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Comment by FreelanceX | Hacker News Reader

There is a much simpler system with a proven track record, used in many democratic countries: two-rounds voting [1]. Just vote a second time for one of the two top candidates if no candidate reached 50% of more.

I'm convinced this would deeply, radically change the US.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-round_system

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We have run offs in Texas but get extremely low turnout partially because they are not advertised, either by the government or the candidates. I can't imagine its cheap either, for the government, candidates, or the voters.

This is why I prefer calling the version of Ranked Choice Voting I seeing being pushed as Instant Runoff because it makes how it works and the advantages clear.

These do exist in some states, under the name runoff elections. They cost campaigns and taxpayers a lot of money, and election turnout in the US is already bad enough without having people return to the polls a second time.

https://www.thirdway.org/memo/high-costs-and-low-turnout-for...

It's not that different, two rounds is approximately equivalent to ranked-choice with one round of preference distributions. With the added uncertainty of different voting attendance, and people changing their preference between rounds.

That's the system we have in Brazil and we don't have a less polarized political situation currently, neither a stronger democracy, I believe.

Hey, I recently wrote a post about an idea on this: https://blog.vslira.net/2022/05/negative-voting.html?m=1

What do you think? Basically second round stays the same, but on 1st you can either vote for or against a candidate, “against” votes simply deduct from their “for” votes

My first reaction is a sum of “stick with the devil you know” and “the simpler the better”. So I would be against changing.

I like what we have in Brazil (for executive elections), and I think it is better than what they have in the US. But I don’t think changing the US system to two rounds will make things better there. That might sound contradictory, but I think sticking with a voting system has benefits for democracy, even if, in isolation, that system is subpar. Predictability is voting system is very desirable in a democracy, I think. Same with trust.

I think we have to improve democracy by other means, not a simple “fix” through a voting system. I don’t know what those other means are. It is a complex system. But I am skeptical that changing voting systems is part of the solution.

I agree, there’s no single tweak that would “fix democracy”. I’m just assuming that something like this could improve voting expressiveness in exchange for just a little bit of complexity.

This is actually a thing for US Congress races in a number of states, including Georgia and California, I believe. The issue that comes up is that it consistently rewards a stronger party - for instance, if the population is, let's say, 30% hardcore party A, 30% hardcore party B, and 40% who could go either way, what often happens is if party A runs 2 candidates only, and party B runs 5 with a diversity of ideas, party B could end up winning 60% of the vote overall, but at 12% per candidate, and party A could win just 40% spread across 2 candidates, but have both of their candidates easily make the runoff.

It may be better in a world where there's 5+ real parties who will never back down from each other, but even in that case, it seems like it rewards parliamentary-style coalitions where if you're polling at 5% or so, you just tell your supporters to support a stronger candidate you mostly agree with so that you don't get locked out of the final vote entirely, and you're back to essentially either a two-party system, or a two-party system with minor parties that mostly play spoiler to the main party by pulling off votes.

One of the biggest issues I tend to find with a lot of voting proposals is that they seem to assume that the parties and candidates will act only to serve their party/candidate directly, and not strategically run/withdraw in order to help/hurt other candidates, or collude with each other to game the system.

The American South already has two-round voting.

We can barely get people to vote once. Why do you think we could get people to vote twice?

That is essentially the primary and election we already have

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