is too simplistic. The situation is candidates D, R with the largest numbers of voters who prefer them first, and consensus candidate I with smaller first preference than D, R but lots of 2nd preference. Under any Condorcet method, the D and R voters can hurt their candidate by ranking I as second (later-no-harm criterion). This leads to a negative partisanship spiral, say, as D/R voters feel like they must only rank 1 candidate in order to counter the threat from the other party doing the same, and thus the consensus candidate I, which would be the Condorcet winner under voter's true preferences, does not become the winner under the actual votes. IRV does a better job of inducing everyone to rank choices.

> I will always find "Approval" to be unsatisfying because I want to say I like A more than I like B.

This is the "expressiveness fallacy". https://www.electionscience.org/library/expressiveness-in-ap...

tl;dr

Total information throughput for a voting system is a function of THREE things:

1. Amount of information you can express on a ballot.

2. Accuracy of that information (which is distorted if the system gives you an incentive to dishonestly/tactically vote) .

3. Tabulation efficiency — how effectively does the system utilize the info on the ballots (for example there are numerous ranked voting systems from IRV, to Borda, to the entire Condorcet family; and IRV is extremely lossy) .

When you factor these all together, Approval Voting does surprisingly well, especially because it's so good at #2 and #3. See this graph of performance as measured by Bayesian regret. http://scorevoting.net/BayRegsFig.html

Essentially what's happening is that the people who's approval threshold sits between candidates A and B (i.e. those people who only approve one of them) will, in a statistical sense, have about the same A-vs-B preference as the people who voted for both or neither of them. So the aggregate effect doesn't really suffer from your inability to express a ranked preference for all candidates. Voting is statistical.

To really drive that home, note that you could switch to a better voting method and STOP VOTING, and STILL get better election outcomes. The tiny impact your vote has on the process is statistically negligible. The properties of the voting system matter vastly more.

>because it has bad outcomes and for no additional cost or complexity those ranked ballots could have been counted by a Condorcet method that results in better democracy.

Can you show how the differences in outcomes is better using the Condorcet method?

Yes, approval voting leaves the door open for some tactical voting.

So if candidate #1 would win a simple majority (50.01% of voters), but is absolutely hated by everyone else, but #2 is "acceptable" or second best to 100% of the voters, should #1 win?

We are used to the binary "simple majority takes all" in elections, but maybe the compromise "everybody is pretty OK with this one" _should_ win.

If it were a group of friends going to a restaurant, or playing a game, #2 sounds like a much better option.

The "favorite betrayal" criterion is defined mathematically. In your scenario, as long as you approve Ideal, you are not betraying your favorite, even if you also approve Good. The only betrayal would be if you didn't approve Ideal. And in approval voting, there is no way others could be voting so that betrayal would be a good idea.

You are talking about a form of strategic voting — whether or not you approve Good. But it isn't favorite betrayal. In fact, it isn't betrayal at any level. All rational approval strategy (assuming a convex distribution over others' votes) is "semi-honest" in that you never approve a less-liked candidate but not a more-liked one. The only strategic choice is where to set your threshold, then honestly approve all candidates above it.

According to the Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem, any voting method has some form of strategy, so in that sense the best you can possibly do is ensure that all strategy is semi-honest. Approval is optimal in this sense.

Using polling data to vote tactically is exactly what we want to avoid and gives undue power to pollsters (and the people paying them.)

Good winning over Ideal is a desired outcome when Ideal doesn't have the votes to win. That's one of the main attractions of non-plurality voting. The point of approval voting is not to rank candidates as Ideal > Good > Bad, that's what IRV is. Approval voting says, "These candidates are equally acceptable to me, so I'll be happy if any of them win over the candidates I didn't vote for."

These criteria are moot as regards popular systems. They cover cases where opinion is so mixed that no single-vote system can reliably pick a winner.

People hate change.

A few of us have been sneaking approval voting in wherever it makes sense. Familiarize people with the process.

One example is we use approval voting for prioritorizing our motions during membership meetings. Previously, our endorsement process was a major food fight, was way too dependent on the order which motions (from the floor) were recognized (unfair, yielding results not representative of the membership) and took way too long.

Now, using approval voting to pre-rank the motions, everyone sees the process is open, fair, accountable.

I appreciate your opinion, but I want to point out that our definitions of fairness and simplicity may vary. Much of scholarly work around elections systems strives to ground itself on particular formal criteria.

Sortition (that is, random selection) is a system for roughly-proportional representation; that is, for choosing multiple winners for a legislature so as to represent a population.

Approval voting is a way of picking a single winner.

They solve entirely separate problems.

(Sortition is nearly optimal if your only goal is to match the distribution of voters by a subset of equally-weighted representatives. Technically, it's possible to improve on it slightly by allowing voters to cluster themselves into a hierarchical structure of parties and factions, then performing sortition under the constraint that each party and/or faction must come within 1 seat of its correct proportional representation. This kind of technique is called "reduced-variance sampling" when used in sequential monte carlo sampling.

But sortition, or party-clustered sortition, pays no attention to candidate quality. Most people would agree that if there are two candidates that hold the same ideology, but the only difference is that one of the two has a medical problem that only allows them to work for 1 hour a week, the other one would make a better representative. Sortition cannot be fixed to take this kind of factor into account, which is a big part of why many people prefer more traditional voting methods.)

Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem, as I understand it, applies quite broadly to voting systems. To put it simply, you can’t avoid it. You just decide what trade offs you want to live with.

<raises hand>

And political scientists! (No-one listens to us, of course).

More seriously, the case for standard First-Past-The-Post voting is really bad in terms of its decision-making properties. It's really only as dominant as it is, where it is, because of its historical position. Exactly what you might replace it with is a trickier question, with multiple plausible candidates, all better than FPTP and all different from each other. I lean towards Single Transferable Vote, and its special case AV/IRV in single member elections, but reasonable people can disagree.

Intriguingly, the British Parliament has just effectively used approval voting to try to break its Brexit deadlock. It failed in this case largely because many members voted highly tactically for their 'ideal' option only, not for what they could live with. AV/IRV would have been a better choice, I think, if a compromise winner was actually wanted.

The main benefit of FPTP, for third parties, is that they can hijack elections by acting as "anti-tiebreaker" (Threatening to turn their nearest ally into a lose by joining the election, unless that nearest ally adopts their platform). This is why third parties generally (and openly) advocate for FPTP.

Of course, the simple and well-tested solution is to reduce the power of the Executive, move power to Parliament, and assign power proportionally to parties.

I advocate approval voting for executive positions, proportional representation for assemblies, and fair redistricting.

That combo will reform our duopoly. Plus other benefits, like improve campaign civility and reduce polarization.

(FWIW, I upvoted you for your end goal.)

I'm also libertarian (leaning, in the sense I have voted for libertarian candidates in multiple elections at multiple levels, but not most of the time) but do research on this. I am not sure what to say to allay your concerns, except to say that mathematically/statistically speaking approval voting is what I would implement after a rating system, which I think is the best but also maybe the most cumbersome.

I personally don't really care about the political impetus behind changing the election format (not to say I don't care about politics, just that in the case of alternative voting systems the standard US format is almost the worst you could do). Anything that moves the US toward something better would be an improvement.

My one concern is that for whatever reason ranking systems seem to be the thing being pushed most, when approval or rating systems would probably be better.

Changing to an approval system would probably be the easiest way to increase 3rd party viability at the moment. Which of those 3rd parties would benefit is a different issue, but approval systems allow people to diversify their expressed preferences, so at the very least it wouldn't be worse for 3rd party candidates.

The basic issue is that plurality voting is a very poor measure of preference. Imagine if you were asked to measure height of 5 people in the room, 3 of whom are over 6 feet 10 inches tall. You could report how tall they are; this is most similar to a rating system. You could rank order their heights; this preserves rank ordering information but not anything about absolute difference, so the two people who are 7'2" and 7'1" look as different as the people who are 7'2" and 5'2". You could also ask people to just mark which are taller than 6'10", which at least acknowledges that more than one person could be taller than 6'10", and preserves some info about absolute height. Or, you could do as is standard, and just indicate who is tallest, which doesn't preserve much information at all about height.

But there is a downside, by your own logic. If you vote for a candidate that you disapprove of (don’t want to elect), you run the risk of increasing their support.

> It seems to me that Approval Voting might have the unintended negative consequence of electing a joke candidate

I think we've already crossed that particular bridge.

> So we are left with 'establishment' mediocrity instead of the most popular result.

In this case, Left is the most democratic winner of the race, also known as the Condorcet winner (assuming Right supporters would support Left over Far Left in a two-person race between them). However, not all elections have a Condorcet winner. Also however, approval voting doesn't guarantee the Condorcet winner wins the race (if one exists), but it's an improvement over FPTP.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet_criterion

"Left" and "Right" are nearly meaningless when people can have stances on an issue-by-issue basis. As someone who has important disagreements with both big US parties, some would call me a moderate, and I feel disenfranchised by the current system, which doesn't let me pick the person whom I agree with most.

I don't know what you mean by "'establishment' mediocrity".

Nothing in your example means that the "Left" has to be "establishment" or "mediocrity".