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Comment by ojkelly | Hacker News Reader

My understanding is that calculating ranked choice isn’t the easiest thing to do.

In Australia we have a national electoral commission (AEC) who runs the process, have perfected this over decades. So much so that they also run the elections for Registered Organisations (unions) [0].

The story is similar in our state elections where our electoral commissions are so we’ll regarded you can hire them to run elections for your company [1].

This is all to say, trust in the process and the fairness and accuracy of the outcome are paramount to democracy. And that we’ve been doing ranked choice for decades, it works—don’t write it off because there’s teething issues.

I can see merits to the US approach of having thousands of effectively independent elections being run (for a county for example), and the Australian approach where it’s run nationally by a capable independent commission that holds itself to a very high standard.

Stories like this one, where a county is trialling a different election process, are important to share and appreciate—not because they stuffed up, but because they fixed it. It’s one of those counterintuitive times where admitting failure/fault should build trust.

Democracy is slow on purpose. Statistics get us results on election day, but they don’t change the outcome even when they’re wrong. To borrow some jargon, I think it’s more important democracy is observable than it is fast.

Ranked choice voting is, to my knowledge, the most representative process to elect. No vote is wasted. You don’t have to game theory your choice of the lesser of two evils, you rank who you prefer.

It captures your opinion, not the shadow groupthink choices.

This is all to say, keep going it is worth it.

[0] https://www.aec.gov.au/ieb/ [1] https://www.vec.vic.gov.au/voting/types-of-elections/other-e...

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> My understanding is that calculating ranked choice isn’t the easiest thing to do.

It really isn't easy. There's an outer for loop that adds significant complexity because you need to do a reduce sum and pop the argmin each time. The more complex the system is, the easier for mistakes. There are plenty of voting systems (see Cardinal Voting) that don't have this computational penalties and can simply be argmax(reduce_sum(votes)).

> Ranked choice voting is, to my knowledge, the most representative process to elect. No vote is wasted.

I highly encourage you to look into more voting systems then. Especially because there are many versions of "ranked choice" voting. I should note that Australia's system is slightly different than what many American states are doing despite them looking the same. There are also Condorcet voting systems (which are ranked/ordinal) and are far more representative. But many people advocate for cardinal systems because you get the same properties as ranked (and some more like handling a strong spoiler -- there are strong and weak spoilers btw) but are far more computationally efficient. The common ranked systems aren't that great on that representation front but as far as ordinal systems are concerned they are computationally simple.

Definitions:

- Ordinal voting: systems where candidates are ordered or ranked in comparison to other candidates.

- Cardinal voting: systems where candidates are assigned a score or preference value independent of other candidates.

Cardinal voting is a lot more expressive than ordinal. For example, with 3 candidates, the following 3 cardinal votes

A:35% B:33% C:32%

A:99% B: 1% C:0%

A:51% B:49% C:0%

all reduce to the same ranking but express rather different relative preferences. Btw, in this example scores are normalized to add up to 100%, but should still be considered independent of other candidates.

Yeah but I've seen how the typical person would actually do cardinal voting, because I've seen how Yelp, Uber, IMDB ratings work. Someone who's more thoughtful about it will rank each candidate (on a scale of 0-10) at reasonable values like A:3, B:5, C:7, and someone who gets all their news from tv will rank A:10, B:0, C:0. The latter is more than canceling of the reasonable person's vote.

This kind of voting rewards dumb votes over informed votes. I'd rather have ranked voting.

If you're actually concerned about this (as far as I'm aware there's been no evidence that the voting you suggest is common when experiments have been done) you can normalize the individual ballots (e.g. softmax). But I truly believe that the added complexity to this would unnecessarily complicate an effect we do not observe. (Consider that we also have an edge case of A:10 B:10 C:10 as well. Though this ballot is easy to handle in other ways: toss it) Most voters will use a scaled sincerity voting strategy and thus you'd have A:6 B:8 C:10 and our bullet voter will no longer have an advantage. It pays to be sincere.

Continuing down this, you're essentially discussing bullet voting. I should EXPLICITLY state that this is a well known case and has been extensively studied[0][1]. I appreciate that you have concern with the system and I implore you to continue to search for flaws, but also to look for information discussing these ideas. The reason the bullet voting was likely so low in this study is that most voters are rational and understand that they are giving up significant leverage when bullet voting (note that the case is even worse in approval!). We often think our neighbors are far less rational than they actually are and we shouldn't make this mistake.

We should probably also discuss Monotonicity[2], but maybe in a follow-up conversation.

[0] https://www.rangevoting.org/BulletBugaboo

[1] https://www.rangevoting.org/RVstrat3.html (called Plurality here, strategy B)

[2] https://electionscience.org/library/monotonicity/

I'm loving learning about these different voting methods. I do still stand by my point though.

You're right, I was arguing that voters degenerate into bullet voting over time 100% for the candidate they liked, 0% for the ones they don't. Your article [0] contends that it's not a good strategy to vote like this if you're trying to be strategic, because if candidates are A=974, B=974, F=231 and you liked F, you'd be foolish to vote 100% F, as if you like B better than A you should vote some for B.

This looks too much like the current system we have, where people don't vote for the person they like best, they cast all their votes for the person they hate the least who could beat the person they hate the most. Basically: if you normalize votes, people are going to vote 100% for the lesser of 2 evils and we're back to square 1.

If you don't normalize votes, you'll get one of the other voting strategies you've already linked to in your [1]. I expect it would essentially devolve into approval voting, as it's still voting for the lesser of 2 evils of the strongest candidates, then casting additional votes for anyone who seems viable. Perhaps it finds some other equilibrium.

Either way, I think it takes too much strategy and voter headspace compared to ranked voting, where you can just vote for the candidates you want, in the order you want, and you didn't waste a vote if your top candidate loses because your #2 vote didn't lose any weight.

I think you're trying too hard to look for errors in a system that isn't your preference and not looking hard enough at errors for the system that is your preference. All voting systems have errors and we must be clear about this.

But this strategy and consequence exists in ordinal systems just as much as cardinal systems. There is nothing stopping a voter from bullet voting on a ranked ballot. They just rank one person and no one else. The consequences are quite similar actually but might be more obvious that you're throwing away your ballot in this case. But I assure you, you're effectively throwing away your ballot in the cardinal case too.

I'm also not sure what is wrong with approval. Approval is awesome.

I am also not sure why you keep using the phrase "lesser of 2 evils". If we have a 2 candidate election then there's no point in using any of these voting systems because plurality is a strictly better system (in a 2 candidate election). In fact, it is preferential that a multi-candidate system degenerates into a plurality system when there are only two candidates! The phrase "lesser of n equals" is not really about a voting system so much as it is related to another saying: "those that seek power do not deserve it" (or Plato's alternative: "Only those who do not seek power are qualified to hold it"). This has nothing to do with a voting system but has everything to do with a candidate selection process. There's an ethical conundrum though because you need strong authoritarian power to force thrust (the potential for) power upon people. But we're digressing, just like the normalization discussion is digressing (it was intended to introduce the concept of scaled sincerity, which we see people use in practice).

Every one of your criticisms here is very valid.

> I think you're trying too hard to look for errors in a system that isn't your preference and not looking hard enough at errors for the system that is your preference.

This is true that I have that bias. I think there's currently momentum in the US for switching from single vote to ranked voting, and I worry that if we get into disputes over which alternative voting system is better, that momentum will be lost and we won't change at all. You're right I was far too quick to dismiss approval voting as a devolution from cardinal voting.

> I am also not sure why you keep using the phrase "lesser of 2 evils".

I don't know if you're from the US or not, but this is a common idiom about how our election process works in practice. The Simpsons [0], South Park [1] and dozens of others have pretty great parodies of it. In each of our presidential elections, even though there will be a plurality of presidents running, there are practically only 2 -- the ones backed by the major parties. And often, they happen to be the 2 worst -- where they're either shamelessly narcissistic enough to be unfazed by criticism, or are overly agreeable and quick to make impossible promises. Your quote by Plato is on point here.

That's the phenomenon that I desperately don't want to have any more, that I want n-candidate elections to actually have n candidates. I (perhaps wrongly) attribute a lot of the polarization in the US to two-party elections.

It's true that you can be a bullet voter on a ranked ballot, but there's no incentive to (that I can think of). In an n-candidate election, if there are 2 known popular candidates, and you absolutely despise one of them, then in a normalized cardinal system you'd be incentivized to bullet vote for the other popular candidate -- whether or not they're terrible. That's the scenario I'm talking about when I say lesser of 2 evils. Without normalization, you'd be incentivized to approval vote. And I don't have anything wrong with approval voting, I shouldn't have criticized it in my last comment.

But I do still dislike cardinal voting, because of the fact that it gives people strategies for voting. I think some people will vote earnestly like A:1, B:3, C:6 and others will vote strategically like A:10, B:0, C:0, and so this will leave the earnest voters feeling like they had the election stolen from them by strategic voters when A wins.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7l9QmtiXHU

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7pfsneLSSM

> I worry that if we get into disputes over which alternative voting system is better, that momentum will be lost and we won't change at all

I worry that history will repeat itself and that we'll try it for awhile and then turn back because it does not resolve the things people care about (multi-parties and strong spoilers).

> I don't know if you're from the US or not

I am and demonstrated knowledge about this idiom. My comment was that the idiom is inappropriate for the conversation at hand, not that it is inappropriate for all circumstances. Why else do you think I quoted Plato?

> I want n-candidate elections to actually have n candidates.

Then you want a system that is scalable, transparent (i.e. low computational complexity, trivially parallelizable, and trivially verifiable from statistical subsets).

> It's true that you can be a bullet voter on a ranked ballot, but there's no incentive to (that I can think of).

Don't explain it to me, explain this to yourself. Why is the logic for "no incentive" invalidating in one case but not another? I argued that these are nearly identical situations and have several comments noting that there is no incentive to vote in the way you are suggesting. You are not being consistent in your logic and I'm trying to explain but it is frustrating. Maybe I am being too liberal in using my links and expecting others to read. So let me state it explicitly: there is no incentive to not give your top candidate the maximal score. So your logic is inconsistent. On the other hand, I don't expect all voters to be rational but I do expect (and have linked to experiments with people) a convergence to rationality (also consider what rational means. It doesn't mean smart but that people will play near optimally. We mix normal language and game theory language and this can create a lot of confusion).

No no your links are good, very cool to learn about rangevoting.com, I can see it has a ton to teach. But it's hard to immediately reconcile the data from these links with my own intuitions and first hand experiences and draw conclusions while still in the middle of the discussion.

You're making the argument that I shouldn't be concerned about people thresholding their votes because scaled sincerity is a nearly optimal strategy in a cardinal voting scheme, so people can vote with their heart and not feel like their vote has been wasted. That's one of the findings in the paper you shared[1] that Scaled Sincerity gets (at worst) 91% of the utility compared to Mean Based Thresholding when there are 3 candidates, 80% percent for 5 candidates, 78% for 9... etc

But there'll still inevitably be an election where 2 candidates were very close and the scaled sincerity voters who supported the 2nd place candidate feel like the election was stolen from them. The media will make an uproar about it. Voters will vote with a thresholding scheme after that. So in this case we should just skip to approval voting so people don't feel like they were robbed of the fraction of the vote they didn't contribute to their candidate.

Your other point is people will bullet vote in ranked voting and so I'm defending it too strongly. Your other article[0] very strongly argues that IRV is worse than approval voting in regards to getting bullet voters. I know it's a cop out of me to quote the criticisms that the article itself provides, but the data size really is too small. In their summary of comparisons, 16% bullet voting in Burlington and ~21% bullet voting in Irish presidential are not bad percentages in my opinion, and I don't know anything about the SF 07 or Dartmouth 06 elections.

I don't understand why the low computational complexity is important as long as the algorithm is simple to understand. Bubble sort has higher computational complexity but is a simpler algorithm than merge sort. But I don't know the details of vote counting in practice. If the computational complexity is so high that you wouldn't even determine who won until days or weeks later and was highly prone to error, then I'd stand corrected.

I don't see how cardinal voting would make a difference in there being multiple parties.

Edit: Also I don't mean to occupy either of our New Years Eves on this conversation. I could be sold on approval voting if that's the takeaway you're trying to get it. I learned a lot today. Hope nothing I said offended in any way.

[0] https://www.rangevoting.org/BulletBugaboo

[1] https://www.rangevoting.org/RVstrat3.html

^ re-linking these because the context is so far up the thread

> You're making the argument that I shouldn't be concerned about people thresholding their votes because

I'm actually trying to get you to apply the same scrutiny to ordinal systems as you are giving to cardinal systems. I actually appreciate that you are critical of cardinal systems but I don't appreciate that you aren't being as critical of ordinals (recognize I'm talking about at least a dozen voting systems here. We have to start here before we can enter the nuance of individual systems but we're not even clear here). To be a good scientist you need to detach yourself from your preference. You need to critique YOUR preference more than you critique the opposing options. You're smart and if you've picked the right system then you should be able to defend it. But if you're smart and picked the wrong thing then you need to change because it isn't about what you like, it is about what is right (I'll keep stressing that no voting system is optimal and we need to define our metrics -- I have stated mine -- but we're not discussing these, we're caught up on a single strategy which appears in both cardinal and ordinal and as far as I can tell you don't recognize the latter).

> But there'll still inevitably be an election where 2 candidates were very close

Yes, and we need to think about how distant these candidates are from one another. Then ask yourself, can we compose a system where these candidates are similar? Is it always random and we have no control? Or are these candidates always distant and on opposite sides of the spectrum? You may be primed to believe the latter because that's the likely scenario in plurality voting but is this true for all systems? To answer this you need to have a deep understanding of Voter Satisfaction Efficiency (VSE), spoilers (both weak and strong -- aka favorite betrayer criteria), and how we embed preference (this is why I keep mentioning distances between candidates on the ballot. Note that this is a different distance/manifold than the previously mentioned one at the beginning of this paragraph).

> 16% bullet voting in Burlington and ~21% bullet voting in Irish presidential are not bad percentages in my opinion

I agree it is a cop-out since we see lower bullet voting tendencies in cardinal systems. I agree that sample sizes are small but we do have lots of simulations. Unfortunately we have very little real world data. Unfortunately that means we need to advocate for these systems to get real world natural experiments. Fortunately there are a few approval systems: Fargo ND and St. Luis MS (also Latvia). So we are collecting some of this data and it is very promising so far. We also have non-political versions of this like HN itself! There is only a binary voting system here (until you reach a certain score, then we get range voting). So I'd also argue we have tons of data (also surveys frequently use disapprove/neutral/approve styles of voting. Yes, this is voting). We've seen substantial success with these and I think that's not something we can exclude (though we must be aware of things like vote inflation for certain services, like Uber, that don't exhibit in other services, like old Netflix rating or current ratings).

> I don't see how cardinal voting would make a difference in there being multiple parties.

Back to the embedding.

> I could be sold on approval voting if that's the takeaway you're trying to get it.

Let's say all things are equal in effectiveness. Approval is O(n) and RCV is O(n2). I think that's killer and matters a lot (see the main topic).

> Also I don't mean to occupy either of our New Years Eves on this conversation.

This is one of the few political topics I'm extremely passionate about so I enjoy discussing it. I do want to be clear in that my goal here is not necessarily to get you to come to the cardinal side (though that'd be nice) but I want you to understand that voting methods are extremely complex (lots of people want you to think they are simple) and we shouldn't have strong passions about them without putting significant time to learn (I think discussions can be good learning mechanisms fwiw). Also plenty of time before I'm going anywhere tonight. And you have not offended me in any way. I'm glad we had this conversation.

Happy New Years :)

I don't understand how normalizing the individual ballots would change anything in the example he has given?

So a standard normalization (divide by max value) wouldn't solve much but why I specifically mentioned a softmax is because you then rescale all voting preferences to have the same power. I don't think it is a good idea btw, other than the added complexity. But it does change the above example. The problem with the example was that the first voter gave no strong preferences and thus the second voter had more power. The solution is to rescale these, which is why I said that voters tend to do this automatically (give their preferred candidate on the ballot the stop score and rate all others in proportionate to them).

Yes, in ordinal ranking schemes, there's a strategy that's individually rational: Figure out who the two front runners are. Rate the better of them 100. Also, rate everyone else you like more than that front runner a 100.

So what we should actually discuss more is how preferences are embedded. The problem with ordinal systems are that exactly the same but with cardinal systems they aren't. I don't think a percentage system is a good way for expressing the advantage because people are going to be used to more discrete systems like a 5 star rating system. Here's a better example:

Suppose there are three candidates, A, B, C, and D. We have a strong preference for A, we like B and C equally, and strongly dislike D. How do we express these?

- Ordinal: A > B > C > D

- Cardinal (5 points): A:5, B:3, C:3, D: 0

We can see the embedding issue here pretty clearly. In an ordinal system there cannot be a means for us to express that we have no strong preference of B over C. We also can't express how much we like C over D because we're forced to place them equidistant from one another. This is a big problem because in the ordinal system we say that our preference of B over C is identical to our preference of C over D. There is a clear advantage here to cardinal systems that have a lot of downstream effects that lead to cardinal systems passing the favorite betrayer criteria -- aka strong spoiler -- (ordinal fails) and is why these systems are monotonic (ordinal systems aren't).

I argue strongly in favor of cardinal systems but I often find that people are strongly invested in ordinal systems. Unfortunately fair vote has done a great job at advocating for RCV and people get passionate about things they are not passionate about learning about. But I need to note that there are downsides to cardinal systems too. Voting systems are over constrained and so it really depends on what criteria you are optimizing for. If we strictly want the best VSE over everything else, there's ordinal systems that out perform cardinals. There is nuance here that we need to recognize and be aware of in these discussions, especially when passion is abound. We'll also see if Clay shows up. If it stays on the front page long enough he'll probably see it (hi Clay ;) He's the real expert here.

It's perfectly possible to allow equality in ranked choice voting systems, so A > B = C > D.

But what happens in your cardinal voting system, if D and C are the front runners in competition for a single seat? Imagine the final results were

A: 30 points, B: 20 points, C: 50 points, D: 51 points.

If only you had given the realistic challenger to D your full support (5) instead of being expressive in your preference and docked them 2 points. Now D will rule for another 4 years and the C supporters will call you a traitor for voting your honest preference, just like in the present system.

And this scenario is easy to imagine. You usually know who the front-runners are, and because not only you, but everyone else, wants to avoid that scenario, belief about who the front runners are has a self-reinforcing effect.

A scenario where you're glad you didn't award the full 5 points, though, is much harder to imagine. And a scenario where you are BOTH glad that you didn't award them 5, yet glad that you didn't award them 0, is as far as I can see never going to happen in a single candidate election.

> It's perfectly possible to allow equality in ranked choice voting systems, so A > B = C > D.

While this is easy to write down it isn't easy to tabulate. You must provide a new tallying algorithm (you'll find that important features break).

> But what happens in your cardinal voting system, if D and C are the front runners in competition for a single seat?

I'm a bit confused what you're asking here. There are no voting systems where a single vote/rank permutation/rating will not change the outcome of an election. To do so would mean votes are being wasted. Yes, there are people that will be upset in these situations just like people are upset in a close sports game. But unlike a close sports game we have a higher expectation that the teams that win like this are more likely to be similar. That is candidate C's voters frequently like candidate D (your ordering even suggests that despite the example ballot being from someone on the other side of the political isle). The point is to get someone that is the most representative. In the end, it shouldn't matter what a single voter's preference is, it matters what the collective preference is. That's why we vote in the first place. So that's why I'm confused.

But maybe you should click on the montonicity link. You may also find this link[0] interesting. It is also extremely important that we remember that no voting system is perfect. So if you're going to put down a voting system because you've found a flaw you'll never be happy with a system unless you lie to yourself. It also means that if you're arguing with someone and point out a flaw you need to attempt to convince the person why that flaw (and others) are important in comparison to the upsides/downsides of the other competing system/s. Discussing voting systems is difficult because there are no global optima but it is also more difficult to discuss because proof by counter-example is meaningless and will only convince a novice. If you're wondering the motivation I'm giving in my arguments, click the links.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20180721221826/https://www.starv...

> While this is easy to write down it isn't easy to tabulate.

Ranked pairs etc. have no problem tabulating it. If the change to allow equal ranking breaks some obscure metric, that's a sign the metric isn't very important. After all people can just rank everyone if they worry about it.

I've read a lot about this, and I argue with the usual suspects range people every time the topic shows up.

I don't understand how you don't understand the argument. You can come into situations where you'll regret you didn't min-max your choice (rank everyone 0 or 100). You can't come into situations where you say, "gee, I'm glad I ranked that candidate somewhere in between". Consequently, everyone will do that, whether it's good for the collective or not. Sure, I want what's best for society, but I'm not volunteering to have my vote diluted for the common good - especially since I know that the people I disagree with most, certainly won't do it.

RP has a resolve time of O(n4) so I'm not sure that's a method you want to argue for under a thread where (an even lower) complexity led to a critical mistake. It would be naive to maximize VSE over all other criteria. I cannot stress enough that there are no optimal systems and that we cannot look at criteria independently.

> I don't understand how you don't understand the argument.

Because pure honesty is never an optimal strategy? I'm not aware of a system where that's the optimal strategy. But as we showed here in range, the best strategies are some form of honesty. The dishonest part is that you rescale, which I don't think most people would be upset about. What is frustrating to me is that you appear (I'm willing to admit a misread because these conversations are difficult and it is clear you're primed on my position given your usual suspects statement) to be ignoring identical strategic issues in ordinal systems. But I've also stated pretty clearly why I have a preference of cardinal systems. It is because I care a lot about the resolve complexity (the thread topic is a good example), monotonicity (something IRV/RCV fail (RP and Schultz pass but fail the prior criteria)), favorite betrayer/strong spoiler effect (again IRV/RCV fails), and an important factor is the embedding aspect. That the distance between all preference is not identical. We just can't have as richly expressive latent embedding as we can in a rated system. This has a lot of benefits that I think we need to discuss, including a smoother VSE solution space[0]. That dictates how resistant a system is to dishonest strategies and how representative we are.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4FXLQoLDBA

> Because pure honesty is never an optimal strategy? I'm not aware of a system where that's the optimal strategy

It's not in a system alone. Strategies are something you have when you have information about the other players and their payoffs.

As it happens, honesty is an excellent strategy in Condorcet methods (even the "bad" ones, like those who aren't monotonic) when you have a realistic amount of information about other people's preferences/strategies. People who are honest because they can't be bothered to be strategic, do great with those methods.

In approval, even the information about who the front runners are, causes trouble.

And in range, even with NO information, you'll know it's better to just use the max and min values.

Those systems don't encourage honesty, and the "extra information" range sneaks in from self-reported strength of preferences on an absolute scale, is junk information. Nothing good can come of using it. Certainly it's no good to use it to reject a candidate that is preferred by a majority over all the other candidates.

https://electionscience.github.io/vse-sim/

We've been through this so many times. The original version of those simulation-based utility arguments was pushed by Warren D. Smith on RangeVoting.org.

There are so many ways to lie with simulation. When you took away even the most obvious lie in the simulations painting range in a good light - namely when you took away the simulated people's magical ability to honestly compare interpersonal utility on an absolute scale, so they always ranked their most preferred 100 and their least preferred 0, no matter where they were in "opinion space" - then most of the good properties of score vanished. Smith for a while conceded that, and advocated range with top-2 runoff if you were concerned with that (as if this was some obscure technicality).

Second, those simulations had lousy ideas of "strategy", as if strategy was just a percentage slide. Strategies are inherently dynamic, and require coordination - if I see you instructing your supporters how to vote, I can take that into account in how instruct my supporters to vote.

A cardinal voting system might be a more popular, balanced, expressive, and satisfying if you could also vote against candidates you actively dislike with negative percentages, where 0% is neutral "don't care".

So for the common case of hating all the candidates, you could vote:

A: -100% B: -100% C: -100%

There could be some way to normalize it so everyone gets the same voting power, but can choose to spend it positively or negatively in any combination.

That would give Republicans who hate Trump but refuse to vote for a Democrat the psychological out of not voting positively for any Democrats, but voting negatively for Trump.

This is an unnecessary complication but I get what you're saying. We could instead label a ballot numerically as: strongly disapprove (1), disapprove (2), neutral (3), approve (4), strongly approve (5). Or rather, both. What I'm getting at here is that nothing in the math changes so it isn't correct to say that these modifications make a system more balanced or expressive. I'll make no arguments about popularity or satisfaction since this is opinionated.

A benefit of cardinal systems that you are actually pointing out is that not only can we determine winners, but we can also get a lot of information about voter preference. This is quite useful to politicians and researchers (understanding how represented people feel). But I will also note that a strictly negative ballot is likely to be rare as it is purely a protest ballot.

Even though it may be mathematically equivalent, I think the psychological appeal is important to motivate people to vote at all, if not think clearly about how they vote, and do it honestly and wisely.

Human factors are important -- remember the Butterfly Ballots of the 2000 elections!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_United_States_presidentia...

I think that 0 being "don't care" and negative numbers being negative percentages is easier to grasp and more balanced and granular than (3) being neutral. Even -3 to 3 would be better than 1 to 7.

Voting "A: -100%, B: -100%, C: -100%" weights each candidate the same as "A: 0%, B: 0%, C: 0%" the same as "A: 100%, B: 100%, C: 100%", but as you said, it's useful to get an overall count of the voters' absolute satisfaction with each candidate.

A popular positively winning candidate would have a more legitimate claim to a mandate, and the lesser of two evils candidates would be branded as such.

> Even though it may be mathematically equivalent, I think the psychological appeal is important to motivate people to vote at all, if not think clearly about how they vote, and do it honestly and wisely.

I agree with you here, maybe I did not articulate my previous comment correctly to reflect this.

The biggest issue with a proposal like this is that a lack of any preference given whatsoever should not count positively towards a candidate. If someone labels candidate A as +3, candidate B as -3, and doesn't label candidate C, candidate C should not be given more preference than candidate B. People will either not understand the ramifications (they might not know someone and think that "no preference" is truly no preference when in reality it's positive preference), will forget, be lazy and not fill in some candidates, etc. I don't think that's a desirable trait since it's essentially ascribing a vote which the voter did not want. Of course if you want to make -3 (on a -3 to +3 scale) the default value assigned to "no preference" votes, perhaps that would be okay.

Another great feature of the Australian system is compulsory voting, which has made our politicians less extreme.

Oh, it sounds amazing to have people who only vote to avoid a penalty. I'm sure they'll make sure they know the issues and do their research and not who they see the most on TV or offers them the most free stuff

It is though. Because we frame it as a civil responsibility, not a privilege. There’s only a few situations where it’s taken away [0] (convicted of treason or treachery, imprisoned for a sentence greater than 3 years, of an unsound mind).

> In 1912, the former Electoral Act was amended to make enrolment compulsory. In 1924, to increase voter turnout and reduce party campaign expenditure, the Electoral Act was amended to make voting at federal elections compulsory.

Our election cycles are short, and there’s a small defined period where we talk about the election. After which we all get back to what we were doing. Contrast to some other countries, when the elections (even 4 years out) are always on the cards.

But to your point, even if they don’t know the issues, or care their vote is worth as much as mine. They have a responsibility to submit a vote. They don’t have to fill out the vote correctly, they can submit an informal or donkey vote.

They can partake in the classic Aussie tradition of drawing richly detailed genitalia on their ballot for the poll worker to admire.

What you do with your ballot is between you and that piece of paper.

But short of a few very limited circumstances you need to do you duty and make your voice heard. We’re not asking the informed, the educated, the wealthy, the elite or any other subset who they think should run things. We’re saying, your job as a citizen is to record your opinion on who should be running things (even if your opinion is “I don’t know”, you still need to record it).

And the key part here is that no one can take that away from you. The alternative is the game of voter suppression, making you think your vote isn’t wanted or won’t change things. Dropping you from electoral roles days before an election. Damaging the postal service to hamper mail in votes.

We’re one of a tiny number of countries that do it, and almost a century on I think it was a brilliant idea.

We don’t have a draft, and other than Jury duty (which you can reasonably get out of), voting is _the responsibility_ you have as a citizen.

[0] https://www.aec.gov.au/About_AEC/Publications/backgrounders/...

Hey, you forgot to mention the democracy sausage

Do you believe that the current pool of voters are any better or more considerate?

Most voters are "the base", likely to be extreme in their politics, and mostly irrelevant to political outcomes (as they can safely be ignored, since they are voting for their team regardless).

Sorry, Peter Dutton? This is like how the UK Tories always go on about the lack of PR preventing a UKIP entering power: newsflash my dudes, the UKIP is you.

> which has made our politicians less extreme

OTOH, if only Murdoch had been happier at home, he might not have felt the need to metastasise?

News Ltd were unable to prevent a Labor victory this last federal election here in Australia. I have hopes they won't be able to thwart the coming UK general election either.

They are now coming up against the Millennial and Gen Z tide, a demographic that is both overwhelmingly left leaning, and largely eschews the type of media where Murdoch is prominent.

I don't want to count my chickens before they hatch, but I dare say the peak of Murdoch's influence may be somewhere behind us.

If the historical drift right with age is true (I've never believed so, but it's a popular theory) they could return to influence. That's the main fear.

Imo, it's clear that the 'historical drift' was an artifact of Western society in the past century. It's not an absolute rule or some fundamental property we've established about human beings.

I'm 66; when I was younger, I assumed (with some dread) that I'd drift right, and become more like my dad. The opposite happened; I have consistently moved leftwards, as centre-left politicians have consistently disappointed me.

I did become more like my dad; but mainly on personal matters, not on economic or social issues.

Perhaps a bit longer than that [1]

[1] https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/02/24/heart-head/?amp=1

Indeed, I also think it's partly an artifact of the sheer size of the baby boomer generation, which gives them outsized political power even as their cultural influence wanes.

Good timing: https://www.ft.com/content/c361e372-769e-45cd-a063-f5c0a7767...

I linked this elsewhere in the thread, but given it’s an up to date survey on this very question I’ll post it here too.

Top line is, the drift to conservatism as we age no longer holds. The thread goes into more detail as it’s a bit nuanced.

But as one LNP strategist said dejectedly on national television during the LNP wipeout “you can make new conservatives if they have nothing to conserve”. If the status quo doesn’t serve the majority of voters why would they do anything but vote to change it.

https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1608746369505976323?...

To start off with, I think our elections are some of the best in the world and ranked-choice voting is a good system to use in that it's simple enough to explain and to work at scale, and still gives fair outcomes.

However, I don't particularly like the way we talk about it. I've heard a lot of people say things like, "You can't waste your vote." This is frankly untrue and there were even examples in the last election where certain voters could have voted strategically (e.g. by not making their favourite candidate their first preference).

Ah sorry, I had a feeling that phrase was going to be problematic. I tried to surround it with the context around the game theory required in first past the post.

To clarify what I meant, with FPTP you have to be quite tactical because of how that system fundamentally works.

With Ranked Choice the effect and likelihood is far less. Importantly the second order effects are meaningful. Even if your vote was exhausted it still captures your opinion, and can influence the next election because you can record your opinion for others to see.

With FPTP, we don’t record everyone’s opinion on who is best suited for office, rather we record who you think everyone thinks will win (else your vote can be wasted or work against your intent).

IMHO if you need to vote strategically with Ranked Choice, it’s implementation has been warped and needs to be improved.

Like everything brevity is required before you can dive into the nuance. Perhaps a better way to describe ranked choice is that you can’t waste your vote like you can with FPTP.

Wasting a vote has a much more specific meaning than the general usage I come across, which complicates this more. [0]

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wasted_vote

Worth noting that (at least for national elections) your first preference also affects which political parties receive funding, so there’s an advantage to preferencing a party first even if they won’t be elected.

Fair enough, I mostly agree with you. I was just trying to say that it's not really feasible to eliminate game theory from voting entirely. I wish that nuance was discussed, but seeing as so many people still seem to think they can only put an LNP or Labor candidate for their first preference, I may be fighting a losing battle

I feel like a law of game theory is you can’t eliminate game theory. But, I think it needs to be minimised to such an extent that we don’t need to bring it up. And that, even if your vote doesn’t elect someone this election, it sends a powerful message (because it’s your honest genuine intention) for the next.

I don’t think it’s a losing battle. If anything the last Australian federal election showed not only how good Ranked Choice is at conveying voter intention, but that a meaningful number of us understand it.

The LNP stopped representing their base (perhaps in a similar way to the ALP with the Greens) which opened the door for the Teal independents.

As an outsider looking in to US politics it appears as though similar issues exist, but there are no viable alternatives. In a positive sign for democracy US voters largely rejected candidates who were sowing doubt about the elections.

Related this thread [0] is a nice dive into the changing political landscape around the world as we age. It’s not following the expected path, and I think a lot has to do with us being more educated than ever.

[0] https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1608746369505976323?...

There is a world of difference between a vote being wasted and a votes power not being maximised.

Example seats? I’m curious to see how this edge case played out.

Generally if you put someone above your ‘2 party preferred’ candidate either your vote flows down or it was irrelevant.

Was it razor thin on first preference then the bottom 2 or 3 crackpots sealing the deal? This is the only way I can think of that’wasted vote’ happening.

Nah, let's say there are 3 candidates: A, B and C.

A wins a plurality of first preference votes. Otherwise, voters are split between B and C. We assume that if a candidate places C as their first preference, they will place B as their second preference, and vice-versa.

In this scenario, whoever gets more first preference votes out of B and C will win the election since the other will place third and get knocked out of the race, so anybody who placed A as their first preference didn't get to express whether they'd prefer B or C.

If it wasn't obvious,

A: LNP

B/C: Labor/Greens

https://www.abc.net.au/news/elections/federal/2022/guide/bri...

Is it known that B/C voters strategically voted to knock out A?

B and C voters aren't strategic here. If they wish to knock out A, then placing A at the bottom would not be strategic voting.

The point is that A voters arguably should have voted such that they could influence which of the two other candidates (B and C) won. This would require 'lying' about which candidate is their favourite; i.e. strategic voting

> You don’t have to game theory your choice of the lesser of two evils, you rank who you prefer

You "have" [1] to game-theory your choice no matter what the voting system is. Ranked-choice is apparently believed [2] to be less susceptible to tactical voting than some other systems, though. (Not sure if this is quantitative or qualitative.)

> IRV may incentivize forms of tactical voting (such as compromising) when voters have sufficient information about other voters' preferences, such as from accurate pre-election polling. FairVote mentions that monotonicity failure can lead to situations where "having more voters rank [a] candidate first, can cause [the candidate] to switch from being a winner to being a loser."

[1] https://homepage.cs.uiowa.edu/~dwjones/voting/4980.2020/proj...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting#Tactical...

Yes, at best a voting system can make it so that your naive intuition is pretty close to your best tactical voting.

Approval voting and range voting come pretty close.

However, your first link only seems to critique deterministic voting systems. It's fairly easy to sidestep these critiques (especially Arrow's theorem) with a probabilistic systems:

Eg this variant of sortition: every voter chooses a preferred candidate on their ballot, and we draw n ballots at random to fill up parliament. (Pick whatever system you prefer for resolving one candidate getting picked multiple times, eg give them extra voting power in parliament, or pick the voter's next choice on the ballot etc.)

If you can find a way to vote 'tactically' in this scheme, please let me know.

I believe it's fair in some sense, and free of the pathologies outlined in your links. You are always better off voting for the candidate you prefer.

(I specifically mention using this scheme to fill up parliament with a few hundred people in it. If you want to pick a single position, like a president, the low of large numbers won't kick in, and you might have a greater variance than you'd like from your voting system.

But even for picking a president, a randomised system can still avoid the pathologies mentioned.)

> Pick whatever system you prefer for resolving one candidate getting picked multiple times, eg give them extra voting power in parliament

That is a really interesting idea.

But it quickly shows another problem: share of votes in parliament, is not equal to share of power in parliament.

Picture a body where there's 4 members. A has a voting power of 12. B and C have a voting power of 8 each. D has a voting power of 3.

It's easy to see that once A, B and C have cast their yes/no vote, the issue will be decided no matter how D votes. D has a share in "voting weight", but no power at all. We can say this for sure without knowing anything about the ideology of the participants.

That problem occurs in exactly the same way on any vote in a "normal" parliament where party affiliation determines vote.

> D has a share in "voting weight", but no power at all. We can say this for sure

This is interesting in a different way. D's ability to vote has no power at all. That's true. You're taking a leap when you extrapolate that D has no power; by that argument, lobbyists have no power either. Is that something you believe?

Lobbyists have power through money and networks. If a non-pivotal voter has power, it's likewise through something else than his vote.

That this is a problem with party whipping in parliaments too, doesn't mean it's not a problem.

I'm not sure party whipping is actually a problem?

Btw, parties and how they work in specific electoral systems are (at least partially) a function of how general voting works in those systems.

If you have a sortition system, parties might work rather differently, if they would be present at all. MPs submit to the whip's party discipline, because they need the resources of the party to get re-elected etc. Under sortition, the incentives are all different.

> That problem occurs in exactly the same way on any vote in a "normal" parliament where party affiliation determines vote.

It also occurs under most 'normal' voting systems in safe seats.

Who says parliament has to run by majority vote?

You could run parliament on probabilistic lines, too.

More realistically, I agree with thaumasiotes: this is exactly how forming a government works in most parliamentary systems around the world (eg both in the UK parliament and the German Bundestag.)

There may be something to say for small, "moderate" parties being pivotal, having the deciding vote. But that's why I emphasised, this is completely independent of political opinions. D are powerless whether it's a centrist or an extremist. There's no way to defend that as a feature.

Of course, if A, B, C and D are groups of people with less than perfect party discipline, the people in D may still have some power.

> D are powerless whether it's a centrist or an extremist.

No. That's only true in a deterministic parliament that works by majority rule.

You could have your parliament make decisions by lot (with probabilities weighted by what MPs vote for).

Or you could give your parliamentarians a steady stream of tokens they could use for voting; small parties could save up their tokens for a while, to have a decisive influence on something they care about.

(You'd have to work out a lot of kinks in such a token system..)

What's a small moderate party? Moderate parties are larger than other parties.

No, not necessarily. They may be so bland as to please nobody. (This was the case for an old rural progressive party in my country for many years). Or, they may be neutral by default on most left-right issues because they really care about something mostly orthogonal to it. This has been the case for the Christian Democrats and to a lesser degree the Farmer's party in my country.

The paradox is that they get a good deal of power being pivotal, but only on issues they don't really care so much about.

See the role the Free Democrats https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Democratic_Party_(Germany... played in the German Bundestag for a long time.

> You could run parliament on probabilistic lines, too.

My instinct is that this would have significantly more negative effects, to do with the ease under that system of making radical policy changes.

Though more likely, it would fall into a pathological state where most votes are votes on whether to retake other votes.

Probabilistic doesn't have to mean completely uniformly random.

And you can also still have safeguards, like constitutional guarantees etc.

> Ranked choice voting is, to my knowledge, the most representative process to elect.

It is not. “Ranked Choice Voting”, as a commonly used name for the specific ranked ballots method also known as “Alternative Vote”, “Instant Runoff Vote”, and a couple other names, is not “the most representative process” by any measure. It’s not even part of the best class of ranked-ballots single-winner methods (Condorcet methods), and single-winner elections of any kind are less representative than systems which provide proportional representation through the use of multimember constituencies (whether candidate-centered systems like Single Transferrable Vote in multimember districts, or whole-legislative-body systems like Party List PR.)

The name is even chosen to avoid consideration of competing ranked-ballots systems by creating the impression that it is the system for elections with ranked ballots.

> No vote is wasted.

Plenty of wasted votes in RCV/IRV/AV.

I find it ridiculously amusing how practically every Australian I meet considers their voting system to be perfect. Voting in Australia is basically the NHS of the UK.

I wouldn’t proclaim its perfect. But I think it’s a system we are all generally pretty proud of.

It may have something to do with the fact that everyone has to vote, so you either learn how it works or try to dodge it. As in, it’s your responsibility as a citizen, not your right.

We also had the decade of Prime Ministers, where it was reasonably for you not to know who the current prime minster was. Amusingly the UK recently had a go at this as well, with about the same results.

here in NZ we use STV (Single Transferable Voting) for some local elections - it's one of the fairest systems around, especially for electing multiple representative (or at large) wards - but it is complex because it passes fractions of a vote around (if only a portion of your single vote is used to elect someone high on your list the rest is passed on down your list).

So it's very fair, all of your vote always gets used .... but complex - to the point that the law (these days a regulation) specifies the floating point precision (9 digits)

https://www.legislation.govt.nz/regulation/public/2001/0145/...

The problem is that it forces people to vote for the lesser evil as well. Sure you can vote for your loved party, but if that only gets two votes then your ballot gets counted for your second choice anyway.

We need a system where you’re vote counts against everyone you don’t list.

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