Alaska Ranked Choice Voting Cast Vote Record [JSON at the Bottom]
elections.alaska.gov
elections.alaska.gov
BTW, I've always found the descriptions of Condorcet to be self-defeating, even on Wikipedia (and my edits have been rejected). I've always considered there to be a conceptual separation between the Condorcet method itself, and the various "tie-breaking" schemes that are bolted on if the Smith Set has more than one member. But in the voting literature, they're always communicated together. The reason this causes confusion is that then a "Condorcet Method" can then be described as having this flaw or that, when those flaws almost entirely come up only in those tie-breaking scenarios. So then Condorcet itself gets painted with the same broad brush. But an election with a single-member Smith Set is free of all of those flaws that only apply to the tie-breaker methods.
And personally, I don't see why we should be so scared of a multi-member Smith Set. The presence of which is an accurate indicator that the voting population is actually unable to come to a clear decision - that is valuable information! In a Democratic election, I'd honestly be more interested in having a runoff election at that point, rather than trying to bolt on some sort of flawed tie-breaking vote-counting mechanism.
(I really like this framing BTW, separating the concepts of the Smith set and the tie-breaking process).
Why combine two systems to make a more complicated system when you could just use Condorcet directly?
So i think the tiebreaking methods are reasonable. It is probably also worth noting that for some Condorcet methods, attempting to vote dishonestly to exploit some flaw in the system is has great risk of backfiring. The impact that the dishonest vote will have when a Condorcet winner does exist can differ from the impact it will have if a tiebreaking method come into play, such that it is only safe to try to strategically vote like that if you already know there will be no Condorcet winner. (Which would be very hard to know. Polling can't even reliably predict who will win with single vote elections. Existing polling methodology would be way too under-powered to detect if there will be a Condorcet winner or not).
* People who previously didn't vote learn about the situation and participate.
* People who previously didn't indicate a preference between two candidates think more and vote accordingly.
This example does not have enough information to have a optimal VSE solution or even a good guestimate. We don't know the distance between A and B nor percentages of A that are okay with B and vise versa. So essentially we don't know what our latent landscape even looks like. But if you can add to that and figure it out then we can actually capture information about population bullying.
The issue with voting is that it appears simple but is rather complex. But complex problems also require nuanced solutions (not necessarily complex, but can't be solved by first order terms).
If you are (hypothetically) a binary thinker and think A and B are far apart and absolutely prefer A and hate B. And if I am (hypothetically) a nuanced thinker and can see plusses and minuses to both, and after careful consideration I choose B. Then should your vote matter more than mine?
This is my entire point?
> Then should your vote matter more than mine?
No.
But just because you view them differently doesn't mean there isn't a latent landscape that can't capture both these viewpoints within higher dimensions.
And the HN discussion surrounding it:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30847133
[Unfortunately, while you can test ranked choice voting systems against each other directly using examples, you can't really test them against cardinal voting systems because the ballots aren't the same. At best, you use statistical models to compare them.]
Exhaustive or even partially exhaustive RCV makes that tactic impossible.
That manipulation is also an easy to overcome strategy as you can bullet vote your favorite candidates. There actually isn't any real strategic advantage to not voting your preference (albeit minor ones). There's no concept of tossing your vote away by scoring your preferred candidate high (the most common strategy is to weight your safe candidate the same or just below, but above your actual preference). Yes, you have to teach people how to vote under this new system but that's no difference than teaching them to rank candidates (instead we teach to give them a ?/5 star review. A concept people are highly familiar with).
Of course parties will try to convince people to do that. The question is whether voters will listen.
It's extremely easy to prove to yourself that, if my ranked preferences are O'TruePreference is better than Doe who is better than McBadGuy, then this ballot:
Evil McBadGuy: 0
John Doe 10.0
Andre O'TruePreference 10.0
Evil McBadGuy: 0
John Doe 10.0
Andre O'TruePreference 0
I know this happened with Approval Voting, but that doesn't necessarily mean it'll happen to Score Voting. It's likely that voters just didn't read the directions, and thought that if they voted for more than one candidate their ballot would be discarded.
To be clear, bullet voting in Score is equivalent to Approval Voting. AV still has a lot of advantages over Runoff Voting.
> It's likely that voters just didn't read the directions
This is actually a point (that I don't bring up much because it is minor) that I prefer cardinal over ranked. It is much easier to mess up a ranked ballot than cardinal. Give the same score to multiple candidates? No problem. In a ranked ballot you have issues and no good resolutions (toss ballot, flip a coin on preference and then reorder? Both of which can be called voter manipulation, despite them not really being). These issues arise more as the system scales too.
The big killer to me (besides the information embedding) is the tallying (backend that voters don't see). Cardinal systems are just an argmax reduce-sum (trivially parallelizable). Trivial to calculate and do statistical samples/verification on. This is a lot harder with run-off systems. The multi-elections required actually takes a lot of man power. Just think about how recounts like Arizona would happen under Cardinal vs Ordinal. This is something people really have to consider when accounting for voting systems. There is a front end and back end but most people argue front end + a few cherry picked strategies.
The fact that it's in a modern data-friendly format, is super impressive. I would have been happy if they'd even managed to put it in a CSV without headers
Of the largest 20 cities in the US, all but one have open data sites where you can programmatically pull down datasets. I feel like this is more becoming the norm rather than the exception. Maybe it's just smaller municipalities that don't have open data sites?
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1TtnlrfCMs9C4exLsKhzp...
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1vpSCiNFolwtG765Lxe92...
I guess repetitive JSON compresses REALLY well.
I tried playing with it in SQLite but that CvrExport JSON needs some extra work to break it up into separate tables for it to be readable.
Here's a demo that shows the other tables but ignores the 300MB+ one: https://lite.datasette.io/?sql=https://gist.githubuserconten...
This is a different technique from entropy coding, which gets its improvements by allocating fewer bits for more frequent symbols. But most modern compresses uses a mix, for example gzip uses DEFLATE, which is a combination of literal backrefs and dynamic and static Huffman tables.
and Yes, JSON is usually absurdly compressible.
Not only is it so small, but it's easy to improve while remaining compatible with zip:
Infozip -9 -> 5693Kb
zopfli -> 5437Kb
Some point to Alaska's special election as a failure of some sort. It isn't. A large number of Republican voters simply put only one choice. Had they ranked Palin as #2 (assuming this was their preference) she would've won by a significant margin.
Now whether they didn't understand the system or they really didn't want Palin as a second choice we can only speculate about.
The rules for any election should be strictly interpreted. Trying to divine the intent of the voter (as happened in Florida in 2000) is a subjective and really dangerous standard to use. If something could be better or clearer you fix it in the next election. You don't try and ret con it into the election just run.
The first past the post ("FPTP") system used in the majority of American elections is just horrible. Spoiler candidates are a real problem (eg [1]).
The only issue with the Alaska system is one of education. That can take some time but it'll be worth it. I'm glad Alaska is being transparent about the results by publishing this.
We certainly don't need to make the voting system even more complicated as some other commenters suggest.
[1]: https://www.tampabay.com/news/florida-politics/2022/08/25/fp...
Yep, they just got educated. Next election will IMHO see more 2nd choices!
My concern with sophisticated voting schemes like Condorcet or RCV is that these systems may be too complicated for some unsophisticated voters to understand, and therefore risk the perception of unfairness. FPTP is less fair, but is easy to understand and is therefore easy to perceive as fair. FPTP is simple enough that any common fool can hold a mock election with his friends and trivially calculate the winner. Send that same man to the Condorcet method wikipedia page and I think his eyes will glaze over before he figures it out.
It may be the case that my concern is misplaced, so I support testing these voting methods in low-stake elections, such as this one in Alaska. But I recommend caution when applying these methods to high-stake elections. Peaceful transitions of power is more important than anything else, and anything that might risk that peace should be considered with caution.
And yet, we add a single level of quantization (the electoral college) and half the country loses their mind whenever the "majority vote" candidate doesn't win. Maybe something a little more complicated would be good ;-)
But you’re correct that even that modest complexity causes people to have a fit every four years when it doesn’t reflect their intuitive understanding of how elections should work.
EDIT: Grammar: my parents are 80 years old, I don't have 80 parents.
It's the devil they know. An obvious broken system that nevertheless has a track record of delivering the priority goal, peaceful transitions of power, is safer than the unknown.
I know how this will come off but it's true -- one of the oddities of the US political system is that despite it being bitterly polarized the majority is largely unaffected by politics in any meaningful way. This isn't to say that politics couldn't have big effects on people's lives but despite the marketing both parties are generally interested in protecting the status quo, not disrupting existing power structures, and making small incremental changes. Again I really hate to distill it down to this but if you're white, above the poverty line, and put as much distance as possible between you and the justice system, to first order it doesn't really matter who you vote for -- your interests are protected. The biggest divides between the two parties are policies that affect vulnerable populations.
This last election demonstrated that nobody knows how it works - because of the complexity and unwritten "norms", and therefore we end up leaving up to judges to decide the election.
I've referred to Trump as the ultimate pen-tester of the US political system.
Lots of places have been using RCV for some time. It is not hard to understand.
These concerns about the importance of the "perception of fairness" are never brought up when it comes to issues like voter ID laws, elections being on work days, election holidays, publicly funded elections, etc.
I know you're being downvoted, but I agree with your assessment re: concern trolling. The position seems disingenuous.
The broader concerns is legitimacy. It is more important that there be a general acceptance of the election results, and peaceful transition of power, than the results themselves be optimally fair. That said, there is no reason we can't have both and plenty of jurisdictions do have fairer systems without collapsing in civil war.
But we should lose sight of fact that gaining buy-in from the populace at large is one of the factors required for successful democratic-governance.
>These concerns about the importance of the "perception of fairness" are never brought up when it comes to issues like voter ID laws, elections being on work days, election holidays, publicly funded elections, etc.
Lots of places on Earth have solved all these issues: an easily available ID, election holiday or at least early voting, public funding, automatic voter registration, etc.
To those places, IRV is arguably not a very good idea, and people who live there might note this even on HN. You shouldn't reduce everything to US partisan politics.
But it's not as easy to understand as "count the pottery shards, biggest number wins." To ensure peaceful transitions of power, an election should be perceived as fair by the greatest number of people possible, not merely to those who are comfortable with math.
> voter ID laws
Laws which disenfranchise part of the population threaten the perception of fairness, threatening the peaceful transition of power. I therefore oppose voter ID laws at least until every single citizen can be given a free national voter ID. I hope this affirmation of Democratic values assuages your 'concern trolling' concerns.
Then why do so many of its proponents misunderstand it?
We have voted with RCV for a century and in Australia it is compulsory to vote, so the below-average intelligence voter is made to show up as well as the above-average voter.
It works because it's piss easy to understand "number them in the order you like them". Millions of people vote this way for multiple levels of government. The USA is not a special place with a different kind of human and the Australian experience can be generalised to the American case. RCV works and will continue to work just fine.
Australian politics is, relative to US politics, a hugging contest with the parties all singing kumbaya with perfect choristry.
As for the two-party system, it's not perpetuated by how you count the vote. It's perpetuated by the economics of capturing single-member electorates. Australia has multi-member electorates for its Senate and most state upper houses and, unsurprisingly, that's where minor parties largely succeed in gaining representation.
One of the simplest tweaks to the American system might be consolidating e.g. Senate elections so that the states elect two Senators at one time. It's simpler than combining House districts in that it's merely a scheduling change.
This was done intentionally to make it difficult for the Senate membership to be swept in a landslide at the same time as the House, which can happen to the House every two years.
Compared to the House, the Senate was intended to be a more deliberative body, changing its composition on a longer timescale, and less responsive to short-term political opinion. Whether or not that works as intended is certainly debatable, but every time we change the Senate to work more like the House it raises the question of why we should bother having a bicameral legislature if both chambers are increasingly similar.
The Constitution doesn't, to my knowledge, require both Senators from a single state be in separate classes [1]. You'd still have a staggered Senate with consolidated elections. A third of the states would simply vote their Senators together every two years.
[1] https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/article-1/section-3...
I wish this system was getting as much attention as Ranked Choice.
Under Approval Voting, it is always safe to vote honestly for your true favorite, which increases the visibility (and perception of electability) of third parties.
Under IRV, it is not safe to put your honest favorite as your primary choice, or you risk creating a spoiler effect that helps the greater of two evils win.
Say what you want about Approval voting, but this is also one of the areas where Approval voting is clearly better. It's very easy to understand, and much simpler to tabulate the results when it's still just "the person with the most votes wins".
Again: Americans are not a different sort of human from Australians.
The problem is that losers are muddying the waters, not that the water was undrinkable by American minds.
I'm not talking about biology, I'm talking about culture. I thought I made that clear, and I'm sure you understand the distinction.
In the contemporary US, the strongest opposition to RCV comes from the political right.
In Australia, RCV (or "preferential voting" as we call it) was originally introduced because – at the time – it was viewed as politically beneficial to the right. The 1918 Swan by-election (what Americans would call a "special election") was won by the centre-left Labor Party, despite only receiving a minority of the vote – because the centre-right had split into two separate parties, one with a predominantly urban base (businesspeople, professionals, etc), the other with a predominantly rural base (farmers). The conservative government introduced RCV to reduce the political advantage the centre-left had obtained through greater unity.
So, maybe what RCV really needs to succeed in the US, is a split in the GOP (Trumpists vs anti-Trumpists?), so it becomes in the political self-interest of conservatives to support it.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_and_use_of_instant-r...
While I agree that FPTP is much simpler in concept, it is massively less representative in the context of the US system. An informed electorate is an engage electorate, and it's political processes should be concerned with lifting up it's lowest common denominator, not dragging down it's highest.
Condorcet itself is simple: Look at each pair of candidates and see who was ranked higher by a majority of voters. Elect the candidate who beats all the others.
I was surprised at how negative a reaction some voters had to the scheme. Digging in a bit, their perception of unfairness seemed to come from the fact that some people's votes would be counted more than others'. That is, if you voted for a series of fringe candidates in increasing likelihood of electability, your vote might be counted several times, while someone who voted for the mainstream candidate would just get their vote counted once.
This kind of folk analysis of ranked-choice voting makes some people very mistrustful of the method and is hard to counter. Since elections are a social phenomenon, and not just a mathematical exercise, and given our current atmosphere of mistrust and attacks against the electoral process itself, I think the interest in having a crystal clear criterion for winning ("most votes wins") outweighs the many theoretical advantages of ranked choice.
It's hard to square that knowing these voters are in small states whose votes already count more than others, but I'll bet they are okay with that. It's also not really unfair since each voter is free to adopt the strategy the voter is claiming is unfair.
I wonder how representative the voters you talked to are of the population.
Did you catch this story on Croydon, NH about the school budget nearly getting cut in half by a handful of voters who were not all representative of the majority?
https://www.thisamericanlife.org/776/i-work-better-on-deadli...
The problem is that by ranking candidates the distance between two candidates is identically spaced. Instead by scoring candidates you are better able to express this distance (even in simple systems like approval). This quickly resolves issues like the favorite betrayer (strong spoiler effect) and resolves some strategy issues (no system is immune to all strategies fwiw). Plus you get a much easier to calculate election (`argmax([candidate.sum() for candidate in candidate_list])`, which also has nice sampling properties for winner estimates and verification). Aren't these the systems we want to be using? I mean could you imagine the Arizona recount with an ordinal system? Or RP or Schultz? What a disaster that would have been.
We have no cultural context for this distance. Until that can be harmonized, such systems are DOA.
Voters don't know which candidates they prefer? If you really believe this (in the strong sense, not the weak sense) then I think you have to throw out voting all together. Maybe I'm missing your point?
> voters may still want to express the ordinal preference.
This is a feature, not a bug. Cardinal systems can capture ordinal preference but ordinal systems can't capture cardinal preference. (obviously not exactly)
They know which candidates they prefer, they don't have a score for it. One voter may prefer A over B and B over C. There's an argument to give A 10.0 and C 0.0 (it's not the only way to allocate, but I'll grant it for the sake of argument). What is B's score however?
Most voters do not have an answer. The only people who will have an answer are ultra-ideological voters who are willing to grade every legislative vote. Not sure this is what we want to encourage.
>This is a feature, not a bug. Cardinal systems can capture ordinal preference
This isn't entirely true. Let's give an American example.
Say the candidates in 2024 are Biden, Romney and Trump. For the sake of argument, your preference is Biden > Romney > Trump.
So you give Biden 10.0, Trump 0.0, and for Romney, say 1.0. It's possible your 1.0 vote gives Romney the election. Now, if only Biden and Romney ran, you'd have given 10.0 and 0.0 respectively. So Romney gains by having Trump run despite no change in the ordinal preference.
In an ordinal perspective Romney would have a larger edge because you've given a higher weight to him. You have to think about the embedding process and how much information is lost through that embedding.
You're also only looking from the democratic viewpoint. Flipping this matters too because you have a potential favorite betrayer (Romney v Trump). Something Ordinal systems aren't good at handling. In a plurality voting those three could make an advantage for Biden because Romeny takes votes from Trump (and vise versa). In ordinal we have a similar but less severe problem because people will be placing their order strategically rather than preferentially. Even preferentially you are still embedding a decently high preference for Biden despite the fact you'd give him a 0 in Cardinal.
See it this way. You could vote Trump 10, Romney 9, Biden 0. (or any variation). This indicates a strong preference of republicans over democrats. In an ordinal system you'd have to preference Trump > Romney > Biden for the same ballot. This does not express this large preferential difference. You've lost a lot of information through this embedding process. You maintain the order but you lost the degree of preference. There's no reason to drop this information.
Perhaps. Is that a necessity of ordinal voting? I'm not so sure. Trump could have been dropped in the initial round, and then you'd have gotten a straight Biden > Romney vote.
>You maintain the order but you lost the degree of preference. There's no reason to drop this information.
The reason to drop this information is because it's often garbage (there's no real score, at most an hidden ordinal preference), and its very existence gets voters to create even more garbage in order to get their actual preferences.
In our example, the strongly Republican voter probably actually wants something like this: Trump 10.0 > Romney 0.0, Trump 10.0 > Biden 0.0, Romney 10.0 > Biden 0.0.
However, Romney has to get only 9.0 because our Republican voter can only give a global score and wants Trump > Romney. Now Biden may win because Romney got 1.0 less. By forcing a global preference score, you got garbage info.
Another point is that we shouldn't conceive of candidates as passive observers. They can also create tactical manipulations, and that's much much worse than when voters 'lie'.
Say in 2024 the country has more Republican voters than Democrats. Biden now gets Warren and Sanders to run. Most Republicans have Biden > Sanders > Warren (or Biden > Warren > Sanders, it doesn't matter). So they may wish to give Biden 2, Sanders 1. Or Biden 2, Warren 1. Biden gains the more radical Democrats run, since Republicans have to give him a higher score to express their ordinal preference! (They could vote Biden 1 and give 0 to the others, but then their ordinal preference between the other democrats disappears).
In general, the effects on _candidates_ are hugely underlooked in the voting system discussion which tends to look only at the effects on voters.
This is stronger than plurality or ranked? Ranked encourages you to run opposition ads against your in-party competition (see favorite betrayer) because ordinal systems do not account for the strong spoiler effect (only the weak spoiler effect).
I'd also strongly encourage you to read up on the Monotonicity Criteria[0]. It seems your last two comments are acting under the assumption that IRV passes this criteria.
Much stronger and more damaging. In a non-score system, a candidate does not care if their supporter ranks the other side as a 1, 3, 5 or 9. They voted for the candidate and that's what's important. In score, it's critical for every candidate to demonize the other side completely to ensure they get a 0 from their supporters (yes, that happens anyway, but now there's a much greater incentive). Way more polarizing.
[EDIT: Note that ads against your in-party opponent can only be so negative, because you'll need the opponent's supporters to vote for you in the general. This is true in general for wavering voters - they dislike too negative ads against people they also like, and that provides a limit of sorts. In score systems you have an incentive to demonize your opponents, even when talking to people who already support you]
>It seems your last two comments are acting under the assumption that IRV passes this criteria.
Actually, I prefer AV, but my considerations are... atypical. It's just I am very much against score/range methods, unless they are a thin disguise for a ranked system*, in which case it's slightly less bad.
* e.g. STAR, highlighted in a different comment below, is a ranked system in disguise. It's clever but way too complicated for voters.
My problem with the cardinal systems is score/range systems which believe voters have a super-exact utility function and we just need to get it out. I strongly disagree with that assumption.
Necessary? No. Likely? Yes. This depends on if the candidates are included in the ranking or not. So for example, if we had 10 candidates and you rank your top 5, then no this wouldn't happen. But if you rank your top 10, then yes. But if you limit your ranking then some votes don't get counted because their top 5 don't make it past the first 5 rounds.
> The reason to drop this information is because it's often garbage
This is a pretty strong claim that needs strong evidence to counter. Especially considering there's lots of works demonstrating the usefulness of this information.
> In our example, the strongly Republican voter probably actually wants something like this:
If the voter truly has no preference of Romney over Biden, then yeah, that makes sense. And you can't really express this in an ordinal manner. You can only do: Trump > Romney > Biden. Cardinal systems you can do any of the following: 1) Trump > Romney >> Biden, 2) Trump >> Romney > Biden, 3) Trump >> Romney = Biden, 4) Trump > Romney = Biden. There's a whole slew of permutations that are available at no additional cost (I'd actually argue the cost is lower because `argmax(reduce_sum(candidates))` is a hell of a lot easier than `while [candidate_votes < 0.5].all() pop(lowest_score)`). I'm not sure why you're convinced that these permutations are "garbage".
> Another point is that we shouldn't conceive of candidates as passive observers
This is a point that has not been ignored and I'm not sure why you think I am ignoring this. I've stated numerous times that no system is immune to strategies. I am specifically INCLUDING this parameter. I've made zero claims that cardinal systems are impervious to strategies and manipulation. I have made claims about the effectiveness of this manipulation being reduced but reduced is not dismissal.
> Most Republicans have Biden > Sanders > Warren
To be clear, it is easier to simulate a ranked system FROM a cardinal system than the other way around. In fact, ordering candidates in a cardinal system is perfectly valid and will become equivalent to an ordered system. You are also perfectly valid to vote {Trump >> Biden > Sanders = Warren, Trump >> Biden = Sanders = Waren, etc}. Those votes are all valid and none are considered "a bug."
To be clear, in an ordinal system you CANNOT given Biden, Sanders, and Warren an equal score (of 0 or any value) unless we limit the number of candidates a voter is able to rank (which is necessary for large elections, but comes with a lot of other problems and may be unconstitutional).
My claim: "Data X does not exist". Your reply: "Data X would be very useful!". Note that your reply does not actually refute what I said. As for support, IMHO, I think the burden should be on score supporters to prove the data exists. All my experience talking to people is that almost nobody has a real score. They have candidates they'll never support, a few they may waver between, and eventually they settle on some ordinal preference.
>If the voter truly has no preference of Romney over Biden, then yeah, that makes sense.
Err.. I think you meant the voter has Romney > Biden, right? Or you have misread me here.
>Cardinal systems you can do any of the following: 1) Trump > Romney >> Biden, 2) Trump >> Romney > Biden, 3) Trump >> Romney = Biden, 4) Trump > Romney = Biden. There's a whole slew of permutations that are available at no additional cost...
Most of these preference either don't matter (Why should a >> vote matter more than >), or create more problems then they solve (= preferences create actual draws. I don't mind making voters choose an ordering).
>In fact, ordering candidates in a cardinal system is perfectly valid and will become equivalent to an ordered system.
I got that, my point is that it creates a lot of other effects, like giving Biden a reason to run Sibyls.
---
Your general assumption is that elections are a large public survey and we need to get max data and then average it out. I strongly disagree with that model. Most people have vague preferences. Scores don't really exist and we end up with GIGO.
In fact, this seems like the perfect example of ranked-choice voting giving people the outcome they preferred.
52.5% of people preferred Begich to Peltola. That majority of voters did not get the outcome they preferred.
Imagine an election with 6 candidates. 5 candidates each get 20% of the 1st round voting, and 1 candidate gets 0% of the 1st round voting, but everybody marks him as their 2nd choice. He is nobody's favorite, but everyone likes him over their alternatives to their favorite.
It seems reasonable to me that a good voting system should select this guy who is broadly approved by everyone. But in IRV, he is eliminated in the first round.
The recent Alaska election was much less egregious version of this same failure mode.
In other countries, like Australia, where they're used to alternative styles of voting, they have guides on how to vote and who to put in what rank to match what a given party thinks is the best rundown of potentials.
Alaska will get there.
"Condorcet failure" is a phrase meaning a failure of the voting system to select the Condorcet winner. If a candidate beats all other candidates in a 1-on-1 election, they are what is referred to as the Condorcet winner [1]. If a Condorcet winner exists, and an election system fails to select that candidate, that is a Condorcet failure.
Whether or not you think Condorcet failures are important or not is a matter of opinion. But they are important to many people (at least on an intuitive level).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet_winner_criterion
The majority of R voters voted for Palin. Without IRV the election would've been between palin and Peltola would've still won. I also disagree that most people would prefer their second choice over the plurality first choice.
There are non-FPTP, non-IRV election methods that would have correctly picked the Condorcet winner, Begich.
32% Palin
29% Begich
Begich's votes split to 3: 50% for Palin, 29% for Peltola while 21% were exhausted.
That adds up to: 49.67% for Peltola and 46.5% for Palin.
And you said "52.5% of people preferred Begich to Peltola" ignoring that 40 + 32 percent preferred other candidates over Begich. What this says is that if Begich didn't run, more people would have picked Peltola oved Palin.
You could just as easily say that if Palin hadn't run, more people would have picked Begich over Peltola (the 52.5% I mentioned). This is just tautological based on the IRV method. My claim is that if you reason from first principles, the IRV method produces results that are suboptimal.
Begich beats both Peltola and Palin in head to head elections. It seems to me that if a candidate beats every other candidate in a head to head election, that candidate should probably be the one selected. If they aren't selected, that is a failure of the tabulation algorithm you're using. IRV is just one possible tabulation algorithm. My argument is that there are better tabulation algorithms.
If you disagree that a candidate who beats every other candidate in a head to head election should win, that's the core of our disagreement, and I'd be interested to know what you think this criteria is not a good one.
Begich only got more second choice votes because after picking your first, it comes down to "the least evil", on one hand some people preferred Palin because they'd hate Peltola to win, and on the other hand people picked Peltola because they'd hate for Palin to win.
If there were Republican primaries, Palin would have won over Begich, because in that instance you cannot count the votes that went second after Peltola as they're like Democrats. And then in a general election, we'd have the same scenario play as it did with RCV.
The ultimate question is which candidate is socially optimal. Don't think about specific methods like FPTP, RCV, etc. Just think about specific heuristics.
If you somehow had an algorithm for summing up societal satisfaction, which candidate would maximize it?
Given that 52.5% of people prefer Begich over Peltola, do you agree that more Alaskans would be satisfied if Begich was the winner (again, without thinking about the details of the algorithm that selected him)?
Given the result, it is clear that Alaskans are more satisfied with Peltola than Palin, but it's also clear that Alaskans would be even more satisfied with Begich over Peltola. But due to the particular algorithm used, that better outcome was precluded. There are different tabulation algorithms that result in higher expected satisfaction.
edit: see https://www.elections.alaska.gov/results/22SSPG/RcvDetailedR...
Evidently not. Or at least many of them didn't in this case.
Pairwise Preferences
88222 Begich > Peltola
79574 Peltola > Begich
Begich wins with 52.5% against Peltola
101530 Begich > Palin
63681 Palin > Begich
Begich wins with 61.4% against Palin
91418 Peltola > Palin
86271 Palin > Peltola
Peltola wins with 51.4% against Palin
Edit to include all of the failures here. I am copying this from a comment on r/endfptp, analysis is not mine (link below):
Condorcet Failure: Begich beats Peltola by 52.5% and Palin by 61.4%.
Favorite Betrayal Failure: If 2913 Palin voters that preferred Begich to Peltola betrayed Palin by strategically ranking Begich 1st he would of won instead of Peltola.
Monotonicity Failure: If Peltola were able to gain the support of 5825 Palin voters, she would of lost to Begich.
Participation Failure: If 5825 Palin voters that preferred Begich to Peltola had forgotten to vote, Begich would of won.
Consistency Failure: If 5828 Palin>Begich voters, 2915 Begich voters, and 2914 Peltola>Begich voters were removed from the election, Begich would have won and if you counted just those removed votes, Begich also would of won
https://www.reddit.com/r/EndFPTP/comments/x9oupk/2022_alaska...
IRV, on the other hand, does not encourage candidates to drop out, allowing the voters to express their views more clearly.
Almost all Palin voters would have preferred Begich to Peltola, so they could have gotten a better result by lying about their preferences and strategically voting for Begich as their first choice. Expressing their views honestly resulted in a worse outcome than if they had expressed their views dishonestly.
Among voting nerds this failure mode is referred to as "favorite betrayal" -- https://electowiki.org/wiki/Favorite_betrayal_criterion
That's literally the opposite of what it does. Palin should have dropped out, or her voters should have dishonestly ranked her second, so that the win would have gone to a Republican instead of a Democrat. IRV did not prevent Palin from acting as a spoiler and did not make it safe for voters to honestly rank the candidates.
Everyone is reporting this as a failure of Ranked Choice Voting, but it's actually a failure of Instant Runoff Voting. There are other, better, more reliable Ranked Choice alternatives, and any serious expert in voting systems would tell you that IRV has as many weird failures as FPTP.
http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/ is a good overview of different methods.
I don't know if I have ever seen any movement to push back against "wrong" vernacular succeed. Consider the more recent "coronavirus" which is equivalent to COVID-19 in the vernacular, even though it's really just a family of viruses and COVID-19 is an illness caused by a particular coronavirus instance (SARS CoV-2).
With FPTP, every voter casts one vote for one candidate, and the candidate with the most votes wins. Simple.
If you need a website with diagrams to explain the abstruse differences between different voting mechanisms, I think you've already failed. This stuff is certainly of academic interest but the average voter cannot handle it.
At best, you're made RCV/IRV with extra steps. Because still you give your guy 5 stars, but now there's people you do not want at all. They're 0s. Then there are people you're ok with, but would rather have your guy win. They're 1s. That way, if the runoff is between one of your 0s and one of your 1s, you're making sure a 0 doesn't win. Which is exactly RCV/IRV where you've ranked them 1, 2, and 3.
Past that, candidates towards the bottom of the ballot are going to get shafted. There is incredible decision fatigue in having to rank everyone 0 - 5 stars. After a while, you will either give up or just start picking more arbitrarily.
RCV/IRV is fine. Condorcet is fine. Star voting is just bad.
Star voting outperforms IRV on both 100% honest and 100% strategic election strategies.
Decision fatigue is easier for Star than for IRV—just rate everyone you don't care about as a 2, whereas for IRV, if you want to distinguish between "8 people I don't know" and "person I hate", you have to decide on a ranking order for the 8 people.
I'd argue that every single word in this small claim is wrong.
Scoring isn't equivalent to ranking unless the conditions are that you cannot score two candidates the same and that you must fill in every possible score vale (i.e. rank). Neither of these conditions are true for any cardinal system. You can score candidates the same and you can score candidates with variable distances (e.g. 5,3,2,1. Note there is no 4). This has different embedding properties. You actually can express more information in cardinal this way.
Second, run-off voting is much more complicated. Cardinal systems are determined by argmax of a reduce-sum. Which is trivially parallelizable and only requires a singular election. Run-offs require multi-elections. Even in simple cases like this one, there were 2 elections (and that's with 3 candidates!). This doesn't scale well either.
UKIP getting 13% of the vote in a general election, showing a large amount of support, but not winning a single seat is, in my opinion, a travesty (and I vehemently disagree with their platform and what they stand for). It left 13% of the electorate feeling that their views were not represented in any way whatsoever .
If only 13% of voters support UKIP, UKIP would not win elections no matter what kind of voting system you have: ranked choice, instant runoff, etc.
On the other hand, with proportional representation, if a party gets 13% of the vote it would end up with 13% of the seats in Parliament. That's a different type of system, though, and it is hard to reconcile with a per-constituency election system.
One way to reconcile it is with different legislative bodies. Exchange the house of lords for a proportional body, and keep the commons local to constituencies.
FWIW I also disagree with the suggestion that people can't handle it. Plenty of countries use ranked or proportional voting systems and their citizens understand how to use them just fine. They may not be able to perfectly optimise their preferences, but then they can't do it in FPTP either (and it's provably impossible to do so in every case whatever the voting system).
Observation: contingent preference is a valid concept; the "problem" for Condorcet is that it is reductionist.
Among other things this means that it is not a given that you can compare percentages as shown.
Now... how to vote for our voting system of preference?!
Even leading up to this election, I saw some mainstream coverage of the fact that the election would come down to who finished 3rd. i.e. if Palin got eliminated in the first round, most of her votes would’ve gone to Begich and he probably would’ve won. Doesn’t speak well for RCV that it can come down to such a slim margin, but I still think RCV > FPTP for the third party reason above.
As you allude to, RCV is fine when the minor parties essentially have no chance at winning. They get knocked out in the early rounds and then don't matter. In cases where two candidates have similar vote shares, the result is fairly chaotic.
One of the classic results in political science is Duverger's Law, sometimes formulated as 'under first past the post the number of effective parties tends towards two', but 'tends towards' is doing an awful lot of work. One could unkindly suggest that, like a lot of political science results, it works better in the US than in the rest of the world. And I say that as a political scientist...
(Palin beats Begich in a one-winner Republican primary, given that she had more of the votes cast for the two R candidates which is ~= the votes cast in a primary with only Republican voters, then loses to Peltola in the general by 51.4 to 48.6.)
It might be that non-transferable votes as a result of preference failures would change this a bit, of course.
Now I'm not sure if Alaska was semi-closed, but that's not moving the needle as hard as you want it to. Because if you're already registered for a party, you cannot vote in the other party's primary. Only unregistered voters may, and only in one.
And typically, independent voters don't do that. As reflected in the low vote totals in the various primaries in previous elections.
The two-tier primary/general election system produces more extreme-position winners, exactly by this mechanism.
And consider another common outcome - shift the odds very slightly here and the Palin-esque candidate wins the primary, and the general, even though the eliminated primary candidate (Begich in this case) would have been more acceptable to the electorate at large.
Odd example here. That election wasn't FPTP, it just happened to work out that way. Overall people don't think FPTP is consensus because you have to vote pragmatically for people you don't necessarily like. Therefore the winner is not the consensus "favorite" choice of everyone who voted.
With the current US political climate, a third party would likely win a lot of the time if we were simply doing pair preferences like you laid out, because people are essentially voting by party for the lesser evil in most elections these days.
From https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-democrats-win-in-a...
> 40 percent of voters had chosen Peltola as their first choice, 31 percent had chosen Palin and 29 percent had chosen Republican businessman Nick Begich III. Under the rules of ranked choice voting, Begich — as the candidate with the fewest first-choice votes — was then eliminated, and his votes were redistributed to whomever his voters ranked second.
> Unsurprisingly, most of Begich’s votes (50 percent) went to his fellow Republican, Palin. But an impressive 29 percent went to Peltola, and 21 percent were “exhausted,” meaning there was no second-choice pick, and the votes were essentially thrown out. That combination was enough for Peltola to win. While Palin gained more votes from the redistribution than Peltola did, Peltola was starting from a higher total, and receiving 29 percent of Begich’s votes was enough to keep her ahead of Palin. In the end, Peltola received 51 percent of the votes counted in the final round, while Palin received 49 percent.
Sounds fair to me. Some of Begich’s voters expressed a “Begich or nobody” preference. Many Begich voters expressed a “Peltola over Palin” preference. It’s not clear to me why pairwise preferences are meaningful, they don’t encode nuances like the above. Though maybe that’s a feature and not a bug?
I’m aware this gets pretty technical with Arrow’s theorem, maybe there isn’t an ELI5.
This short video gives an example that’s easy to understand:
https://youtu.be/Xekj6gycFpU?list=PLz0n_SjOttTcmP-7y4beuYv49...
I can see how ex post, one could say "if I had ranked my choice lower, they would have done better", but it's not clear to me that this property actually informs any real-world voting strategy ex ante.
Basically, this seems like a somewhat academic property that most voters probably wouldn't care about, so it's not clear that a lack of monotonicity would actually impede IRV from popular acceptance.
I think Condorcet kind of fails here because people are voting "not Palin" more than they are voting for anyone with their second choice.
If there were primaries, Palin beats Begich, not by much, but she does. In which case, the general is Palin and Peltola. Palin is a particularly odious candidate to Democrats. Very few Democrats are going to vote for her. So Peltola will win any general election that's just them two.
So Republicans are split among Begich > Peltola > Palin; Palin > Begich > Peltola; and possibly some degree of others. Probably some degree of Begich > Palin > Peltola as well.
Democrats are mostly going to be Peltola > Begich > Palin. Because while they would prefer Peltola, they absolutely do not want Palin.
Independents are going to independent.
So I think that's what we're seeing. Condorcet is showing us results for elections we would never actually see. Palin against just Begich in an election where Democrats can vote just doesn't happen.
To address your point about why IRV is seen as more consensus based than FPTP is because FPTP doesn't care about 50%+1. If Alaska was FPTP, then Peltola still wins the election here, because she had the highest vote tally in the initial round. But then she wins with only about 40% of the vote. With IRV, you don't stop until someone gets to 50%+1.
I think the biggest problem with Condorcet is simply math. Already, Condorcet is very "set-theory" based. And once you hit an edge case, you all of a sudden get dropped into a whole world of combinatorics.
Another issue is that the expectation is that your down ranked choice can't cause your first rank choice to lose. But that's what happens in Condorcet. The people who voted Peltola > Begich > Palin are the ones causing Begich to win even though they prefer Peltola.
Every voting method is imperfect when things are split near the middle. And hilariously enough, they're all perfectly fine when most people want something in particular.
This method of ranked choice voting is really bad. FPTP is awful. IRV is awful-1%.
Why not choose something good like range or approval voting that doesn't have all these bizarre gotchas and strategies about who is 3rd?
Score and range are even simpler to tabulate than IRV.
Approval voting, on the other hand, is very simple to understand and doesn't have the same spoiler effect problems that FPTP and IRV both have.
I think your idea about being the tiebreaker is a little reductive, since it really assumes you are choosing between 1 of n candidates you like, and that the other candidates are known to be losers.
Then when it comes to politics, you need the most byzantine structure imaginable.
I want A, and if not A then I guess B, and if not B I guess C isn’t that complicated. Determining a system to tally those votes in a way that represents everyone’s preferences faithfully is when you start needing math.
Not 1, not 7. But 3.
When students are evaluated by their teachers, do the teachers just say "this student is the best" and not express anything about any of the others?
I would never live anywhere that has it.
It's much simpler to have one vote from one person for one candidate.
You shouldn't have to have a degree in stats (and that doesn't help much) to calculate the winner.
Voters should be confident in the system and that means being able to verify it yourself with simple addition.
Ranked choice voting is like the current tax code, full of exceptions and rules for the elite to manipulate while the common person gets boned.
If there's only two candidates.
You either got a vote from a person or not, leave it at that.
Currently you have Alaska being majority red but Pelosi losing to a Democrat, I wonder how that happened.
But certain people when they lose want to change things, whether it's advocating abolishing the Electoral College or implementing a complex RCV system to create arbitrary rules to tip the scales to candidates they favor.
-- edit @mikeyouse --
No I'm not mad, as I said I prefer to live in a place that has a simpler voting system where it's easy for everyone verify the vote and be confident in the system.
I'm maybe more disappointed in people allowing it and being that naive.
Do you feel the same way about the tax code or should just voting be complicated?
How do you feel about the EC system? Were you advocating getting rid of it recently?
There's a certain group of people wanting to flip the game table up here recently.
-- edit @ceejayoz --
So the flipside of your statement would be you "grumping" about the simpler system.
Has RCV solved the split vote issue? Hint: no it hasn't. Nor was that ever really a problem, just an excuse to implement RCV.
-- edit @esoterica --
That's an extremely partisan take and not at all what I've heard from Alaskan friends. Pelosi is well respected in the party and in the state, no matter what liberals think, they usually mix her up with Tina Fey anyways.
But if a heavy blue state elected a red governor (especially with a popular blue opponent) out of nowhere immediately after switching to a new voting system people here would be suspicious right?
But because it happens that blue candidates are winning in areas they weren't before, everyone here is fine looking the other way and even defending it.
It was a ballot initiative that passed by will of the people. Who are you to argue about their decision?
It's their choice, but it's a stupid choice. Personally it seems they were naive or even lied to about the outcome.
I can argue their decision because of the 1A. Same as you can argue against their previous system...
..
> But certain people when they lose want to change things, whether it's advocating abolishing the Electoral College or implementing a complex RCV system to create arbitrary rules to tip the scales to candidates they favor.
So you're mad that a candidate that had less popular support won the election in Alaska but the system where there's been one Republican popular vote winner and 3 Republican presidents in the past 30 years is sacrosanct?
Which can lead a candidate with a dedicated but small fanbase getting 30% of the vote but winning because the other side has a couple candidates running. The precise sort of problem you're currently grumping about.
Palin lost because she’s a national laughing stock and a terrible candidate. Not because of RCV. Instead of acknowledging that you are resorting to inventing nonsensical conspiracy theories that can be disproven by performing the “simple addition” you keep talking about.
I think IRV is an interesting step towards an alternative to FPTP, but as others have noted, it also has serious flaws. Condorcet methods (of which there are many) and approval voting / score voting much better, and I wish we would see more adoption of these.
I would encourage you to look at approval voting, which is as simple as FPTP (the only difference is that you can vote for as many candidates as you want, instead of just one), but produces much better outcomes.
https://ncase.me/ballot/ is a good explainer of different voting methods.
Really? Which rules and exceptions are you referring to?
These substitutes all have issues. Party-segregated primaries promote extremism. Polling is inaccurate. When candidates drop out early, they take away choices from voters.
Ranked choice voting combines multiple rounds of voting into a single ballot. The winner is the person with the most support from voters.
First past the post: winner has the most first-choice votes. Ranked choice: winner has the most people who would vote for that person if other candidates couldn't win.
Ranked choice results in the best outcome. The winner has the most support from voters, and the data from the ballots informs future campaigns better than polling ever could have.
Then why introduce the complicated system if we're already doing it in your opinion?
> Primaries promote extremism.
Wow what a statement, please elaborate. Personally that's the only time I've seen issues talked about the majority of the time. Otherwise it's just non-answers and pandering.
> Polling is inaccurate.
That has nothing to do with the voting system and everything to do with the media and pollsters.
> When candidates drop out early, they take away choices from voters.
Not really and it's not relevant, if they didn't survive the primary, if they drop out of the race they would have been a bad representative anyway.
> Ranked choice results in the best outcome.
Saying it doesn't make it true. It's overly complicated and you haven't said anything of substance to make it worth switching over from the simple voting system.
Because the current system promotes extremism.
> Wow what a statement, please elaborate.
Abortion is an obvious example. The vast majority of Americans are pro-choice, but the majority of R primary voters are pro life. If a Republican votes for a pro choice bill they'll be primaried and lose, even though most of their constituents agree with the vote.
They drop out often to prevent being a spoiler for the candidate they prefer of the remaining options. If Nader dropped out in 2000, Gore would have likely won. Nader, if anything, showed he was a bad representative by dropping out.
Not sure whats so complicated about just ranking the candidates in your preferred order. Sure marginally more complicated than FPTP, but if that is too much for someone, they are feel free to just mark one candidate.
Primaries promote extremism because they segregate the first rounds of voting to specific parties. Each primary will remove candidates that might otherwise have majority support, in favor of candidates who have the most support from that particular party only. This is bad enough in the US's two-party system, but would be even worse if there were more parties.
Polling informs voters which candidates they should vote for, and which candidates would be pointless to vote for. In first-past-the-post, it's a waste to vote for anyone other than the two most popular candidates. Voters may drop support for their preferred candidate based on polling incorrectly saying that person had no chance.
Candidates who drop out to prevent vote-splitting only do so because the current voting system doesn't allow voters to specify that they like two people equally. There's no reason why having two good choices should skew results toward one bad choice.
Limiting voter choice limits democracy. Each candidate is slightly different, and the determination should be made by voters. But our current system often requires candidates to drop out before voters can make that determination.
Consider presidential primaries. Candidates attend primaries one region at a time. Along the way, polling and results from completed primaries inform which candidates should stay in the race. Candidates drop out to put support behind others based on these early results that only represent certain states. If candidates didn't drop out, they risk dragging down all similar candidates. This situation isn't ideal, and is solved by ranked choice voting.
I'm not familiar with Alaska's version of ranked choice voting. But I am familiar with Maine's. In Maine, the ballot allows voters to select candidates in order based on preference. If the first choice candidate wouldn't have received majority support, the second choice vote is used, and so on.
Maine's implementation is the same system used in run-off elections, but done all at once on a single ballot. A run-off election happens when the winning candidate is required to have >50% of the votes. The worst performing candidates are dropped, and a new election takes place. This continues until the winner of an election has >50% of the vote.
Pre-RCV, Maine had several elections where the winner had ~35% of the vote, while the other two candidates were equally liked and their voters would have supported either. The solution was to require a candidate to get >50% of the votes to win, and the possible implementations were run-off elections or RCV.
RCV enables voters to specify that they like more than one candidate, while also specifying which they prefer overall. They get to say, ahead of time, "if my favorite loses, vote for my second favorite". There's still only one vote from each person in the result.
Personally, I don't find RCV to be complicated. It's simply an instant runoff, without the costs of holding multiple elections. But maybe that comes from me living in a place where run-off elections were common. I think you may agree at least that it's good to require the winning candidate to have majority support, and failing that, would you agree that it's better if they have majority support than majority disapproval?