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Comment by dragonwriter | Hacker News Reader

Single-winner ranked ballots methods are reform theater; they aren't particularly “more fair and inclusive” that FPTP in general, and the particular method called “Ranked Choice Voting”, “Alternative Vote”, or “Instant Runoff Voting” in particular is only minimally different in structure and effect from majority-runoff.

Established elites make a show of opposing IRV/AV/RCV because centering the debate on that focusses attention there rather than on real reform, which requires systems that produce proportional results.

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This statement seems to be in conflict with everything I've read about ranked choice voting. If I can put my preferred independent candidate as rank 1 and a safe choice at rank 2 then this is objectively better than just voting for the safe choice out of fear of stealing votes away and giving it to the opposition.

What systems would you prefer?

...That just degenerates to propping up the duopoly! That won't change anything.

I'm straight up against any methodology that blunts the sting of no confidence in the two big parties. They should absolutely have to react to shifting priorities. That means, no safety net. Otherwise, you're handing them the same election advantage they've always enjoyed and just handwaving the entire issue.

It sounds more to me like we need to start tracking negative votes (not this person) as well. It's bollocks that no confidence is treated as "I have no opinion".

Right, what is considered “real reform” here?

Just wanted to chime in that all ranked voting systems can be gamed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theore...

This is an oversimplified conclusion.

FTA:

> The practical consequences of the theorem are debatable: Arrow has said "Most systems are not going to work badly all of the time. All I proved is that all can work badly at times

Followed by:

> Although Arrow's theorem is a mathematical result, it is often expressed in a non-mathematical way with a statement such as no voting method is fair, every ranked voting method is flawed, or the only voting method that isn't flawed is a dictatorship.[11] These statements are simplifications of Arrow's result which are not universally considered to be true.

Bottom line - this seems interesting, but is hardly as simple as "all ranked voting systems can be gamed".

> Bottom line - this seems interesting, but is hardly as simple as "all ranked voting systems can be gamed"

It is almost that simple. Every deviation from the unattainable ideal in Arrow’s theorem corresponds to one or more ways that the system:

(1) can be gamed, or

(2) is insensitive to voter preferences, or

(3) changes outcomes in the opposite direction of changes in expressed voter preferences.

(And usually several from multiple categories.)

There are whole catalogs of these and enumerations of which ones apply to each voting system.

Good thing approval voting isn't a ranked voting system!

Approval voting is an unforced preference (i.e., allows ties) ranked voting system with only two ranks just like bullet voting systems (plurality and majority-runoff), differing in that it allows ties in both ranks and not just the second.

Arrow’s Theorem applies to unforced preference ranked voting systems (with or without limited numbers of preference ranks) the same way as it does to forced preference ranked systems.

Perhaps surprisingly, no, approval voting is actually a score voting system, which provides more information than a strict preference ranking.

This isn't necessarily intuitive, and our immediate impulse might be to object that 2^n-1 is less than n!, but as a quick informal illustration, note that the voting system where each voter assigns each candidate a score in [0,1] and selects the candidate who earns the highest sum from all voters fairly straightforwardly violates Arrow's theorem. Now, consider an approval vote where each voter rolls a single random number in the range [0,1) and vote for each candidate whose score exceeds their random number, and we get asymptotically the same result (but with some error bars). It turns out that scoring, even on a 2-point scale, is just a better primitive operation than ranking!

(Also, it helps that 2^n-1>n! for n=2,3, which covers a surprisingly large proportion of interesting elections.)

Nailed it.

Real reform is not palatable. The correct reforms include rotating appointments on the Supreme Court, abolishing the Senate, re-apportioning the House, and changing the presidency to have significantly less power. But something like this is not achievable with the current ossification of our dysfunctional political systems in the US.

Given that, I still believe ranked choice voting is the first baby step toward more representative politics.

Yes, we also need multi-member, proportional legislative districts. https://www.fairvote.org/prcv.

Single member districts are a disgusting thing for a society that claims to be a representative democracy. As a very simple example, rural liberals and urban conservatives effectively never get represented in our government, and that's still within the context of the false dichotomy of left/right.

But single winner ranked choice voting is still important for elected positions that necessarily must be one person, like executive seats.

> But single winner ranked choice voting is still important for elected positions that necessarily must be one person, like executive seats.

Executives are neither necessarily single seat nor necessarily directly elected. When indirectly elected, the electoral body that is itself directly elected need not be elected with single-winner methods. The US, in fact, uses multiwinner elections for electing the electoral college now, though mostly using the specific method (multiseat plurality winner-take-all) whose manifest unfairness and utility in excluding minority voices is the specific reason for the existing statutory ban on multiwinner elections for Congress.

We don't need anything so complicated, we just need to return to the house and electoral college being periodically resized according to census data rather than fixed at 435. Those reversions would solve most electoral problems without even needing to touch hard issues of engineering fair an trustworthy alternative voting systems.

> Those reversions would solve most electoral problems

No, they wouldn't, as the problems (including duopoly) predate the changes you would reverse.

The population, level of urbanization, and amount of information were all far less back then. It would be a lot harder for two parties to completely control an 8000 member congress or gerrymander that many districts.

> The population, level of urbanization, and amount of information were all far less back then.

To the extent those are relevant, they magnify the problems now (with or without more districts), rather than mitigating them.

> It would be a lot harder for two parties to completely control an 8000 member congress or gerrymander that many districts.

More districts make gerrymandering easier, not harder. As does more information.

Sure, there'd be more independents (absolute count), and at least one more often, in an 8000 member House, but proportionate to the total, there'd probably be fewer, on average, than there have been with the 435 member House.

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