Comment by uoaei | Hacker News Reader

Comment by uoaei | Hacker News Reader

I went deep into electoral systems after the 2016 election, and emerged a tentative ranked choice voting supporter for the momentum that FairVote was accruing at the time, but secretly I really considered approval voting an ideal next step in electoral reform:

1. Amending the law is relatively simple: replace any instance of only one with any when it comes to election laws regarding marking the ballot.

2. Amending the ballot is a minor change: just allow anyone to mark any (including none or all) of the bubbles representing each candidate on the ballot. The language on the ballot itself barely changes, the structure of the ballot can and would be identical to today's ballots.

3. Explaining the method to the public is dead simple: there's a pattern here, "instead of marking just one, now you can mark any of them" is a sentence that anyone can understand and implement. Explaining the calculation ("whoever gets the most votes, wins") is also dead simple.

4. Extending to multi-seat races is trivial: just take the top n vote-getters instead of the top 1.

5. It appeals to intuition: it does feel like "cast one lot per candidate you approve of" and aggregating that across a population is a fair way of distributing consensus. "Approval" means many things to many people but it is still a clear subjective threshold for each person. This also means that voters will consider the result harder to dispute on the grounds that it doesn't represent the people's will.

6. Tactical voting is straightforward and hard to do wrong: for what it's worth, tactical voting is always an option, and people are always going to use it. It's just how things work, at least for the foreseeable future. That being said, of all the systems, approval voting makes it the simplest to engage with and the least underhanded. Vote for people you want to promote in the election, don't vote for people you want to suppress in the election.

I really don't see the downsides. Deep in the discussion boards of the internet where the election nerds lurk, they complain about this or that theoretical imperfection. But as for the options that have been suggested, this one stands out as the easiest to adopt societally, with the most bullet- and fool-proof implementation.

If you want A or B to win, but you really prefer A to B, then should you approve of B at all or not approve of them?

This preference situation happens in every election, and approval voting has no answer to it. It's completely unclear what a voter should do to get the result they want.

You vote for who you approve of for the position in question. Whoever has the most approval wins. It's that simple: It doesn't matter whether you prefer A over B, all that matters is whether you think each is a good-enough candidate. Fiber grained preferences then emerge at the population level, not the individual level.

"What the voter should do to get the result they want" assumes a level of individual agency which really isn't present in a real election: The result is always a combination of individual choice with collective will.

I knew tons of people with a preference of Bernie > Hillary >> Trump. They preferred Hillary but did they "approve" of her? How should they vote?

This kind of situation isn't special. It comes up in every election, and approval is completely confused about how to handle it.

Would you be OK with Hillary as president? If yes, give approval; if not, don't. Order of preference simply doesn't matter in approval voting. The only reason it seems complicated is because we are too used to strategic voting in the First Past the Post system.

I recently had the occasion to really game out what happens in ranked choice voting. It is similar to approval voting (you should only rank people to approve of), but in practice you elect whoever gets past the 50% threshold first, which may not be whoever had the most raw approval. The first person past 50% is effectively random, especially in a large field with complicated voter preferences. So, you get an illusion of choice: everyone lists their preference, but the actual winner is a somewhat random choice amongst the candidates with >50% approval. Thus, I advocate removing the illusion, and simply picking the candidate with the greatest approval. Easy.

i wrote a page on this very issue.

https://www.rangevoting.org/RVstrat6

This echoes critiques I hear elsewhere, and so gets the same response: so what? What about that statement (1) doesn't apply to another election system and (2) isn't expected as part of a normal experience when voting among multiple candidates? Only one person will win anyway, so disappointment about the outcome actually seems like the wrong focus vs eg satisfaction that you got to represent your preferences fairly.

This also is addressed by the point that what you describe is the most complicated part of approval voting. But I'd argue that that is way less of an issue than the current spoiler effects we see in FPTP and RCV, since that is the limit of how complicated your choice can get in practice, whereas with other systems there's much deeper dynamics with respect to tactical voting.

> Only one person will win anyway, so disappointment about the outcome actually seems like the wrong focus vs eg satisfaction that you got to represent your preferences fairly.

Except that approval voting doesn't allow you to express your preferences very well, since there is very limited differentiation between candidates. I understand the appeal of approval voting since it's a very small change to the voting machines, voter experience, existing legislation, etc, but most people who want to express their preferences will be drawn to methods that actually let you do that most effectively. If approval goes head to head with IRV or STAR (the two other movements that seem to have some momentum) I would generally expect the voters to go with STAR or IRV, for better or worse.

> doesn't allow you to express your preferences very well, since there is very limited differentiation between candidates

Again, so what? The function being optimized here is not "fealty to true preferences for individuals", but rather "level of satisfaction with outcome for the entire group of electors". And actually, my preference is to not be asked to rank candidates but just issue binary assessments. Your claim that people want the former is wild, unsupported hypothesis, and the way you phrased it seeks to imply they'd rather not vote than vote approval voting. I think you are strongly (albeit transparently) forcing your own preferences through others' mouths in an attempt to start this more or less malformed debate.

> approval goes head to head with IRV or STAR (the two other movements that seem to have some momentum) I would generally expect the voters to go with STAR or IRV, for better or worse.

IRV is literally the same thing as RCV and so displays the same idiosyncracies and fundamental flaws so I'm not quite sure you know what you're talking about here.

Further, the kind of person attracted to STAR is the same kind of person who can devise linear algebra algorithms for deciding what's for lunch, and go in to change every setting on their new smartphone before the wallpaper. They are micromanipulating technocrats, and while this community massively overly represents that type, it doesn't represent the public per se. I assure you, what you parrot from online discussions by people who very much don't have their finger on the pulse, is then predictably very far from representing views considered "normal" in the literal sense.

> approval voting doesn't allow you to express your preferences very well

yes it does, in the aggregate. because the people who approve only X or only Y will statistically have a pretty similar X-vs-Y preference as all other voters (who approved both or neither).

https://medium.com/election-science/expressiveness-6ef8c034b...

and because approval voting uses the preferences it does have more accurately than IRV, it ends up being much more accurate, as measured by voter satisfaction efficiency simulations.

https://rpubs.com/Jameson-Quinn/vse6

strategy affects all deterministic voting methods, and an optimal ranked ballot can be quite complex. see an example from andy jennings, who did his math phd thesis on voting methods and co-founded the center for election science (with myself and some others).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtKAScORevQ

optimal approval voting strategy is simply to approve everyone you prefer to your expected satisfaction. to an approximation it's, "vote for who you normally would, plus everyone you like better." so it's rarely any more taxing than now, and often easier.

hundreds of thousands of voters have now used approval voting in fargo and st louis, and we've heard no reports of difficulty. approval voting is also simpler in essentially every way we can objectively measure. most of the points here apply to approval voting even more so.

https://medium.com/election-science/star-voting-is-simpler-t...

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