ClayShentrup

> Instant-runoff voting (used in practice for counting RCV ballots in the US) actually satisfies the "later-no-harm" criterion[0] of voting systems (unlike Approval Voting)

This is a flaw for instant runoff voting at a benefit for approval voting.

In a nutshell, later no harm means voting for your second can't hurt your first. But it can also mean that your vote for your second can't hurt your third either. Thus if it's more important to target your third than your first, you want to hoist your second favorite into the first position by burying your true favorite. That can never be strategically good with approval voting.

https://medium.com/@ClayShentrup/later-no-harm-72c44e145510

No they do not convey equivalent information, because the information content isn't just the number of states, it's the encoding mechanism too.

For instance suppose you encode the position of missile strikes on some land area in a 16x16 grid, meaning 8 bits of information.

Another person uses only six bits of information, encoding the missile strike position as degrees and distance from the center point of the grid.

Then it turns out the latter method is more accurate because the missiles tend to always strike pretty close to the center of the grid.

The specific patterns of voter preference that emerge in a realistic scenario are counterintuitive and can end up being more accurately measured by the kind of expression approval voting allows. You can get people who have radically different intensity of preference but the same order of preference so that they look identical to a ranked voting method but appear different to approval voting based on their thresholds.

In addition, you have tactical behavior, as well as the efficiency of how the voting method uses the information on the ballots. When you combine all of these factors together, approval voting tends to perform better than ranked voting methods.

https://www.electionscience.org/library/expressiveness-in-ap...

CES has a whole page on this.

In a nutshell, the reason this works is because the people who approve only X or Y have a pretty similar X versus Y opinion as the whole electorate, just based on random chance. It's just statistical sampling principles.

https://www.electionscience.org/library/expressiveness-in-ap...

the big problem is that begich was by far the most preferred candidate, but didn't win. and palin voters would have been better off to rank begich in 1st place. the whole thing is a mess.

cordorcet methods are overly complicated and don't optimize the right thing. the goal is maximal social utility in the face of strategic behavior. cardinal methods are simpler and generally better at this.

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

later-no-harm is a bug not a feature. it's the whole reason IRV is so vulnerable to tactical voting.

https://clayshentrup.medium.com/later-no-harm-72c44e145510

for instance, alaska just elected peltola even though begich was preferred to peltola by a large 5% margin. palin voters preferred begich to peltola 10-to-1. but IRV ignored their 2nd choices. therefore they would have been better off strategically ranking begich as their favorite.

whereas with approval voting, once they cast a strategic vote for begich, it's safe to approve palin (and anyone else they prefer to their lesser evil). this is, in a nutshell, why score voting and approval voting (rated, not ranked, methods) are so superior. this is social choice theory 101.

https://electionscience.org/commentary-analysis/rcv-fools-pa...

this is absurd. you're talking about what the CANDIDATE wants, not what voters (who actually do the voting) want.

STAR voting is shown to outperform virtually all other methods with any mixture of honest or strategic voters.

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

no, it's not a case for approval voting over score voting, because score voting is better than approval voting if even one voter votes sincerely.

if enough people use honest scores, then score voting is better than approval voting even for the "honest suckers".

https://www.rangevoting.org/ShExpRes

you have this exactly backwards, as explained by 3 different math phd experts here.

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

https://www.rangevoting.org/NESD

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

no. scoring is more resistant to strategy.

consider a green party supporter who normally votes democrat. with score voting or approval voting, he also votes green (of course).

with ranked voting, he still ranks the democrat strategically in 1st place to avoid getting the republican, and that makes it impossible for third parties to grow. ranking is too vulnerable to strategy.

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

this is obviously false. simply consider that green party supporters usually vote democrat. with score or approval voting, they'd ALSO want to vote for the green.

whereas with ranked voting methods, they'd still strategically rank the democrat in 1st place, crushing any hope for the greens.

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

scores would be more like:

STAR or score or approval = 5 IRV/RCV = 2 plurality = 0

how i'd approve them in a real election would be based on electability, which would be true with any voting method used in an actual contentious election.

Approval voting is much better.

https://www.electionscience.org/library/approval-voting-vers...

Of course it works in practice. You just vote for the stronger lesser evil candidate, for the same reason my aunt voted for Biden even though she preferred Warren. This is called compromise strategy.

The opposite strategy would be like if Trump supporters voted for Warren to advance the weaker candidate against their guy.

The same strategy works in any kind of runoff method including instant runoff voting.

This is simply wrong.

Palin voters didn't get their second choice preferences counted. If they had instead tactically/ insincerely ranked Begich first, he would have won by a 5% majority against Peltola. They were punished by voting sincerely for Palin.

Palin was a spoiler. People who voted for her threw away their vote, period.

Fairvote lack expertise and lie a lot.

Of course approval voting doesn't reduce to bullet voting, for the same reason tactical plurality voting (the status quo) isn't honest. Green supporters voting Democrat for instance.

https://www.rangevoting.org/BulletVoting

The normalization error, what you are calling subjectivity, is already accounted for in VSE calculations.

Score voting methods like star voting and approval voting are objectively superior.

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

No it's not just his opinion, there are objective metrics like voter satisfaction efficiency that back it up.

https://www.electionscience.org/library/approval-voting-vers...

Yep

LVT wouldn't reduce mortgage or rent prices, but what WOULD reduce them is eliminating property taxes. and that's easier to do if you can offset it with another more efficient tax, like LVT.

https://clayshentrup.medium.com/does-a-land-value-tax-have-z...

approval voting is also great.

God I so relate to you and I just hope it all works out.

Seattle will become the third US city to use approval voting this November 2022. It will come to entire US states in the next few years. It will be dominant electoral reform in no time.

The United States has a deeply flawed democracy and is ranked number 36 by the economist.

https://www.democracymatrix.com/ranking

We use the world's worst voting method and are heavily gerrymanded.

The voting method is by far the biggest problem.

The most promising thing happening in American activism right now is the movement for approval voting. Simpler and better than ranked voting.

https://www.electionscience.org/library/approval-voting/

It's already used in Fargo and St. Louis and will be voted on this November in Seattle. If a majority approves it, they'll use it August 2023.

Nailed it.

> The idea that a single candidate can better represent a smaller (and usually gerrymandered) district than a larger number of diverse candidates in a larger district flies in the face of everything we know about real democracies and party systems.

This is simply not correct. Elections are a form of statistical sampling, and with a good single-winner voting method, all voters of every stripe affect the centroid position, "tugging" it left, right, etc. Which you can see graphically depicted here.

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

> Again, theoretical claims against real world experience.

You're not citing any real world data that contradicts my argument.

> I've experienced polarization in AV to the point where center becomes a wasted vote, and people are incentivized to support one of the two dominant slates.

If you mean "alternative vote" (known to experts like myself as "Instant Runoff Voting"), note that I'm not advocating that. I'm advocating cardinal methods such as score voting and approval voting. Which tend to elect broadly appealing centrists.

https://www.rangevoting.org/IrvExtreme

Here's a compilation of the best expert research, arguing for and against PR. https://www.rangevoting.org/PropRep

A. The research compares proportional (PR) methods to plurality voting, the worst single-winner voting method there is. But superior methods like score voting and approval voting roughly double the accuracy (i.e. group welfare) compared to plurality voting. So no, there's no research showing the superiority of PR to these methods.

B. Even in that limited comparison, of PR to plurality voting, the data still is actually not that clear. For instance, Canada uses plurality voting rather than PR, and is rated as one of the most high functioning democracies by The Economist. Meanwhile lots of proportional democracies are far worse than plurality countries. Compare proportional Brazil (and several other Latin countries) to non-proportional UK, Canada, and USA.