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Comment by loughnane | Hacker News Reader

I’m in MA and our question 2 is whether to institute it, though it wouldn’t apply to presidential elections.

I think it’s a great idea. The only specific criticism I’ve seen is that it’s “more complicated” but to me that’s a price worth paying for the improved representation of the public will.

What’s surprised me is that I’ve heard several smart people tell me that they weren’t sure because they had heard that “it can cause unexpected results”, but hadn’t dug deep enough to elaborate.

Has anyone come across strong, detailed arguments against it?

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Australian here. Firstly, ranked choice voting is so much better than first-past-the-post and you should do it.

But since you asked, Australia has seen one problem in recent years. But this is a problem specific to the conditions we have here. Firstly, some background:

1. In the Australian Senate, the single pool of voters from the state are deciding on 12 senators (EDIT: oops, should be 6). This is decided by running the ranked-choice algorithm until 12 remain (EDIT: 6).

2. In the Senate, there are now dozens of parties, so the ballot is hilariously wide.

3. Australia has compulsory preferencing. You MUST rank all parties on the ballot.

4. Because you can't expect the population to rank dozens of candidates at the polling booth, each party can decide for their voters what order to rank the other parties. So how do the parties decide how to rank the other parties? Backroom deals. Who knows what the terms of the deals are. In any case, it's not the voters who decide.

The result is that minor parties like the Sports Party and the Motoring Enthusiasts Party, who each get almost no direct votes, jostled their way up just high enough on the preference lists of enough major parties that they ended up snagging one of the seats.

More details here: https://www.fairvote.org/reforming-the-australian-senate

But as I said, this is made possible by the specific conditions of the electoral system here. It wouldn't be a problem if the election were for a single candidate, or if there were no party-defined preferences (necessitating non-mandatory ranking).

The multi member district approach is preferable to single member districts because it gives a more proportional result. The Australian example demonstrates this in the extreme with very large multi member Senate districts electing different parties and single member House districts which end up electing the usual two parties only, maintaining the duopoly.

Arguably multi member districts of between 3-5 members would be a better sweet spot.

Removing the need to rank all members is also an easy solution. If someone doesn’t want their vote to transfer beyond their first or second (etc) preference why should they be forced to? Where STV is used in NZ for local elections you just rank those you want to rank. The Australian requirement to rank all probably stems from their compulsory voting requirement.

A nitpick: in a normal election, half of the Senate faces election, so 6 per state.

It's only double-dissolution elections where all 12 face election at the same time. In those scenarios minor parties and independents are much more likely to get elected, because the quota is halved.

Voting above the line works basically fine. What happened is that the major parties were too lazy to discuss things with many minor parties, who then went off and arranged their own preference deals.

We have it here in St Paul for city elections. It is definitely more complicated. It sounds easy in practice--just rank your candidates--but how you actually put that down on paper in a machine-readable way is a bit non-obvious. Here's an example of how it actually looks[1]. Now imagine that same thing, for every office on the ballot... It's not too bad if you know what you're doing, but it's easy to see how someone would do it wrong.

To be clear, I'm a huge fan of RCV and think it is massively unethical that we do not have it (or some similar system) for all elections. I consider elections that don't use RCV to be borderline invalid.

[1] https://www.minnpost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/default/fi...

The layout of that ballot isn’t helping. For comparison, I’ve found the RCV ballot in San Francisco pretty intuitive (https://sfelections.sfgov.org/sites/default/files/Images/Dem...)

It would be nice if groups (including but not limited to political parties) could provide recommended ballots, in line with straight ticket voting, but in a ranked choice setting so for instance, the Democrat ballot might recommend the Democrat first and then the Green Party candidate second (or something like that).

I haven't fully absorbed this but Nicky Case built some visualization tools around this and other methods.

https://ncase.me/ballot/ (To Build a Better Ballot)

I came here to post that link. This is by far the best introduction to the topic that I've ever seen, and makes a complex issue with plenty of subtle, non-obvious consequences very accessible.

That's pretty interesting. Thanks for sharing.

IMO I'd probably settle for anything beyond FPTP but it's good to know that there's research behind the options.

> Has anyone come across strong, detailed arguments against it?

There's a simpler way that's much easier for voters to understand: "approval voting." You mark all the candidates you approve of, and the candidate(s) with the most total votes wins.

This feels like voter disenfranchisement to me. For an example, I don't "approve" of any candidates in our current presidential election. I'm simply going to vote for what I think is best, strategically. If I had to say who I "approved of" (and took the words literally) I would vote no-one. I suppose I would end up still voting strategically and ignore the wording, but would all voters?

TBF, first past the post is even worse in this regard (any vote that doesn't support a member of the Democratic-or-Republican Party is effectively entirely ignored), and ranked-choice isn't much better unless it includes a "leave the office empty" option, which also improves approval voting.

That's not so much an argument against approval voting as it is an argument for carefully and clearly wording the ballot. That's true of any voting system.

This basically devolves to FPTP.

Why?

Political parties are incentivised to mislead voters into marking only one candidate.

It can occasionally lead to weird results, the most often cited is the 2009 Burlington Mayor election[1] where more voters preferred Montroll to Kiss, but Kiss was the winner. The counter-argument to this is that plurality voting quite frequently leads to weird results (spoiler effects, etc.), and it seems relatively rare in RCV in practice.

[1] https://ranked.vote/report/us/vt/btv/2009/03/mayor

>where more voters preferred Montroll to Kiss That's only true in the first two rounds. In total more voters preferred Kiss over Montroll.

> That's only true in the first two rounds. In total more voters preferred Kiss over Montroll.

No, in total 4064 voters preferred Montroll to Kiss, while 3476 voters preferred Kiss to Montroll. "Preferred" here means either that they ranked a candidate above the other, or that they ranked a candidate and did not rank the other. (Some ballots ranked neither candidate, and so are not considered)

Edit: I did the math independently, but it lines up with the Wiki page here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Burlington_mayoral_electi...

Ah yes you're right. I wasn't looking at the 3rd most popular candidate in the first round.

That being said the results would have been the same Under STAR voting too which people seem to suggest is better than RCV.

Personally I like strict proportional representation with a Parliamentary system. This way you get what people want and you don't get a leader from a different party than the legislative.

I'm not sure why you think the results would have been the same. I would guess that STAR voting would have Montroll beating Kiss in the runoff.

Condorcet methods > RCV

When talking about argument against RCV, you'd need to come up with a way to create a "spoiler" effect.

While it's trivial to create a spoiler in the current system ( Bush v Gore v Nader ), trying to create a spoiler in RCV is much much harder. Go ahead and try. Then compare that to what would have happened in the current "one vote" system. You can easily see that RCV is clearly an improvement and makes it much harder to have 3rd party candidates spoil the election by stealing votes from the most popular candidate.

I haven't but seems like a threat to the two-party system and those invested in it.

This is the main reason why I like it. The current two parties have a choke hold on the government and a third (or fourth) party has no chance today.

Multi-member electorates are far more likely to produce multi-party systems. Australia's lower house is single-member electorates and remains dominated by major parties. Its upper house is composed of multi-member electorates (one for each state) and consequently, that's where minor parties and independents most frequently show up.

Approval voting is simpler and has a similar end result.

Wouldn't it increase the odds of an extreme and/or single issue candidate winning?

I mean isn't the point of it that a 3rd party candidate would have a more viable shot at winning?

Though I suppose it would also better express the voters' will if those 3rd party candidates still lost.

If they win it's hard to say this will be a result the electorate finds disappointing. The advantage for mainstream candidates is that third parties won't be spoilers, which is currently a relatively common occurrence (and why Maine has ranked-choice voting).

It has the opposite effect that you described.

Consider the 2000 Gore v Bush v Nader. Bush won with a minority of votes. But if they used Ranked Choice, and Nader voters are generally assumed to have the preference order (Nader > Gore > Bush) then Gore would have won.

We can assume that politically, Nader is to the left of Gore, and Bush is to the right.

So in fact, ranked choice voting helps the candidate that is in the political center!

> So in fact, ranked choice voting helps the candidate that is in the political center!

I think you might be right, but the single case you cited doesn't make it so.

Australian politics is dominated by policies aimed at the median voter. That's over a century of cases.

It's more nuanced than this. RCV helps the median in the way you suggest when the median is more popular, by allowing the more extreme voters to avoid splitting the vote. In the example, by allowing Nader voters to fall back to Gore once Nader is eliminated.

But, when the race is closer, it flip flops to have the opposite direction. Say Nader is marginally more popular among liberals. Now Gore is eliminated first, and Nader beats Bush. But hold on, what about the conservatives, who voted Bush > Gore > Nader? They've been screwed, because Gore was eliminated before Bush, so the system never considered their preference for Gore over Nader. And actually, if enough of them had flipped their vote and gone Gore > Bush > Nader, then Bush would be eliminated first, resulting in Gore's victory -- the lesser evil.

If you are liberal and have a hard time identifying this as a problem, consider the reverse: an election in the south, where voting D > R > Tea party results in the tea party candidate winning, but voting R > D > Y elects the mainstream Republican.

So the short summary is that, under RCV, it's only safe for you to put your favorite candidate first if:

A) Your favorite is likely to win,

B) The election is not close -- you know your favorite(s) will be eliminated before your next choice, who is likely to win.

It is still an improvement over FPTP, where you always have to vote for a likely-to-win candidate, but not as good as any form of score voting (e.g. approval, STAR).

If a candidate is everyone's second choice, I don't think you can call them extreme or single issue.

I think it actually increases the chances of a common 2nd choice winning.

Extreme candidates are only going to draw from their limited constituencies, but a choice that's "nice, but not my top choice, but I'd like them if my top choice doesn't get elected" candidate for a lot of people actually does really well in this sort of system.

RCV eliminates the spoiler effect, but I don't think that necessarily means that 3rd party candidates have a higher chance of winning. I don't know.

It is nice to be able to show your support for third party candidates in the way that matters most, by actually voting for them, even if they still have little chance of winning. It's nice to be able to do this without throwing your vote away. You no longer have to choose between strategic voting and showing support for your favorite candidate.

Even with RCV there will still be political parties with varying popularity, and there will still be 2 at the top that are most popular. At least we wont have to have candidates strategically drop out to avoid being a spoiler any more.

It doesn't eliminate the spoiler effect. Here's a simple example of what can happen under RCV:

Pretend Bernie Sanders in 2016 ran under the Green Party after dropping out of the Democratic Primary. RCV claims to eliminate the spoiler effect, so it is "safe" for all the people who want Bernie as their first choice to actually express that. Assume everyone who likes Bernie the best follows that: they put Bernie as their first choice and either Trump or Clinton as their second choice. Presumably more will have Clinton as their second choice than Trump since Clinton is more centrist than Trump who is on the right.

Say the "first choice" votes go as follows:

- 45% top choice Trump

- 35% top choice Bernie

- 20% top choice Hillary

Hillary gets eliminated and the people who put Hillary as their first choice now have their second choices distributed among the remaining candidates. Say that split goes (within the 20%):

- 6% 2nd choice Trump

- 14% 2nd choice Bernie

Trump wins, even if all the Bernie voters had Hillary as their 2nd choice, because their second choices didn't count for anything. So the claim that it was "safe" to express their true preferences and put Bernie as their first choice completely backfired.

summary: among three choices, under Ranked Choice Voting, you only get your votes moved to your 2nd choice in Ranked Choice if you do not come in 2nd place overall. If your candidate comes in 2nd, your votes are worthless.

A system that fixes this and other issues is STAR Voting, and it's what people should be pushing for:

https://www.equal.vote/

https://www.starvoting.us/

I watched the video at your link, but it wasn't very descriptive as to how the votes are actually tallied.

This video does a good job of explaining RCV:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Y3jE3B8HsE

Is there a similar video for STAR?

I can see the problem with RCV now. It doesn't completely eliminate the spoiler effect, just makes it less likely.

I understand how votes are cast in each system and they seem similar. STAR seems like RCV, but you can put multiple candidates in the same rank. I'm not sure how STAR votes are tallied, but wouldn't you be able to implement that same system with RCV? The only difference is same-ranking candidates. Is that the key to STAR's improvement?

EDIT:

Is it just this simple? You sum their score, then instant runoff the top 2?:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NuVSn2rAFVU

I can't tell if it's better or not yet. It still definitely doesn't elect the condorcet winner... which you can see from 3 voters and 12 candidates:

Voter 1: 4 for A, 3 for B, 2 for C, 1 for J

Voter 2: 4 for D, 3 for E, 2 for F, 1 for J

Voter 3: 4 for G, 3 for H, 2 for I, 1 for J

It's more contrived than the example for RCV, so I think it's more resistant to spoiler effect, but it clearly happens here. Essentially, every favored candidate higher than 1 is different and they all have the same candidate for their last favorite candidate. As you can see, A,D,G have the most votes, but in 1-on-1 face-offs, J would win most of the elections. Voter 1 likes J more than D,E,F,G,H, and I. Voter 2 like J more than 6 other candidates as well and same with Voter 3. But in STAR, he gets eliminated.

I believe you could come up with an example where the top two candidates aren't tied, but it would be more complicated.

These voting systems are difficult to measure. I thought RCV was very secure until this HN thread. Hopefully STAR holds up, but I think you'd have to look more into the incentives to fully know if it eliminates the spoiler effect.

> Is it just this simple? You sum their score, then instant runoff the top 2?

Yes. First round counts stars, second round just counts preference.

If I remember correctly, the main purpose of the second round is to discourage strategic voting -- if you give all other candidates the minimum score, to give your favorite the best chance, then you don't get to express a preference in the runoff, in the event that your favorite is not top 2. So it's only worth doing this if you really like your favorite so much that everyone else is the same to you.

> It still definitely doesn't elect the condorcet winner... which you can see from 3 voters and 12 candidates

My understanding (from Wikipedia) is that the condorcet winner is "one candidate who beats every other candidate pairwise". Since often no candidate fulfills this criteria, all condorcet systems that expect to survive contact with the real world need to specify a fallback way to choose a winner. I don't know much about the different strategies they use to do this.

If my understanding is correct, then it seems like there is no condorcet winner in this scenario (rather, a 3-way tie). So I'm not sure how you expect a condorcet system to handle it.

Edit to my previous comment: there are 10 candidates, not 12

I'm new to these terms, but when I look up "condorcet winner" in on wikipedia, it's defined as: "the candidate that wins a majority of the vote in every head-to-head election"

So, I'm assuming "every head-to-head election" would be 10 factorial elections in our case (one for each pair).

Let's look at a couple of these elections and then extrapolate on the rest of them:

J vs A:

Voters 2 and 3 didn't put A on the list, while they did indicate that they liked J, so they would vote for J. Only Voter 1 would vote for A.

D vs A:

Again, two voters didn't put D on the list (1 & 3), but did indicate that they liked J, while only one voter (voter 2) likes D over A.

You can see that, for each candidate besides J, only one voters like them, while all voters at least like J a little. This means that J will win "every head-to-head election" and thus be the condorcet winner.

The only problem with this proof currently is that STAR doesn't explicitly elect a winner, so therefore it is not "choosing the wrong winner" as it isn't choosing any candidate. It is eliminating the condorcet winner though, which is concerning, and I believe a more complicated example would show STAR choosing a non-condorcet winner.

I like STAR more than RCV after reading up on STAR more. I believe that approval voting might be better though, as it completely elimintates the spoiler effect I believe. Though it may have other problems.

Thinking about this more, I believe a condorcet winner can be chosen with RCV (and STAR with some assumptions) just by changing the tallying system. I was able to dicern from my example who the condorcet winner was, so why not do the same in an election? Just simulate all head-to-head elections to find the condorcet winner. I must be missing something.

Here's a scenario where STAR elects a candidate that is not the condorcet winner:

  Voter 1:
    5 for B !
    4 for C
    3 for D
    2 for E
    1 for A !
  Voter 2: 
    5 for G !
    4 for H
    3 for I
    2 for J
    1 for A !
  Voter 3: 
    5 for L
    4 for M
    3 for N
    2 for A !
    1 for B !
  Voter 4: 
    5 for Q
    4 for B !
    3 for S
    2 for T
    1 for A !
  Voter 5: 
    5 for V
    4 for W
    3 for G !
    2 for Y
    1 for A !

I've marked important votes with a '!'. All others are unique votes for candidates with no support.

In this scenario, B and G get the top two scores with 9 and 8. B wins the election with 3 votes (voters 1, 3, and 4) over G's two votes (voters 2 and 5). A is the condorcet winner though as they win every head-to-head contest (with close elections (3-to-2), against B and G). A was eliminated though, as they only scored 6 points.

This was complicated and too much fun to write, so it probably isn't practical in a real world scenario.

Ah! I had a total brain fart and was still scoring the ballots like STAR — "in an election between A and J, A has 4 points and J has 3". -.-

> a condorcet winner can be chosen

A condorcet winner doesn't exist, if there is a circular relationship:

    Voter 1: A > B > C
    Voter 2: B > C > A
    Voter 3: C > A > B

Yes, there are cases when STAR does not elect the condorcet winner. Of course, you could always add condorcet on top, and use STAR as the fallback. But you can do that for any system — basically all of which fail to elect the condorcet winner in some edge case — so it's not a particularly interesting insight. It's more about tradeoffs and what scenarios are most likely.

Note that Approval voting is also a form of score voting — with a range of 0-1. The drawback here is limited expression — I can't say that I love or hate a candidate, and so it can elect a candidate with broad, weak approval and some strong opposition, over a candidate with broad, weak disapproval and some strong support. For example, let's draw the "I approve" line between 2 and 3 stars (approval indicated with +/-):

    Voter 1:
      5 for A (+)
      3 for B (+)
    Voter 2:
      5 for A (+)
      3 for B (+)
    Voter 3:
      3 for B (+)
      2 for A (-)
    Voter 4:
      2 for A (-)
      1 for B (-)
    Voter 5:
      2 for A (-)
      1 for B (-)

A is preferred by 4 out of 5 voters and 16 vs 11 stars, but B wins with 3 approvals, to A's 2.

This is not a terrible failure mode — electing a mediocre, likely moderate, candidate over a decent one — considering it is the worst-case scenario for approval voting. Compare to the worst case scenario for FPTP, where sufficiently many candidates representing the most popular viewpoints split the vote, giving the win to a universally disliked, radical candidate. Of course, in actual elections we (the electorate) avoid this scenario by favorite betrayal, which has its own obvious shortcomings. To fix the Approval voting failure mode, scenario, we just have to be more stringent with our votes (ie, raise our standards).

Note how we were able to use the STAR ballot to derive what the outcome would have been in Approval. If we only had access to the Approval ballot, we couldn't tell that it was electing an inferior candidate. If the goal of the election is to choose the candidate who best reflects the preferences of the electorate, Approval is leaving information about those preferences on the table (edit: as is condorcet!). Aside: I remember reading (maybe on https://rangevoting.net ?) that increasing the range past about 7 sees quickly diminishing returns on this front.

STAR is more expressive, at the price of (mostly) complexity. edit: forgot to add that, while score voting is about the best you can do in terms of preferences among candidates, support of a candidate doesn't capture the full picture, either, since it bundles all the issues you may care about into a single decision (but putting that on the ballot moves us towards a different system of government).

At the end of the day, any form of score voting would be a MASSIVE improvement over the status quo. I would wholeheartedly support any of Approval, STAR, or vanilla score voting (on the same 5-point scale / STAR minus the runoff). I think we should put our efforts behind whichever one is most politically viable. STAR actually has a chance of being implemented (in Eugene, Oregon — see https://www.starvoting.us/campaigns); not sure where Approval stands.

>At the end of the day, any form of score voting would be a MASSIVE improvement over the status quo

Yeah, I think we're both of one mind. I just find the math (or logic) behind these voting methods interesting. And it is somewhat important.

>Yes, there are cases when STAR does not elect the condorcet winner. Of course, you could always add condorcet on top, and use STAR as the fallback. But you can do that for any system — basically all of which fail to elect the condorcet winner in some edge case — so it's not a particularly interesting insight

I think the interesting part of my work in these threads is that the non-condorcet winner example for RCV is much easier to produce than the non-condorcet winner example for STAR. The RCV version only takes 3 candidates, while the STAR version takes ~25 candidates. While this could be a failure of our ability to find scenarios where the non-condorcet winner is elected, I believe it says more about how resistant these systems are to the spoiler effect, which, in essence, is where a non-condorcet winner is elected.

I really like the idea of overlaying STAR and approval voting to show that STAR's expressiveness makes a big difference and I think your example is pretty realistic overall. But I have some issue with it as well. I made an assumption about voters in my example that you didn't make, which is that voters will try to impart their own will as much as possible. This means always using the 5 star vote in the STAR method. I thought this was a sane assumption to make about voters and that only using the 4 slot (never bubbling in 5 star) would be irrational. I think I could make a much less complicated example if I dropped this assumption. Also, I kinda feel uneasy about the cut off, but I'm not sure how to improve it. I just imagine that if a voter had any slight preference of one candidate over another, they would indicate that in the approval method.

>Approval is leaving information about those preferences on the table (edit: as is condorcet!).

How would a condorcet election leave out expressiveness? I think expressiveness is subjective and hard to define. I might've simplified analysis of these schemes by assuming that a condorcet winner system had the ultimate expressiveness (assuming there is a condorcet winner).

>A condorcet winner doesn't exist, if there is a circular relationship:

I meant a condorcet winner will be elected if it exists.

I think the biggest problem with STAR voting is that these stars are kinda hard to reason with. What exactly does it mean if I give a candidate 4 or 5 stars? What affect will that have on the election? RCV might be more complicated, I'm not sure, but it's a lot easier to understand as it's easier to rank your favorite candidates. This really comes down to preference though and it's where I kinda checkout because it can lead to some really tedious arguments. They're all good. It would be great to see STAR in action in Eugene!

Assorted thoughts, with no particular relationship or broader point:

> the STAR version takes ~25 candidates

I was just poking around on the star voting site, and "More than 5 candidates" was one of the criteria for whether there should be a primary or a single election.

> I just imagine that if a voter had any slight preference of one candidate over another, they would indicate that in the approval method.

Well, depending on the number of candidates, this isn't always possible — If there are 4 candidates who you love, like, dislike, and hate respectively, you don't have a way to express the difference between love/like and dislike/hate.

> I made an assumption about voters in my example that you didn't make, which is that voters will try to impart their own will as much as possible. This means always using the 5 star vote in the STAR method.

There's research here that considers both honest and strategic voting: https://electionscience.github.io/vse-sim/VSE/

I don't know if it considers that someone might always vote 5 stars for their favorite candidate, but thinking about that, I agree it is probably likely. It would not make much sense to cast an approval voting ballot and vote against, or for, all candidates. Might as well not vote, at that point :P

> How would a condorcet election leave out expressiveness?

N voters rank A=5, B=1, C=1.

N+1 voters rank A=4, B=5, C=1.

B is the condorcet winner, but I think it's clear that A is the best choice. This a failure mode of STAR voting as well, which elects B, while vanilla score voting (and approval voting) would elect A.

> What exactly does it mean if I give a candidate 4 or 5 stars?

I like to work up from FPTP (if I'm talking to someone who's not into this, I'd just call it "our current system" or "single choice"):

- In our current system, you vote for one person. Count the votes, and whoever has the most, wins.

- In Approval voting, you vote for as many people as you want — anyone you'd be okay with. Count the votes, and whoever has the most, wins.

- STAR voting works like Approval voting, but instead of a yes or no, you rank the candidates with 0-5 stars, like Yelp/Amazon reviews. Add up the stars, and whoever has the most, wins.

At this point, I make a choice about whether to mention the runoff, because it is hard to explain with words alone. If the person I'm talking to is interested, intellectual, or if I have access to a computer where I can show them this picture[1] on https://www.starvoting.us/star, then I'll go ahead and mention the runoff. Otherwise, it causes too much confusion.

[1]: https://d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/unifiedprimary/pages/2...

>like Yelp/Amazon reviews

This seems like the easier parallel to make, but also, I don't like the idea of relating presidential elections to something as inconsequential as product reviews...

>B is the condorcet winner, but I think it's clear that A is the best choice.

Ah, thanks, that makes sense. To rephrase it in my words: a condorcet election could elect someone that a minority HATES rather than a candidate that everyone is indifferent to. This makes a lot more sense why we would have these voting methods like RCV/STAR.

>There's research here that considers both honest and strategic voting: https://electionscience.github.io/vse-sim/VSE/

I'm definitely going to look into this when I find some free time. Thanks.

I've simply enjoyed attacking these voting methods via these small details, but I think it's really important as well. We are putting into place a system that will be put to extreme tests and will need a ton of integrity. Millions of people will be affected by it and will spend time coming up with strategies to maximize their votes (as they do currently by not voting for 3rd party candidates). Campaign strategists will try to use the system to their advantage (as they do currently by campaigning in battleground states). And malicious outsiders will try to use misinformation to attack the system as well. I want to make sure it's done right.

I think I was a little angry in my last comment where I said these conversations were tedious. I'm just really hesitant to choose a method like STAR, or even RCV as they're so different from our current system. I want a safe removal of the spoiler effect, which I think approval voting might do best, but I'm not sure, and it may be best for America if we make a big leap to a more complex system as this could help us avoid problems in the future, rather than having to transition again. Definitely going to look into this more though.

This post seems logical and takes time to explain the thinking with examples. I don't think it should be down voted (it is grey right now).

I have learned about STAR recently here https://www.wired.com/story/dana-debeauvoir-texas-county-cle... (A Texas County Clerk’s Bold Crusade to Transform How We Vote) and it is a legit system and has real promise.

Since you replied to me: I agree, STAR would be better. I also like approval voting for its simplicity. I believe both are better than RCV, but for whatever reason RCV seems to have the hype and I'm not sure whether it's better to try to run with that hype or redirect it towards STAR or approval voting.

The second vote was still counted, though. It just happened that Bernie had 49% (35 + 14) of the vote vs Trump's 51% (45 + 6) in this example? Just because I don't like the hypothetical results of the vote doesn't mean it is wrong.

The point I was trying to make is that the system doesn't fully reflect peoples' full set of preferences, it chooses some voters' and takes their second choices into account while ignoring others.

Can you help me validate this assumption I've formed based on what you said: The only time this seems to be impactful is when you rank two candidates with the same preference [0].

It seems that otherwise this just creates a roughly equivalent ranking structure. I think that's interesting in a system with many candidates or very similar ideologies, but in this example I would probably expect the same result.

Edit:

[0] After reading more, I now realize that the initial selection is also the sum of preference votes, so someone could rank Bernie 5, Hillary 4, Trump 0 which could create changes in who the run-off candidates are.

Surely in your example STAR Voting would have had the same result?

Hilary (and all other lesser candidates of which there are none) get eliminated leaving Bernie and Trump. Then preferences of Hilary voters for those two are calculated (Preference for a runoff between Bernie and Trump are already determined) so you end up with the exact same result.

You're assuming the scores were chosen from e.g. 1,2,3, and people gave their first preference 1, second preference 2, and third preference 3. So yes, if you force everyone to rank the candidates like in Ranked Choice Voting, in this case you get the same outcome as Ranked Choice Voting. STAR doesn't restrict people to strict ranking though.

The only situation where what you say is true is if enough of Hilary's supporters give both Bernie and Trump the same preference number. This is reflected in RCV by not putting a second and third choice. Remember that only the first round takes into account scoring. Runoff only uses relative preference which works out the same as RCV.

Also it took me way too long to understand this which makes this seem to me to be a bad system. I've never struggled to understand how a voting system works before and I've used, STV, MMPR, PR, RCV, and FPT.

I honestly think proportional representation in a Parliamentary system is way better than any of these complicated system. It's simple to understand, I vote for who I want, and it doesn't end up with the stupid situation of an Executive who can't command support of a Legislative.

> Wouldn't it increase the odds of an extreme and/or single issue candidate winning?

You act like this isn't happening already.

> The only specific criticism I’ve seen is that it’s “more complicated” but to me that’s a price worth paying for the improved representation of the public will.

The main problem with IRV (RCV is a horrible name for it, since its one of a large class of ranked-choice methods) is that, for the complexity of a ranked-choice method, it gives pretty much the least benefit of any single-winner system.

(The multimember district version of IRV, STV, is a fairly reasonable proportional system, on the other hand.)

No there are no real valid arguments against ranked choice voting. Ranked choice has the benefit that the there is no point in "gaming" your vote, so your optimal strategy and nash-equilibrium is to provide your real candidate preference order.

The key benefit of ranked choice is that voters will tell you what they actually want (even if their favorite candidate has no chance to win).

Ranked choice has the benefit that the there is no point in "gaming" your vote, so your optimal strategy and nash-equilibrium is to provide your real candidate preference order.

This is very demonstrably false, both theoretically and in the real world. Ranked choice voting only solves the spoiler effect in cases where the spoiler candidate has a small enough amount of support as to be rendered non-competitive, but if you have more than two candidates who are competitive then the spoiler effect comes back in full force. This is not just theoretical; it happened in the Burlington 2009 mayoral election, and fallout from that election led to ranked choice being repealed shortly afterward.

So, not only does ranked choice still incentive strategic voting sometimes, but it does it in a way that is harder to see and understand. There are other non-ranked voting systems like approval voting and score voting that are much simpler and better in this respect.

Ranked choice also has other drawbacks - like violating the monotonicity criterion - as well as more practical issues like making it impossible to distribute the counting process across precincts.

No there are no real valid arguments against ranked choice voting.

This is also quite incorrect. Our current system of first-past-the-post is bad, yeah, but there are plenty of valid arguments against ranked choice and - in my opinion - there are much better systems we could choose instead.

Incorrect.

From the article you discussed on wiki (Burlington 2009 mayoral race)

> In IRV, there is no tactical incentive for a voter withhold or falsify their second choice.

We can get into the weeds about mathematical details like Monotonicity and Condorcet, but the truth of the matter is that nearly all the time (much more often than First-past-the-post) these measures end up being identical anyway.

I don't think anyone would argue that first-past-the-post would have produced a better candidate in this election than RCV did.

The statement "there is no tactical incentive for a voter withhold or falsify their second choice" says nothing about a voter falsifying their first choice, which is exactly where IRV broke down in that election. If Republican voters who preferred the Democrat to the Progressive candidate had falsely specified the Democrat as their first choice, they could have changed the election outcome in favor of a candidate they would have preferred over the winner that IRV elected.

I don't think anyone would argue that first-past-the-post would have produced a better candidate in this election than RCV did.

I don't think so either, but I also think that's a straw man argument. The Condorcet winner would've been the Democrat. IRV elected the Progressive, but according to that same Wiki page FPTP would have likely elected the Republican, whereas the Democrat would have likely won under systems like approval or score.

IIRC, the Burlington election as evidence of a failure isn’t universally agreed. Some point to it as an example of it working.

It's a tricky example because the Republican was effectively the third party candidate in that election. But once you realize that, the spoiler effect is very easy to see; the Republicans would have mostly preferred the more centrist Democrat candidate over the progressive Independent candidate, and if they had strategically ranked the Democrat first on their ballots the Democrat would have won.

By voting honestly and putting their favorite candidate first, they screwed themselves over and threw away their vote, and were understandably bitter about it given that ranked choice is frequently claimed to solve this exact problem.

It's also maddening that a single mayoral election is apparently the slam dunk counterexample.

Meanwhile, Australia has been voting this way for a century. And over that time period, I think there have been fewer ugly paradoxes than in the US.

I agree that Burlington is overweighted, but I also wonder: we know about Burlington because in the US, jurisdictions typically make data available down to the level of how many times each rank-order was voted. Does Australia do this? Or is it possible that Burlington-like paradoxes have happened that we just don't know about, because we've only seen the tabulation-level data?

Australia also uses proportional representation (STV) which is quite different from the winner-takes-all instant-runoff elections that are being referred to as "ranked choice" in the US.

Only in the Senate. The House of Representatives is single-member electorates.

Ah thanks, my mistake - I didn't realize that.

The advantage that RCV -- at least exhaustive RCV -- has over other systems is that by forcing a ranking, you prevent a collapse back to FPTP.

In approval voting, score voting, range voting etc, parties can and will push their voters to effectively "just vote 1".

This isn't a hypothetical -- it happened in Queensland, Australia when they switched from exhaustive preferential to optional preferential voting (you could rank any number of candidates, rather than having to rank all candidates). The Labor party campaigned on "Just Vote 1" and destroyed the Liberal-National Coalition at that election. Those parties in Queensland then had to merge to offset the effect on their primary votes. In turn that caused the separate Liberal and National party caucuses in the Federal parliament to merge into a single caucus (otherwise there'd be three party rooms). That in turn greatly strengthened the power of hard-right Liberals in the selection of Prime Minister. It's been fairly fucked ever since.

There are better voting systems on paper, but typically those theories don't account for political parties actively misleading voters about how the voting system works.

This is unfortunately exactly what Maine is doing, as per their example ballot linked above.

That is disappointing.

As others are saying, there are certainly drawbacks to IRV. I think there are theoretical results showing that all of the mainstream proposals for voting systems are susceptible to strategic voting aka “gaming” your vote, among other issues.

What they aren’t acknowledging is that the situation is even worse with our current system.

My personal preference is approval voting, but I’m down with all sorts of systems that are better than the status quo. I expect that anything that lets you express more of your preferences will increase buy in and participation. Increased participation with preferences closer to people’s true preferences goes hand in hand with increased legitimacy.

We shouldn’t let perfect be the enemy of better.

We shouldn’t let perfect be the enemy of better.

I mostly agree with you, but I do fear that some of the hidden flaws of ranked choice could end up poisoning the well for better systems like approval voting. After 2009, Burlington switched back to FPTP, and as far as I know there have been no serious efforts to try any other alternative systems there.

If massive money and effort is put into adopting RCV while people falsely claim that it solves the spoiler effect, then once the problems with RCV start to become more widely understood, people are going to be a lot more skeptical next time around when advocates of approval/score/STAR voting come around and say "okay but this time it really fixes it!"

This is completely false. Pretty much all voting systems are susceptible to tactical voting, e.g. gaming the vote. This was formally proven via the Gibbard–Satterthwaite theorem[1], which showed that the only way for a voting system to be ungameable was to either have a dictator (a certain special voter who always picks the winner), or to pre-constrain the output space to only two alternatives.

This critique certainly applies to Instant-Runoff Voting, the algorithm in question here. It is known that IRV often incentivizes voters to not rank their favorites first [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibbard%E2%80%93Satterthwaite_... [2] https://electionscience.org/library/tactical-voting-basics/

Not only is Gibbard–Satterthwaite only applicable to ordinal voting systems, it is only applicable to single winner electoral systems. A popular example of a multi-winner system is STV[1], which I suppose could be used to elect a President and Vice President, similar to the situation in the US before the Twelfth Amendment was ratified.[2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_transferable_vote

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twelfth_Amendment_to_the_Unite...

Gibbard–Satterthwaite only covers ordinal voting systems: it doesn't apply to, for example, approval voting.

Yes, you are right. I should have written more carefully. I am a huge fan of approval voting. Anyone reading this -- you should look more closely at approval voting, which surpasses ranked choice voting in many ways.

https://electionscience.org/library/approval-voting-versus-i...

This is incorrect: people do better voting strategically even with ranked choice. To take an example, 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 ranked choice 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. Staying home and not voting would similarly have helped them.

I said there is no real argument against it.

I'll go ahead and make the unfounded claim that situations like the one above are mathematical curiosities, and nothing more. True voter preferences do not align in a circle.

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