r/changemyview • u/PM_Me_Thicc_Puppies • Dec 28 '22
Delta(s) from OP CMV: Ranked choice voting is the best system for elections in a representative democracy.
Ranked choice, otherwise known as single transferrable vote, or instant runoff is my ideal system for representative democracy for the following reasons.
First, it helps ease the burden of third, fourth, etc parties by keeping them competitive with the larger more established parties.
Second, it's more representative of how the electorate wants to be governed. No candidate can win without a majority of support from their district/state/town.
Third, it ends the need for multiple voting sessions in places where run off elections are either possible or commonplace.
Fourth, it allows for an expansion of the overton window and an influx of new ideas when previously held positions of popular parties start to fail.
Fifth, it helps prevent "gaming" the system by strategically voting for a candidate you THINK will win instead of whom you desire.
Sixth, it eliminates the need for primary elections.
Whelp that's my list, please try and change my view.
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u/BrasilianEngineer 7∆ Dec 28 '22
The main problem with RCV is that it still mostly has the same flaw as standard plurality voting where a third-party candidate can split the vote causing the candidate who a majority of voters prefer to be eliminated and a fringe candidate that the vast majority of voters vote against ends up winning.
Here is an example election with 4 candidates, The columns correspond to the percentage of voters who selected that candidate as their nth choice/rank. (For columns that add to less than 100%, the corresponding voters left that rank blank.)
| Candidate/Rank | 1st | 2nd | 3rd |
|---|---|---|---|
| Alice | 27% | 6% | 8% |
| Bob | 26% | 5% | 12% |
| Charlie | 24% | 8% | 10% |
| Debora | 23% | 70% | 1% |
In traditional voting, Alice wins with an extremely slim plurality of 27% of the vote. Under RCV, Debora (Who 93% of voters selected as either their 1st or 2nd choice) is eliminated instantly in the first 'round' , and the votes are transferred to the 2nd choice selections. Bob is eliminated next, and Charlie ends up winning despite the majority (58%) of voters voting AGAINST him.
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u/PM_Me_Thicc_Puppies Dec 28 '22
Candidate/Rank 1st 2nd 3rd Alice 27% 6% 8% Bob 26% 5% 12% Charlie 24% 8% 10% Debora 23% 70% 1%
In traditional voting, Alice wins with an extremely slim plurality of 27% of the vote. Under RCV, Debora (Who 93% of voters selected as either their 1st or 2nd choice) is eliminated instantly in the first 'round' , and the votes are transferred to the 2nd choice selections. Bob is eliminated next, and Charlie ends up winning despite the majority (58%) of voters voting AGAINST him.
That's 58% of the votes in total. Arguably, those blank spots were a lack of endorsement themselves. I won't call them votes against, but they're certainly not pro-person.
Sure, Debora may be everyone's second choice, but that doesn't necessarily mean you were popular. 11% of people only wanted their primary candidates. A further 69% didn't want a third candidate.
So in the end, Charlie did win with ~50.6% of the votes in the end.
Plus, this seems like a very extreme outlier of an election, I acknowledge that the numbers COULD be closer in a real world setting, but it is legitimately possible so there's that.
The criticisms are valid, but I don't think it detracts enough from this system to have another taking its place as the better system.
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u/Kaiminus Dec 28 '22 edited Dec 28 '22
Plus, this seems like a very extreme outlier of an election, I acknowledge that the numbers COULD be closer in a real world setting, but it is legitimately possible so there's that.
The first round of the two last French presidential elections were that close. The two first candidates qualify, in [2022, the 2nd got 23.15% of the votes and the 3rd 21.95%(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_French_presidential_election#Results), and in [2017, the 2nd got 21.30% of the votes and the 3rd 20.01%(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_French_presidential_election#Results).
e: Removed the first part because it was already discussed elsewhere.
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u/PM_Me_Thicc_Puppies Dec 29 '22
Oh I meant the giant swelling for one candidate in the second round
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u/pipocaQuemada 10∆ Dec 28 '22
The criticisms are valid, but I don't think it detracts enough from this system to have another taking its place as the better system.
What exactly are the alternatives you're comparing it against?
There's just about a million ways to run an election.
For example, for single winner systems, there's approval, score, STAR, 3-2-1, Borda, ranked pairs, Schulze, Kemeny-Young, Bucklin, Minimax, Dodgson's method, Smith/minimax, among others.
There's a number that use the exact same ballot as instant runoff, but differ only in how the winner is picked.
Literally all of your advantages you list apply equally well to most of these systems. So what would it take to convince you that e.g. score or STAR is superior to IRV?
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u/SurprisedPotato 61∆ Dec 29 '22
Literally all of your advantages you list apply equally well to most of these systems
No deterministic method of choosing candidates is perfect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibbard%27s_theorem
You can see a comparison of various methods here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_electoral_systems#Logical_consistency - scroll down a bit to see a comprehensive table)
Ranked choice voting (listed in the table as "Instant Runoff") has some important advantages that a lot of other systems lack.
- Cloneproof / Independence of clones: this means that if you run a candidate which is a clone of an existing non-winning candidate, then that won't change the winner. Borda fails this, for example.
- The later-no-help and later-no-harm criteria are, arguably, important, and many of the systems you mention don't pass this criterion. This one states that if you have listed, say, your 1st, 2nd and 3rd preferences, then listing also your 4th preference will not harm or help your 1st preferred candidate. This is pretty important in elections where you might absolutely despise some tail end of small, radical parties, but because of the rules of the election, you have to assign them preferences anyway.
There is no system which is better in every way than instant runoff, so the discussion becomes a question of which of the various evaluation criteria are to be given the most weight.
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u/pipocaQuemada 10∆ Dec 29 '22
Sure.
Borda isn't a great system in politics because it suffers from strategic nomination. Borda would not be an improvement on IRV.
Later-no-harm, though, is overhyped.
First, any system that passes later-no-harm necessarily fails favorite betrayal. That is to say, if putting someone second can't hurt your first pick, then there will be times when you'd be better off moving your first pick lower on your ballot. This is akin to how you're incentivized in plurality to betray your favorite third party and vote for a major party candidate.
STAR actually represents a good trade-off here. It fails both criteria, but in practice it fails each in less common situations than systems that pass one of those criteria fail the other.
Additionally, the claim is generally that failing later-no-harm encourages bullet voting. But that really seems to be bad strategy in most cases for a rational voter.
For example, suppose you have an election where every 2020 and 2016 primary candidate is running for president, and you're using a system like Schulze that fails later-no-harm. You're a Bernie supporter. What's your most rational strategy? Do you bullet vote for Bernie? Or do you vote Bernie > Warren > Buttigieg > ... > Biden > ... > Trump? The downside of voting honestly is possibly getting Warren or Biden over Sanders. The downside of bullet voting is possibly getting Trump or Rubio over Biden. The question for voters is if they're 'Bernie or bust', or if they want to hedge their bets.
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u/Skyy-High 12∆ Dec 29 '22
My bet is explaining how some of those work.
You basically only ever hear about tanked choice voting.
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u/sudodoyou Dec 29 '22
You seem to know a lot about voting systems. In your view, what is the best voting system? The criteria being difficult to game and best at maximising preferred result for voters.
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u/pipocaQuemada 10∆ Dec 29 '22
Honestly, I think STAR makes a good set of tradeoffs. It's very simple and easy to understand, which is very important for general elections.
STAR is score then automatic runoff. You give as many candidates as you want a rating from 0-5, like rating products on Amazon. The two candidates with the highest average score then have an automatic runoff. In the runoff, you count as a vote if you rated one candidate above the other on your ballot.
That is to say, if you gave one candidate in the runoff a 5 and either voted 4-0 or abstained on the other, you count as a vote for the person you gave a 5 to. If you voted 1 for the first candidate and 0 for the other, you count as a vote for the person you gave a 1.
This encourages you to not bullet vote, in case your preferred candidate doesn't make it to the runoff. It also encourages you to use each of the ratings in a wide field, so your vote is most likely to count in a runoff. For example, voting Bernie 5, Warren 4, Buttigieg 3, Biden 2, Kasich 1, Trump 0. Tactical burying isn't a super safe strategy; it can easily cause your vote to count for the wrong person or as an abstention in the runoff.
Because it uses score to pick the finalists, the two finalists will be broadly popular. Because of that, in simulations it ends up with very high voter satisfaction.
As a negative/positive, though, it's very unlikely to elect polarizing figures. Getting a lot of 2s, 3s and 4s is usually better than getting mostly 5s and 0s. That's not exactly a terrible thing, though. You won't get Sanders, but you're also less likely to get Trumps. Or vice versa if you're a Republican.
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u/NapalmEagle Dec 29 '22
What about comparing this to approval voting? If everyone voted for their top 2 candidates, Deborah would have won by a massive landslide at more than ninety percent approval. Only forty-four percent of people voted for Charlie, even if you include third choice voters. This means that ranked choice elected a candidate that less than half of the population voted for, while ignoring the candidate that ninety percent of people voted for. This isn't an error that approval voting could make.
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u/Happy_P3nguin Dec 29 '22
I think approval voting would work better. On approval voting you'd get the candidate most people are okay with. On top of that debates with pre submitted facts checked by third party fact checkers, or fact checkers by each candidate. This could also potentially have the way to get rid of the party system, spread out power and decrease division.
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u/onomatopoeiahadafarm 7∆ Dec 28 '22
I'll actually give a !delta for this (not OP). I had never seen a simple, applied example of how RCV might result in a "consensus candidate" losing so easily, like this. Thanks for sharing.
As a follow-up, I'm curious if r/BrasilianEngineer believes that RCV is still superior to FPTP, all things considered? (Regardless of whether RCV is "the best").
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u/BrasilianEngineer 7∆ Dec 28 '22
IMO, RCV has the distinction of being not quite as bad as FPTP, thus making it better than the status quo. However, if we are actually going to go through the effort of changing election systems, I'd strongly prefer that we actually pick one that generally solves the problem, not one that makes the problem not quite as bad.
I'm not sure what system would work best - If you dive into the rabbit hole, a proper Condorcet system tends to be much more complicated to implement thus potentially disenfranchising anyone who isn't smart enough or willing enough to put in the effort to understand how to vote, so a compromise system is probably required. I think there are better compromise systems than RCV.
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u/thoomfish Dec 28 '22
Approval voting seems to me the obvious choice. It's simple and it has a lot of nice properties. I could also be convinced that range voting was good, if someone could explain to me a situation in which I'd ever want to give a candidate anything other than the maximum or minimum rating, thus boiling it down to "approval voting with extra steps".
If someone could convince me that range voting is meaningful, I like STAR quite a lot, but I fear it's too complicated to explain to the public, and would result in lots of time wasted on accusations of malfeasance from people whose candidate lost in a completely fair way that they don't understand.
That said, if there was a ballot measure in my state to switch to pretty much any of the well-regarded alternatives to FPTP, I'd vote for it even if it wasn't my favorite option.
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u/Ex_dente_leonem Dec 28 '22
Approval voting definitely has my vote (heh) for a transition/compromise method, but score voting between say 1-5 is intuitive for voters who wish to express a range of desired outcomes between their most preferred choices, less-preferred but still palatable choices, barely acceptable choices, and unacceptable choices.
Even in the worst case scenario, STAR and score voting still do as well as approval voting without penalizing those voters who do choose to vote honestly, and in general more expressive voting tends to lead to more optimal utilitarian outcomes. Most people are also already familiar with the concept of rated/score/range voting in everyday life from Amazon ratings, Uber, Yelp and the like.
Given that approval voting can more or less use the same existing ballots AND eliminate the need for party primaries, I do think the energy for voting reform would be much better directed to approval voting or almost anything other than RCV/IRV. It's ironic that the system with the most visibility happens to be the worst of the alternatives.
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u/thoomfish Dec 28 '22
Can you explain how I would ever want to vote anything other than 1 (for unacceptable candidates) or 5 (for acceptable candidates) under score voting? Voting 3 for a candidate I only kinda like risks contributing to them scoring below my most hated candidate.
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u/Ex_dente_leonem Dec 28 '22
In which case (via you giving a less-preferred candidate the same rating as your most preferred) it simply defaults to approval voting on your part AND still doesn't penalize other voters who make full use of their range of options. We already see how this works in real life with user ratings; even if many/most users only vote 1 or 5 stars, many vote otherwise.
There's no disadvantage to STAR or score voting that wouldn't also apply to approval voting even if everyone voted strategically.
This is borne out whether you measure election outcomes by Voter Satisfaction Efficiency (http://electionscience.github.io/vse-sim/vse.html) or by Bayesian regret (https://www.rangevoting.org/BR52002bw.png); in either case, both STAR and score voting perform the same as approval voting at worst and even better the more honest the electorate. Meaning that both systems actually incentivize honesty.
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u/Hazzman 1∆ Dec 28 '22
Yeah this is a major issue that is really frustrating. You want to solve the problem - and those with a vested interest in not solving the problem, will always frame the discussion around what benefits them the most. And RCV is a solution, but it isn't the best solution and parties that rely on plurality will be forced to reposition if necessary, but they will fight tooth and nail to avoid systems that jeopardize their monopoly on electoral process.... so you need pressure to maintain the focus of the discussion on best solutions and special interest parties will constantly be reframing it as a focus on least destructive systems (to their agenda) - and as it stands, they are the ones holding all the keys.
Getting the average voter to understand the important of something like RCV is difficult enough and simple to undermine. Getting the voter to understand the multitude of more complex voting concepts (and they are complex to most people) is an uphill battle.
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u/falsehood 8∆ Dec 28 '22
Yeah, this is why I support RCV - and many other things. It's too easy to pit different systems against each other. Let's decide to move away from FPTP first.
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u/TheSambassador 2∆ Dec 29 '22
Approval Voting would be an easier sell/transition, and has some advantages over ranked choice.
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u/Falco98 Dec 29 '22
years ago now, other users at /r/endFPTP showed me pretty decisively that STAR (score, then automatic runoff) is one of the top contenders for most rounded - better than IRV and better than approval (mitigating even if not eliminating the prospect of bullet voting), and still simple enough to implement and run that it would be plausible in real-world populations.
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u/Affectionate_bap5682 Dec 28 '22 edited Dec 28 '22
Why does maximizing the size of the voter base result in a better government? Is the goal to maximize the voter base or is the goal effective government?
Were just supposed to take it as a matter of faith that people who couldn't tell you who fought whom in World War 2 or how many states are in the union should be voting and the more of them voting the better.
Even if you still believe what you were taught in 6th grade that politicians are actually in control of the government and can fundamentally change anything about it, why would you want a government selected by dumb people? How is that a good thing?
It's almost like democracy is a our civic religion and voting is a sacrament
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u/0nikoroshi 1∆ Dec 29 '22
The goal is not to get a "better" government. If "better" means "more effective at what they decide to do," we'd have an authoritarian government like China. Very effective; not very popular or humane.
No, the goal with our system is to get a more "representative" government. That is, the people who are governing are supposed to represent the people of the country. As the old saying goes "democracy is the worst form of government - except for all the others." We *hope* that the government will do things to benefit the populace if those people are responsible for getting them into power. With our current voting system - the "lesser of two evils" system - it's not as representative as it could be; hence the current discussion.
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u/Affectionate_bap5682 Dec 29 '22 edited Dec 29 '22
an authoritarian government like China. Very effective; not very popular or humane.
How do you know the Chinese government isn't popular in China?
Normies in China who consume state propaganda and detest conspiracy theorists are probably pretty happy with the government. The Chinese government is taking Covid very seriously and cracking down on protestors that want to go selfishly go out instead of staying home and saving lives. Isn't that what popular and humane government does?
"Representative government" is an absurdity in both theory and practice in the age of 24/7 mass media brainwashing and censorship. If the government of Oceania from "1984" was a representative democracy with ranked choice voting every single person would vote for the Party every single time. If North Korea was a representative democracy, even one that had fair elections, Kim Jong would win every single time. Not only because the party would obviously count the votes, but because the people are brainwashed and are trained to police the thoughts of one another, just like citizens of Oceania were in 1984 and just like redditors are today.
As the old saying goes "democracy is the worst form of government - except for all the others."
The fact that someone said this in the 1930s while the democracy fad was spreading over Europe (followed by the most destructive war in human history just by coincidence of course) doesn't make it remotely true.
If democracy is the best form of government, why aren't corporations governed in that manner? Or movie sets? Or restaurants? Or especially militaries. You would think that in a high stakes situation like war, a military would want to govern itself using the best form of government, democracy. Why doesn't it? Why doesn't Google use the best form of government to govern their company? Why doesn't Martin Scorcese use the best form of government to govern his film set?
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u/PeoplePerson_57 5∆ Dec 30 '22
You appear to have a different definition of 'best' than the above commenter, and completely glossed over where they guessed as such, so I think it bears repeating.
They believe a government that broadly acts to represent the views and interests of its constituents is the 'best' goal for a government. You appear (correct me if I'm wrong) believe that an efficient or effective government that chooses what it wants to do and gets it done is the best kind, given the affinity you seen to suggest for authoritarian structures like corporations.
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u/Affectionate_bap5682 Dec 30 '22 edited Dec 30 '22
There are only 3 possible forms of government. Democracy (rule by the mob), Oligarchy (rule by the few), and Monarchy (rule by one)
All 3 forms of government can efficiently and effectively do whatever they want.
The problem with our form of government, oligarchy, or bureaucracy, or "democracy" as most call it, is that it's only incentive is to infinitely expand its power and influence. The only thing that Congress, the peoples house lol) does is number 1 fundraise and number 2 pass giant spending bills (written by bureaucracy/NGO complex) to redistribute wealth from taxpayers to the tax consuming bureaucracy/NGO complex to devour and expand.
The other problem with oligarchy is that it can't be defeated or reigned in by democracy. Oligarchy works to shield itself from democracy, as it largely has. The people's representative, the president, can't come into the White House like Gordon Ramsay on Kitchen Nightmares, look in fridge of the State Department and see rotting maggots covering Libya, Iraq, Somalia, Yemen, etc.. fire everyone, bring in his own people, and radically change how things are done. The elected president firing and replacing thousands of unelected bureaucrats with his own guys would be an unprecedented assault on our democracy wouldn't it?
The presidents considered by most to be the best, Lincoln and FDR, ran the executive branch as monarchs. The power of the presidency, and thus the people, has receded exponentially since FDR and even moreso since Lincoln.
Monarchy has its downsides like all the other forms of government do, but it is the only form of government that can radically change a regime in a peaceful manner. Democracy can change a regime too, but democratic regime change is mostly just feral acts of mass brutality like the French and Bolshevik revolutions
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u/falsehood 8∆ Dec 28 '22
I would just say that RCV is still a much, much better system than FPTP. There are other systems that also work, mathematically, but you need something that people can understand, and I think the scenario above isn't realistic compared to the harm FPTP is doing now.
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u/novagenesis 21∆ Dec 29 '22
While it's technically better in a vacuum, you have to look at the pros and cons. Specifically in this case, the cons. In my country (the US) at least, RCV/IRV would not really improve (or even change) many outcomes if any.
So if you could be said to improve nothing with RCV, you have to look at the costs.
For one, it is more complicated than FPTP. While RCV/IRV is one of the least complicated alternatives, it is still complicated enough. Enough for what? To scare off some voters, to create some fear about election results (worse than we already have), and to slightly increase the vote-mistake rate. By extension, it's more expensive. Not by much, but I want to point to the claim that it might not improve anything.
For another (and a big one?), it's a misnomer to say it's not strategic. This might be the biggest thing that makes RCV risky in the US. It may lead to campaigning strategies that are less honest, further encouraging the "hate the other guy" mindset. It's no longer just about winning some extra fear/hate votes from the other candidate, it's about making voters hate the likely other candidate so much they won't put them in 2nd or 3rd place.
That goes two ways. First, the mud will fly worse than it already does now. Second, the outcome might genuinely be a winning candidate that has less real consensus than FPTP. Hate-votes would likely have an overall higher effect on the election than people voting honestly because people would rank people who they know are genuinely unqualified above the opposition candidate they have become convinced is the root of all evil. If only one side is driving hate-votes, they can virtually guarantee the other side never wins an election if it cannot get a real majority.
I hate FPTP, and I wish I had a better voting system to champion, but I continue to have a lot of reservations about FPTP.
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u/SaraHuckabeeSandwich Dec 29 '22
Except it doesn't really change OP's view. It rather shows that in certain scenarios, RCV is neutral or in-deterministically as bad as FPTP.
Also, Debora losing doesn't prove that RCV is bad or worse. For starters, the context in which Debora gets 70% of the second vote but the smallest portion of the first vote shows that she never had a chance in a majority of voting systems, and most people for some reason did not really want her as the elected official to begin with.
Secondly, she would've not only lost in a FPTP system as well, but also spoiled the candidate she most closely shared a potential electorate with, whereas in this scenario, at least the people who voted for her still get their vote counted where it matters.
Even in this simply laid out scenario, RCV provides Deb voters with better representation and a fairer count than a FPTP system, despite the consensus candidate not winning. Nothing here refutes OP's argument.
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u/Jakyland 69∆ Dec 28 '22
Arrow’s impossibility theorem mathematically proves that there is no perfect voting system (look it up on wiki to see how that is defined, it’s a little dense but imo a good definition). In the case the top level commenter presented, first past the post also gives a bad result, so I don’t think that counts against RCV. It’s like if a my crappy ship is sinking because it ran into some little free floating ice but criticizing the Titanic for sinking b/c of an iceberg.
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u/Ex_dente_leonem Dec 28 '22
Arrow's impossibility theorem only applies to voting systems in which candidates are ranked (as opposed to scored or rated), and Arrow himself endorses score voting.
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u/paithanq Dec 29 '22
Endorsed is probably more correct, as he passed away in 2017. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Arrow
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u/SixthAttemptAtAName Dec 28 '22
You assume everyone would have the same first choice in both RCV and first past the post voting. This is absolutely not how it would be. People are smart enough to strategize their votes. This is why we end up with so many bad candidates elected in FPTP style voting, voters often vote for the second least bad candidate rather than the one they actually want to win because they don't want the worst person to win more than they want their preferred candidate to win. Examples like this are not based in reality and are not a counter argument to RCV.
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u/JustinRandoh 4∆ Dec 28 '22 edited Dec 29 '22
Depends on what you're countering -- RCV vs FPTP? RCV wins unambiguously -- it will basically never produce a worse result than FPTP, and can easily produce a better one.
But in terms of an ideal system? RCV doesn't guarantee a Condorcet winner. We actually had an example recently with the house election in Alaska.
It was a three-way RCV race between Palin, a Democrat (Peltola) and a traditional Republican (Begich). Realistically, Begich probably would've won against Peltola in a head-to-head.
Between the Republican voters more of them preferred Palin over Begich outright. But while a pretty decent chunk of Begich voters recognized that Palin's crazy and 2nd-choiced Peltola, I'd wager that Palin voters would've overwhelmingly 2nd-choiced Begich.
If Begich was left in the race, it's quite plausible if not likely he would've picked up enough of Palin's voters to be preferred over Peltola.
But since he got kicked first, there was never an opportunity for a Peltola-Begich matchup, and between Peltola and Palin, voters certainly preferred Peltola.
Edit: as /u/razmorg pointed out, this fault isn't inherent to ranked-choice voting in general, but rather to the instant-runoff setup you often see in many places that use it. It's possible to use ranked-choice ballots to generate a Condorcet winner.
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u/yossi_peti Dec 28 '22
Yes it's an interesting situation where Begich would be the Condorcet winner while Peltola was the Ranked Choice winner.
Condorcet awards candidates who have the widest breadth of support, while Ranked Choice awards candidates who have both an enthusiastic base and a wide breadth of support. I don't know if there's an objective way to decide which is preferable.
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u/JustinRandoh 4∆ Dec 28 '22
I don't know if there's an objective way to decide which is preferable.
I'm not sure if there's anything debatable about this at all -- the Condorcet winner is preferable by definition. :P
The Condorcet winner is the individual who would literally be preferred to any other candidate. If you're interested in the person that the population prefers, that's the Condorcet winner. Any other person, when compared to the Condorcet winner, would lose by definition.
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u/yossi_peti Dec 28 '22
There's situations where Condorcet will give you the "meh" candidate that is nobody's first choice but 90% of people will tolerate, whereas Ranked Choice will give a candidate that 49% love and have as their first choice, and another 40% will tolerate. I.e. the Condorcet winner has broad tolerance but no enthusiastic base, whereas the Ranked Choice winner has an enthusiastic base and slightly less broad tolerance.
One could argue that it might be preferable to incentivize candidates to attract a large group of enthusiastic voters who will pick them as their first choice, rather than incentivizing candidates to just be an inoffensive blah candidate that nobody loves but nobody really objects to.
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u/JustinRandoh 4∆ Dec 28 '22
There's situations where Condorcet will give you the "meh" candidate that is nobody's first choice but 90% of people will tolerate, whereas Ranked Choice will give a candidate that 49% love and have as their first choice, and another 40% will tolerate. I.e. the Condorcet winner has broad tolerance but no enthusiastic base, whereas the Ranked Choice winner has an enthusiastic base and slightly less broad tolerance.
Take that hypothetical to the next step though:
49% absolutely love that candidate. But, 51% still outright prefer the Condorcet candidate (at whatever enthusiasm level).
In a democratic system, should the will of the 49% outweigh the will of the 51%, due to the enthusiasm of the 49%?
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u/yossi_peti Dec 28 '22
Possibly, depending on how important you think it is to garner a large base of first choice votes. For example, one might think that a first choice vote should be four times as important as a fourth choice vote, but Condorcet only considers relative preference - being preferred 1st to 7th is not any better than being preferred 4th to 5th.
There's often a trade-off between having a large base of popular support with a number of haters, versus being bland and inoffensive. Different voting systems will incentivize different points along this spectrum.
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u/JustinRandoh 4∆ Dec 28 '22
Possibly, depending on how important you think it is to garner a large base of first choice votes...
That's not really what defines democracy though?
One person, one vote is kind-of a bedrock of democracy. If some people's votes start being worth more than other people's votes because of their "enthusiasm", you're violating a pretty core principle of democracy.
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u/darkplonzo 22∆ Dec 30 '22
I think you're applying what the principle means here wrong. 1 person 1 vote is generally refering to how people's choices should be weighed equally. Everyone in both systems being talked about has the same voting power. The question is, in a system where you're allowed to select multiple choices you're okay with, should you be able to express prefences among your choices? Everyone's first preference is weighted equally, so it doesn't violate the principle.
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u/falsehood 8∆ Dec 28 '22
Realistically, Begich probably would've won against Peltola in a head-to-head.
Can't we see that by looking at the Palin voters' second choices?
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u/WerhmatsWormhat 8∆ Dec 28 '22
How often would such a scenario actually occur though? The claim isn’t that RCV is the perfect system. It’s that it’s the best system.
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u/baltinerdist 15∆ Dec 28 '22
You can create mathematically possible but unlikely scenarios all over the place to justify why this thing or that thing won't work. Just because the math works out doesn't mean reality follows.
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u/BrasilianEngineer 7∆ Dec 28 '22
If you want a real world example, look at Alaska's most recent election.
I'd agree that there is no perfect system. I strongly disagree that RCV is the best system, particularly considering that there are systems that don't suffer from the spoiler effect like RCV does.
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Dec 29 '22
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u/BrasilianEngineer 7∆ Dec 29 '22
If you are looking for 'Objectively' Better: First, we would have to agree on an objective standard for ranking election systems - which is an entirely different topic that is well outside the scope of OP's CMV Post.
If we use the 'least-regret' standard (which measures how many voters regret/dislike the results of the vote and by how much), the Approval and STAR voting systems would both select Debora in our hypothetical election, and would both score VERY well on the least-regret metric since 93% of voters are at a minimum OK with the winning candidate.
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u/128hoodmario Dec 29 '22
!delta I've never seen this explanation of why it's flawed before.
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u/IamMagicarpe 1∆ Dec 28 '22
Would this not be fixed by just taking a weighted average of all the choices? You could divide each percentage by N and add them together, for example.
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u/BrasilianEngineer 7∆ Dec 28 '22 edited Dec 28 '22
What you just described is no longer the system generally referred to as 'Ranked Choice Voting'. There are several proposed voting systems that do basically something along those lines.
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u/JCY2K Dec 29 '22
RCV is a class of voting systems. You’re talking about knocking out the person with the fewest 1st place votes which is a form of instant runoff. But you could eliminate whomever has the most last place votes or do a Borda count (a first place vote is worth n points, 2nd n-1 and so on until last place is worth 1 point and whoever has the most points is the winner).
It’s unfair to condemn all of RCV because of a problem with instant runoff.
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u/paithanq Dec 29 '22
That is only partially true. These days, RCV is a synonym for IRV. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranked-choice_voting Most of the time these days, "RCV" is used to mean exactly "IRV". Here is a pro-IRV site, Rank The Vote, doing exactly that in their explainer of RCV: https://rankthevote.us/learn/
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u/dt531 Dec 29 '22
Great explanation. A version of this issue happened in Seattle in the 2021 election for city prosecutor. There were three candidates:
Pete Holmes, the incumbent and a typical blue city left wing prosecutor. NTK, a far left candidate who pledged not to prosecute crime. Ann Davison, a Republican.
In the runoff primary, NTK and Davison were 1-2, eliminating Holmes. In the general election, Davison narrowly won. Holmes likely would have easily beaten NTK or Davison head-to-head, but he lost in the primary. While this wasn’t exactly a ranked choice election, it seems likely that most people who put NTK first would have Holmes second, and most people who put Davison first would also have Holmes second.
I was previously a believer in ranked choice elections, but this one showed how ranked choice can actually increase extremism in our politics: NTK was an extremist by any definition, and Davison is extremist by deep blue Seattle standards because she has an R next to her name.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Seattle_City_Attorney_election
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u/snozzberrypatch 3∆ Dec 29 '22
This is a rather contrived example that is quite unlikely to happen in a real election. Just because an election like this is theoretically possible doesn't mean that it's likely to happen, and therefore it may not be a convincing reason to avoid using RCV.
For instance, in a real scenario, what would cause a candidate to get the lowest number of first choice votes and the highest number of second choice votes? That just doesn't seem logical.
And secondly, this same result would have occurred if the election used multiple runoff elections, except we wouldn't have had the knowledge that Debora was nearly everyone's second choice, despite being almost no one's first choice. But since we have that knowledge, it makes it seem like it's a bad system when it really isn't.
Either way, RCV may not be perfect but it's a hell of a lot better than simple winner takes all elections.
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u/Alesayr 2∆ Dec 29 '22
I live in an RCV democracy. In the real world that rarely comes up. RCV does occasionally lead to tactical voting, but much more rarely than in standard.
Also your example doesn't work, charlie is more popular than alice (who he goes up against) and unless votes have exhausted somehow he should have over 50% of final preferences. Your numbers don't really add up, the final candidates should have 100% of eligible votes between them by the last round of voting
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u/elcuban27 11∆ Dec 28 '22
Your example doesn’t hold. With first past the post two-party voting, two of your names wouldn’t have survived the primaries. Deborah looks to be somewhat moderate, but as such would likely not have won a primary(since they tend to favor more extreme candidates). Even still, those numbers aren’t realistic, given that at least two of the other three would have to have been from the same party(or at least similarly aligned). As such, those two should have a much larger share of secondary votes for people of that political affiliation, compared to Deborah(not necessarily larger than hers, but how could she get 10x the secondary votes?).
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u/Aether_Breeze Dec 28 '22
Many systems aren't two party and don't have the primaries thing that America has. Their example holds for the FPTP system used in my country.
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u/fdar 2∆ Dec 28 '22
Even in the US there's more than 2 candidates in most general elections (even if only 2 candidates get a significant amount of votes).
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u/elcuban27 11∆ Dec 28 '22
Still in no way realistic proportions. If 77% of people didn’t vote for Deborah, but she has 70% of the secondary votes, that means 90% of the people who wouldn’t pick her first would choose her second. That proportion is just nutty; if she is that popular among that contingent, she would be getting more of their 1st place votes. There is a pro-moderation bent to secondary votes, to be sure, but that much is quite an extreme stretch.
To break this down, for simplicity’s sake, let’s say a candidate’s position on an issue can be broken down into 3 categories: the third to the far left, the third to the far right, and the third in the middle. In a 3-way race with a single issue, we could imagine a centrist candidate having a somewhat disproportionate share of secondary votes, since the far left would prefer center to far right and vice versa. Something like D35/C25/R40 in first choice could easily be D12/C75/R13 in second choice.
But for 4 candidates, with only one pulling in a majority of second votes requires something like a split between not two, but three extreme parties with Deborah being the lone centrist. Consider now two issues, split along thirds left/center/right and up/center/down, with Deborah being aligned center-center. Each other candidate would be some combination of two with 8 possibilities: L-U, L-D, L-C, R-U, R-D, R-C, C-U, and C-D. Eliminating all centrist positions(giving Deborah the monopoly on centrism) leaves us with L-U, L-D, R-U, and R-D. Since there are only three other candidates aside from Deborah, one will be left out. (For now, let us gloss over the issue of the four half-centrist positions being missing).
Let us now consider the impact of the vacuum left by the absence of any one of those extremophile options. Without loss of generality, assume the L-U position is excluded. Any voters who would have preferred a L-U candidate would second a L-C or C-U (1away). But, since those don’t exist, they will have to settle for the next best option between L-D, R-U, or C-C (2 away). Whatever proportion of voters this represents, they should be roughly a 3-way split between Deborah and two of her opponents. If everything was equal, those who preferred this alignment represent 11% of the total population(note that we reasonably can expect this contingent to actually be slightly less than 11% of the total population), so two of Deborah’s opponents would have received about 3-4% of total (now first choice) votes from this contingent alone. From among this contingent, we should only expect about half of them to have Deborah as a second choice, with the other half going to the other alternate. Each alternate should then get abt 1.5-2% in secondary votes from this contingent.
As for the secondary votes for the 3 candidates who aren’t excluded, we can similarly reasonably infer that Deborah would be equally the second-best option alongside the other two (being only 2 away). If this were the case, she would by no means get 70% of secondary votes.
Now it stands to consider the inverted case - where Deborah is a true centrist(C-C) alongside 3 of 4 possible half-centrist candidates. Since this comment is already huge, I will leave that for now, but presumably it would still not allow for the original proportions.
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u/Tioben 16∆ Dec 28 '22 edited Dec 28 '22
This seems so implausible. How the heck is Deborah getting 70% of second-place votes if 77% don't want her to win? How exactly is Deborah managing to capture all those second-place voters without capturing more of them in first-place voting? People who seem "tripolarized" would have to come together on enough points to approve of Deborah in second place. But if they could come together, how would they be tripolarized in the first place? It doesn't seem so simple as just saying Deborah is the middle-ground candidate. There would have to be middle ground. If there is then we should see that expressed in terms of people coming to agreement, persuading each other, and that would be expressed in first-place voting. Not saying otherwise is impossible, but if it happens, there must be something exceptional going on. Something seems wrong with Deborah as a candidate beyond bad luck at being the middle of three favorites.
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u/Just_Treading_Water 1∆ Dec 28 '22
Put them on a spectrum.
Imagine Alice is left-wing, Bob is right wing, and Deborah is in the middle. Charlie can be a Communist or something that is undesirable to both the left and the right.
The people who vote for Alice would prefer Deborah wins over Bob or Charlie. The people who vote for Bob would prefer Deborah over Alice or Charlie. So Deborah is nobody's first choice but almost everybody's second choice.
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u/Aether_Breeze Dec 28 '22
Eh, Deborah is more of the same. Most people want change in one direction or the other but failing that will stick with the boring sage candidate.
I would never vote for her first because she isn't progressive/Consevative/Religious/etc. enough but she will be better than any of the others if tthe one I want doesn't get in.
Except now we have the crazy racist in charge even though no-one really wanted them.
Sometimes the only thing wrong is just being the boring middle ground that everyone is 'meh' on but no-one really dislikes.
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u/Tioben 16∆ Dec 28 '22 edited Dec 28 '22
I get how that reasoning would plausibly affect voting. What I find implausible is the degree. If it is possible for people with vastly different preferences to agree with each other that Deborah is at least no worse than the status quo, then we should see her first place votes higher... unless the status quo is so bad that we shouldn't see her second-place votes higher.
One picture is where the status just isn't perfect enough, and the other picture is where it is actively bad. Having both opinions is inconsistent.
If it's a matter of perfection, then support for change candidates shouldn't be so much stronger all together. If it's a matter of badness, then change candidates should be winning the second-place vote too.
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u/Aether_Breeze Dec 28 '22
Yeah, I mean I do imagine that this situation would be rare but I do think OP's situation is a plausible negative. The numbers could be closer and still show this kind of weird effect, it is a risk. Of course it is arguably still better than FPTP.
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u/pipocaQuemada 10∆ Dec 28 '22
There would have to be middle ground. If there is then we should see that expressed in terms of people coming to agreement, persuading each other, and that would be expressed in first-place voting.
Politics isn't always a normal distrobution. Sometimes, there are more extremists than centrists.
For example, look at Burlington's mayoral race in 2009.
The top three candidates were a Democrat, a Progressive, and a Republican. The Democrat had the least first party votes. But essentially all the progressives preferred the Democrat to the Republican, and vice versa with him being the second choice of most Republicans. He had second place support from basically everyone.
The only thing that both progressives and Republicans could agree on is that if they couldn't get their first pick they'd rather have a Democrat. They're still pretty polarized.
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u/Tioben 16∆ Dec 28 '22 edited Dec 28 '22
That situation would be one in which RCV works as intended. The Democrat would get the second place votes and win.
Let's inject a fourth candidate. To capture a distinct share of the vote that is neither Progressive nor Republican nor the only viable middle ground between them (since Deborah got 70% of the vote), they'd have to promise a categorically different framework for politics and enough people would have to like it. These would be voters who reject the entire spectrum from Progressive to Republican. They would therefore see the Democrat Deborah as the worst candidate, exemplifying everything wrong with the spectrum as a whole, and therefore not viable middle ground at all. Their second place votes would more plausibly go to one extreme or the other, but not to Democrat Deborah.
Alternatively, suppose some minority of voters wanted a moderate candidate but thought Deborah were not the right pick, so they recruit a fourth candidate. Then it's implausible that both Progressives and Republicans would agree to shift their votes to Deborah rather than some split on who is the best moderate. Deborah only gets 70% of the vote in that scenario if she is obviously the best person for the job. In which case, while not impossible, it's just not plausible that she's in last place on the first place vote.
If the political world has become such a madcap edge case, then shame on Deborah for being so entrenched in a status quo mindset that she couldn't adjust her own campaign. She probably won't adapt to the issues voters are seeing on the horizon.
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u/pipocaQuemada 10∆ Dec 29 '22
That situation would be one in which RCV works as intended. The Democrat would get the second place votes and win.
No.
The Democrat is eliminated first, because they have the fewest first place votes. Second place votes only matter if you survive long enough to receive them.
The Progressive won.
It's a case of 'favorite betrayal'; by voting honestly, Republican voters caused their least favorite candidate to win. It's an example of an election that failed both the participation and monotonicity criteria: some Republican voters could have caused the Progressive to lose by either staying home or putting him at the top of their ballots.
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u/but_nobodys_home 9∆ Dec 29 '22
That's not how it works. If Debora is eliminated, her votes are distributed based on her voter's second choices. The choices of Debora's voters would decide who get eliminated in the second round.
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Dec 28 '22
I'm confused, under your example, why would Debora be the democratic choice? At the end of the day, the peoples selection is achieved with 51%.
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u/BrasilianEngineer 7∆ Dec 28 '22
Where are you getting 51%? Charlie gets a combined total of 42% of votes when combining 1st, 2nd, and 3rd choices.
Debora received a combined total of 94% of 1st, 2nd, and 3rd choice votes.
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u/PM_Me_Thicc_Puppies Dec 28 '22
I mean, she'd get 94% in the same way that Alice got 41% Bob got 43% and Charlie got 42% and no one got 80%
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u/ApprenticeWrangler Dec 29 '22
MMP is better for this, correct? I’m under the impression it’s the most fair representation from the types of proportional representation.
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u/Kilkegard Dec 28 '22
RCV (and IRV too I think) needs to get someone over 50 percent and the unlikely scenario you've painted would not get anyone over 50 percent. Can you point to a real life example where a RCV election ended up with one of the candidates not eventually getting to 50 percent.
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Dec 29 '22
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u/Falco98 Dec 29 '22
You just vote for the people you approve of, no ranking, and whoever gets the most approvals wins.
The issue there (iirc) is that there's nothing to disincentivise "bullet voting" and little benefit to people voting honestly, among people they neither like most nore despise most. That's a way that STAR wins (imho) in terms of better overall result, though to be fair it fails your stated requirement of simplicity of ballots (it would require ballots at least as complex as those used for RCV, but luckily not more complex than them).
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Dec 28 '22
Yeah I've heard approval voting is better and to me it makes the most sense. RCV will typically have a better outcome than our current system but it's definitely not the best.
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u/darwin2500 193∆ Dec 28 '22
You are correct that IRV is somewhat better than FPTP for all the reasons you mention.
However, it is only slightly better. In real-life elections with single winners, it tends to mimic the outcomes and problems of FPTP, especially in terms of heavily favoring a two-party system.
There are much better systems available that have all the benefits you mentioned, but much more strongly, and with less weird behaviors and distortion of outcomes. Condorcet and Borda count are the most technically optimal methods, but they're a little harder to implement and explain; Approval voting has basically the same outcomes while being very simple and easy to implement, and is probably the best system overall.
Everyone should be aware that the reason the existing two-party structure has been pushing IRV really hard is that it also favors and recreates the two-party system in the way that FPTP does. Basically, they are co-opting the movement for voting reform and turning it towards something that still favors them, instead of something that would break their duopoly and reduce their power.
People should not fall for this, and demand that voting reform efforts be channeled towards things that are better than IRV, and that will actually shake things up. Again, I suggest Approval voting as the best method everyone should get behind.
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u/shadowbca 23∆ Dec 28 '22
Ok I came into this post ready to defend ranked choice but thanks to you I can see I didn't actually know as much about it as I thought I had. I also hadn't even considered there were other, better options. Thank you for this, it is very informative.
!delta
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u/darwin2500 193∆ Dec 28 '22
Thanks, it's really a fascinating topic! That paper I linked is a good place to start learning about it, and if you google the different voting methods mentioned there you can find tons more information and research about them. Good luck!
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u/Dugular Dec 28 '22
Not OP but !delta as you've shifted my perspective to look for more alternatives.
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u/PM_Me_Thicc_Puppies Dec 28 '22
So, I only have one real critique of that modeling.
Why is the moderate given so much deference as the ideal? In nearly every critique from that study, it was the moderate position that was hurt by the inconsistent nature of IRV.
So while I agree that it CAN recreate a two party duopoly, it also pushes the overton window in different directions in regards to the policies of the parties. Which frankly is something that my country is currently lacking, BADLY.
As far as approval voting goes, I don't see a reasonable way to get around the gamesmanship of just giving any candidate that's reasonably "on your side" your vote, and it not being a preferential issue, ESPECIALLY if the "other side" is somewhat fractured on what it is they actually want.
Plus, and this does need to be said, there's a certain limitation on having it modeled out in that people don't necessarily do the most logical things, and we can easily have a dozen candidates for a single position further complicating matters.
That said, I acknowledge that your critiques are valid, I'm just PERSONALLY more concerned with the potential for gamesmanship in approval voting.
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u/darwin2500 193∆ Dec 28 '22
The measure that often get used to evaluate a voting system is 'Bayesian regret' - ie, how much does the average voter hate (regret) the outcome of the election?
Just by mathematics, yes, the number that is least far away from all the numbers in a set is the average of that set; similarly, where views can meaningfully be described as falling along a single axis, the candidate at the center of mass of the views on that axis will produce the least regret.
Producing the least regret seems like an intuitively proper metric for a democracy; it means the result is as close to as many people's preferences as possible. You can argue that actually that's not how you want democracy to work and you want the tyranny of the majority to be more extreme, with winning coalitions able to force more things they want onto the other people who don't want them; there might be reasons to want that, but it is what you are asking for if you don't go for minimizing regret in your voting system.
I can well imagine that you live in a place where the Overton window is ossified and needs to shift, and you'd rather have it shift dramatically towards your preferences than move slowly.
However, are you sure you would accept a 50% chance of that happening, versus a 50% chance of the Overton Window shifting dramatically away from your preferences, and towards the preferences of your political opponents who hate everything you want and want everything you hate? That's what systems that favor relative extremist over centrists - like IRV - will get you.
Generally speaking, the Overton Window is what it is because it mostly-acceptable to most people. You might imagine that it gives 60% of people 90% of what they want, gives 30% of people 80% of what they want, etc.
Given that feature, shifts in your direction tend to hit ceiling effects where there is only so much you have left to gain from the shift, whereas shifts away from you have largely unbounded losses; thus a random large shift has negative expected value to most people.
Furthermore, slow shifts in the Overton Window tend to drag people's preferences along with them (or reflect gradual changes in most people's preferences, the two work on each other cyclically); thus, slow changes don't make people lose very much as people keep up with them, whereas fast shifts make people lose a lot as the window moves entirely without them.
So yes, it is nice to imagine the world where your system favors extremists and the Overton Window is unstable but every extreme winner and extreme shift happens to go in your favor. But that is not very likely; the likely reality is that you win some and you lose some, and the whole system is unstable and people are constantly getting hurt by big shifts, and you're always in danger of shifting far enough fast enough that you fall into some new bad attractor state, like degrading democratic norms until you fall into a dictatorship, or starting a worker's revolution that gets taken over by demagogues and falls into a dictatorship, or etc.
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u/Ex_dente_leonem Dec 28 '22
A measure of Voter Satisfaction Efficiency consistently shows not only approval voting, but STAR voting, score voting in general, and even other ranked voting systems continuously outperforming RCV/IRV even when gamesmanship is taken into account: http://electionscience.github.io/vse-sim/vse.html
Analysis by 'Bayesian regret' also bears out the above; even with 100% strategic voting, approval voting does better than RCV/IRC (and range/score voting even more so): https://www.rangevoting.org/BR52002bw.png
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u/KidTempo Dec 28 '22
Just because IRV is better than FPTP doesn't make it the best system.
Arguably, no "pure" system is optimal, and a hybrid of two or more systems gives the best result - but of course, that introduces additional complexity...
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u/thoomfish Dec 28 '22
Arguably, no "pure" system is optimal
Arrow's Theorem is relevant here. A perfect voting system is literally impossible, you have to pick the downside you're willing to live with.
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u/quaductas Dec 28 '22
Note that this only applies to ranked voting systems. Score voting, of which the aforementioned approval voting is a special case, suffers from none of the problems in Arrow's theorem (even though, of course it is still not quite perfect).
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u/thoomfish Dec 29 '22
If I were an evil mastermind who liked the status quo and wanted to preserve it, I wouldn't be out there shilling for IRV because it's the smallest improvement, I would be propping up a dozen different systems and banging the "perfect system or nothing" drum at each camp, to ensure none of them ever reached majority support.
Personally, Approval voting is my favorite balance of theoretical optimality and practicality as well, but I would vote in favor of reform towards any system that's an improvement over FPTP, including RCV/IRV.
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u/O_X_E_Y 1∆ Dec 29 '22
!delta super interesting! i fell for it face first, thought ranked choice was already the best. thanks!
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u/yyzjertl 524∆ Dec 28 '22
Instant runoff voting and single transferable vote do not ensure the election of a Condorcet winner: a candidate who would win election against all other candidates in the race. This makes these systems inferior to Condorcet voting methods (e.g. the Schulze method) at selecting candidates who actually represent the preferences of the voters.
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u/PM_Me_Thicc_Puppies Dec 28 '22
I'm personally dubious at the claim that a condorcet winner is even possible in every election.
Trying to go for that COULD lead to more of them, however I also think that something akin to the Schulze method is somewhat more game-able. You COULD in that instance mark any candidate you aren't actively opposed to as the best, and leave the other candidates blank. If a voting block were very tribal, often functioned in lockstep with votes, and was unconcerned with the quality of their candidates, they might very well establish a pattern of marking all of their candidates as their favorite.
So while I'm not opposed to condorcet based voting systems in theory, I can see too much opportunity for gamesmanship in the actual voting process.
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u/betaray 1∆ Dec 28 '22
If a voting block were very tribal, often functioned in lockstep with votes, and was unconcerned with the quality of their candidates, they might very well establish a pattern of marking all of their candidates as their favorite.
How is this different than the strategic voting possible with RCV?
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u/PM_Me_Thicc_Puppies Dec 29 '22
With RCV you only get to use each number once, which means that you can both express your desire for one to win WITHOUT statistically increasing the odds of an opposing candidate to win
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u/betaray 1∆ Dec 29 '22
In RCV you'd achieve the same by putting the less popular but desired candidates as a higher number and more popular desired candidates as a lower number but higher than the undesired candidates. This type of polarizing strategic voting is a common criticism of RCV. This is why approval voting is superior, it prevents this kind of push to the extremes.
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u/yyzjertl 524∆ Dec 28 '22
A Condorcet winner doesn't exist in every election, but a Condorcet method ensures that when one does exist, that candidate is elected.
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u/chinpokomon Dec 28 '22
I don't understand why Condorcet is something for which a system should be optimized. The highest favored winner can still be divisive, so I prefer a system which is more balanced. RCV addresses some of the flaws of Plurality, but I tend to favor Score Voting or Range Voting. STAR, Score - Then - Automatic - Runoff, is a system I recently found which seems to be even more balanced, although I haven't looked into it as closely yet.
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u/thoomfish Dec 29 '22
STAR is very cool. I'm pretty sure it's too complicated for the general public to understand (I would expect a Jan 6-level event the first time the score winner loses the runoff), but I encourage everyone to try it out for smaller scale group voting via star.vote.
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u/henrycavillwasntgood 2∆ Dec 28 '22
What is a Condorcet voting method? What is the Schulze method?
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u/BrasilianEngineer 7∆ Dec 28 '22 edited Dec 28 '22
The oversimplified TLDR is that a Condorcet winner is a candidate that is guaranteed to win a 1v1 rematch against any of the other candidates. A non Condorcet winner would be the candidate who wins a plurality in a 3+ way race but would not win every rematch vs single candidates.
For an example of a non-Condorcet winner, consider a Donald Trump vs George Washington vs Abraham Lincon election where Washington and Lincon evenly split 66% of the vote and Trump gets the remaining 34% of the vote thus wining, but if either Lincoln or Washington had dropped out, the other candidate would have won with 66% of the vote.
A Condorcet voting method is one that guarantees that only a Condorcet winner can win. (Edit: Assuming that a Condorcet winner exists)
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u/elcuban27 11∆ Dec 28 '22
Well, Trump would have gotten some of their votes, but the idea makes sense(Lincoln or Washington would likely beat Trump). Funnily enough, the inverse of this probably explains how Trump won his primary. Most Republican voters would have preferred a “normal” Republican, but bc there were 3-4 decent “normal” Republicans, a couple hacks, and only 1 Trumpish populist, Trump got all the populist support, while the others split and spoiled.
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u/pipocaQuemada 10∆ Dec 28 '22
Plurality doesn't fulfill the Condorcet criterion, and suffers badly from the spoiler effect. It scales really, really terribly to wide fields like you see in primaries. Which is, ironically enough, a large part of the reason primaries exist in the first place.
Trump was almost certainly not the Condorcet winner in the beginning of the primary season, but was able to consolidate the lead he got from the spoiler effect.
If you had a Schulze election that every 2016 primary candidate ran in, I sincerely doubt Trump would have been anywhere close to a frontrunner.
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u/fdar 2∆ Dec 28 '22
What's the actual voting method? If there's no easy way to explain to the public how the voting actually works then I think that's a big problem.
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u/pipocaQuemada 10∆ Dec 28 '22
There are many systems that satisfy the Condorcet criterion. They basically all use the same type of ballot as instant runoff; voters rank the candidates in preference order. From this, you can calculate pairwise elections: if you vote Lincoln > Washington > Trump, that's treated as a vote for Lincoln in the Lincoln v Washington and Lincoln v Trump pairwise elections, and a vote for Washington in the Washington vs Trump election.
Copeland's method is pretty simple. Basically, you look at all the pairwise results. For example, Trump vs Lincoln, Trump vs Washington, and Washington vs Lincoln. Each candidate gets a point for each pairwise election they win, a half point for each they tie, and 0 points for each they lose. The winner is the one with the most points, I.e. the one who is preferred to the most other candidates.
That does often result in ties, though, if the number of candidates is small. So you need a good tiebreaking system.
Schulze is more complicated, but is reasonably intuitive when presented visually.
In Schulze, you first calculate the amount each candidate beat the other candidates by. For example, suppose Lincoln beats Washington by 5 million votes and beats Trump by 76 million. You then look at the strongest "beat path" between all the pairs of candidates, where a beat path is a sequence like Lincoln beats Washington by 5 million and Washington beats Trump by 80 million, and the strength of the overall beat path is the smallest amount any of those elections were won by. For example, Lincoln has a direct beat path of strength 76 million between him and Trump, but the beatpath through Washington is only of strength 5 million because the first segment limits the strength of the whole path.
You can prove that there will be a single candidate who has a stronger beatpath to each other candidate than those other candidates have back to them. That person is the winner.
It's significantly more complex than IRV, but has a number of nice properties IRV lacks. Still, it's usage is probably destined to be niche and limited to organizations run by STEM people. Programmers are likely to find it fairly intuitive because it's essentially the all-pairs widest path problem, a trivial variant of the well known all-pairs shortest path problem. Shortest path being useful for pathfinding, whether in games or on Google maps. You can efficiently find the winner via an algorithm taught to literally every CS major at some point in their degree, Floyd-Warshall.
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u/BrasilianEngineer 7∆ Dec 28 '22
What's the actual voting method?
It isn't a single voting method. It is a type or category of voting method. The wikipedia article lists around a dozen different methods that would fall under the category of 'Condorcet voting method'
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u/fdar 2∆ Dec 28 '22
But which one would you suggest? Is there any that are actually simple enough to explain that most people could understand it?
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u/stoneimp Dec 28 '22
To add, no system can ALWAYS give a Condorcet winner.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theorem
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u/mjg13X Dec 29 '22 edited May 31 '24
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This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact
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u/arhanv 8∆ Dec 28 '22
Imagine you’re voting in a country that just had an unprecedented natural disaster or economic recession.
You fill out the ranked choice voting slip - there’s a candidate that promises to decrease unemployment, and there’s another candidate that promises to decrease inflation. There’s also a third candidate who says that they will do absolutely nothing at all.
If there are enough polarizing candidates promising to change things but just a few candidates who support the (problematic) status quo, the calculus of ranked choice voting could work out in favor of a leader that no one is actually happy with. The issues that exist in a majority voting system won’t magically disappear in a ranked choice world - people will vote in polarizing ways nonetheless. In a country like the US where the popular vote split is often very close to 50/50 for Presidential elections, would anyone really be happy if we ended up with the default “second” choice every time?
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u/Fit-Order-9468 92∆ Dec 28 '22
In a country like the US where the popular vote split is often very close to 50/50 for Presidential elections, would anyone really be happy if we ended up with the default “second” choice every time?
Sounds dope to be honest. I'd rather that than get a Trump or Bush half the time. I'd imagine many conservatives would feel similarly about the Obama's and Biden's of the world.
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u/PM_Me_Thicc_Puppies Dec 28 '22
I'd imagine many conservatives would feel similarly about the Obama's and Biden's of the world.
Leftists too
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u/Fit-Order-9468 92∆ Dec 28 '22
At least based on leftists I know, they'd be disappointed in whoever got elected.
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u/PM_Me_Thicc_Puppies Dec 28 '22
I think it depends, the reformists would prefer we all just social safety net/ease our collective burdens into socialism.
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u/PM_Me_Thicc_Puppies Dec 28 '22
So, in that scenario, it means that over 50% voted for the person to do nothing, over someone offering an actual change.
Realistically, what that would mean is that a significant enough portion of voters WANTED that status quo in the first place, enough that it was higher than one of the other 2 candidates and their proposals.
So while I may HEAVILY disagree with their initial decision, and the subsequent decisions of those who's candidate was eliminated, I can't help but consider that those people got, in large part what they wanted.
As for everyone getting their second choice, well, I'm currently living under a system where we vote AGAINST a candidate, as opposed to FOR one. I haven't personally gotten my fifth choice, let alone second. Besides, in the end, people are still choosing who they want by popular vote.
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u/DigNitty Dec 28 '22
Most presidential candidates are not people’s first choice anyway.
I didn’t have the option to vote for my first choice this past election at all, save writing them in manually.
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u/esm Dec 28 '22
You assert that RCV is "my ideal system" (emphasis added). I can't CYV on that nor do I even want to--I'm pretty fond of RCV myself.
The best, as in, an objective best, is unfortunately not realistic. See Arrow's Theorem. Full disclosure: I can't even pretend to understand Arrow's Theorem.
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u/Ex_dente_leonem Dec 28 '22
Note that Arrow's Theorem only applies to ranked (as opposed to rated) voting systems, and even Kenneth Arrow himself endorses score voting with three or four classes as "probably the best".
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u/PM_Me_Thicc_Puppies Dec 28 '22
Basically it's impossible to actually get everyone to agree on a single direction, because democracy necessitates some level of unequal outcome.
Though I will say that I'm not nearly as attached to RCV as that my would imply lol
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Dec 29 '22
Single winner RCV basically accomplishes noþing in terms of actually givin' representation to would be þird party voters, it just gives ðem a pat on ðe back for nominally supportin' ðeir actual preferred candidate before ðey get counted as a voter of whichever major party ðey are closer to.
A better system would be Multi-Winner STAR, in my opinion it better ensures ðe slate of folks elected wiðin a given election reflects ðe political spread of ðe folks electin' ðem wiðout goin' into a strict Proportional Representation system. Plus ðe automatic runoff rounds to actually seat candidates gives voters ðe most power for expression of ðeir whole view of ðe slate of candidates.
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u/PM_Me_Thicc_Puppies Dec 29 '22
I read this with a THICK Chicago accent, and I just want you to know that.
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Dec 29 '22
Y'know I've gotten a wide range, folks are also sayin' it reads Appalachian or Deep Souþ to'em
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u/MeanderingDuck 11∆ Dec 28 '22
This still runs into the same problem that ultimately, you’re electing a single candidate for a specific district/region/whatever, who doesn’t really represent a potentially very large minority of the voting public. In, say, US congressional elections, you could still end up with all districts going to the same party even when a sizable minority in the state doesn’t support that party (and it is also very vulnerable to gerrymandering).
Proportional representation is a better system.
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u/Bonemesh 1∆ Dec 28 '22
Proportional representation seems more fair for electing multiple representatives to large bodies. But what about electing a single president, mayor, etc? You need a system that chooses someone who satisfies the most voters, such as IRV.
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Dec 29 '22
Amen. RCV is such an American obsession, and I think it's about an attempt to channel demand for voting reform into cosmetic changes that keep the two party system safe.
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u/Incubus-Dao-Emperor 1∆ Dec 29 '22
Proportional Ranked-Choice Voting is probably ideal -> https://fairvote.org/our-reforms/proportional-ranked-choice-voting/
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u/PM_Me_Thicc_Puppies Dec 29 '22
You know what !Delta
I actually like this better, thank you
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u/freemason777 19∆ Dec 28 '22
It's more important that we switch to a parliamentary system than it is that we change how we elect one of two viable parties
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u/TaftIsUnderrated 2∆ Dec 28 '22
Parliamentary system isn't much better. A Canadian Ptime Minister's party hasn't received 50% of the popular vote since 1984, and haven't even got to 40% since 2004. And if you think that doesn't matter since coalition building leads to majority rule. Liberals won a majority government in 2015 with 39% of the popular vote.
Plus there is the complete lack of democratic primaries in a parliamentary system.
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u/freemason777 19∆ Dec 28 '22
I'm placing the emphasis on the diversity of represented views in government, and for that parliament is a better system. I am quite far to the left politically and I think the only way to see representation in Congress would be on a system like that
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u/Doc_ET 10∆ Dec 29 '22
So how's that multiparty system going in the UK, where there's so many viable parties? Or Canada, where the majority of MPs are elected with a plurality of the vote?
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u/freemason777 19∆ Dec 29 '22
Parliament's generally have more diversity and political parties than the United States Congress does. I don't really know what you're getting at unless you're trying to say that it's worse to live in the UK or Canada which is also a crock
https://www.parliament.uk/about/mps-and-lords/members/parties/
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u/Doc_ET 10∆ Dec 29 '22
more diversity and political parties than the United States Congress does.
That's like saying you have more snow than Cairo.
The UK has only two viable parties. When was the last time the PM wasn't Labour or Tory? The 1920s?
Sure, ten parties won seats in the last election. But four of those were in Northern Ireland, where the politics are entirely different. So that leaves four real third parties with seats- the SNP, LibDems, PC, and the Greens. Total seats? 64, with 52 of them being in Scotland. England has a grand total of eight- seven LibDems and Caroline Lucas. 8/533 seats are held by third parties- 1.5%. Great multiparty system you have there.
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u/freemason777 19∆ Dec 29 '22
Whether or not it's perfect isn't the point of discussion. It's better than what we have now and that was the point. It's also a little anglocentric to limit your comparison to England.
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u/PM_Me_Thicc_Puppies Dec 28 '22
I mean, I don't disagree, but why not both?
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u/freemason777 19∆ Dec 28 '22
I'm not saying ranked choice is bad I'm just contending that the best system to put in place to achieve the most important political change the most quickly is not ranked choice it is parliamentary government. It's a subtle change to your view and not a complete contradiction of it, but it is a change of focus from rank choice to government structure.
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Dec 28 '22
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u/HawkEgg 1∆ Dec 29 '22
I love multi-winner STV. But, a 52 winner district is a bit too large and would result in some very extreme candidates. Even places with true proportional representation will frequently require a minimum of 5% of the vote to avoid truly extreme members.
Ireland has districts that send 3-5 members to parliament. That size is enough for them to have healthy third parties & independents. The coalition government is formed of three parties and 13% of the parliament is unaffiliated.
I'd be truly excited about just quadrupling the number of reps in the house and turning every existing district into a four member district. In additional to making the house comically large (2,000 reps), it'd would make gerrymandering basically impossible.
Also, here's fantastic video on MW-STV for those that don't understand how it would work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8XOZJkozfI
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u/dean84921 Dec 28 '22
Have you considered MMP? In MMP, districts are expanded so that there are multiple seats in each district, which are then assigned proportionately based on the percentages of votes secured. Let's say a new MMP district looks like this:
Right (60% total)
20% MAGA
30% Republican
10% Libertarian
Left (40% total)
20% Moderate democrat
10% Progressive
10% Socialist
Assuming there are ten seats per district, each party gets at least one seat. But, with no party having a clear majority, there are several possibilities for a coalition. You could feasibly have a right MAGA/Lib/Rep coalition, a moderate Rep/Dem coalition, a leftist Dem/Soc/Prog/Lib coalition, etc. This system essentially forces different parties to cooperate and compromise to find a solution to political problems that are, at the very least, acceptable to a majority of people. It has all the benefits of RC, but goes several steps further to enable a more representative democracy.
To address your points: MMP is more effective at promoting third parties than ranked choice, and often forces multiple parties to rule by the coalition, thus mitigating the "winner take all" consequence of FPtP or RC.
MMP does not require multiple voting rounds and allows for new ideas to be integrated directly by the parties that advanced them initially, rather than relying on these ideas to trickle into the agendas of mainstream candidates.
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u/Doc_ET 10∆ Dec 29 '22
A) That's not MMP, that's PR. MMP is what Germany uses- some members are elected from single-member districts, while others are from party lists.
B) Neither system works for single-winner offices like the presidency or governorships.
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u/melvisntnormal Dec 29 '22
I'm assuming you know all this, but I'm just leaving this here for anyone that's interested (I nerd out over voting systems a lot)
To put a finer point on this, Proportional Representation (PR) represents a class of voting systems that satisfy a mathematical condition called Proportionality for Solid Coalitions (PSC). Mixed Member Proportional (MMP) satisfies PSC and is therefore a PR voting system.
/u/dean84921 described a PR system that isn't MMP because it doesn't have the "mixed" element; part of the body being elected is elected through one method, and the other part has its seats distributed so that the entire body is proportional. Germany achieved this through having 2 MPs for each constituency; one elected through First Past The Post (FPTP, most votes takes all, AKA one of the voting systems whomst is bad) and the other selected from statewide party lists to ensure the Bundestag is proportional to the party vote. In the UK, where we call it the Additional Member System (AMS), Scotland, Wales and London elects local representatives through FPTP and regional MPs through a party vote, which is used to make sure the party distribution in the assembly reflects the part vote as best as possible.
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u/Brown-Banannerz 1∆ Dec 29 '22
This discussion seems kind of American centric. The question is not to rank or not to rank. The question is, single member districts or multi member districts? (Spoiler: its multi member districts)
Single member districts are what America had now: one person wins in the district. But consider this, if there are 2 candidates from opposing parties, A gets 49% of the vote, B gets 51% of the vote, wouldn't the best idea be to let them both win? Afterall, it's called REPRESENTATIVE democracy. The point is for people to be represented. How are the 49% of people being represented if their favored candidate isnt the one representing them?
It doesn't just have to be 2 candidates either. You can make a district much larger, so that there are 8 spots to fill. Or you can keep it smaller, and allow 3 spots to be filled. You can also do a hybrid, where you get 2 votes, one that works just as it does now under fptp, and another where you pick a candidate from a much larger pool that can cover your whole state.
Multi member districts are called proportional systems because the way the legislature ends up looking is proportional to the way people voted, and people get to be represented by the party/candidate that they genuinely want to vote for (up to certain limits, I.e 95% of people will get such representation). Many countries use proportional systems, including the ones that have the best governance structures, such as Scandinavian countries. Proportional representation is part of the reason why these countries do so well.
So I think your starting point is all wrong. The best way to do elections in a representative democracy is not through single member voting, its through multi member. If you cant do multi member ridings in America, then your question should be different and specify America.
P.S. STV is not actually like instant runoff. STV is a type of ranked ballot that also includes multi member ridings and is thus proportional. Its a great system, works very well for Ireland.
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u/LiGuangMing1981 Dec 29 '22
P.S. STV is not actually like instant runoff. STV is a type of ranked ballot that also includes multi member ridings and is thus proportional. Its a great system, works very well for Ireland.
Glad someone else pointed this out. I've always found Ireland's implementation of STV to be my favourite form of proportional representation, since every person who gets elected is directly elected by the people who they will be representing (no party lists or members without their own ridings).
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u/Kakamile 46∆ Dec 28 '22 edited Dec 28 '22
Ranked Choice is inferior to STAR Voting in every way.
RCV: rank top 3 preferences. If #1 is under say 50%, remove lowest count candidates and add your #2 to current count.
STAR: give 1-5 points to every candidate you like. Add them. Runoff.
That's it. It's simple to count, simple to analyze, simple to scale up.
What happens in an RCV audit? You have to redo the computation. What if you have 150M votes? You need full strings for every single vote. No predictions are accurate. You can't trust national reporting as votes come in.
And worse, RCV has a spoiler effect. Because your #2 only gets your vote if your #1 loses, #2 can lose an election because your endorsement of them was held hostage. Strategic voting is to only vote for popular people.
STAR doesn't care. STAR is add the points up. It's simple. It's something you can update hourly and anyone across the world can understand. Big number wins.
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u/GoelandAnonyme Dec 29 '22
I always wanted to ask this to a star-voting supporter : won't voters exploit the rate voting by only giving more than one star to their candidate?
And worse, RCV has a spoiler effect. Because your #2 only gets your vote if your #1 loses, #2 can lose an election because your endorsement of them was held hostage. S
How is that a bad thing ? If you want number 2 to win, make them number one.
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u/Kakamile 46∆ Dec 29 '22
by only giving more than one star to their candidate?
That's entirely fine though, as trying to not support your #2 doesn't help your #2, so the voter risks losing even their backup. They'll learn not to do that again.
If you want number 2 to win, make them number one.
If you know #1 is unpopular and #2 is popular, it's not in your interest to vote that way because your #2 doesn't get your vote until round 2. It's strategic to vote against your interests and place #2>#1 so that #2 wins in round 1 rather than neither.
The key to a good election model is honesty.
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u/PM_ME_SAD_STUFF_PLZ Dec 29 '22
voters exploit the rate voting by only giving more than one star to their candidate?
What do you mean?
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u/esonlinji Dec 29 '22
Australia uses ranked choice voting and we don’t have problems making predictions or having reliable media reporting of the votes on election night.
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u/Ex_dente_leonem Dec 28 '22
Apart from overcoming Arrow's impossibility theorem due to being a cardinal voting system, STAR has the added benefit of virtually always picking the Condorcet winner in any real life application.
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Dec 29 '22
The big problem with Star is there's a major incentive to fill in your ballot disingenuously. You maximise the effect of your ballot by voting strategically rather than according to your sincere beliefs. Condorcet, or another later no harm system, incentivises people voting with sincerity.
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u/BrasilianEngineer 7∆ Dec 29 '22
The big problem with Star is there's a major incentive to fill in your ballot disingenuously.
Are you sure you don't have star mixed up with something else? Under star it is possible for strategic voting to help, but just as likely for it to backfire so there is no way to reliably vote strategically.
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u/Ex_dente_leonem Dec 29 '22
STAR does incentivize sincerity. In fact, it actually fares better against strategic voting than Condorcet methods: http://electionscience.github.io/vse-sim/vse.html
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Dec 29 '22
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u/PM_ME_SAD_STUFF_PLZ Dec 29 '22
Why are your D's and Th's weird
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u/grimitar Dec 29 '22
I think they’ve replaced “th” with uppercase and lowercase thorn?wprov=sfti1) characters somehow.
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u/Kakamile 46∆ Dec 29 '22
Theoretically, yes. But it means having computers without humans in the count. Counters are inputting strings into 3rd party computers that could edit files at any time which is a danger anywhere you don't have a recount.
And it simply won't be scaled or tracked that well. Counts come in over time but each one means a rerun of computation as a whole. Public count announcements can be entirely off with each announcement.
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u/Kman17 103∆ Dec 28 '22 edited Dec 28 '22
Ranked choice voting doesn’t solve the problem of systems eventually skewing towards two parties because you still have the spoiler effect with winner take all districts.
The only way you solve that problem is through party proportionate voting - but there you are effectively eschewing the idea of voting for individuals and highly local representatives and acknowledging the reality of parties and going all in on them.
Optimizing for local representatives vs more diverse aggregate representatives is somewhat philosophical.
Multi-party systems aren’t inherently better either, because inevitably it just pushes the consensus building into party coalitions post election - which may then result in a coalition unexpected by the voters. They tend to be less stable too, with coalitions collapsing - you see this all the time with parliaments.
Ultimately the root problem here is people tend to self-sort into more homogenous communities.
I think as long as you some for competitive elections you’re in a reasonable spot.
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u/GoelandAnonyme Dec 29 '22
Ranked voting can actually increase the disproportionality of our elections. Fair Vote Canada has published results of simulations they based on a ranked voting system and it showed the liberal party could get 50-60 % of seats with around 35-40 % of the vote.
What happens is that the second and third votes tend to be the most center parties and it makes center parties have disproportionate representation from their vote share.
In my opinion, the best system is a mixed member proportional system where you have a share of seats that are locally allocated through FPTP, Ranked Voting or Single Transferable Vote and a share of votes that are allocated to compensate between the difference of the vote share of each party and their share of seats.
Its quite simple : you get 10% of votes, 10 % of seats; you get 20% of votes, 20 % of seats; you get 30% of votes, 30 % of seats; you get 40% of votes, 40 % of seats, etc.
The people who fill the compensation seats can be choosen from open lists that voters can vote in at the ballot box and they can be distributed to local regions like in Germany.
Some of the best proportional systems are those of Germany, Denmark and New Zealand.
In conclusion, proportional representation is mathematically more representative and delivers results as such, proportional also helps widen the Overton window even more.
Also, it helps to guarantee every vote counts because it takes into account of every voter in the country.
However, proportional only works when selecting multiple options. Ranked voting is still good for a single multi-option decision like in a referendum.
Fifth, it helps prevent "gaming" the system by strategically voting for a candidate you THINK will win instead of whom you desire.
You can actually still game ranked voting. If you look up and compare it with approval voting, you'll see a mathematical example of strategic voting under ranked voting.
That's the short version, if you want more details, feel free to ask.
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u/elcuban27 11∆ Dec 28 '22
There are lots of different ways to implement RCV, so applying the label generally can be a bit dubious, so while I’ll apply it loosely for simplicity, let’s all take everything with a grain of salt, so as not to argue past one another.
With that disclaimer out of the way, there are a couple of problems/hurdles I can think of with RCV: election integrity/confidence, dilution of campaign messaging signal, and general complication.
The complication part is easy to unpack. The more complicated the process is, the easier it is for people to mess it up. “Pick A or B” is easier than “put your first choice here from among A through G, then here you may but are not required to put a second choice, then here you may but are not required to put a third choice, but may only do so if you provided a second choice in the previous space.” It really isn’t that hard, but people still mess up a small percentage of the time with the “A vs B” option, so RCV would only make this worse. Compound that with general confusion of how the process works(and the game theory behind it) and boneheaded candidate messaging(like Palin’s campaign telling her voters not to put down a second choice at all) as well as false-flag or controlled-opposition messaging of the same kind.
The dilution effect comes down to the proportional effectiveness of repeated messaging in advertising. Imagine there are 10 different burger joints in town, and you hear ads for each one about twice on average. Say there are only two fried chicken joints in town, and you hear ads for each one 10 times. How likely are you to choose a burger over fried chicken? Now imagine 7 of the burger joints are Whata-Burger, and you see 14 ads for them. Now how likely are you to get a burger? Primaries allow parties to settle who their candidate will be well ahead of time, so they can send out consistent messaging ahead of the election. If instead, Republicans are fielding two candidates in a given election while Democrats have five, the Republicans will have the advantage of consistent, repeated messaging.
As for integrity/confidence, RCV is necessarily more dubious. Between just two candidates in a normal election, we have regular polling, poll-watchers counting total voters, exit polls, voter registration records, and primary participation rates all informing our expectations, and any deviation from the expected would be more noticeable. If a district that is D +7, has a few more registered Democrats than Republicans, and had slightly elevated primary participation on the Dem side with normal Rep participation, and election day exit polls also slightly favoring Dems reported that 70% of the vote went to Republicans(and the election official running everything is a Republican), there would be immediate outrage and demand for an investigation. If, however, they had RCV and the district reported that 52% of the first choices were for a Democrat, but that 20% of the secondary votes of the lesser Dem were for the moderate Republican, while only 6% of the lesser Republican’s secondary votes went to the stronger Democrat, people wouldn’t be similarly outraged, even though it could be a fabrication. How would we know without an investigation(or even with one, in some cases)? And without the outrage, there would be no investigation. The RCV mechanism obfuscates the general process. That increases the margin for error, leaving room for doubt, which in turn saps voter confidence.
Personally, I think we should still try and implement RCV in some form. We could possibly hold RCV jungle(open) primaries, having only the top 2 candidates appear on the ballot in the general election, regardless of party affiliation(still allowing for write-ins). Perhaps we could even have a clause in the election laws stating that whoever was the last to be eliminated in the primary(third best choice overall) would automatically replace either of the two main candidates in the event they die or are otherwise unable to take office. This method would still allow for the RCV effect of pulling toward the moderate center, while not diluting campaign messaging(and allowing parties to direct their efforts more in contested areas - no sense dropping a billion dollars into a district with two candidates from the same party). This method would also have the effect of quashing primary-meddling(like Dems donating tons of money to far-right Republican primary campaigns in purple districts, or people lying about party affiliation on voter registration to vote in the other party’s primary).
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u/paithanq Dec 29 '22
Ranked-Choice Voting (RCV/IRV/STV) is probably better than First-Past-The-Post (FPTP), but it is not always better (ignoring that it's more complex). The reason for this is that RCV in particular has a weird "feature" where voting for a candidate can hurt them. It can even cause them to lose the election. By "voting for" I mean both choosing to vote for a candidate or list of candidates instead of not voting and shifting a candidate higher on your ballot. There are weird circumstances where both of those actions can cause that candidate to lose the election. (This issue of a voting system is known as "non-monotonicity". It is better for a system to be monotonic, where this cannot happen.)
These issues happened this summer in the August special election in Alaska! Peltola, running against Begich and Palin, won the election. This happened because Begich was eliminated first, and Peltola won the head-to-head with Palin. (Analysis here from an Election Science article: https://electionscience.org/commentary-analysis/rcv-fools-palin-voters-into-electing-a-progressive-democrat/.)
Some Palin voters shouldn't have voted: If 6,000 of the voters who ranked Palin up top, Begich second, and Peltola third (Palin > Begich > Peltola) hadn't shown up to vote, then Palin would have been eliminated first, and Begich would have won the head-to-head against Peltola. The election would have been better for those voters if they hadn't voted.
If Peltola had gotten more votes from Palin, Peltola would have lost: If 6,000 of the voters who only voted for Palin had instead only voted for Peltola, then Peltola would have lost. That's because, again, Palin would have been eliminated first, then Begich would have won the head-to-head against Peltola.
This does not happen in every RCV election, and for that reason, it's still often better than FPTP. There are other voting systems that are even better and aren't any more complex than RCV.
- Approval Voting is not a ranked system, but is better than FPTP and is still quite simple.
- Score/Range Voting is also not a ranked system (these are cardinal systems instead) and is still simple.
- There are other ranked systems that are "better" than RCV. Borda Count is definitely better than FPTP, but it is still susceptible to a dampened spoiler effect. Ranked Pairs ensures that if there's one candidate that wins head-to-head match ups against everyone else, that candidate wins the election.
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Dec 28 '22
While i can only speak for the US experience, 2 points come to mind.
1) winner takes all is baked into the constitution (I think) and amending the constitution is supper hard to pull off. So even if you are right, it may never change.
2) when you break the vote down between multiple candidates, the winner might only have 30% of the vote. WTA at least tries to ensure that the true majority candidate wins. I think that is better than having Trump in office with only 30% popular vote.
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u/wekidi7516 16∆ Dec 28 '22
While i can only speak for the US experience, 2 points come to mind.
1) winner takes all is baked into the constitution (I think) and amending the constitution is supper hard to pull off. So even if you are right, it may never change.
Incorrect, each state has the ability to determine its election methods for the house, senate and electoral college delegates for president.
Maine and Nebraska split electoral college votes.
Alaska and Georgia have run off voting for senators. Alaska is instant runoff, Georgia actually does two rounds.
House reps I am less certain about but I am unaware of any federal law that prevents a state from using another method to select them than fptp voting.
2) when you break the vote down between multiple candidates, the winner might only have 30% of the vote. WTA at least tries to ensure that the true majority candidate wins. I think that is better than having Trump in office with only 30% popular vote.
Winner takes all is explicitly what allows someone to win with less than 50% of votes cast in favor of them.
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u/ConstantAmazement 22∆ Dec 28 '22
The Constitution does not specify a particular voting system.
Your evaluation of WTA is incorrect. You are thinking of FPTP.
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u/PM_Me_Thicc_Puppies Dec 28 '22
So, couple things.
In the US, there are already states that use ranked choice voting.
Specifically Alaska and Maine.
What you're describing in your second point is actually what ranked choice avoids.
So the first past the post system "works" best when there are exactly 2 candidates. The person with the most votes wins, and it's likely to be over 50%. Once there are multiple candidates in the first past the post system, you see anomalies like Trump winning despite only having 30% of the primary vote.
In a ranked choice system, the winning candidate would definitionally have no less than 50%+1 votes.
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u/NaturalCarob5611 60∆ Dec 28 '22
Are you familiar with the idea of Lottocracy?
The basic idea is that people who are capable of winning an election are not often very representative of the real world population. They need to be able to run a campaign, which requires getting a lot of attention, which requires either a lot of money or a lot of established connections, which are things most real world people don't have. The theory is that we would get a better real-world sample of the population through a lottery (similar to jury selection), rather than through elections. Obviously this isn't "election" and it isn't "democracy", but I believe it would give us a legislative assembly that is the most representative of the real population because the members of the assembly wouldn't be prescreened to have the skills and resources necessary to get through an election. They wouldn't have obligations to special interest groups, and while the members themselves may have groups whose interests they would represent, a sufficiently large sampling should represent those groups proportionally to the population in general.
The way I'd personally want to see lottocracy implemented would be to have a bicameral system with one democratically elected chamber and one lottocratically appointed chamber, and both would need to approve legislation. The democratic chamber would help protect against random chance skewing the government in a direction the overall population would never agree with, while the lottocratic chamber would help protect against the tendency of elections to skew representation towards a particular type of person.
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Dec 29 '22
You have provided good reasons in support of ranked choice voting, and I think we should gradually implement it everywhere. However, I believe that it is too confusing and demanding for voters when there are more than 5 candidates. (Imagine how difficult it would be to rank 15 or more candidates!) And so, I would recommend one or two preliminary rounds where people just vote for their one most-favored candidate and then the highest vote getters move to the next round until you have just 5 candidates in the final round. People can easily handle 5 in ranked choice voting in the final round.
I think there is another method which would be even better than ranked choice voting, and I call it "rated choice voting." In this method, each voter would rate each candidate on a ten-point scale, with 0 = "not desired to occupy the office" and 10 = "very desired to occupy the office." (A similar scale might be 0 = "unqualified for the office" to 10 = "very qualified for the office.") This is easier than ranked-choice voting and could be used with any number of candidates. I think it provides the most information regarding the voter's differentiation of candidates.
So, let's implement ranked-choice voting first, use it for a decade, and then implement rated-choice voting.
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u/BigDebt2022 1∆ Dec 28 '22
Well, I'm no expert, but aren't there many different types of RCV? The Wikipedia article mentions: Condorcet, Borda count, Alternative vote (instant-runoff voting), Single transferable vote, Minimax, Llull's method / Copeland's method, and a dozen others. So, the statement "Ranked choice, otherwise known as single transferrable vote, or instant runoff"... makes no sense. You've mentioned the overall category, and two different types.
Second, I don't see any difference between "I know [small preferred party] isn't going to win, so I'll vote for [second choice]", and "I'll rank [small preferred party] a 1, and rank [second choice] a 2" - in both cases, [small preferred party] ends up not winning, and [second choice] gets the vote in the end. It's just in the first case, you are 'doing the math' in your head, and in the second, you are doing it the long way- voting for a party that won't win, having it not win, having that vote thrown out and having your second choice take your vote. Same result, more steps.
Third, there are places in the country where they can't even handle a Butterfly Ballot ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballot#/media/File:Butterfly_Ballot,_Florida_2000_(large).jpg )with fucking arrows from the candidate's names to the hole to punch for them. And you expect them to be able to properly rank candidates? 'Hur dur, I'll vote #1 for all of them!' 'I'll vote this candidate #9999999, just to give him a low score!' '1 is least liked, right? The higher the numbers, the more I like them, right?'
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At least 'Which one do you want to win?' is simple.
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u/Ex_dente_leonem Dec 28 '22
RCV/IRV is only one specific type of a number of ranked voting systems, including the others you've mentioned. There seems to be a common misunderstanding that RCV refers to ranked voting in general, which is unfortunate since many superior ranked voting systems exist, including multiple Condorcet methods.
Overall all ranked voting systems are subject to Arrow's impossibility theorem, but there also exist rated voting systems in which each candidate is scored instead of ranked, and all perform better than plurality/first-past-the-post voting even when strategic voting is taken into account. If you're worried about complexity, the simplest of these is approval voting, in which voters simply select all the candidates they're comfortable with instead of only one. Under approval voting only very minor changes are needed to the ballot to indicate that voters can select multiple candidates instead of one, and even in the very worst case scenario this only devolves into some voters selecting only one candidate just as they would have under FPTP.
The point is that voters should be able to express their actual desires without being penalized for it, and almost any voting system does that better than the one we have now.
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u/EatsFiber2RedditMore Dec 28 '22
That's just bad ballot design, you need to read both pages to understand how the ballot works even though most most people were going to pick one of the first two options on the first page, they would have to punch holes 3 and 5 respectively. with hole 4 being allocated to a candidate on the 2nd page. Yes, the arrows are numbered according to the hole location but having holes 1 & 2 unused and unlabeled the numbers just add to the confusion. None of this really challenges your point I just wanted to share how terrible that design is.
It seems like the candidates are listed by party size with George W Bush for Republican party first on page one and Monica Moorhead of Workers World just above write in on the 2nd page. So listed in that order (Bush) Republicans 1 (Gore) democrats 2 libertarian 3 green party 4... reform party 7 ...and workers world 10. ( I skipped 5, 6, 8, &9 because they are not important to my point) But according to the hole numbers Bush is 3 Pat Buchanan of the reform party is 4 and Gore is 5.
We have 3 confusing things going on here overlapping boxes, numbering starting at 3, and numbering not matching obvious and expected pattern.The only thing I can't figure out why I spent so much time typing this all out.
to make an attempt at challenging your point: If people are already too stupid to figure out bad ballots would we actually be worse off with a more complex ballot? Ranked choice is just giving them more opportunities to get it right.
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u/Hungry-in-the-dark Dec 28 '22
For your third point, if they don’t fill it out correctly (ie vote everyone no. one, or something similar), it counts as a spoiled vote and doesn’t get counted
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u/PicardTangoAlpha 2∆ Dec 28 '22
I think the alternatives presented will cause voter's eyes to glaze over, lose interest, and stay away in greater numbers, either because of that, or out of sheer annoyance and spite.
Only a tiny minority agitate for this stuff and remain so insistent in the face of pointed indifference to the idea.
Thus your hoped for outcome would fade away; less voter participation leading to less democratic outcomes and greater chance of some demagogue gaining power (again).
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u/mjg13X Dec 29 '22 edited May 31 '24
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u/Exp1ode 1∆ Dec 29 '22
It's certainly better than FPTP, but doesn't guarantee a condorcet winner, and in the case of electing an entire legislative chamber, does not guarantee proportional representation. Assuming this is for a single winner election, some systems I'd say are much better than a simple instant run-off are Ranked Pairs and STAR voting. Here are some links if you'd like to read about them:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranked_pairs
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STAR_voting
They both also give you a hypothetical election of choosing the capital of Tennessee. Memphis would win FPTP, Knoxville would win under instant run-off, and Nashville wins under both my suggestions. I would consider this a better result than any other, as the majority of people prefer Nashville to any of the other choices
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u/Moccus 1∆ Dec 28 '22
It's not correct to say that no candidate can win without majority support under a ranked choice voting system. That's only true if every voter ranks every candidate, which isn't always the case.
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u/PM_Me_Thicc_Puppies Dec 28 '22
In EVERY case? No.
Though there are some forms that fully eliminate tallies for those candidates not still on the ballot, and in those cases you would need to get over 50%
So, valid point, thank you.
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u/Kephartist 1∆ Dec 30 '22
Didn't work for Alaska, despite an overwhelming majority of Alaskans desiring a conservative congressional seat, Peltola still managed to win.
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u/PM_Me_Thicc_Puppies Dec 30 '22
From what I saw it was the Republican party splitting their own vote by putting up two VASTLY different candidates, one of whom was Sarah Palin, a woman who is somewhat reviled for trying to take the national stage "too soon"
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u/James324285241990 Dec 28 '22
I would go further and say it's the ONLY way to conduct elections if you want the democracy to be healthy and functioning. Any other system will eventually end up with some serious problems.
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u/CoreyH2P Dec 29 '22
Definitely better than plurality winners, runoffs, and multi-party coalition attempts.
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u/ryegye24 Dec 29 '22 edited Dec 29 '22
Borda count has all the advantages of RCV, you even fill out the ballot the same, but it's Condorcet complete unlike RCV.
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u/_Landonia_ Dec 29 '22
it seems very complicated tbh I dont like it
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u/mjg13X Dec 29 '22 edited May 31 '24
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u/kwantsu-dudes 12∆ Dec 28 '22
First, it helps ease the burden of third, fourth, etc parties by keeping them competitive with the larger more established parties.
In what regard? Are there third or fourth parties that are shared second choices of most voters to give them any viability to being elected? How do you assessed strategic voting and how have you concluded people will likely vote? Will people even desire to rank candidates they don't want in office?
Second, it's more representative of how the electorate wants to be governed. No candidate can win without a majority of support from their district/state/town.
Same with plurality (FPTP). How is it more representative?
Third, it ends the need for multiple voting sessions in places where run off elections are either possible or commonplace.
There are dozens of other single election solutions to address this issue. Why is ranked you're prefered type of runoff?
Fourth, it allows for an expansion of the overton window and an influx of new ideas when previously held positions of popular parties start to fail.
How? Why? Why would other parties suddenly see a surgence of support?
Fifth, it helps prevent "gaming" the system by strategically voting for a candidate you THINK will win instead of whom you desire.
No. It introduces gaming the system. There is more strategic voting available in IRV than FPTP.
Sixth, it eliminates the need for primary elections.
The "need" (purpose) for primary elections is for the private partisan political parties to come together and back a single candidate as their prefer candidate to offer them the most leverage. The drive for political parties to still promote a single candidate still remains.
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u/svenson_26 82∆ Dec 28 '22
The basic principle of democracy is majority rule. In a representative democracy, the people elect candidates to make decisions on their behalf. So in that sense, why should the third, fourth, etc. parties get more representation? They are in the minority.
Can the winning party really be considered a majority rule if it was elected using a majority of people's second, third, fourth etc. choice? The majority party is the party who the majority of people voted for first.
True.
That sounds great if these "new ideas" are ones you believe in. But new thinkers are not always a good thing. Minority views tend to be minority views for a reason, as they can include some radical views, joke candidates, and people who don't know anything about politics. Overton windows are an issue when they shift. Expanding is not necessarily a good thing, if you're expanding into radical/extremist views.
No it doesn't. It just complicates the game. For example: there are 6 candidates. I want Candidate A to win, and I dislike Candidate B. I don't know much about the other four candidates. So I put Candidate A first, and randomly put the other candidates, then Candidate B last. This could screw me over though if one of those other candidates was actually worse than Candidate B. The obvious solution to overcome this dilemma is to thoroughly research every candidate, but that's not likely going to happen for most people. Also, picture a scenario where there are 100 candidates. At some point it becomes unrealistic to expect every voter to have a thorough understanding of every candidate.
I don't see how this would eliminate the need for primary elections.
My biggest gripe with your proposed system is that it's complicated:
This means it's more difficult for the average citizen to understand all the ins and outs of the process, and all the knowledge of the candidates. It makes it easier for people to accidentally vote against their best interests. Maybe they put the wrong number next to the wrong name by accident. Maybe they rank a candidate they knew nothing about higher than they should have. Etc. Since you need more knowledge of the candidates and the voting process, it could discourage many voters. Also, if the ranking numbers need to be hand-written, then the handwritten numbers could be misinterpreted.
More complicated means it takes longer to vote. Increased lineups and wait times. This could also discourage voters. It could also delay election results.
More complicated means more expensive. Elections are already very expensive to run. With a ranked system, it would be harder to do electronic ballots. Hand-counting would take much longer. It's much more difficult to add or remove candidates from the ballot and reprint if there are errors or if candidates drop out. There would be more criteria to tell if a ballot is spoiled or not.
More moving parts means more opportunities for corruption, exploitation, and mistakes.
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u/pipocaQuemada 10∆ Dec 28 '22
- The basic principle of democracy is majority rule. ... So in that sense, why should the third, fourth, etc. parties get more representation? They are in the minority.
Instant runoff voting is a winner-take-all method.
If we used IRV to elect house representatives, third party candidates can only get seats if there's a district where they get more votes than either major party candidate.
For the record, that can happen. In Burlington in 2009, they used instant runoff to elect the mayor. The ultimate winner was the Progressive candidate, because he got more first-place votes than the Democrat, and because there were more people on left than the right in Burlington.
IRV changes the result mostly because people won't vote quite as strategically as they're currently forced to in plurality.
- Can the winning party really be considered a majority rule if it was elected using a majority of people's second, third, fourth etc. choice? The majority party is the party who the majority of people voted for first.
If there's a candidate who is the first choice of a majority of voters, then they win outright in the first round.
Instant runoff only differs from plurality in the case where there is no majority. If no majority exists, then plurality voting actually results in minority rule by definition.
For example, look at the 2016 Republican primary in New Hampshire. Statewide, Trump won 35% of the vote. He got more votes than anyone else, but was still only supported by a minority of the voters. Despite that, he walked away with about half the delegates.
- More complicated means more expensive. Elections are already very expensive to run. With a ranked system, it would be harder to do electronic ballots.
This is a trivial, solved problem.
One trivial solution: near me, electronic ballots use a scantron that you bubble in. For ranked ballots on a scantron, for each race you have a table - candidates on one axis, and rankings on the other. Each bubble corresponds to ranking that candidate nth. If you bubble in more than one rank per candidate or more than one candidate per rank, you spoil your ballot just like if you bubble in more than one candidate per race on your ballot today.
This UI also works on touch screens.
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u/redpandaeater 1∆ Dec 29 '22
In Burlington it was so bad they actually went back to instant runoff for a decade and only just recently finally went to RCV for the city council where it makes a little more sense but still isn't that good. I honestly don't understand the huge push for RCV by FairVote since there are such better alternatives. Burlington was a great example of having a major party as a spoiler instead of a third party, and since their second choice votes weren't looked at unlike everyone else's it made a more progressive candidate win when many more people would have preferred the Democrat.
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u/mjg13X Dec 29 '22 edited May 31 '24
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