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Comment by ElijahLynn | Hacker News Reader

But also it gives voters the option to actually vote for whom they want to vote for instead of who they think will win. Big game changer and will fundamentally affect everything about the vote.

Big vision here is that it also shifts the discussion to how can we make the voting system better, just by implementing _something_ better.

I agree with you hugely that "it's a start, and I'm grateful for that alone". And we need to push this across the finish line, even though it isn't _perfect_. We just need _better_ right now, we need momentum.

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> But also it gives voters the option to actually vote for whom they want to vote for instead of who they think will win.

You already have the option to vote for who you want to vote for in "first past the post", you just might get an outcome you don't like very much...

IRV and every other voting system is the same way: you can vote your heart, but you'll get an outcome you prefer more often if you vote tactically. There's even a theorem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibbard–Satterthwaite_theorem

For the specific case of IRV, consider an election like:

* 32% of people: Clinton, Sanders, Trump

* 33% of people: Sanders, Trump, Clinton

* 35% of people: Trump, Clinton, Sanders

Now, this is a terrible election and there's no clear winner because people's preferences point around in a circle. Under traditional voting Trump wins, while under IRV Clinton is eliminated and Sanders wins. But if a few people preferring Trump > Clinton > Sanders had instead voted just Clinton > Trump > Sanders we could have had:

* 32% of people: Clinton, Sanders, Trump

* 33% of people: Sanders, Trump, Clinton

* 32% of people: Trump, Clinton, Sanders

* 3% of people: Clinton, Trump, Sanders

Then Trump would have been eliminated first, with only 32% of the first place votes, and his second place votes would have gone to Clinton, making her win. So by voting for a candidate they liked less, these voters got an outcome they liked more.

I'm not at all a fan of G-S and the Arrow Theorem, since they make widely unrealistic assumptions about voting (e.g. Arrow's IIA is nonsense - intensity matters!).

G-S and Arrow damaged tremendously any attempt to look at electoral systems rationally by imposing a mathematical description which is simply irrelevant to actual concerns.

In your given example, the particular unrealistic assumption is the way it looks at voting. Voting is not an extended opinion poll. It is use of political power where each voter is given an equal amount. Therefore, there's no need to reduce "tactical voting" to a minimum (the useful requirements are far laxer than that).

The voters in your example did not "fail" or "cheat" by voting for a candidate they liked less. They compromised, and therefore got a better result for them. Arguably a voting system that pushes people into consensus and majority is actually desirable and not a flaw.

Aside, I do prefer Borda or Approval over IRV, but the better reasoning is just they are far simpler overall while preserving the actually important advantages.

Indeed. I'd be in favour of people who know Arrow's Theorum designing the voting system; but not because I care about tactical voting.

I rank the voting systems [Anarchy] -> [Dictatorship] -> [First Past the Post] -> [IRV] -> [Approval].

Anarchy is sort-of the base case. Dictatorship is better than anarchy because at least it is large-scale organisation and infrastructure might happen. FPTP is that and the dictatorship can't be truly unpopular (<35% general support). IRV adds in a really stabilising ability for 3rd parties to successfully build support with a slow rolling campaign - makes it really hard for major parties to move away from the centre because people have a powerful signal for what they want. Approval adds in a level of simplicity to IRV.

I like IRV for the same arguable reason you like tactical voting - a good system should really be a bit random in tight situations. 50.1% of the votes isn't really different from 49.9% and voting systems don't need to differentiate. In Australia (IRV) when we had our last really tight election a bloke got elected on a couple of hundred primary votes from the Australian Motoring Enthusiast party. His platform was basically that he liked souped-up fast cars. Nobody had ever heard of him. Dude was an excellent Senator, he read the legislation and thought about things. Big win for Australia, IMO. Better than some political swamp-creature elected on a tiny margin.

Also; my favourite voting link: http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/

EDIT I think the order is obvious, but I upgraded my '>' to '->' for tmporter.

Your ranking list can be interpreted in two very different ways depending on whether you consider ">" to be an arrow or a greater-than sign.

Nitpicking, but Ricky Muir (the car guy) was elected in the Senate, which does not really have instant runoff in the way described here. (For outsiders: our House of Representatives is IRV, our Senate is Proportional Representation which is like IRV but with multiple winners on each ballot)

Agree with you that electing a random citizen gave much better results than party slime.

The Old senate system cannot fairly be called STV in its effects not in the options available to voters. Above the line voting with no (voter controlled) preferences made in more like a list.

In addition to the simplicity issue, IRV can have a practical problem of legitimacy, when the elected official is everyone's 10th choice (I exaggerate for effect).

There are some arguments for allowing that, but I think the argument against is stronger - officials need legitimacy to serve effectively, otherwise we have a period of political instability which will end badly, and 10th choices won't practically have legitimacy. In Approval voting the preference order is a bit hidden so this doesn't happen. One of those cases where treating an election as if it's not an opinion poll at all is the better choice.

If the preferences have run off to 10th place; the first 9 choices are controversial enough they wouldn't have legitimacy either.

Look at America - the president has so gained so much legitimacy from FPTP that the House is trying to eject him from office. Voting system doesn't help with that much.

That is an argument like the Chinese claiming democracy wouldn't work because China is different. In theory it can't be instantly debunked, but in practice it seems to be a non-issue (compared to alternatives) when IRV is tried.

What's happening in America is not due to the election result, not anymore. That has more to do with the President's... temperament, and some very particular circumstances.

If it was just FPTP where he won more electors but less votes, he would have been seen as legitimate by now, just like Bush was.

I disagree. Polling in 2016 clearly showed Trump and Clinton were each individually the two least-liked nominees in their parties in modern presidential history. First-past-the-post and bitter primaries were largely responsible for the result-- over a third of voters remained at home on Election Day 2016. In some electoral systems, they even have an option to reject all nominees in these kinds of situations.

> over a third of voters remained at home on Election Day 2016

Isn't that an unusually high turnout?

I thought about the general elections. As for the primaries:

* Clinton locked out nearly all of the viable opponents by using institutional control, the only one left was one sufficiently outside the Democratic party so she had a strong institutional advantage. No voting system could have fixed that.

* Trump actually had some popularity as a second choice among Republican primary voters, and we see that later on when only Cruz and Kasich were left. The other candidates' failure were more mundane - Not taking Trump seriously, op research failure, Trump being able to coordinate with Christi while the others were less able to coordinate, etc.

* The option to reject all nominees.. is interesting, but can lead to a 2nd/3rd ballot while the government is semi-paralyzed. It may not be a good idea to allow that.

> Clinton locked out nearly all of the viable opponents by using institutional control, the only one left was one sufficiently outside the Democratic party so she had a strong institutional advantage. No voting system could have fixed that.

Uh, yeah, simply not having voting superdelegates in the nominating contest (a reform to the candidate-selection voting system Democrats made in response to 2016) would have likely fixed (or at least mitigated) that, since the nominating contest was close even with the early superdelegate commitments and the effect that had on the perception of inevitability.

A general election direct (no electoral college) voting system like Bucklin or IRV, modified some that the same ballots, skipping votes for the winner, were tallied again by the same method to select the vice president, encouraging a party to bring it's two independently strongest candidates into the general election (and increasing the space for other parties or independent candidates) would absolutely both discourage that and limit the effect it would have on constraining viable general election choices.

(The same system internally to the party for choosing the Presidential and Vice Presidential nominees also would fix it.)

The superdelegates went for Clinton because there wasn't any serious institutional D challenger (Sanders was an independent before), so Clinton had by default a huge advantage there. If there was a serious internal D challenger, the picture would have been far more equal.

IRV can make the contest more fair than the previous voting system, but it can't make candidates run...

> The superdelegates went for Clinton because there wasn't any serious institutional D challenger

No, that's s almost exactly backwards. A key way Clinton locked out other traditional candidates was to secure an unusually large number of superdelegate commitments extremely early, needle other candidates would normally commit to the race.

> IRV can make the contest more fair than the previous voting system, but it can't make candidates run...

Yes, it can. Running in a Presidential primary (and the same is true of many other races) is an investment of time and resources people make—or avoid—in part because of the perceived prospects for success factors like a competitor having a substantial share of the total available vote sewed up before you decide, or a voting system that naturally narrows the field people will actively consider during the campaign do, very much, effect who decides to run.

> No voting system could have fixed that.

Literally the point of IRV, Approval Voting and so forth is allowing viable 3rd parties not endorsed by the official channels of the major parties. They fix precisely this sort of problem. Democrats could have voted for a different left-leaning candidate without advantaging the right wing of politics.

There wasn't a coordination issue between 100 small left-leaning candidates for the Clinton opponents to choose - in that scenario IRV/AV would have helped. In the real scenario, the problem was solved for them by having only 1 option...

The candidate who is everyone's 10th choice can't win. To make it through the first exclusion the candidate has to be more people's first choice than at least one other candidate.

In practice the most outlandish result you get is someone winning from third on the primary (first choice) votes (eg https://results.ecq.qld.gov.au/elections/state/State2017/res... or https://results.aec.gov.au/15508/Website/HouseDivisionFirstP... ), but such a candidate still needs a considerable amount of first choice votes to be in the running (and of course a very strong flow of second/subsequent choice votes).

The legitimacy argument of IRV is that the winning candidate needed to accrue 50%+1 of first-and-subsequent choice votes, so they are at least the preferred winner over the second-place candidate by a majority of the electorate.

I did exaggerate (and said I did), but my point was that IRV makes it very obvious when a candidate loses badly on 1st order preferences but wins based on subsequent choices.

That can be argued as an IRV benefit over other systems (the winner knows s/he's on thin ice! The winner does have 50%+1 overall!), but the other way to see it is that the winner would be hobbled and would have difficulty governing effectively, and a voting system that emphasizes the ranking a bit less might have had the same result but with the winner having more legitimacy following the election.

Ricky Muir was not elected on IRV. He was elected on an exhaustive flexible list. Voting above the line without (voter controlled) preferences in the old system, which is what got him elected, has none of the characteristics of IRV, and was basically like a strange list that required all candidates to be on all lists.

> Arrow's IIA is nonsense - intensity matters!

Independence of irrelevant alternatives (IIA) says that adding another option shouldn't change a voter's (or the election result's) relative preferences among all other options.

"The table's waiter comes by and says their desert options are blueberry pie and vanilla ice cream. You order the pie. Then the waiter comes back and says, we also have chocolate cake. 'In that case, I'll have the ice cream!'"

I don't see what this has to do with intensity?

Arrow's theorem does assume that intensity doesn't matter, but this isn't IIA but is rather the unnamed predicate that voters express their preferences by ranking candidates with no ties allowed, rather than an approval voting scheme, or a "on a scale of 1-10" scheme.

Your example only looks irrational when one looks only at the overall preference list and furthermore thinks that the only important result is the winner. i.e. when looking at elections as an extended opinion poll and applying a purely mathematical logic ignoring politics, just like the Arrow Theorem does.

If a voter went for chocolate cake despite polls showing that this may cause blueberry pie to lose the election, maybe the voter does not care that much for blueberry pie over vanilla ice cream, or the voter really really cares for cake far more than the other choice - both of these are intensity issues and the election method de facto taking them into account is not irrational.

Maybe the cake was the only nut free option, and some voters deciding for the cake despite not having nut allergy themselves and despite losing convince the restaurant to offer more nut free foods later.

99% of the 'irrelevant choice' cases actually have some political logic like the above behind them which Arrow theorem just blithely ignores. The 1% are usually some attempt to mislead the voters (say by running a hopeless candidate with a similar name to another in order to siphon off votes), and should be handled by the electoral commission.

One thing to consider is that because gaming the vote is harder to understand, it may have less of an impact. People can easily understand that voting for 3rd party candidate is not voting for a candidate that actually has a chance. Fewer people will be able to understand the second example you give, meaning it will have less impact on people gaming their votes.

But you also have to consider that most people don't understand it because it's currently not relevant to them. If the system was put in place, I would imagine people who hear a lot more about that strategy.

This is a good point I think. If this system were adopted, all it would take is a small number of activist people to understand how to game the system, then post a bunch of YouTube videos explaining to all their acolytes how they can join in and game the system.

The lived experience of IRV is that this does not happen.

There are probably a few reasons for this. Firstly, the situations where tactical voting can be of benefit tend to arise only rarely. Secondly, when these situations do arise, it is not usually apparent in advance of the election. Thirdly, even when such a situation arises and it is reasonably forseeable in advance of the election, it is easy for the tactical voting to backfire and hinder the candidates chances rather than helping them, if the vote shares/exclusion order aren't as predicted.

>The lived experience of IRV is that this does not happen.

What "lived experience"? IRV has never been used in American elections at least, unless you count some towns.

It's been used for single-member constituencies at the Federal level in Australia for 100 years, and in the various States for at least 50 years. French Presidential elections have been using run-off elections for even longer, and those are in theory open to the same kinds of tactical voting in the early rounds as IRV.

People not understanding how their vote affects the outcome is usually considered a downside.

Every single voting system has some element of fault. Very few voting systems are close to "perfect representation" and they tend to be more math heavy, in a way that would lead to distrust from the average voter.

IRV might have some corner cases, such as the one you listed, where strategic voting is beneficial for some. IRV reduces that element drastically, and encourages positive voting and true representation to a much larger degree.

Essentially, everything the NYT article says.

> There's even a theorem

Calling it the "same" is missing the point. It's a corner case in instant runoff, while in first past the post it's just normal voting.

IRV failing to capture voter preferences is not a "corner case". It is absolutely unclear that IRV is better at all than FPTP. See a set of voting simulations with candidates and distributions here for different voting methods:

http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/

Alarmingly, IRV is the worst voting system of all just by eyeballing these simulations. The charts it produces are bizarre, and it tends to select for extremists and/or candidates that do not capture the voter's preferences!

It's not just of theoretical interest either, IRV famously spoiled the 2009 Burlington mayoral election, resulting in its repeal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Burlington_mayoral_electi...

The only good takeaway from IRV picking up steam is that maybe it puts us on the path towards something like approval voting, which is much harder to game, and is much easier for voters to understand (I doubt more than 1 out of 10 people could explain how IRV works).

As someone who voted in the 2009 election I disagree that IRV actually spoiled the election, people - when voting in an IRV system, need to comprehend that they don't need to rank all candidates and doing an exhaustive ranking is a tactical decision to vote against an ultimate candidate.

That "spoilage" ended up being less about IRV and more about the fact that Bob Kiss was someone a lot of people ranked without good knowledge of him was more at issue, along with his personal character. Don't forget that he wasn't some 5th place follower who managed to pick up protest votes, he was the 2nd place candidate in the primary round.

I just wanted to add, the fact that IRV was repealed over this removal from office was a travesty and the result of shady politics - please understand this is a terrible case study.

IRV picking up steam might also have negative effects towards people's general opinion of alternative voting systems once they see all the strange outcomes it can have.

But I think that the positives attention around it brings outweigh the negatives. The first (recent) overhaul to a voting system is more difficult than subsequent changes.

Voter Satisfaction Efficiency (http://electionscience.github.io/vse-sim/VSE/) is another way of looking at different options, and IRV compares very poorly by it

I hate the way they've defined their metric:

> VSE is expressed as a percentage. A voting method which could read voters minds and always pick the candidate that would lead to the highest average happiness would have a VSE of 100%. A method which picked a candidate completely at random would have a VSE of 0%. In theory, VSEs down to negative 100% would be possible if a voting method did worse than a random pick

If VSE is going to be a percentage, it should be a percentage of the maximum happiness -- that is, the total happiness if everyone got their first choice, not the total happiness that is the highest any candidate can actually achieve. I say this mostly because it's much easier to calculate.

But more fundamentally, there is no reason to expect the worst-case candidate to be equally as bad as the best-case candidate is good. It's a huge mistake to rank systems on a scale from +100% to -100% where the units on the positive and negative "halves" of the scale are different!

And it's also a mistake to define 0% as whatever sortition achieves. It's trivial to construct a pathological system in which 0% VSE is equal to 100% VSE. (Everyone is equally un/happy with all candidates.) This should be impossible.

Let's consider an example:

You have 100 candidates. For 99 of those candidates, the entire electorate agrees that any one of these interchangeable guys would do a fine job. Nobody prefers any of them to any other.

The last candidate is Mao Zedong. Under his leadership, the country's industrial and agricultural bases will be systematically destroyed, anyone who owns a rental property will be executed, and tens of millions of people will starve to death for no reason.

The electorate agrees that Mao is an undesirable choice.

So: any method that can't pick Mao achieves a VSE of 100%.

Sortition, by definition, achieves a VSE of 0%. But it's still pretty good -- there's a 99% chance of selecting one of the good guys, and a 1% chance of epic, country-shattering disaster.

A method that is guaranteed to select Mao has a VSE of, I assume, -100%. But it is much, much worse than sortition (the notional midpoint, 0%), while the VSE of 100% is only moderately better than sortition.

These numbers don't make sense.

That is very interesting and I hadn't seen it before. IRV still does better than plurality by quite a bit, although it doesn't do well compared to the rest. As the chart shows, one of the biggest outliers is 100% honest voting with plurality.

I hadn't heard of 3-2-1 voting before but that is interesting. Maybe it would be one of the best. I generally prefer ranking to scoring (I'm not sure how much better someone prefers a candidate should really be part of the process) but the simpler tallying and presentation of results is nice. I also like that in the "scenereo type" breakdown the easy case gets the best results, condorcet cycles get the worst results, and the rest are in the middle (all with little effect of strategy). It seems like the right distribution to me, but none of the other methods measured get that distribution. IMO a ranked preference is usually much easier to determine how to vote (although it can still be an issue when some candidates are much closer than others), although I guess the limited effect of strategic voting should hopefully mean that it usualy doesn't make much difference exactly how you vote. OTOH, at least the names of the options should be changed; it is the rare race where I could describe any of the candidates as anything other than "bad".

https://electowiki.org/wiki/3-2-1_voting

IMO, proportional representation would be a much better change of voting system rather than just changing the method. Voting for one person is almost always going to leave lots of people unrepresented.

This particular example is a bit of a corner case, as it has no Condorcet winner. This is rare: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet_paradox#Likelihood...

IRV still has serious failure modes in its typical deployment, but this is not a great example.

The Wikipedia article for this particular example says Andy Montroll, the Democratic candidate, was the Condorcet winner.

Gah, too many examples. I was referring to the synthetic example further upthread.

There should be a rule - no majority = no win.

Let alone - anything is better, than a simple plurality based system.

Very often when there are more than two candidates, none of them have a majority of supporters. In fact, sometimes that's true even with two or even one candidate...

What do you do when votes lead to a plurality?

What election are you thinking of where majority of votes didn’t win?

Because if you say 2016 / electoral college, I’ll have to remind you that the winner had a fairly vast majority. If you are thinking Canada or some ranked system, iirc they still elect by majority.

“No majority no win” is a great recipe for tyranny of the majority and why we have representative democracies, isn’t it?

> What election are you thinking of where majority of votes didn’t win?

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

> Because if you say 2016 / electoral college, I’ll have to remind you that the winner had a fairly vast majority

If you mean the winner who lost, sure?

The winner of the 2016 election received the majority of the votes cast in the electoral college by Presidential electors

Those electors voting for the winner were themselves, however, elected by only a minority of those voting for Presidential electors in elections which misleading had the name of Presidential candidates but not electors on the ballots.

This is pointlessly pedantic. The person clearly meant they preferred elections be won by a majority of the popular vote.

In the USA we don't use popular vote. We use state votes. The winner won with a vast majority of those state votes.

You can be upset at the outcome, but you can not argue the facts of the system.

I wasn't arguing the facts of the system. I wasn't even stating a preference (though, yes, I'm upset at the outcome). I was responding to a thread where:

1. Person states preference that majority wins 2. Person states that majority did win 3. I demonstrate that majority did not win 4. Person #2 says majority won EC 5. I point out that it was plainly obvious that person #1 would prefer a majority of the popular vote win

Canada uses FPTP voting and it has highly skewed the last few elections, sadly there was an expectation that the last federal election would result in election reform but that never materialized.

The fundamental reason for this: IRV doesn't care what your preferences are other than your top choice, until your top choice is eliminated.

Until choice A is eliminated, votes for A>B>C and votes for A>C>B are treated identically, and neither one will affect whether B or C gets eliminated first.

Better systems take all preferences into account from the beginning.

> there's no clear winner because people's preferences point around in a circle.

Is there evidence around how often such cycles actually occur in practice? Seems like a convoluted example, intuitively speaking.

When voters are all arranged on a single primary axis it doesn't happen, but when voters care about multiple axes at once (ex: socially liberal / conservative + economically liberal / conservative) it's relatively common.

One well-known and widely discussed case is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Burlington_mayoral_electi...

This particular case was brought up previously, but as a participant I'd like to mention that this election actually went quite well, the candidate with the second most primary round votes ended up winning. I believe it's often cited and discussed because the election was repealed and the candidate thrown out of office, which was hugely frustrating... the voting system was scrapped because the electorate selected a bad candidate.

Let me draw a parallel, let's say that Trump is impeached - when he's impeached should we all say "Oh hey, well that democracy thing... what a dumpster fire - let's go back to a monarchy!". No, we shouldn't, but high amounts of pressure from the dominant parties were deployed and caused a voting system to be repealed just because someone elected by it was removed from office.

Seriously, the BTV election is a terrible case example, it was intensely tainted by lobbied interests and used as an excuse to regress voting rights.

A (Constitutional) Monarchy is better _because_ it has no legitimacy. The purpose of the Monarch is not to Rule but only to provide a Figurehead, a living Symbol of their country.

That's what Liz is for and she's really good at it.

If the US had an elected Figurehead president, Trump would have been a perfectly functional drop-in. Likes gaudy things, talks bullshit, eats too much fast food - symbol of America, works for me.

The problem is that the US combines the Figurehead role with Executive leadership. That's crazy, there aren't going to be many suitable candidates for either role, and now you're asking the electorate to vote for a single individual to do both, no surprises the results aren't good.

For groups of individuals, it is quite possible https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet_paradox

It's obvious that these cycles can exist when the things referred to have labels like "A, B, C" or "carrot, potato, lettuce", but how often do they occur for political candidates like the ones described above?

I'm willing to buy that IRV is objectively not suitable for picking meals, but that in practice it is suitable for picking presidential candidates -- or that it's always inferior. Seems like an empirical question, not a theoretical one.

The wikipedia page includes a cite of such an empirical analysis: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet_paradox#Empirical_...

Thanks! I'm just going to quote here because the footnote was interesting:

> A summary of 37 individual studies, covering a total of 265 real-world elections, large and small, found 25 instances of a Condorcet paradox, for a total likelihood of 9.4%[14]:325 (and this may be a high estimate, since cases of the paradox are more likely to be reported on than cases without).[13]:47

> 13: ""most election results do not correspond to anything like any of DC, IC, IAC or MC ... empirical studies ... indicate that some of the most common paradoxes are relatively unlikely to be observed in actual elections. ... it is easily concluded that Condorcet’s Paradox should very rarely be observed in any real elections on a small number of candidates with large electorates, as long as voters’ preferences reflect any reasonable degree of group mutual coherence"

I think I have to file this one under "it's complicated, must dig more".

Thankfully lots of smart people have written papers about how that's incorrect. They just use generic terms like "A,B,C"

Yep, it is flawed and, conversely, can be gamed with unintuitive choices. Yet, it is an improvement nonetheless just because fewer people get an outcome they liked less.

i know very little about the various methods of voting and wanted to learn something about it here. while i’m not a republican (i’m independent) it’s very hard to take you seriously when your post reads of anti-trump. if people really want voting reform the reason needs to be something other than stopping trump. otherwise it seems like an attempt to game the system and i’m less likely to vote for reforms. granted it looks like you tried to make it neutral but the last paragraph kinda ruined it

What part of that post is anti-Trump?

How is the post anti-Trump?

Voting tactically will give a false impression of endorsement. If all the third party voters voted for Hillary, it would send a hugely wrong message about what the people actually want.

Dude... In the two cases you list the least objectionable candidate won. What is your problem? Do you not understand how you rank your options?

Could you clarify? I'm not sure what you're objecting to.

> We just need _better_ right now, we need momentum.

Agreed. But we shouldn't be relying on local governments to provide that momentum. I think the people in the best position to legitimize improved voting systems are the pollsters. If they allowed the people they poll to rank or rate all the candidates, in the Democratic primary for example, for whom they have an opinion, then I'm pretty sure the political media (always desperate to fill air-time right?) would start reporting how the candidates would be fairing under different voting systems (that more accurately reflect their inherent popularity). Once these voting systems become familiar in their media, I think the public would be much more ready to accept them at the ballot box.

> it gives voters the option to actually vote for whom they want to vote for instead of who they think will win.

They can already do that now. The idea of voting for the “winner” is just ridiculous. Vote for who you want.

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