________________________________________________________________________________
Anything is better than the status quo. Instant Runoff Voting has legit flaws, but it would still be an improvement.
I always point folks at this
I sincerely believe that a better voting system is one of the highest ROI changes we could make towards better government, and some systems are just so simple it’s crazy not to do it.
I personally prefer approval voting, because it’s still trivial to mark, count, and explain (speaking by analogy, it's just switching from radio buttons to checkboxes). It also doesn't have as bad failure modes as some other systems (see the link above for comparisons). But everything’s better than today’s FPTP system.
The problem is pretty much all systems that make voting more fair also make Republicans win much less, so there's very little bipartisan motivation to make changes.
Both ruling parties oppose anything that opens the system to additional parties. Ballot access is a prime example. It's very hard for additional parties to get candidates on the ballot in most states.
This is the great difficulty of writing a constitution. If there's a game in which it might happen that the system produces an undesirable result, you have to have anticipated it beforehand. Otherwise, eventually the game gets locked up and whoever is in control uses the constitution to cement control.
IMO legislatures should have proportional representation. Sure there are drawbacks but they're not as bad as locking out minority opinions.
I think the Senate should be entirely determined by proportional representation. Leaving everything else the same, it would make a massive difference in how much people feel the government represents them. The drawback is that we would have at least three Q Anon Senators, but I'm pretty sure we're going to get that anyway.
For the US, it's kinda interesting. It seems that when the original constitution was written, people kinda thought of the states as different countries. Robert E Lee seemed to think he had to fight for Virginia, for instance.
Nowadays, that thinking seems wrong. Not sure what yall think over there, but I've always thought of Michael Jackson an American artist, rather than a person from Indiana. I just don't see that Americans see the states as a federation of countries, but I guess people there might.
Something like the UN might have similar votes per country, on the rationale that countries are equal regardless of relative size.
Mass media and industrialization have definitely caused some convergence, but in the context of an America where it took more than a day for some intra-state trips this made sense. There's still definitely a lot of regional pride and some differences, most notably in Texas, which is rather unique in its mythology because it existed as a country for a short period and fought an independence war.
The US when it formed was probably more aligned with what the EU is today. That original setup was very impractical so they reformed into the current US with the Constitution in 1789.
But only in America (still due to FPTP, btw) is the ratfucking so bad that the biggest supporters of libertarians is the democrats and the biggest supporters of the greens are republicans. RC voting (or proportional representation) doesn't have this issue, since theres not a good reason to fund whichever party is more extreme than your opponent.
> Both ruling parties oppose anything that opens the system to additional parties.
Virtually all RC election schemes in the US, and also nonpartisan primaries (which are a close cousin) are championed by democrats. That's just not true.
Edit to expand: it's a partisan issue because structurally the democratic party is _already_ a loose collection of interests. They've always structured their internal workings around this kind of dealmaking and coalition-building. Shifting to an environment where those groups (Blue Dogs, DSA, The Squad, the Congressional Black Caucus, etc...) become first class parties doesn't really change the way democrats have always governed.
The Democratic party fought extremely hard to keep the Green party off the ballot in many states this year. They sued and literally harassed petition signers into recanting their signatures. Both parties in the United States disenfranchise voters.
https://www.gp.org/dem_voter_suppression
Trying to keep third parties off the ballot while still operating under a first past the post system is very different from opposing a switch to something other than first past the post.
Under systems like ranked-choice, IRV, etc., having the Green party or Libertarian party on the ballot would be much less likely to harm the near-term prospects for candidates from the two major parties: most of the voters that minor parties would gain are people who currently pick a major-party candidate that has a real chance of winning. Those voters would mostly continue to select a major-party candidate as a second choice.
Can you blame them after what happened in Florida in 2000?
It was very mean of the greens to vote for their preferred candidate.
On the other hand, it can be argued that 400 green votes to Al Gore would've unmade the Bush presidency and all the misery that followed.
I've worked with a 3rd party in New York. At least in that state what you said is false and I've heard but not verified stories in other states.
To get a candidate on a statewide ballot you have to get signatures from a percentage of registered voters. I don't remember the numbers off hand but it's in the tens of thousands. This alone is both cost and time prohibitive. There are also a bunch of other hoops you have to jump through.
As a German, this whole registered voter thing still puzzles me. It's almost as if un-registeres people are second class citizens. No ballot access, and even that access can be cut off with voter role purges. It took me a while to really wrap my head around the fact that bot every resident is automatically registered. Without party affiliation off course. Just implementing that would go a long way to fix things. Add more polling places, get rid of gerrymandering and make voting day a public holiday and the US would almost be there. Except for that electoral college thing.
Germany is based on the experience of the Nazi's raise to power, one thing Germany got right after WW2 was the German constitution. Stuff like the 5% hurdle to get seats in parliament for example. The US on the other hand still seem to struggle with a system put in place after the civil war to suppress the black vote and satisfy the former confederate states. But I might be wrong.
I think the crux of the issue is that the elections are held by each state, and each state can't enumerate its own eligible voters due to the lack of a 100% comprehensive ID system. Think of European Parliament elections, but in this case there is no concept of "home country". However, I certainly do agree it's not ideal.
Doesn't Germany also follow a voter registration system ? With proof of identity ?
You are legally obliged to have a ID card or passport. You also have a officially registered primary residency. Being a German citizen makes you eligible for all German and European elections.
No need to present your ID to vote, your invitation is enough. Your ID will do if you forgot that invitation.
So in a sense, we have. A mandatory, government run. You cannot be purged, we don't sign ballots (our elections have to be 100% anonymous), we don't need our ID to vote. And any party affiliation is not part of that system. makes stuff a lot easier, and individual parties cannot toy around with it.
For clarity: no one signs a ballot in the US. States with remote voting options generally have a ballot _envelope_ which must be signed and sealed. That is: you have to authenticate that the ballot was cast by the right person, but the vote itself can only be tallied anonymously.
This is sort of a dumb idea, really. But it's not as broken as you imagine.
Both your and the other counterexample are talking about something _other_ than nonpartisan ballotting, though. I mean, yes, if you have a third party candidate _in isolation_ then whoever that third party is going to "steal" more votes from is going to oppose it.
So democrats would oppose a Green or other progressive candidate in (most races in) New York, sure. That's just self-interest. But for the same reason they'd clearly welcome a libertarian entrant. That's not responsive to the discussion.
The claim upthread was that "both" parties oppose ranked choice voting. And that's simply not true.
This was for the LP. The rules apply the same to all other parties.
A single party's goal may be to avoid direct competition but they work together with each other to prevent all other parties. This is one of the things that's easy for them to have bipartisan agreements on.
Maine voters passed it via ballot measure, no partisan politicking required. Likewise, the two states voting on it this year, Alaska and Massachusetts, are also doing so via ballot measure.
Article 1, Section 4, Clause 1 of the U.S. Constitution says,
> The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators.
There have been two Supreme Court decisions that have analogized the electorate as a legislative body in ballot measures, referendums, public initiatives, etc. The latest was
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arizona_State_Legislature_v._A...
[1] In that decision it was the liberals and Kennedy who upheld precedent; all the conservatives would have prohibited direct public votes on Congressional election rules. But now Kennedy and Ginsburg are gone, and their replacements are very likely to vote against precedent if the question comes back to the court. (In fact, IIRC, some justices, like Thomas, don't even like the idea of public initiatives for purely state elections, an argument based on their own peculiar notions of Federalism. Also, if you read the order opinions over the last few weeks by Kavanaugh and Gorsuch, some of their arguments seem to be aimed at reversing Arizona.) Roberts might switch his vote to uphold precedent, but Roberts would only make 4 votes, not enough to save it.
If (or, rather, when) SCOTUS prohibits the public from directly legislating their Congressional elections, only Congress could restore the ability, unless the Constitution was amended.
[1] Skimming through the Arizona case, I _think_ the first was Pacific States Telephone & Telegraph Co. v. Oregon, 223 U. S. 118 (1912). But I don't have time to reread the Arizona opinions carefully to refresh my memory.
I come from a country with a civil law system, so please excuse me if I'm misunderstanding things here, but isn't the legal precedent already established? How would something like this come to court again? Same with Roe v. Wade. There's already been a ruling by the Supreme Court, how can there be another one?
The Supreme Court can overturn precedent. For example, Plessy v Ferguson (which held that segregation was legal) was overturned by Brown v Board of Education (which held that it was not). More recently, South Dakota v Wayfair directly overturned Quill v North Dakota in holding that states can directly charge sales taxes on internet purchases from out-of-state businesses.
The Supreme Court is a political institution, none of the members have any obligation to precedent, and they aren't required to be lawyers. There's a lot of pomp and rhetoric around it that implies otherwise, but that's required in order for it to maintain the respect it needs to function.
The Supreme Court is not prohibited from overturning existing precedent. They just generally choose to operate under a doctrine that says they should try to avoid overturning precedent. Lower courts are more formally bound by precedent from higher courts, but their rulings as constrained by precedent can be appealed up to the level(s) that are empowered to overturn the relevant precedent.
(IANAL. As I understand it,) Precedent is generally followed unless there is a difference of circumstance, which could include changing cultural mores.
The most recent U.S. Supreme Court nominee briefly talks about some of the nuances related to precedent here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nlchBfW036s
The (old) British legal scholar William Blackstone dives into it in his work "Commentaries of the Laws of England" (Introduction - Section 3) if you want a more thorough understanding of the foundation of precedent in common law.
Oh man, this is a doozy of an explanation to go through, so I won't try. Wikipedia has a good explainer on it here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_law
TLDR and _very_ over-simplified:
Legal precedent is established until the laws change. The various legislatures/governing-bodies of the US can change the law whenever they please. When those laws then come into conflict with other laws out there, you have to have a ruling by a court. Sometimes this is intentional.
Which court does the ruling is super complex and sometimes they are not called courts, FYI. Judicial bodies, sometimes called courts, are also super complex. In general, the US legal system is more like the Ancien Régime than anything else, in that we strive to make sure no two people are governed under the same law. Just kidding, sorta. ;)
In the case of SCOTUS, they mostly rule on matters that affect the US constitution, and only if they feel doing so. They then make a ruling, and that becomes the new way the laws work. Sometimes this makes a law null-and-void, sometimes it just sets guidelines on how to make a law function. Again, super complex. There are many other courts in the US that can similarly do things at laws, but SCOTUS gets the most news.
The makeup of SCOTUS is irrelevant in this case, because before they could hear the case Congress would need to pass a law contradicting these state measures, which could then be challenged up to SCOTUS. No matter what, the ball is in Congress's court here.
Look at the parties in Arizona State Legislature v. Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission. Any state legislature (or perhaps even any state legislator) that wanted to challenge their state's initiative-back election laws could sue. I'm not that well versed in election law, but it's also possible any state citizen could do it as well. In any event, just looking at the plaintiffs in the flurry of 2020 election cases shows how easy it would be to bring a case back to SCOTUS.
Er, I feel like you're actually deflating your own argument here. Note that the aforementioned clause in the US Constitution grants no power to Congress to dictate how states perform their own legislative elections. The scenario you're envisioning first requires a state to pass an alternative voting system via ballot, then for the state legislature elected by that voting system to sue the state itself to overturn it (which is guaranteed to be wildly unpopular among the electorate that just passed the ballot measure), then for the case to make it to SCOTUS, who can only overturn it for federal elections, not for any state elections, and especially not in state elections in states other than the one that challenged it. A state politician has nothing to gain and everything to lose by supporting such a measure.
The context here is Federal elections for President and Congress--Maine's Federal Senate race is also via rank-choice, as mentioned in the second paragraph/sentence of the linked article. To another commenter's argument that switching to ranked-choice voting for those elections would require bipartisan support, you had retorted that
> Maine voters passed [ranked-choice voting] via ballot measure, no partisan politicking required. Likewise, the two states voting on it this year, Alaska and Massachusetts, are also doing so via ballot measure.
My point is that for Federal congressional elections the legal capacity to use voter initiatives to institute different voting rules, bypassing partisan state legislatures and Congress, will likely be extinguished in the coming years. The same is likely true for Presidential elections as the relevant constitutional language is nearly identical: "Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors...."
My comment about Thomas' view (uncited--I could be misremembering the nuances) about who gets to pass laws controlling state legislature elections was merely to suggest how likely he would be to overturn Arizona; his opinion about the Constitution's and SCOTUS' role in dictating/safeguarding a very specific form of representative government extends beyond a simplistic plain text[1] interpretation of the aforementioned constitutional clauses.
[1] I feel like I should point out that no justice, conservative or otherwise, subscribes to a "plain text" philosophy of constitutional interpretation. Conservatives justices tend to espouse either a so-called Original Intent philosophy or Scalia's Original Meaning philosophy, where "Original Meaning" is not the same thing as "plain text". And justices of all political philosophies will make a "plain text" argument when it suits their interpretation. All things being equal (though they rarely are), everybody tends to agree a plain text defense is the best defense.
Makes me wonder how federal ballot initiatives might play out, and why they don't exist...
The long and the short of it is there’s no provision in the Constitution. The powers of Congress are a whitelist, and it would be a stretch even for some of the stretchier clauses in there to allow for Federal ballot initiatives.
That said, I wouldn’t support it. I view State-level ballot initiatives as an anti-feature, at least in my native California. Wouldn’t want that crap making it up to the Federal level.
National Initiative is an existing proposal for doing just that which was proposed by Mike Gravel. Tom Steyer included it in his 2020 platform.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_initiative
In Canada, we say "electoral reform is always popular with the opposition party/parties".
The GOP is the minority party in the United States. The only reason they are not in opposition is due to structural defects. This quote does not make sense when applied to the US.
Well, because two-party systems are an emergent phenomena of First-Past-The-Post voting (Duverger's law), any move away from FPTP would favor third parties.
Almost immediately, the GOP and the DNC would start losing votes to the Libertarian party and the Green party, so they'll _both_ rally against any change to the existing system.
Any major shift toward better voting systems will have to start in local elections where voters are fed up with both parties. Maine is doing an awesome job leading the way on the state-level.
Note that important part of forming two-party systems are single-member districts. It seems unlikely that just removing FPTP and keeping single-member districts changes this in a significant way.
A good example of a proportional (and thus multi-party) system that uses single-member districts is MMP[1]. You could argue, though, that this system doesn't fully keep single-member districts because some of the representatives are chosen from a national or regional list and such lists are effectively giant districts.
There is still much to be said in support of non-FPTP single-member systems, though, since they allow factions within a party to break off and present their own policies. Even if such a splinter party never replaced the party it split from, it could still prevent the bigger party from becoming too complacent and reliant on being the lesser of two evils.
[1]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed-member_proportional_repr...
I'm not sure they'd lose elections though.
In the console video game world, there was a period of time when you either had an Xbox or a PlayStation, but everyone also had a Nintendo Wii as their second system. Some very casual gamers only had a Wii.
It's not hard to imagine a local election where both the DNC and the GOP put forth lackluster, hyper-polarizing candidates, and a reasonable third party candidate who's everyone's #2 pick wins.
It's not so much that these other systems would enable third party candidates to _win_, it's that they would reward less polarizing candidates with more broad appeal.
Agreed. Libertarians will probably put Republicans as preference 2, and similarly for Green -> Dems. It should, however, get more people out to vote, and that's a good thing.
It also gives hard feedback to the parties about their constituent's real politics. If a party wins but sees their votes mostly coming from #2 preferences, the next round of primaries will probably shift further from the center. Similarly, if they see themselves as #1, they can shift back towards the center.
I agree with your first statement, but: "It should, however, get more people out to vote, and that's a good thing." is not necessarily true, though you're presenting it as axiomatic.
Currently, the average voter is poorly informed, the marginal voter is uninformed, and the non-voters are misinformed. I challenge you to read any book about voter ignorance and come away with your current view.[1]
[1]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Against_Democracy
I assume this book is largely about American voters? I'd counter that democracies with a hyper-informed and engaged electorate absolutely exist in the world, even if it's just on the local level or just with regard to specific issues.
Also, while a highly educated person might have a much better understanding of foreign affairs, they may have a poor understanding of what it feels like to come home to a decrepit apartment just to watch your children get skinnier. Even though they might be more informed and have better solutions for the problems they care about, they'll prioritize different issues.
If the average voter is poorly informed, the obvious solution to me would be to work on that issue directly, not on chipping away at what little power they have.
It's kind of counter-intuitive, but getting people to turn up to elections is often the first step in getting them to build informed opinions, read up on issues, and take their civic duty seriously. This is what people are hoping for when they try to improve voter turnout; they believe that many of our society's ills could be helped by fostering a more civically engaged populace.
That book uses many American examples, but it is fairly representative of most western democracies. That specific book is actually about ways to improve electoral results (while abandoning some traditional notions of democracy). There are many other books which discuss voter ignorance, and you can take your pick, any of them will give you the same idea.
>"If the average voter is poorly informed, the obvious solution to me would be to work on that issue directly, not on chipping away at what little power they have."
If someone is capable of doing a great deal of damage, the first step is to limit that damage, before teaching them how to do things properly. Educate the marginal and non-voters before you let them wreak havoc on an already troubled system.
>"It's kind of counter-intuitive, but getting people to turn up to elections is often the first step in getting them to build informed opinions, read up on issues, and take their civic duty seriously."
This is actually a variant of one of the first philosophical cases for democracy (though I can't remember who originally made that argument); the only problem is that it isn't true. Just read some of the books on voter ignorance, and you'll see exactly how wrong it is.
Here's a paper that provides evidence that voters are more informed when they have more political power:
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=316694
It is true if we assume that the point of democracy is to assert collective preferences. We can _hope_ those preferences are informed--indeed, that sounds lovely--but this is not strictly necessary. And under the model that democracy is a collective assertion of preference, having more preference data is a good thing. Informing people is a task left to society, not to the voting system.
Well, if you're a 'democratic fundamentalist', and think that more voting is better, no matter the consequences, then sure, you're right. On the other hand, I think voting is an instrument whose value depends on its results, and that it can be misused.
Okay, but isn't the point that there's no objective way to evaluate those results? If you're limiting people's voting rights in order to get the results you want, then of course you will think less voting is better. It's the political equivalent of begging the question.
The point of democracy is to trust people to be able to make those decisions, and give them the tools to hold their leaders accountable.
I have preferred results, but I can accept a range of democratic outcomes that I see as reasonable. I think most other people take the same view; those 'get out the vote' campaigns are usually targeted towards demographics with predictable preferences, so they're also results-oriented.
I'd rather that electoral outcomes reflect what people would vote for if they were well-informed (which is what the cited book is about). You can predict how more information and understanding would impact voting trends (there are various techniques for this), and the results are not that everyone agrees on everything, but the impact would be an improvement (in my opinion).
you don't have to have perfect information spread throughout a population to make good collective decisions amongst it. it's ok if much of the electorate is somewhat ignorant or poorly informed, as long as that's relatively uncorrelated (i.e., there's no systemic coercion of choice). but that's exactly what parties are designed to subvert to their advantage. so then, what we need to do is to do everything we can to move away from party politics, including better voting mechanisms and removing the outsized influence of money in politics.
The problem isn't systematic coercion of choice, it's widespread popular biases and a general lack of knowledge. If you are interested in improving democratic outcomes, you need to understand the individuals you're encouraging to vote.
> "The problem isn't systematic coercion of choice, it's widespread popular biases..."
what is "widespread popular biases" but systemic coercions?
and no, we specifically don't need to understand individuals, just the systemic coercions (so we can counteract them).
'Systemic coercion' implies outside influence; citizens suffer from a number of _internal_ biases, entirely aside from outside issues. Please just take a look at some of the literature on voter ignorance.
there's no reasonable evidence that people are too dumb/ignorant to make a good electorate. that's primarily ego talking.
and we don't need to correct for internal biases over a population because, by definition, _internal_ biases are uncorrelated. but you said "popular", which is a social bias that correlates beliefs.
I feel compelled to note that while historically Libertarians have been more likely to vote for Republicans as second preference, I don't think that's true any more with the veer the Republican party has taken in the past 4 years of the administration.
The GOP's center of gravity has been shifting away somewhat from the views of its historical base.
Over the past couple of decades, Libertarians aren't becoming Republicans, but Republicans are becoming Libertarians.
That's an interesting perspective. I think it's still a bit of both. Yes, GOP has been shifting away from small-government, balanced budgets, and free trade, leaving the Libertarian platform to pick up those staunch proponents. However, the socially liberal aspects of the Libertarian party, like drug decriminalization, criminal justice reform, and gay marriage have been cornerstones of Libertarianism and Republicans would still be crossing over on those issues that haven't been a part of the historical Republican base.
Another interesting difference is that the current Libertarian nominee's environmental platform is based on Nuclear, solar, and other renewables[0], in contrast to Republicans' usual Oil and Gas position.
[0]
https://jo20.com/issues/environment/
There is one thing that is worse than FPTP: The Top-Two Primary. A bunch of candidates run, if no one gets 50% then the top two vote-getters face off in a second round with no other options allowed. On the surface it sounds a bit like IRV, but it causes really bizarre outcomes.
Basically, let's say party A is unpopular, and has 2 candidates. Party B is extremely popular and has 7. Party A's candidates each get 15% of the vote, Party B's candidates each get 10%. Even though most voters voted for Party B, they're now stuck in a runoff with two candidates from the opposite party.
Some people argue that this forces parties to be disciplined and force out candidates they deem "unsensible" or "extreme". But in practice this often doesn't work, and even if it did I feel like the mark of a good voting system is that voters feel safe expressing their preferences without having to be strategic.
I think this is easily addressed by using approval voting in the open primary. (And this has the benefit of being extremely simple while likely getting all the benefits of IRV/Condorcet.) Any sort of RCV ends up so convoluted I think a lot of people will try to be strategic but completely misunderstand some edge cases.
I don't see how this is worse than FPTP. In FPTP, the candidate with the most votes just wins, even if that is only 15%. A second round for the two most popular candidates is still better than that.
The issue in your example is of course that both parties send all their candidates to the election, instead of just their most popular one, and that dilutes the vote, but the same would happen if they did that in FPTP.
It's only in systems like approval voting or instant run-off that parties can afford to send all their candidates.
> In FPTP, the candidate with the most votes just wins, even if that is only 15%. A second round for the two most popular candidates is still better than that.
In practice, most US elections are preceded by explicitly partisan primaries, and that's the status quo you should be comparing against.
But that's something that they can continue doing. There are many countries where they have a second round between the two candidates with the most votes, and in those countries, parties generally send only one candidate. And that's what they'll keep doing under this system, because they want their candidate to end up in the top-2.
So unless you actively ban any kind of candidate selection by the parties, that is what would also happen in the US.
> There is one thing that is worse than FPTP: The Top-Two Primary. A bunch of candidates run, if no one gets 50% then the top two vote-getters face off in a second round with no other options allowed.
Well, that is just plain two round system, it is pretty common and definitely better than FPTP. The bizzare outcome you describe may also happen with FPTP, you just need one candidate from party A and several candidates from party B. The solution is same as in FPTP system - each party endorses just one candidate.
Do you have a specific example where this scenario played out?
This happened in the 2016 Washington State Treasurer election
https://ballotpedia.org/Washington_Treasurer_election,_2016
Duane Davidson (R) won against Michael Waite (R) after 3 democrats split the vote in the primary:
Republican Duane Davidson 25.09% 322,374
Republican Michael Waite 23.33% 299,766
Democratic Marko Liias 20.36% 261,633
Democratic John Paul Comerford 17.97% 230,904
Democratic Alec Fisken 13.24% 170,117
Well that raises the question why there were 3 Dems to begin with.
That's what we have here in France, which led to a right vs far-right second round in 2002, from which the traditional left never really recovered.
True. But it also prevented LePen. And before it produced Holland, regardless hoe bad a president he was, he was definitely from the left of the political spectrum.
Why would you have inner party run-offs in a public election anyway? Just have sort out their candidate far any given election internally beforehand. Then a Top-Two system is actually pretty nice, for direct mandates that is.
Voting systems that serve to "moderate" voter preferences are anti-democratic. Sometimes an extreme policy is necessary to meet a challenge (e.g. climate change). A voting system should simply do its best to express true voter preferences. That's it.
that sounds like a problem with considering parties when voting, and trying to reduce the complexity of choice to a binary, rather than the merits of the candidates themselves.
I second Approval Voting for similar reasons. In addition to the simplicity, IMO it sidesteps Arrow's Impossibility Theorem [0] by redefining the success condition: rather than trying to accurately capture political preferences, Approval inherently maximizes Consent of the Governed.
[0]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theore...
> Instant Runoff Voting has legit flaws
Talking to people about what they expect "ranked choice" means, I get the idea they mean Condorcet rather than IRV...
"Ranked choice" doesn't necessarily imply a particular counting method and could describe IRV or Condorcet. I'm disappointed that all of these proposals use IRV though.
I'd love condorcet, and I'd prefer it to IRV, but I've only ever seen IRV when it comes to real proposals on ballots and implementations in governments.
I don't have access to TFA, but it's using IRV, right?
My major concern about IRV is that there's a lot of false promises made with it. It is shown (and we have real world examples) that it doesn't do a great job at removing spoilers, which I think is most peoples' number one draw to the system. It also doesn't scale very well and becomes less transparent as it does so. That's why I personally reject the push for ordinal systems and push for cardinal. This may seem absurd, but we've had IRV in the US in the past and we reverted back to plurality. So there's historical precedence for this position as well.
Would love to see Nicky Case incorporate the STAR system into a /ballot-2 version.
I learned about it recently from this article on the long and painful history of how STAR came to be >
https://www.wired.com/story/dana-debeauvoir-texas-county-cle...
(A Texas County Clerk’s Bold Crusade to Transform How We Vote).
Update: I just asked Nicky Case here >
https://twitter.com/ElijahLynn/status/1322230931571159040
from the wired article:
"...the election technology business was a heavily consolidated industry—a cartel, essentially, of just three vendors, all owned by private equity firms—that was starved for profit and all but incapable of innovation. Subsequent research suggested that the companies earned their most stable revenue through a maze of fees: maintenance, upkeep, software licenses. Their core business model seemed to involve locking clients into relationships of “ongoing annual payments.” Small wonder, then, that the firms hadn't leapt to DeBeauvoir's idea of building a machine with open source code that aimed to liberate local governments with cheap, self-sustaining technology."
that's just one of the thousand cuts of corruption undermining our democratic republic. consolidation (including in government, via a 2-party system) has unquestionably proven to be a social bad.
in any case, the wired story was interesting and informative. the STAR system (potentially) solves the problem of verifiability with secrecy, but not the issue of better representing the people's will in voting.
for the record, i'm partial to score voting (like nicky case) with a 7-point scale.
That page doesn't seem to mention the method used for president/governor/mayor elections here in Brazil: there will be an election for mayor (and the municipal legislative) on November 15. If none of the mayor candidates has at least 50% of the vote, there will be a second round on November 29 with only the two candidates which got the most votes in the first round.
This system has the advantage of being very simple to explain (I just did it above in one sentence) and implement, and works well enough in practice.
Brazilian living in Ireland here. The system used in Brazil doesn't help with weeding out extremists (as it's painfully obvious right now). Ranked voting, OTOH, heavily punishes rejection, which results in reducing the size of the Overton Window in politics.
The two dominant parties here are both center-right and are barely distinguishable to the point the Green Party formed a government with them. This is undesirable if you want quick changes, but exceedingly good if the aim is long-term multi-generational stability.
It does help, but not much. It basically enforces that the most rejected candidate does not win. But it does nothing to the second most rejected one.
Of course, ranked and approval voting are much better choices.
We have a similar system for electing the Mayor of Richmond, Virginia. It's biggest drawback is that the 2nd election is needlessly expensive, and since it's out-of-cycle and there are no other elections occurring at the same time turnout is much lower. I would prefer instant runoff.
I don't know about the costs, but here in Brazil the turnout for the second round isn't much lower: for instance, for the 2018 federal elections, the turnout was 79.67% in the first round, and 78.70% in the second round (source: official results website). But that's probably because voting is mandatory (except for voters younger than 18 years or older than 70 years).
This can be really bad if the vote is split enough that the top two candidates are not the actual voters' preferred top two.
Just reading from the website... I would like use the condorcet method and if it "crashes" just use first past the post.
Look into cardinal systems. If you want good voting systems you have to consider more factors than VSE. You'll find that cardinal systems can get to similar VSEs of condorcet with far less complexities and many other benefits.
Why would you expect approval voting to yield different results than FPTP?
Simple answer: The math says so
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4FXLQoLDBA
Longer answer: cardinal systems (the generalized form that approval is part of) is able to capture more information about voter preference. It is easiest to see this with something like range voting. You may be familiar with a question like "Do you agree or disagree with x statement?: strongly disagree, disagree, neutral, agree, strongly agree." That is range. Approval would be "Do you agree or disagree with x statement?: Disagree, agree". Conversely FPTP would present you many statements and you have to pick the one you agree with the most, even though you may agree with many in the list. You can probably see here that you are actually able to capture a fair amount of preference information through this, thus allowing to elect representatives that more accurately represent the population as a whole.
I would frequently vote for more than just one candidate. And people who don't vote because e.g. Biden isn't progressive enough would have someone to vote for who could actually garner a significant number of votes. So maybe turnout improves too. Those other candidates/parties could then get momentum and funding and show up at the debates.
If you did it for just one election, I'd bet something like the president would get the same outcome, but local stuff with half a dozen decent candidates on the ballot would be different. Over time, different candidates winning lower races, plus 3rd party candidates for the big races being able to actually gather momentum would have profound impacts on the top races.
It would even change who shows up on the ballot. Remember in the dem primaries, all the commentary about candidate X drawing votes away from candidate Y, so they had to withdraw from the race to give their policies a better chance of winning? The whole "lanes" thing? Sanders and Warren wouldn't be splitting the progressive vote. And so on. Hell, the dems could nominate biden/harris and another pair in an effort to increase turnout, which would be suicide in FPTP. Or maybe not. I'd expect lots of changes and many would likely be surprising.
You can think about it this way -- approval voting allows you to vote strategically for a candidate (in case you are worried about the lesser of two evils winning), and then allows you to also vote for anyone you actually prefer, guaranteeing this can't hurt the strategically chosen candidate.
This would allow third parties to see real support, and then go on to win subsequent elections.
And in other ranked-choice voting news, two more states have ballot measures to institute it:
https://ballotpedia.org/Massachusetts_Question_2,_Ranked-Cho...
https://ballotpedia.org/Alaska_Ballot_Measure_2,_Top-Four_Ra...
The Massachusetts proposal is less dumb than Maine's. It's for all elections __except__ presidential. RCV is incompatible with the NPVIC, as well as with how the electoral college works in the interim. If Maine voted for a third-party without NPVIC, it would, in effect, waste its vote.
As I understand it, the NPVIC will never happen. Its entire purpose, as expalained in a CGP Grey video, was creating a situation where no one state has to move first by making the agreement only take effect once a certain number of electoral votes are accounted for.
The problem is that this agreement is expressly unconstitutional by way of article 1 section 10: _No State shall, without the Consent of Congress, [...] enter into any Agreement or Compact with another State_
While states are allowed to divvy up their EVs within their own borders however they choose, this kind of interstate agreement to do so in a certain way is illegal, and bipartisan congressional support to circumvent the electoral college seems unlikely.
The question of course is what constitutes an "Agreement or Compact" under constitutional terms. SCOTUS held in Virginia v Tennessee that an agreement is something that increases the power of a state in some fashion. The popular vote compact here may not meet that threshold.
For comparison, note that a lot of what we think of as "treaties" (which require advice and consent of the Senate) aren't actually treaties per the constitutional interpretation, but done only with executive privilege.
More fundamentally, NPVIC doesn't actually require an agreement or compact.
States just need to pass a law which says: "If greater than [threshold] of states pass NPVIC-compliant laws, we will select electors based on popular vote of America, rather than on popular vote of [state]."
This type of collusion very obviously doesn't meet the threshold under Constitutional terms, and continues to be a republican form of government. I don't see any issues.
This sort of collusion is pretty common too. See local COVID19 response state consortia, codes like UCC, professional accreditations, etc. Without that, the US government would be impotent, since there are things which are outside of federal power, but which require coordination across states. If this were banned, the US would collapse.
What exactly could the federal government do about it? Force the states to nominate electors by some other process? Toss out the states votes? I’m not concern trolling I honestly can’t come up with a response that doesn’t seem like a disaster.
> What exactly could the federal government do about it? Force the states to nominate electors by some other process?
Yes, with:
> Toss out the states votes?
...as a fallback.
That's actually how the norm of "have a vote of the people in your state with the actual voting on, or completed by, the standard 'election day', and assign electors by a procedure that exists in law prior to that election" rule works. Its a federal law directing what states should do, and threatening that their electoral votes might be disregarded when the electoral vote count occurs in Congress if they don't comply.
The problem is what happens if a state that signed the compact decided to break it. Because the federal government considers the compact illegal, it won't enforce it, so any state can break it at will.
It might not actually matter if one state (or several) decided to break the compact, since the trigger condition for the compact coming into effect is that the compacting states have enough electoral votes to _guarantee_ the outcome of the election.
As long as the defecting state had fewer (or the same number of) electoral votes as the aggregate of the non-compacting states that happened to assign their electors in support of the popular vote winner, then the defection would not actually change the outcome of the election.
This may reduce the incentive for states to defect from the compact, as might the possibility of electors from non-compacting states becoming faithless out of respect for the compact.
Strategically I think the NPVIC shouldn't have been presented as a compact between states but as a set of individual pledges to the people of America that each pledging state would act in the necessary way once enough other states had made equivalent pledges. That would mean the states wouldn't have standing to sue each other, unlike in a compact, but it seems that their ability to do that is constitutionally questionable anyway.
I'd imagine the electors, or quite possibly any voter in the state, would have standing to invalidate joining the agreement whether or not it's actually enforced.
Separately from any constitutional challenges at the federal level, I bet many state supreme courts will be faced with challenges based on the premise that the state legislatures reached beyond their state granted powers.
> Separately from any constitutional challenges at the federal level, I bet many state supreme courts will be faced with challenges based on the premise that the state legislatures reached beyond their state granted powers.
I'm pretty sure that in the cases around the 2000 Presidential election (and possibly previously) one of the key federal rulings is that because selection of Presidential electors is a power of _state legislatures_ (not _states_ as a whole) specifically granted by the federal Constitution, State Constitutions cannot trump the federal Constitution in how that authority is allocated.
Consent of Congress is a much lower bar than a constitutional amendment, though.
> The problem is that this agreement is expressly unconstitutional
I would disagree with that phrasing, and your final paragraph contradicts that statement. There is nothing unconstitutional about states entering into compacts. They merely require congressional consent to do so as the language of Article 1 Section 10 makes clear.
Additionally, even without congressional consent the supreme court has ruled multiple times since the late 1800s that as long as an a compact is not:
> "directed to the formation of any combination tending to the increase of political power in the States, which may encroach upon. . . . the just supremacy of the United States"
Then congressional consent is not required. [1][2][3]
The argument then is whether the NPVIC violates that rule and encroaches on federal supremacy or grants additional power to the states. However, the power in question here relates to how states appoint electors. This is a power explicitly granted to the states under article 2 section 1 clause 2 [4]:
> Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors
Therefore, in my opinion, any compact regarding the power to select electors does not pass the tests laid out by previous case law, and the compact does not require congressional approval. Of course our opinions don't count, only the supreme courts opinion matters, but there is no indication from any case law that this compact is "explicitly unconstitutional" or "in a certain way illegal". If anything it is borderline, but supported by current caselaw. The supreme court will most likely take up any suit involving the compact for clarification, but they would need a novel justification for deciding that states exercising a power explicitly granted to the states somehow increases the power of states.
Additionally, all of this is entirely moot if congress grants approval.
For further reading I would look at the NPVIC's own FAQ which has detailed citations and caselaw supporting their argument as well as detailing counter arguments [5]. For an independent review of interstate compact caselaw see [1], [6], or [7].
[1]
https://ballotpedia.org/Interstate_compact
[2]
https://ballotpedia.org/Virginia_v._Tennessee_(1893)
[3]
https://ballotpedia.org/New_Hampshire_v._Maine_(1976)
[4]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_Two_of_the_United_Stat...
[5]
https://www.nationalpopularvote.com/section_9.16#myth_9.16.5
[6]
https://www.csg.org/knowledgecenter/docs/ncic/caselaw.pdf
[7]
https://ballotpedia.org/Congressional_consent
NPVIC still assumes a two-party system, so it's fundamentally flawed.
Of course, if the whole country used RCV (or any other non-FPTP system) for federal legislative elections, then the presidential election would be far less important, since one party would be less likely to control the legislature and might actually deign to exercise some oversight, unlike our current Senate.
Thanks for this, this is really _hopeful_!! I want to see Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) here in Oregon next!
I recently learned that there is a group in Oregon advocating a slight twist on RCV called STAR[1]. There are efforts to get it used in Lane and Multnomah counties at the moment.
[1]
Why is star voting (where you award each candidate 0-5 stars) better then ranked choice voting?
The FAQ[1] and comparison page[2] explain their position.
[1]
[2]
https://www.equal.vote/star-vs-rcv
Great links on STAR, especially the comparison!
Fun fact, STAR came out of Oregon too. Lane county (where the University of Oregon) has been trying to pass it for awhile (very close last time).
Simplifying greatly, tactical voting in RCV gets super complex, and STAR does a much better job at rewarding honest voting.
In STAR voting, the optimal strategy is almost always to vote how you actually feel. This isn't the case with pure RCV.
The Condorcet method also rewards honest voting, and can be used with ranked ballots.
I think this is a bad way to think about things. Rewarding honest voting means that people have perfect information and act rationally (meaning they understand how to maximize their voting power). The other way to frame things is how systems handle strategic voting. One of the reasons I'm a big fan of STAR is because it both prefers honest voting (you maximize your power her) AND it handles strategic voting well[0]. That is, the difference between VSE_best and VSE_worst is small. Where we see that the gap in Condorcet methods (like RP and Schulze) is quite large (>10%). I think people get caught up in Condorcet methods because they look at RP's VSE being the max. But STAR0-10 only has a 0.5% VSE difference on max but a 4% difference in worse case (not to mention that STAR is _substantially_ simpler and scales better). You can't compare voting systems just by looking at VSE. It is an important factor, but there are many other factors that matter (e.g. handle of strategy, transparency, handling spoilers, scalability, and more mathematical factors).
[0]
https://electionscience.github.io/vse-sim/vse.html
> _Rewarding honest voting means that people have perfect information and act rationally_
Democracy itself implies that we expect voters to be informed and rational. Since we know that isn't the case, perhaps the important business of ruling countries should be left up to those who are very well educated and who possess a certain... _nobility_.
What I like about Condorcet methods is the Condorcet criterion itself. I have yet to find a better definition of a candidate being most preferred by the voters than that the candidate would beat every other candidate in a two-person race. The later-no-harm criterion (that giving a positive rating to a less favored candidate cannot hurt a more favored candidate) is also valuable and STAR doesn't satisfy it.
STAR does seem easy to count though, and without doing much research, likely to elect the Condorcet winner most of the time.
I'm not sure that's a necessary prior. This also isn't a binary condition (informed vs uninformed) but rather a spectrum. One can be reasonably informed (or worse! Misinformed!) and still not vote optimally, but would trend in the direction. Because of this spectrum it is reasonable to also want to handle strategic voting well. Especially because there's nothing better to discourage strategic voting than to make it not very useful (think why would you perform this adversarial attack if it isn't effective?).
While the Condorcet criterion itself is nice it is far from the most important (cardinal systems are going to do a good job here). VSE really is measuring the MSE distance between true voter preference and candidate policy. But there are other criteria that matters. Simplicity is one, as it allows for transparency and voters to understand the system. Ranked systems typically fail the favorite betrayer. This includes RP and Schulze (the most popular Condorcet methods, and what I assume you are specifically referring to). But also consider factors like: expressiveness, spoiling, monotonicity, scaling (do ballots look the same?), and momentum.
It is really easy to get caught up in a single metric, but the difficulty of voting is that there are a lot of metrics that matter and you really have to do a lot of tuning. But I'll tell you that the researchers themselves, including Arrow, typically prefer cardinal systems because of the combination of criteria.
https://electionscience.org/library/approval-voting/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4FXLQoLDBA
See my post in this thread for an example of why RCV is bad, and see the links I provided to learn more about STAR.
Can you clarify if by "Is bad" you mean not as good as STAR or worse than the First Past The Poll (current system)?
It does sound like STAR is better than RCV, especially after reading about it here
https://www.wired.com/story/dana-debeauvoir-texas-county-cle...
(A Texas County Clerk’s Bold Crusade to Transform How We Vote).
I do wonder if those adopting RCV are still in a better place, than FPTP, simply because it decreases voter apathy and gives voters a chance to be "heard", thus increasing participation. At least in the short run, I feel like RCV is still a win, even though it may not be as optimal as STAR.
Linking your post you mentioned:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24944151
By the way, STAR is not really a twist on RCV, it's a twist on Score Voting.
Oh, I just read a big article about how Star voting came to be.
https://www.wired.com/story/dana-debeauvoir-texas-county-cle...
(A Texas County Clerk’s Bold Crusade to Transform How We Vote)
I thought I remembered it was mostly about how to verify your vote, I'll have to read more into it again. Thanks!
That's a different STAR vote (i know its confusing). The one you posted is about design for a voting machine. The one the comment is referring to is a vote counting method (like first past the post or rcv)
STAR came out of Oregon actually. One of the co-inventors actually sometimes frequents HN.
I live in Massachusetts and had not heard a whole lot about this issue until I got the ballot. I read the proposal and I was a little confused why it's a better system, and it's a lot more complicated than "every person gets 1 vote and whoever gets the most votes wins". RCV feels similar to the Electoral College, a system made with good intentions but is so complicated that it's gameable.
Yeah. I have the same hesitations about it. I think the biggest risk is that it's only a small improvement, and people may feel like, "Tried alternative voting systems, they were more complicated and didn't really improve anything."
However, I ended up voting Yes on 2 because it will increase awareness that alternative voting systems _exist_. The more people who are aware that FPTP sucks moose juice, the more likely we can pass other, more impactful, reforms like STAR. So basically I'm wagering that there's more people like this, than people who will give up on voting reform due to RCV (really, IRV)'s shortcomings.
We have this for all elections in Australia. It works great and allows you to vote for your single issue party but fallback to a more mainstream or centrist party without spending your ballot.
I totally get where this makes sense in your system, where the election typically results in a coalition of parties that come together to form a government, but I'm less clear on whether this makes sense in the US system where it is far more winner-take-all.
It makes sense in our system because it allows individuals to vote for the candidate they like the most rather than against the one they dislike the most.
Unfortunately, RCV only fixes that assuming that you have more than two candidates on the ballot.
This time there were 4 or 5 candidates for president in Maine, so I voted for the 4 I liked. Felt good, but honestly, the largely two-party system prevented many great candidates from being on the ticket.
The US forms coalitions too, and that's actually part of the problem. Both the democrats and republicans have subparties within them. It is really more accurate to think of democrats and republicans as coalitions. That's why we have people like Bernie being so different from Biden. Or Trump, tea party, and neo libs, being far from classical conservatives. All of which are republicans.
Australia's (as well as Ireland's) main advantage seems more due to proportionate representation (parliamentary system) rather than due to IRV. Australia is still dominated by two parties (>70%) and the minor parties have to be pretty close. This is the same problem that plurality has, that it causes parties to form large coalitions in an effort to compete with the other side.
I think it would be excellent if it found more adoption in the US (or approval voting or similar).
What drawbacks/surprising consequences, if any, are there?
Most surprising consequence is probably that IRV is unlikely to break 2 party dominance, even though it this is an often claimed advantage of IRV.
The frequently imagined scenario with IRV is that, in a two party system where most people will rank 1 of 2 parties first, then a small percent of voters can safely rank a third party first. This party is then eliminated, but not before a surprisingly strong showing (e.g. 5% first rather than the .05% we currently have). This would likely happen.
The problem arises in the next election, when the third party is now strong enough to command a large percent of first place votes. Since the party with the least first place votes is eliminated (even if they have a ton of second place votes), the third party now stands a real risk of cannibalizing votes from the next most similar "mainstream" party. If this cannibalization were to occur, both parties could lose to the other mainstream party that many voters might not have preferred! Due to this risk, it's likely voters would strategically rank the third party below the mainstream party even if that wasn't their true preference. In this way, IRV can still lead to 2 party dominance.
Assume for the sake of argument that the policy of the "third" party is just like that of the "second" of the two "main" parties. In that case, it's true that the second party could be eliminated in the initial round of voting. However, all its votes would then transfer to the third party. In that case the third party very well could beat the "first" party, satisfying supporters of both the second and third parties.
It's true that third parties would be unlikely to map to the current political spectrum in such a "pure" fashion. However, that just means that voters reject the political choices currently on offer. Voters really should have that option.
I think you have two incorrect assumptions here. You're assuming A) that parties and political ideologies exist in 1 dimension, and that B) the second party is closer to the third party than the first, such that its votes will go to the nearest neighbor, which is then the third party.
Even granting A, B is definitely not true. There are many similarities between the two major parties, and removing one in favor of a third party would likely split voters between the third party, and the other major party.
Also, A is not true either, so the distance between parties becomes even more unclear.
I for sure believe voters should be able to reject the current political choice on offer! I support IRV over our current system for sure. But, my main point is that IRV is actually not what many people believe it to be, and is far worse than other, simpler systems, such as approval voting.
This whole thread is a thought experiment. I made a single simplifying assumption, for the sake of clarifying the particular qualities of that thought experiment: that voters would understand the policies of the second and third parties to be identical. In that case, IRV isn't "unlikely to break 2 party dominance", as you claimed above. So, that claim isn't universally true. It might be true in some circumstances, but we don't know what those might be. You'll need to explain more carefully why we should reject RCV in favor of some more perfect alternative.
IRV fails the favorite betrayer condition and isn't monotonic.
In Canada it’s been used by the Conservative party for their leadership contests. Both times, the response to the winner has been “Who?”.
So in a field with a lot of contenders it can favour marginal candidates.
You also end up with an absurdly big ballot. Past, say, five ranks the choices are hardly meaningful.
I’m favourably disposed to this type of voting but those are a couple of downsides.
I agree that there are some downsides, but regarding the conservative party leadership contests, it's probably fairly likely that the "who?" response would've happened under FPTP.
2017, likely that Bernier would've won, but I'm not convinced that he was more well-known than Scheer. Happy to be proven wrong here.
The 2020 result would likely have been the same as it is now. A small contingent of Sloan/Lewis supporters strategically voting would have tipped it to O'Toole.
> You also end up with an absurdly big ballot. Past, say, five ranks the choices are hardly meaningful.
How does the type of voting affect the number of people on the ballot?
Right now if you vote for a third party in the US your vote is wasted.
Under a ranked ballot system you can vote for a super marginal party confident that your more mainstream preference will ultimately get your vote if your marginal candidate loses.
This encourages votes for smaller parties
Are you saying more parties crop up? I still have third parties on FPTP ballots.
My vote in MA is not mathematically meaningful today, as you could correctly call the 2020 presidential race for blue back all the way back in 2016.
Change the voting process and I could vote for Party Q, then F, then D and have something closer to my true preferences be measurable vs today and give the parties a sense of where they stand with the populace. I’m still not convinced it breaks the binary star in US politics.
Right now, if those are my prefs, I have a choice of voting Q, voting D, or staying home. If Q is a third party, there’s an argument that vote might as well have not been counted or cast (because from today’s voting you can’t infer the true level of support for Q because some Qs cast their ballot for D just on the off chance that R would otherwise win; for the same reason, you can’t tell as much about the true R or D support either).
My question was around the size of the ballot, not the weight of a person's vote.
More third parties become reasonable contenders.
You have to rank them against one another. 10 candidates, 10 comparisons. 100 candidates, 100 comparisons.
Alternatively cardinal systems scale trivially (you express how much you like an individual candidate -- independently-- not how much you like a candidate -- comparatively -- to another candidate). You can bullet vote a party line if you really want.
That doesn't affect ballot size. You have the same number of candidates with boxes next to their name you put a number in, unless someone is making the implementation more complicated.
It can have strange results when there isn’t a clear moderate.
Canada uses it for a lot of leadership elections. What often happens is that a candidate nobody knows or really wants wins because they got picked so their vote wouldn’t go to the main competing candidate.
So you get party leaders who nobody seriously examined as the more hardcore members just needed to park their votes.
this is a direct consequence of switching from "most popular wins" (FPTP) to "least unpopular wins" (IRV), which is a subtle but very important distinction
The drawback is that it is more complex than a traditional ballot. It's not especially difficult, but given how many people have difficulty with even our current ballots it will cause some additional issues.
It would hurt the current duopoly so you can expect a significant pushback against it.
If MA passes theirs it could pick up real mainstream momentum though.
Actually I think this is why we see widespread support for RCV, because it still favors the major parties. On the other hand, cardinal systems (approval or STAR), do not favor mainstream parties. Really they don't favor _any_ party.
> It would hurt the current duopoly
I get that this is conventional wisdom, and a lot of smaller parties support rank choice voting because they think it helps them. But neither of the major parties like "spoiler" candidates, it seems like the ability to "collect" votes from the green or libertarian parties would be in their interest.
I suspect the reason it's not more widespread is more mundane. It isn't incomprehensible, but it's more complicated than what we have. If you're explaining you're losing. Also people are (perhaps rightly) cautious about messing with how elections happen. Finally, it doesn't ignite the same passions as abortion or police reform. The interest groups pushing most strongly for it are, by definition, small and not really powerful.
That's why I'm a bigger fan of approval voting. No ballot updates and people just check next to who they like.
Not just single issue - you can vote the party or candidate that "far, far from the typical public position on most things but preferred by me", without opening the door to the ones you actively oppose.
I would likely be a green party voter by choice, but when there's a republican on the ballot, there's no way I'm voting green - the downside of having the republican win is (for me) larger than the downside of not casting my vote according to my conscience.Adjust to suit your own political preferences - perhaps you'd like to vote libertarian but are worried about allowing the crypto-DSA democrat into office, etc, etc.
This is MAJOR. The US, the UK and other first-past-the-post systems need RCV or something similar so badly.
[EDIT: yes, STAR is likely even better]
Put another way, first-past-the-post means you're not voting _for_ anyone; you're voting _against_ whichever side of the ruling party is _worse_.
Serious question: given that you have this in Aus, why do the politicians always seem to be conservative clowns like Tony Abbott? I'm 29 but I can't remember any PMs of Aus ever being talked about internationally with anything but scorn so far.
With ranked choice universally adopted there I would have hoped for more diversity of representation :/
We have a massive problem with our media being largely owned by Murdoch. The result is that our elections tend to be heavily influenced by lies and propaganda, just as is the case with Fox News in the US.
(I don't know anything about Australia.)
Generally, election reform advocate for something like RCV for executive races and proportional representation (PR) for assemblies.
PR _can_ moot districts, eliminating some attack vectors, like gerrymandering.
Because the voting system is only one of many factors that determine what kind of government you end up with. Who controls the money in Australia? Who would they prefer to have in government representing them? Are there any ways they might use their money to propagandize or lobby for favorable laws?
(I don't know the Australian answer to that, but where I live the answer is "the ultra-rich and the investor class", "Republicans, but they like to keep Democrats in their pocket, too", and "yes, and it seems to get worse every year")
RCV would be a great improvement, but as long as money rules, things are gonna keep sucking.
I see many comments here asserting that RCV is "fundamentally sound" and that there is proof that it satisfies at least strategyproofness (in the sense of Cooperative Game Theory and Social Choice Theory, s.t. revealing/voting for true preferences is at least weakly dominant).
But can anyone provide backup for these claims?
I'm far from an expert, but I'm curious to reconcile these claims vs Arrow's Theorem and Gibbard's Theorem. My (potentially flawed) understanding as well is that RCV leads to a greater propensity for "extreme" (in the strict sense of being the top choice of a small minority of voters) candidates to win.
FPTP makes the mistake of assuming that the person with the most votes is the best.
Likewise, the biggest flaw of RCV (to me) is that it makes the opposite mistake: it assumes the person with the least votes in each round is the worst. This isn't necessarily the case.
It's still much better than our current system because it collects more data-points from voters about their preferences, and uses that data to make more comparisons between different batches of candidates.
But there are simpler systems out there with even greater voter satisfaction efficiency, because they don't make the same flawed assumptions about voter preferences. In approval voting, you either approve of a candidate or you don't, and you vote as such.
Election science wonks like to talk about theorems and satisfaction of obscure criteria, but I think they often undervalue the two things that matter most: voter satisfaction and simplicity. "Simplicity" meaning: an optimal strategy that's simple-to-explain, an easy to understand outcome, low cost of implementation, etc.
Most of us here are software folks, and we understand that designing a great system is the easy part; the hard parts are implementation and change management. Voting systems should be thought of the same way.
RCV is basically just a very quick runoff election; it has the same propensity for extremeness that a runoff does.[1] That said, I think it is very likely that more people will vote for third-party candidates (TPC) under ranked-choice.
You could make the case that TPC will allow for the representation of a wider spectrum of views, or alternatively that TPC are likely to be extremists. Both may be true.
[1]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranked_voting#Ranked_Choice_Vo...
I would be sensitive to the "TPC under RCV are more likely to be extremists" argument were it not for the fact that FPTP has _already_ allowed profound extremism in one of our two parties, and since FPTP is so anti-competitive it means that it's extremely difficult to combat. I'll take a system that makes parties more competitive, which non-FPTP systems all do.
I'm not sure what your definition of 'extremist' is. If either major party is getting close to 50% of the votes, it must be quite mainstream. I don't have to like it, and I may in fact find it abhorrent, but that has nothing to do with extremism.
A common scenario in many locations in the US:
A district tilts heavily toward one of the two main parties -- it is a "safe" district for that party. The candidate nominated by that party in the primary election is nearly certain to win the general election. If the candidate is _highly_ extremist / flawed, they might lose, but party affiliation is sufficiently strong nowadays (aka the electorate is sufficiently polarized) that a candidate can be pretty far to one extreme -- farther out than the bulk of the electorate -- and still win.
Meanwhile, there is a tendency for the more centrist voters in both parties to skip the primary. Thus, the candidate who survives the primary is often relatively extreme.
The result is that the victor of the general election is often to the extreme side of not only the electorate as a whole, but the membership of their party.
To oversimplify, imagine that political views fall on a one-dimensional spectrum ranging from 0 to 1, and the electorate consists of:
- 40% at 0.4 (center-left)
- 30% at 0.6 (center-right)
- 30% at 0.8 (heavy right)
In the primary, center-right voters are under-represented, and a candidate at or beyond 0.8 has an excellent chance of being nominated. Then in the general election, at least 2/3 of the center-right voters are likely to swing toward that candidate (because of polarization / strong party affiliation).
Looking at your spectrum, I'd see the same distribution as:
- 40% left
- 30% center
- 30% right
Any rating of 'how far' someone is along the spectrum is arbitrary, as the spectrum itself is arbitrary. I wouldn't see any extremism either.
Agreed, the spectrum ultimately is arbitrary. I was thinking in terms of a spectrum normalized to the country as a whole. In a particular district, you often have a breakdown that is off-center relative to the overall nation (of course that can be in either direction).
And in any case, the key point is that the primary process can lead to a candidate taking office who is well off-center even within their district.
Amusingly, upthread you and I are talking about whether encouraging more people to vote leads to better outcomes, and this is an example where the answer is yes: a candidate can be both an extremist and receive 50% of the vote if, as in is true in the US, less than half the eligible electorate actually votes. The current president was elected on the backs of 25% of eligible voters; does that make him an extremist candidate even by the standards of the US electorate? If we had more data on account of more Americans asserting their preferences, then we could actually determine that.
I think that's a sign that each of us has nuanced views!
'Extremist' is a bit of a slippery fish; I can't imagine calling something with even 10% support 'extremist'. If I had to draw a line, it would probably be that the sum of all 'extreme position support' would have to be less than 5% for a given subject. That is not to say that positions with >5% support are necessarily correct or conscionable.
For "extremism" to be anything but a meaningless slur, it has to at least include in its meaning "not common."
Well it's similar to a traditional runoff when there are two major candidates, but it could lead to different results when support is split more evenly among three or more candidates.
RCV gives you the same results as a runoff if the voters have ordinal preferences that they would have exercised in a runoff. There are a number of reasons why either of these may be wrong, but it seems to be a fairly reasonable set of assumptions.
IMO it also lets you just _count_ the interest, regardless of outcome. Now you could see Nader (or Bernie, or the libertarian candidate) get 5, 10% of 1st choices and know it's legit, even if it doesn't change the outcome of the election.
This is why it's opposed by both faces of the status quo party. Once a third party gets to 10% for a given office, there won't be much stopping it from getting to 40% in the next election for that office.
I'm glad you brought this up, because ~RCV~IRV does not actually satisfy these conditions (it is a personal point of frustration how Fair Vote is misleading, even by using the term RCV). IRV doesn't pass the favorite betrayal criteria. IRV also causes a weaker definition of what it means to be a spoiler[1]. Specifically you should look at monotonicity[2].
I'd encourage you to dig a bit into electionscience.org (they have some good YouTube videos as well) as they do a deeper dive on some of these topics. There's a reason Arrow himself was a fan or cardinal systems. The other part is that we need to consider factors other than VSE and spoilers. A lot of people get hyper focused on VSE (typically Condorcet supporters) and while it is an important factor 0.5% isn't a big deal (really a few percent isn't). Also you might want to check out our (HN) resident voting expert's[3] comments, because he links to a lot more information. I'd call myself a hobbyist where Clay is an expert.
[0]
https://electowiki.org/wiki/Favorite_betrayal_criterion
[1]
https://electionscience.org/library/the-spoiler-effect/
[2]
https://electionscience.org/library/monotonicity/
[3]
https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=ClayShentrup
I can't speak for any theorems so take this with a grain of salt, but if the candidate who was the top choice of a small minority manages to win that would mean that they are someone that a majority would settle for, which I would think is a more optimal outcome than having a highly polarized winner who half love and half hate when the goal of an elected official should be to represent as many of their constituents as possible.
There are properties that different voting systems have. Not all voting systems can fulfill all of these properties. In many cases, it is a trade-off of some having some properties but not others and people deciding what they care about more. For instance, RCV satisfies the majority criterion, meaning that if a candidate receives more than 50% of the vote, then they are the winner. However, it does not satisfy the Condorcet criterion, which is that if there is a person who wins in a pairwise matchup against every other candidate, then that person is the winner.
RCV is also sensitive to different tactical strategies. You can rank a weak candidate higher in the hopes that they do well in one part of the run-off and then worse later. You may also have a preference for voting a less preferred candidate first for other reasons.
I wouldn't say it's perfect. It has some nice properties. Other systems may have nice properties too. The useful question to me is if you compare the current system vs. RCV, would it elect of those who more closely match the preferences of people they represent. I would say yes to that, but I also think Condorcet methods would do an even better job.
Have you seen any research on which parties or groups might benefit most from Condorcet methods? It would seem to me that it would benefit smaller parties who share something in common with a couple of major parties (such as the Libertarian party in the USA).
The more typical definition of an extreme candidate is not "this person is not my top pick", but rather "I would not vote for this person at all". Candidates under RCV win when they get 50% of the vote, so if you're so extreme that only a small minority bothers to rank you then you're not going to find yourself elected on behalf of a minority. This is in contrast to FPTP, where any extremist can win with any miniscule percent of the vote if there's enough vote-splitting going on.
I’m in MA and our question 2 is whether to institute it, though it wouldn’t apply to presidential elections.
I think it’s a great idea. The only specific criticism I’ve seen is that it’s “more complicated” but to me that’s a price worth paying for the improved representation of the public will.
What’s surprised me is that I’ve heard several smart people tell me that they weren’t sure because they had heard that “it can cause unexpected results”, but hadn’t dug deep enough to elaborate.
Has anyone come across strong, detailed arguments against it?
Australian here. Firstly, ranked choice voting is so much better than first-past-the-post and you should do it.
But since you asked, Australia has seen one problem in recent years. But this is a problem specific to the conditions we have here. Firstly, some background:
1. In the Australian Senate, the single pool of voters from the state are deciding on 12 senators (EDIT: oops, should be 6). This is decided by running the ranked-choice algorithm until 12 remain (EDIT: 6).
2. In the Senate, there are now dozens of parties, so the ballot is hilariously wide.
3. Australia has compulsory preferencing. You MUST rank all parties on the ballot.
4. Because you can't expect the population to rank dozens of candidates at the polling booth, each party can decide for their voters what order to rank the other parties. So how do the parties decide how to rank the other parties? Backroom deals. Who knows what the terms of the deals are. In any case, it's not the voters who decide.
The result is that minor parties like the Sports Party and the Motoring Enthusiasts Party, who each get almost no direct votes, jostled their way up just high enough on the preference lists of enough major parties that they ended up snagging one of the seats.
More details here:
https://www.fairvote.org/reforming-the-australian-senate
But as I said, this is made possible by the specific conditions of the electoral system here. It wouldn't be a problem if the election were for a single candidate, or if there were no party-defined preferences (necessitating non-mandatory ranking).
The multi member district approach is preferable to single member districts because it gives a more proportional result. The Australian example demonstrates this in the extreme with very large multi member Senate districts electing different parties and single member House districts which end up electing the usual two parties only, maintaining the duopoly.
Arguably multi member districts of between 3-5 members would be a better sweet spot.
Removing the need to rank all members is also an easy solution. If someone doesn’t want their vote to transfer beyond their first or second (etc) preference why should they be forced to? Where STV is used in NZ for local elections you just rank those you want to rank. The Australian requirement to rank all probably stems from their compulsory voting requirement.
A nitpick: in a normal election, half of the Senate faces election, so 6 per state.
It's only double-dissolution elections where all 12 face election at the same time. In those scenarios minor parties and independents are much more likely to get elected, because the quota is halved.
Voting above the line works basically fine. What happened is that the major parties were too lazy to discuss things with many minor parties, who then went off and arranged their own preference deals.
We have it here in St Paul for city elections. It is definitely more complicated. It sounds easy in practice--just rank your candidates--but how you actually put that down on paper in a machine-readable way is a bit non-obvious. Here's an example of how it actually looks[1]. Now imagine that same thing, for every office on the ballot... It's not too bad if you know what you're doing, but it's easy to see how someone would do it wrong.
To be clear, I'm a huge fan of RCV and think it is massively unethical that we do not have it (or some similar system) for all elections. I consider elections that don't use RCV to be borderline invalid.
[1]
https://www.minnpost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/default/fi...
The layout of that ballot isn’t helping. For comparison, I’ve found the RCV ballot in San Francisco pretty intuitive (
https://sfelections.sfgov.org/sites/default/files/Images/Dem...
)
It would be nice if groups (including but not limited to political parties) could provide recommended ballots, in line with straight ticket voting, but in a ranked choice setting so for instance, the Democrat ballot might recommend the Democrat first and then the Green Party candidate second (or something like that).
I haven't fully absorbed this but Nicky Case built some visualization tools around this and other methods.
(To Build a Better Ballot)
I came here to post that link. This is by far the best introduction to the topic that I've ever seen, and makes a complex issue with plenty of subtle, non-obvious consequences very accessible.
That's pretty interesting. Thanks for sharing.
IMO I'd probably settle for anything beyond FPTP but it's good to know that there's research behind the options.
> Has anyone come across strong, detailed arguments against it?
There's a simpler way that's much easier for voters to understand: "approval voting." You mark all the candidates you approve of, and the candidate(s) with the most total votes wins.
This feels like voter disenfranchisement to me. For an example, I don't "approve" of any candidates in our current presidential election. I'm simply going to vote for what I think is best, strategically. If I had to say who I "approved of" (and took the words literally) I would vote no-one. I suppose I would end up still voting strategically and ignore the wording, but would all voters?
That's not so much an argument against approval voting as it is an argument for carefully and clearly wording the ballot. That's true of any voting system.
TBF, first past the post is even worse in this regard (any vote that doesn't support a member of the Democratic-or-Republican Party is effectively entirely ignored), and ranked-choice isn't much better unless it includes a "leave the office empty" option, which also improves approval voting.
This basically devolves to FPTP.
Why?
Political parties are incentivised to mislead voters into marking only one candidate.
It can occasionally lead to weird results, the most often cited is the 2009 Burlington Mayor election[1] where more voters preferred Montroll to Kiss, but Kiss was the winner. The counter-argument to this is that plurality voting quite frequently leads to weird results (spoiler effects, etc.), and it seems relatively rare in RCV in practice.
[1]
https://ranked.vote/report/us/vt/btv/2009/03/mayor
>where more voters preferred Montroll to Kiss
That's only true in the first two rounds. In total more voters preferred Kiss over Montroll.
> That's only true in the first two rounds. In total more voters preferred Kiss over Montroll.
No, in total 4064 voters preferred Montroll to Kiss, while 3476 voters preferred Kiss to Montroll. "Preferred" here means either that they ranked a candidate above the other, or that they ranked a candidate and did not rank the other. (Some ballots ranked neither candidate, and so are not considered)
Edit: I did the math independently, but it lines up with the Wiki page here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Burlington_mayoral_electi...
Ah yes you're right. I wasn't looking at the 3rd most popular candidate in the first round.
That being said the results would have been the same Under STAR voting too which people seem to suggest is better than RCV.
Personally I like strict proportional representation with a Parliamentary system. This way you get what people want and you don't get a leader from a different party than the legislative.
I'm not sure why you think the results would have been the same. I would guess that STAR voting would have Montroll beating Kiss in the runoff.
Condorcet methods > RCV
When talking about argument against RCV, you'd need to come up with a way to create a "spoiler" effect.
While it's trivial to create a spoiler in the current system ( Bush v Gore v Nader ), trying to create a spoiler in RCV is much much harder. Go ahead and try. Then compare that to what would have happened in the current "one vote" system. You can easily see that RCV is clearly an improvement and makes it much harder to have 3rd party candidates spoil the election by stealing votes from the most popular candidate.
> The only specific criticism I’ve seen is that it’s “more complicated” but to me that’s a price worth paying for the improved representation of the public will.
The main problem with IRV (RCV is a horrible name for it, since its one of a large class of ranked-choice methods) is that, for the complexity of a ranked-choice method, it gives pretty much the least benefit of any single-winner system.
(The multimember district version of IRV, STV, is a fairly reasonable proportional system, on the other hand.)
I haven't but seems like a threat to the two-party system and those invested in it.
This is the main reason why I like it. The current two parties have a choke hold on the government and a third (or fourth) party has no chance today.
Multi-member electorates are far more likely to produce multi-party systems. Australia's lower house is single-member electorates and remains dominated by major parties. Its upper house is composed of multi-member electorates (one for each state) and consequently, that's where minor parties and independents most frequently show up.
Approval voting is simpler and has a similar end result.
Wouldn't it increase the odds of an extreme and/or single issue candidate winning?
I mean isn't the point of it that a 3rd party candidate would have a more viable shot at winning?
Though I suppose it would also better express the voters' will if those 3rd party candidates still lost.
If they win it's hard to say this will be a result the electorate finds disappointing. The advantage for mainstream candidates is that third parties won't be spoilers, which is currently a relatively common occurrence (and why Maine has ranked-choice voting).
It has the opposite effect that you described.
Consider the 2000 Gore v Bush v Nader. Bush won with a minority of votes. But if they used Ranked Choice, and Nader voters are generally assumed to have the preference order (Nader > Gore > Bush) then Gore would have won.
We can assume that politically, Nader is to the left of Gore, and Bush is to the right.
So in fact, ranked choice voting helps the candidate that is in the political center!
It's more nuanced than this. RCV helps the median in the way you suggest _when the median is more popular_, by allowing the more extreme voters to avoid splitting the vote. In the example, by allowing Nader voters to fall back to Gore once Nader is eliminated.
But, when the race is closer, it flip flops to have the opposite direction. Say Nader is marginally more popular _among liberals_. Now Gore is eliminated first, and Nader beats Bush. But hold on, what about the conservatives, who voted Bush > Gore > Nader? They've been screwed, because Gore was eliminated before Bush, so the system never considered their preference for Gore over Nader. And actually, if enough of them had flipped their vote and gone Gore > Bush > Nader, then Bush would be eliminated first, resulting in Gore's victory -- the lesser evil.
If you are liberal and have a hard time identifying this as a problem, consider the reverse: an election in the south, where voting D > R > Tea party results in the tea party candidate winning, but voting R > D > Y elects the mainstream Republican.
So the short summary is that, under RCV, it's only safe for you to put your favorite candidate first if:
A) Your favorite is likely to win,
or
B) The election is not close -- you know your favorite(s) will be eliminated before your next choice, who is likely to win.
It is still an improvement over FPTP, where you _always_ have to vote for a likely-to-win candidate, but not as good as any form of score voting (e.g. approval, STAR).
> So in fact, ranked choice voting helps the candidate that is in the political center!
I think you might be right, but the single case you cited doesn't make it so.
Australian politics is dominated by policies aimed at the median voter. That's over a century of cases.
If a candidate is everyone's second choice, I don't think you can call them extreme or single issue.
I think it actually increases the chances of a common 2nd choice winning.
Extreme candidates are only going to draw from their limited constituencies, but a choice that's "nice, but not my top choice, but I'd like them if my top choice doesn't get elected" candidate for a lot of people actually does really well in this sort of system.
RCV eliminates the spoiler effect, but I don't think that necessarily means that 3rd party candidates have a higher chance of winning. I don't know.
It is nice to be able to show your support for third party candidates in the way that matters most, by actually voting for them, even if they still have little chance of winning. It's nice to be able to do this without throwing your vote away. You no longer have to choose between strategic voting and showing support for your favorite candidate.
Even with RCV there will still be political parties with varying popularity, and there will still be 2 at the top that are most popular. At least we wont have to have candidates strategically drop out to avoid being a spoiler any more.
It doesn't eliminate the spoiler effect. Here's a simple example of what can happen under RCV:
Pretend Bernie Sanders in 2016 ran under the Green Party after dropping out of the Democratic Primary. RCV claims to eliminate the spoiler effect, so it is "safe" for all the people who want Bernie as their first choice to actually express that. Assume everyone who likes Bernie the best follows that: they put Bernie as their first choice and either Trump or Clinton as their second choice. Presumably more will have Clinton as their second choice than Trump since Clinton is more centrist than Trump who is on the right.
Say the "first choice" votes go as follows:
- 45% top choice Trump
- 35% top choice Bernie
- 20% top choice Hillary
Hillary gets eliminated and the people who put Hillary as their first choice now have their second choices distributed among the remaining candidates. Say that split goes (within the 20%):
- 6% 2nd choice Trump
- 14% 2nd choice Bernie
Trump wins, even if all the Bernie voters had Hillary as their 2nd choice, because their second choices didn't count for anything. So the claim that it was "safe" to express their true preferences and put Bernie as their first choice completely backfired.
summary: among three choices, under Ranked Choice Voting, you only get your votes moved to your 2nd choice in Ranked Choice if you do not come in 2nd place overall. If your candidate comes in 2nd, your votes are worthless.
A system that fixes this and other issues is STAR Voting, and it's what people should be pushing for:
I watched the video at your link, but it wasn't very descriptive as to how the votes are actually tallied.
This video does a good job of explaining RCV:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Y3jE3B8HsE
Is there a similar video for STAR?
I can see the problem with RCV now. It doesn't completely eliminate the spoiler effect, just makes it less likely.
I understand how votes are cast in each system and they seem similar. STAR seems like RCV, but you can put multiple candidates in the same rank.
I'm not sure how STAR votes are tallied, but wouldn't you be able to implement that same system with RCV? The only difference is same-ranking candidates. Is that the key to STAR's improvement?
EDIT:
Is it just this simple? You sum their score, then instant runoff the top 2?:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NuVSn2rAFVU
I can't tell if it's better or not yet. It still definitely doesn't elect the condorcet winner... which you can see from 3 voters and 12 candidates:
Voter 1: 4 for A, 3 for B, 2 for C, 1 for J
Voter 2: 4 for D, 3 for E, 2 for F, 1 for J
Voter 3: 4 for G, 3 for H, 2 for I, 1 for J
It's more contrived than the example for RCV, so I think it's more resistant to spoiler effect, but it clearly happens here. Essentially, every favored candidate higher than 1 is different and they all have the same candidate for their last favorite candidate. As you can see, A,D,G have the most votes, but in 1-on-1 face-offs, J would win most of the elections. Voter 1 likes J more than D,E,F,G,H, and I. Voter 2 like J more than 6 other candidates as well and same with Voter 3. But in STAR, he gets eliminated.
I believe you could come up with an example where the top two candidates aren't tied, but it would be more complicated.
These voting systems are difficult to measure. I thought RCV was very secure until this HN thread. Hopefully STAR holds up, but I think you'd have to look more into the incentives to fully know if it eliminates the spoiler effect.
> Is it just this simple? You sum their score, then instant runoff the top 2?
Yes. First round counts stars, second round just counts preference.
If I remember correctly, the main purpose of the second round is to discourage strategic voting -- if you give all other candidates the minimum score, to give your favorite the best chance, then you don't get to express a preference in the runoff, in the event that your favorite is not top 2. So it's only worth doing this if you really like your favorite so much that everyone else is the same to you.
> It still definitely doesn't elect the condorcet winner... which you can see from 3 voters and 12 candidates
My understanding (from Wikipedia) is that the condorcet winner is "one candidate who beats every other candidate pairwise". Since often no candidate fulfills this criteria, all condorcet systems that expect to survive contact with the real world need to specify a fallback way to choose a winner. I don't know much about the different strategies they use to do this.
If my understanding is correct, then it seems like there is no condorcet winner in this scenario (rather, a 3-way tie). So I'm not sure how you expect a condorcet system to handle it.
This post seems logical and takes time to explain the thinking with examples. I don't think it should be down voted (it is grey right now).
I have learned about STAR recently here
https://www.wired.com/story/dana-debeauvoir-texas-county-cle...
(A Texas County Clerk’s Bold Crusade to Transform How We Vote) and it is a legit system and has real promise.
Since you replied to me: I agree, STAR would be better. I also like approval voting for its simplicity. I believe both are better than RCV, but for whatever reason RCV seems to have the hype and I'm not sure whether it's better to try to run with that hype or redirect it towards STAR or approval voting.
The second vote was still counted, though. It just happened that Bernie had 49% (35 + 14) of the vote vs Trump's 51% (45 + 6) in this example? Just because I don't like the hypothetical results of the vote doesn't mean it is wrong.
The point I was trying to make is that the system doesn't fully reflect peoples' full set of preferences, it chooses some voters' and takes their second choices into account while ignoring others.
Can you help me validate this assumption I've formed based on what you said: The only time this seems to be impactful is when you rank two candidates with the same preference [0].
It seems that otherwise this just creates a roughly equivalent ranking structure. I think that's interesting in a system with many candidates or very similar ideologies, but in this example I would probably expect the same result.
Edit:
[0] After reading more, I now realize that the initial selection is also the sum of preference votes, so someone could rank Bernie 5, Hillary 4, Trump 0 which could create changes in who the run-off candidates are.
Surely in your example STAR Voting would have had the same result?
Hilary (and all other lesser candidates of which there are none) get eliminated leaving Bernie and Trump. Then preferences of Hilary voters for those two are calculated (Preference for a runoff between Bernie and Trump are already determined) so you end up with the exact same result.
You're assuming the scores were chosen from e.g. 1,2,3, and people gave their first preference 1, second preference 2, and third preference 3. So yes, if you force everyone to rank the candidates like in Ranked Choice Voting, in this case you get the same outcome as Ranked Choice Voting. STAR doesn't restrict people to strict ranking though.
The only situation where what you say is true is if enough of Hilary's supporters give both Bernie and Trump the same preference number. This is reflected in RCV by not putting a second and third choice. Remember that only the first round takes into account scoring. Runoff only uses relative preference which works out the same as RCV.
Also it took me way too long to understand this which makes this seem to me to be a bad system. I've never struggled to understand how a voting system works before and I've used, STV, MMPR, PR, RCV, and FPT.
I honestly think proportional representation in a Parliamentary system is way better than any of these complicated system. It's simple to understand, I vote for who I want, and it doesn't end up with the stupid situation of an Executive who can't command support of a Legislative.
> Wouldn't it increase the odds of an extreme and/or single issue candidate winning?
You act like this isn't happening already.
No there are no real valid arguments against ranked choice voting. Ranked choice has the benefit that the there is no point in "gaming" your vote, so your optimal strategy and nash-equilibrium is to provide your real candidate preference order.
The key benefit of ranked choice is that voters will tell you what they actually want (even if their favorite candidate has no chance to win).
_Ranked choice has the benefit that the there is no point in "gaming" your vote, so your optimal strategy and nash-equilibrium is to provide your real candidate preference order._
This is very demonstrably false, both theoretically and in the real world. Ranked choice voting only solves the spoiler effect in cases where the spoiler candidate has a small enough amount of support as to be rendered non-competitive, but if you have more than two candidates who are competitive then the spoiler effect comes back in full force. This is not just theoretical; it happened in the Burlington 2009 mayoral election, and fallout from that election led to ranked choice being repealed shortly afterward.
So, not only does ranked choice still incentive strategic voting sometimes, but it does it in a way that is harder to see and understand. There are other non-ranked voting systems like approval voting and score voting that are much simpler and better in this respect.
Ranked choice also has other drawbacks - like violating the monotonicity criterion - as well as more practical issues like making it impossible to distribute the counting process across precincts.
_No there are no real valid arguments against ranked choice voting._
This is also quite incorrect. Our current system of first-past-the-post is bad, yeah, but there are plenty of valid arguments against ranked choice and - in my opinion - there are much better systems we could choose instead.
Incorrect.
From the article you discussed on wiki (Burlington 2009 mayoral race)
> In IRV, there is no tactical incentive for a voter withhold or falsify their second choice.
We can get into the weeds about mathematical details like Monotonicity and Condorcet, but the truth of the matter is that nearly all the time (much more often than First-past-the-post) these measures end up being identical anyway.
I don't think anyone would argue that first-past-the-post would have produced a better candidate in this election than RCV did.
The statement "there is no tactical incentive for a voter withhold or falsify their second choice" says nothing about a voter falsifying their _first_ choice, which is exactly where IRV broke down in that election. If Republican voters who preferred the Democrat to the Progressive candidate had falsely specified the Democrat as their first choice, they could have changed the election outcome in favor of a candidate they would have preferred over the winner that IRV elected.
_I don't think anyone would argue that first-past-the-post would have produced a better candidate in this election than RCV did._
I don't think so either, but I also think that's a straw man argument. The Condorcet winner would've been the Democrat. IRV elected the Progressive, but according to that same Wiki page FPTP would have likely elected the Republican, whereas the Democrat would have likely won under systems like approval or score.
IIRC, the Burlington election as evidence of a failure isn’t universally agreed. Some point to it as an example of it working.
It's a tricky example because the Republican was effectively the third party candidate in that election. But once you realize that, the spoiler effect is very easy to see; the Republicans would have mostly preferred the more centrist Democrat candidate over the progressive Independent candidate, and if they had strategically ranked the Democrat first on their ballots the Democrat would have won.
By voting honestly and putting their favorite candidate first, they screwed themselves over and threw away their vote, and were understandably bitter about it given that ranked choice is frequently claimed to solve this exact problem.
It's also maddening that a _single mayoral election_ is apparently the slam dunk counterexample.
Meanwhile, Australia has been voting this way for a _century_. And over that time period, I think there have been fewer ugly paradoxes than in the US.
I agree that Burlington is overweighted, but I also wonder: we know about Burlington because in the US, jurisdictions typically make data available down to the level of how many times each rank-order was voted. Does Australia do this? Or is it possible that Burlington-like paradoxes have happened that we just don't know about, because we've only seen the tabulation-level data?
Australia also uses proportional representation (STV) which is quite different from the winner-takes-all instant-runoff elections that are being referred to as "ranked choice" in the US.
Only in the Senate. The House of Representatives is single-member electorates.
The advantage that RCV -- at least _exhaustive RCV_ -- has over other systems is that by forcing a ranking, you prevent a collapse back to FPTP.
In approval voting, score voting, range voting etc, parties can and will push their voters to effectively "just vote 1".
This isn't a hypothetical -- it happened in Queensland, Australia when they switched from exhaustive preferential to optional preferential voting (you could rank any number of candidates, rather than having to rank _all_ candidates). The Labor party campaigned on "Just Vote 1" and destroyed the Liberal-National Coalition at that election. Those parties in Queensland then had to merge to offset the effect on their primary votes. In turn that caused the separate Liberal and National party caucuses in the Federal parliament to merge into a single caucus (otherwise there'd be three party rooms). That in turn greatly strengthened the power of hard-right Liberals in the selection of Prime Minister. It's been fairly fucked ever since.
There are better voting systems on paper, but typically those theories don't account for political parties actively misleading voters about how the voting system works.
This is unfortunately exactly what Maine is doing, as per their example ballot linked above.
That is disappointing.
As others are saying, there are certainly drawbacks to IRV. I think there are theoretical results showing that all of the mainstream proposals for voting systems are susceptible to strategic voting aka “gaming” your vote, among other issues.
What they aren’t acknowledging is that the situation is even worse with our current system.
My personal preference is approval voting, but I’m down with all sorts of systems that are better than the status quo. I expect that anything that lets you express more of your preferences will increase buy in and participation. Increased participation with preferences closer to people’s true preferences goes hand in hand with increased legitimacy.
We shouldn’t let perfect be the enemy of better.
_We shouldn’t let perfect be the enemy of better._
I mostly agree with you, but I do fear that some of the hidden flaws of ranked choice could end up poisoning the well for better systems like approval voting. After 2009, Burlington switched back to FPTP, and as far as I know there have been no serious efforts to try any other alternative systems there.
If massive money and effort is put into adopting RCV while people falsely claim that it solves the spoiler effect, then once the problems with RCV start to become more widely understood, people are going to be a lot more skeptical next time around when advocates of approval/score/STAR voting come around and say "okay but this time it really fixes it!"
This is completely false. Pretty much all voting systems are susceptible to tactical voting, e.g. gaming the vote. This was formally proven via the Gibbard–Satterthwaite theorem[1], which showed that the only way for a voting system to be ungameable was to either have a dictator (a certain special voter who always picks the winner), or to pre-constrain the output space to only two alternatives.
This critique certainly applies to Instant-Runoff Voting, the algorithm in question here. It is known that IRV often incentivizes voters to not rank their favorites first [2].
[1]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibbard%E2%80%93Satterthwaite_...
[2]
https://electionscience.org/library/tactical-voting-basics/
Not only is Gibbard–Satterthwaite only applicable to ordinal voting systems, it is only applicable to single winner electoral systems. A popular example of a multi-winner system is STV[1], which I suppose could be used to elect a President and Vice President, similar to the situation in the US before the Twelfth Amendment was ratified.[2]
[1]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_transferable_vote
[2]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twelfth_Amendment_to_the_Unite...
Gibbard–Satterthwaite only covers ordinal voting systems: it doesn't apply to, for example, approval voting.
Yes, you are right. I should have written more carefully. I am a huge fan of approval voting. Anyone reading this -- you should look more closely at approval voting, which surpasses ranked choice voting in many ways.
https://electionscience.org/library/approval-voting-versus-i...
This is incorrect: people do better voting strategically even with ranked choice. To take an example, consider an election like:
32% of people: Clinton, Sanders, Trump
33% of people: Sanders, Trump, Clinton
35% of people: Trump, Clinton, Sanders
Now, this is a terrible election and there's no clear winner because people's preferences point around in a circle. Under traditional voting Trump wins, while under ranked choice Clinton is eliminated and Sanders wins. But if a few people preferring Trump > Clinton > Sanders had instead voted just Clinton > Trump > Sanders we could have had:
32% of people: Clinton, Sanders, Trump
33% of people: Sanders, Trump, Clinton
32% of people: Trump, Clinton, Sanders
3% of people: Clinton, Trump, Sanders
Then Trump would have been eliminated first, with only 32% of the first place votes, and his second place votes would have gone to Clinton, making her win. So by voting for a candidate they liked less, these voters got an outcome they liked more. Staying home and not voting would similarly have helped them.
I said there is no _real_ argument against it.
I'll go ahead and make the unfounded claim that situations like the one above are mathematical curiosities, and nothing more. True voter preferences do not align in a circle.
I am curious how this will work with public campaign financing for third parties. Third parties who achieve 5% of the national vote are eligible for public campaign financing in the subsequent election. But would this be 5% of the first round votes? Or 5% of the final round votes?
Maine uses IRV, so the first round votes will probably make sense for the purposes of qualifying for public campaign financing. But if it were a Condorcet-style system you could have strange outcomes where a candidate wins the election, but has less than 5% of 1st place votes and therefore doesn't qualify for public campaign financing.
In Australia it's based on the percentage of first preferences.
The thing that shocked me about US electoral college is that the votes themselves aren’t proportional.
Some states like Nebraska have vote per congressional district, but big states like Texas, California, Washington, Florida are all or nothing.
A republican in Washington has almost no impact on final outcome since its been blue for eons. Vice versa for democrat in Texas.
The way we count votes in US is not a true democracy. It’s a very weird counting game. In addition every state has its quirk of when and how they count votes (esp mail in votes).
We really need to evaluate our election process.
It is the way it is on purpose. The President of the United States is not meant to have so much power that everyone is all up in arms about it all the time. If anything needs to be evaluated, it's executive orders and whatever has happened to Congress.
Winner-takes-all for states in the EC was not the original implementation. In fact the Constitution doesn't make any recommendation on how states should allocate EC votes at all.
https://electoralvotemap.com/winner-take-all-electoral-colle...
This was not historically true on its inception.
The problem is that states are allowed to determine how exactly they allocate their electoral college votes, and when one state became winner-takes-all EC it became more advantageous to campaign in their state to get many more electoral votes for the same amount of campaigning; which started a domino effect and now pretty much all states are winner-takes-all.
Ask yourself why any politician or media outlet who claims to be pro-democracy would fail to promote this.
Way too many financial interests are involved in keeping the status quo. This is a wonderful start and a blueprint the rest of the country needs to follow.
> Way too many financial interests are involved in keeping the status quo.
Indeed. With any major system (voting, healthcare, etc) if you find yourself saying "This system is completely broken", you need to understand that, no, _the system is working exactly as intended_.
Fun story, the Maine Republican party has worked its ass off to try to get this shut down.
I think that people who favor ranked-choice voting have really underestimated how confusing it will be to a lot of people.
It may be "better", but like a lot of things that are "better" it also just feels strange. It feels like your vote, if for the leading candidate, only gets counted once, while voters for the losing candidates get more votes.
And yes, I understand that this is not the case, but adding additional confusion to our system when trust in it is at an all time low doesn't seem like a smart play. Gone will be the days when you can present a simple set of numbers to the general populace.
It's also been very strange to have a lot of out of state money dumped into my city of ~50k to get it added for our local city elections. I've gotten more ads and mailings about it than for our US Senate election, probably by a factor of 5x. It's clear one political party has made the determination that it will be beneficial to their side.
If you don’t want to participate in the ranked choice system, or find it too confusing, just put one vote in like you normally would.
For everyone else, this is a chance to break free from the two party stranglehold.
> _I think that people who favor ranked-choice voting have really underestimated how confusing it will be to a lot of people._
Tens of millions of Australians have voted this way for over a century now. The statistical likelihood that the population in Australia is somehow less prone to confusion is miniscule.
This feels like a problem that can be solved by being taught about it though, and that's exactly what Maine has been doing!
For many years now a volunteer organization has been going to high schools and hosting classroom sized workshops to educate the students on ranked choice voting. When the news brings it up and their parents eventually comment on it, the students are there to clarify any confusing that their parents may have.
Ranked choice voting is also great for write-in candidates. You get the fun of voting for your dog without the guilt of throwing away a vote. Although I'm not sure if write-in votes require additional processing compared to people who just vote by filling in the bubbles.
Score voting is not hard to understand.
- Give each candidate a score (0-5 points)
- Add up everyone's points
- The candidate who received the most points total, wins
It also happens to be a much larger improvement to the status quo than ranked choice (which is still an improvement).
We’ve been using it in my city for ages, and the “everybody will be confused” predictions never really manifested, especially after the first couple years of it.
Voters learn, and campaigns learn how to communicate clear instructions.
Maine has produced some great material for explaining how this all works, with more than a few web pages for it.
Here is a large PDF of examples on how you would fill in a sample ballot:
https://www.maine.gov/sos/cec/elec/upcoming/pdf/RCVMarkedBal...
I have to admit that I dislike the Maine ballot design. I think the "number each box" approach is simpler and less error-prone.
At first I did too, but then I thought about peoples handwriting and how it might be very hard to read the numbers. Then imagine a political fight over how many 1s are actually 7s?
Australia has done this for a century. It's not that hard. You have official counters and each candidate can appoint scrutineers to observe the count[0]. Scrutineers can challenge how a ballot has been counted: "I think that's actually a 7, not a 1". If the count supervisor agrees, it's changed. If not, then not. If it's ruled impossible to distinguish, the ballot is considered informal and removed from the count entirely.
[0]
https://www.abc.net.au/cm/rimage/7570634-3x2-xlarge.jpg?v=6
Maine has "verifiable" machine counting with hand counting as a backup IIUC. Add that to some of the in state standardized tests and bubbling your answer should be very familiar to people.
Sure, but writing numbers is familiar to people as well.
It keeps the process consistent with filling out the rest of a ballot. Just fill in the little oval with your preference. It lets us use the same tabulation machines also, I presume.
They can be counted by hand. And they should be.
They are counted by machine, but there are provisions for counting by hand in cases of discrepancies. Maine towns (usually small ones) can still count the ballots by hand if they choose.
+1000. Let this become a worldwide trend!
Any system which takes more than 1 bit of input (I'm thinking of the top-two runoff system we have in Brazil, but hopefully the analogy is understandable) will generate a result with much higher fidelity. And, who knows, once we get there, we can try progressively shifting the focus of the election from candidates to their policies, which would help remove the most perverse incentives in the system.
When I saw that this will be the first RCV Senate election, I was so happy. It is a close race, with great potential for a 3rd party influencing the outcome. This is exactly where RCV is the right way to tally the votes.
Interesting bit is that RCV was implemented as a result of Maine ballot initiative in 2016, but it took years to actually implement it because of the lawsuits.
The politicians fought hard against it: the people's vote was repealed by Maine legislature right away. In 2017 voters had to vote on it again, and overruled the repeal.
Maine is viewed as a testbed: if RCV works there, it could be the model for the nation. It is on the ballot for congressional elections in Massachusetts right now.
I think there's a sort of Toqueville effect[0] in regards to the popular treatment of FPTP.
According to Arrow's theorem more than two outcome voting systems, in terms of voting preference profiles (e.g. score or ranked choice), often succumbs to matching the least amount of voting preferences--which of course pleases that small disenfranchised minority but in exploit of the populous[1][2].
"Would it be wonderful if, under the pressure of all these difficulties, the Convention should have been forced into some deviations from that artificial structure and regular symmetry which an abstract view of the subject might lead an ingenious theorist to bestow on a constitution planned in his closet or in his imagination?" - James Madison
[0]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tocqueville_effect
[1] Critique for layman:
https://news.stanford.edu/news/2011/november/devlin-ranked-v...
[2] Mathematical Proof:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/arrows-theorem/#NonDic
The current system in the US already favors a tiny minority. That's why they try so hard to limit who can vote. A change is an improvement if it at least grows the number of people represented.
Definitely not true by the empirical voting preferences, however, that's not a good argument to move away from it. If we're to believe Arrow, these other systems guarantee that fate we all don't want. At least the FPTP system has a chance.
There will never be a candidate which embodies every local sphere's preferences. In the Presidential system, the successful candidate is challenged to find and espouse the most common values across their nation to complement the majority of preferences. Thus, they'll commoditize that common ideology, rejecting more niche and sophisticated ideologies which otherwise alienates those individual local spheres with disparate and idiosyncratic preferences; that is to say, ideology is commoditized in a similar manner to a big brand soda as it projects from a niche market to a more massive consumer demographic
Wow!!! This is really a huge step for an actual democracy!
I feel like it’s my duty to evangelize or at least plug STAR in every one of these threads.
It _is_ non-Condorcet, but don’t let that be the reason you dismiss it out of hand because there are very important shades of grey here.
Wikipedia:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/STAR_voting
Their own FAQ, though obviously biased:
As much as I want to see election reform, this seems like a horrific idea. It's hard enough to get people to vote, but now they have to know enough about candidates to rank them? Look, sure, for a lot of us dedicated voters / political junkies its no big thing, but for a lot of people that's way too much of a cognitive burden (I'm keeping it real here folks; it's hard enough to get them to use the privacy sleeve and sign their ballot...).
I'm also thinking in terms of what this does for incumbent vs challenger... would like to see what experts say, as it feels like votes could easily become spread across a group of challengers.
This comment is uninformed. A nice property of RCV is that an individual can choose to entirely ignore it and vote as though it were still FPTP: all you need to do is fill in exactly one box for the candidate you want and ignore the rest. There's no mandate that you rank all the candidates.
Look, I love being downvoted and called uninformed as much as the next guy, but I think perhaps you are missing the nuance of my inquiry. I see at least four different voting proposals in the above comments, so it isn't clear to me whether RCV _always_ works as you describe - admittedly, this discussion hasn't come to my locale in a meaningful way yet, so I'm legitimately interested in understanding the various models.
I have to wonder if perhaps even in the model you are describing still overlooks the human element. Our voting system is remarkably complicated - everything from fill-in-the-bubble to poke-out-the-hole to align-the-paper-ballot, voting by mail, voting in person, etc. The first part of my inquiry was a deliberate interest in the human interaction in this kind of voting.
The second part of my inquiry seems to have been touched upon by several other commenters, regarding the math behind outcomes when this kind of voting is introduced.
>This comment is uninformed.
Perhaps leave this part out next time - the rest was helpful. You make more friends with kindness.
It's fair to be concerned about the UX of voting, especially in threads like this full of wonks who just want to debate the theoretical foundations of voting systems. In light of that I would like to assure you that the RCV intitatives that I have seen in the US that have achieved momentum have done so by fully acknowledging that FPTP originated and persists via the sheer simplicity of its implementation; these RCV campaigns see it as a point in their favor that voters can, to use programming jargon, "gracefully degrade" to FPTP to avoid the need to completely re-educate every voter about the fundamentals of voting.
"now they have to know enough about candidates to rank them"
If you don't know enough about the candidates to know which you prefer over others, why are you voting?
How is Maine integrating it's ranked choice election into the federal election? Everyone voting for Maine's congressional election is using ranked choice, but only maine voters are using RCV to vote for president.
If they eliminate their states least popular candidates till one candidate has 50% then voters risk electing a federally unpopular candidate, in a winner take all election. In this case voters must vote strategically.
It seems Maine would have to wait for federal results and eliminate candidates that are not federally viable. How would this work with multiple states using rcv?
We need to abandon first past the pole (and the electoral college) but how can we do it peicemeal?
I'd like to know this too (and I can't tell if it's in the article, because paywall). RCV (or any other system) at the state level is irrelevant, even dangerously counter-productive, since the electoral college is still FPTP in the end. You get just as much of a spoiler effect. I wonder if this is why MA's bill this year specifically excludes RCV use for the presidential election.
Technically I suppose a state elector from a state with RCV could decide to cast their vote as though RCV were in effect? But that seems unlikely and unreliable.
I disagree that it's counterproductive or irrelevant anyway. In the near term it's inconceivable that someone that isn't R or D will win Maine even with RCV, it will solely allows voters to additionally indicate support for a third party without spoiling their major party preference.
Basically I'd only expect it as enabling the the Libertarian or Green party to start challenging the majors after 20 years of iterated elections, which gives plenty of time to deal with the perceived issue of Maine voting Libertarian instead of Republican and a Dem winning by 1 electoral college vote (which seems an anyway implausible result).
Awesome news! While we will never get to perfection (Arrow’s theorem), there must be some measure on which ranked choice voting can be quantitatively compared to single-choice vote.
For instance, if you took the sets of all candidate pools and voters with all permutations of preferences 0-1 for each candidate and prior beliefs that each candidate will be voted for by others, by how much average preference does ranked-choice voting improve the situation?
Is it ever worse for aggregate preference to use ranked choice voting?
There are numerous ways to compare voting systems. There's a good selection of comparison methods on this Wikipedia page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_electoral_system...
RCV is simple and you should support it or something like it if you are a proponent of Democracy:
Did a candidate get a majority (>50%)?
Yes: They win, the election is over.
No: The candidate who got the least 1st round votes has their supporters 2nd choice votes added on to their supporter's second choice candidate.
Does a candidate have a majority now?
Yes: They win, the election is over.
No: Repeat with those who had the least votes in subsequent 'rounds' until there is someone who has a majority.
Why ranked choice over approval voting?
Approval voting appears to avoid the biggest pitfalls of FTPT, it's easy to explain (no run-off, etc) so fewer spoiled ballots (IRV results in more spoiled ballots by a large margin), and the physical ballot doesn't have to change (voter simply allowed to fill in the bubble for more than one option).
It's simply the one we had a referendum for lol.
I would guess that changing plurality to "most approved" would have brought up other constitutional questions too.
Meta: Recently on HN I've seen big discussions about voting systems. The commenters appear to be experts on the jargon and acronyms, which I've never heard before.
Does anyone know a good and concise introduction to the topic? Perhaps submit it for discussion as well?
I'm probably going to get massively down voted for this, but here it goes.
I became a citizen of the US in 2011, but I still don't understand why Americans think they can only have a viable 3rd party with ranked choice voting. The response I hear all the time is "We live in a winner take all system." Yeah, so does everyone else. All politics is zero-sum, including in every other country. Actually, parliamentary democracies are even more winner take all than in the US, because they (typically) replace much more of their bureaucracy than Americans do after their elections.
Other countries have viable 3rd parties and when no one has a majority you build a coalition. I really fail to see why Americans insist they can't have a viable 3rd party other than sheer historical prejudice, ignorance, and inertia. Perhaps the one difference is that 3rd parties would be spoilers in a Presidential race, but splitting your ticket is easy enough (and if it's not then this country is irretrievably ignorant).
My suspicion is that ranked choice voting isn't going to fix anything in the US, and all the CGP Grey fans will have to go back to the policy drawing board. I'll be the first one to be pleased if I'm wrong, but I doubt I will be.
The US's problems are 90% cultural and institutional.
_Edit:_
I want to be clear that I'm not against RCV, I just don't think its going to do anything.
> Yeah, so does everyone else.
But they don’t. For example, Norway, New Zealand, Germany, Sweden, and the Netherlands, none of which use the first past the post voting system (winner takes all) that most of the US does. As a result, those countries all have a healthy number of parties for voters to choose from.
Ranked choice voting doesn't eliminate the winner-take-all, zero-sum nature of politics. That's entirely my point. All political power is zero-sum (the more I have the less you have), it doesn't matter what voting system you implement.
So my broader point is that, given that plenty of other countries don't have ranked voting of any kind and plenty of viable 3rd parties, Americans really have no valid policy argument to make as to why they don't have viable 3rd parties. The only arguments that hold any water are cultural.
First of all, the countries that use FPTP voting systems and do have more than two parties (like the UK) have the highest measured levels of misrepresentation error in the world, so I don't think it is a goal we should strive for.
Further, I disagree that politics is inherently winner takes all.
For example, ranked choice voting allows that I can be represented by a moderate candidate. If I can't get my first choice (a liberal candidate), I would prefer a moderate candidate to a right wing extremist. In this case, compromise (the opposite of winner takes all) is possible.
Another example is proportional representation, which allows for views with less than 51% of the vote to get representation. So for example, say a Green Party gets 30% of the vote, so they will get 30% of the representation. These minority parties are still often able to implement their agenda by making deals with the other parties. If Green is willing to compromise with either the Labor party or the Conservative party on their union stance in exchange for environmental votes, they can achieve their goals with less than a majority.
I'd be genuinely interested in a paper, citation, article, or whatever for your misrepresentation claim. I've never heard that before (not saying you're wrong).
Can't bring to mind a good book or paper that compares all the countries side by side, but still fairly sure UK would top the list.
For a good introduction to the sad state of UK elections:
> The electoral process is "rigged". In 2005, if you total all the votes cast for the main parties, it took an average 26,906 votes to elect a Labour MP, 44,373 to elect a Tory MP and 96,539 votes to elect a Lib Dem MP. Not since the rotten boroughs of the 18th century have elections been so corrupt.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/may/03/democr...
> All votes should be worth the same, right? With First Past the Post votes are not equal. In the last election it took 26,000 votes for the SNP to win a seat compared with over 800,000 for the Green Party.
https://www.makevotesmatter.org.uk/first-past-the-post
Looking at any recent election will show you the discrepancy quite clearly - the difference they are referring to is the difference between popular vote percentages (nationwide) and number of MPs for a given party (FPTP split by constituency). Parties with high popular vote percentages often get very few to no representatives because they were never the top candidate in any constituency.
The key difference is that in (most) European electoral systems, voters vote for MPs, who then in turn vote among themselves to decide on a leader for the country. This creates a (limited) incentive for cooperation when no single party holds a majority, since a coalition government is required.
Simultaneously, voting for an MP has multiple impacts. Even if the MP isn't part of the coalition, they still have a say in how the government legislates, they can participate in debates, write bills, and take advantage of the resources of a government office to help their constituents.
Finally, voting for an MP is a local affair. The barrier to entry at this scale is high, but tractable. Alternative parties can offer credible competitions at the town or county level (e.g., the US congress has had at least some "independent" representation as far back as I can remember).
These three factors create a substantial difference in incentives in the US presidential election.
There are no shades of victory: Even if your elector votes for a 3rd party, there is no long-term benefit. After they cast their vote, they're done. This makes voting for a 3rd party extremely high risk: you're gambling that everyone else feels the same way you do. Even if you don't like either of the main two candidates, you're faced with what amounts to a prisoner's dilemma where the other 300 million players have repeatedly shown a policy of 'always betray'.
>"We live in a winner take all system." Yeah, so does everyone else.
But they really don't compared to the US. If I vote Green in the US, in most locales (discounting Seattle and Portland here..) that person isn't going to get elected. If I vote Green in Germany (for example), there's a very real possibility that Greens will end up in a coalition government.
>My suspicion is that ranked choice voting isn't going to fix anything in the US,
Agreed!
>The US's problems are 90% cultural and institutional.
Yes. Money talks. If someone said "I'm forming a Progressive Party" or "I'm forming an Eisenhower Republicans Party", they would have enough philosophical supporters to make it happen, _but_ they would need name-brand donors and name-brand candidates to have a meaningful impact. So far, that hasn't happened.
In scandinavian countries each party typically belongs to either the red block or blue block.
Some of them do flirt with the idea of switching sides. But it's typically always the red or the blue block that forms a coalition (or minority government with supporting parties from same block).
So you effectively have two sides. And parties are pressured by the media to declare which block they support before each election. And they rarely switch sides.
Which party within a block you vote on, does matter.. because it gives those parties more influence on the government.
But you could also say that what you vote for during the primaries on US elections does matter.. however, at each stage on use election a group that only makes up 30% of the population gets no representation.
Still not a valid argument for why the US couldn't have a valid 3rd party. The same would be true here. No one who votes Green is going to vote for Libertarians or Constitutionalists.
It doesn't work here because we don't have a parliamentary system of government. That is, our executive is chosen separately from the legislature, so in that contest, the presidential contest, third parties act as spoilers. There's no sense in which Nader could have said he was in the "Democratic block" and thereby given the power of his voters to Gore.
Well, even in the legislative branches, your party could get 10% of votes in 3 states and still not get any representation.
As I understand it, all of your votes must be concentrated in a single district to get any representation.
Hence, you end up with two choices.
France is in a similar position. Granted France is 2-round, but arguably the US is too.
I'm voting mostly Green with a tiny bit of Democrat this time, but I've voted Libertarian before. Libertarians seem to agree with Greens on the single most important issue to me: that we should not fight stupid wars for no good reason, and that the last war not so fought was WWII. Lots of American voters agree with me. So, your understanding of American politics could be improved.
A lot of the other countries that do not have RCV also have one or more of the following features that help keep a healthy number of parties (not an exhaustive list at all):
- parliamentary system
- proportional representation [0] (e.g. party list systems, mixed member proportional representation [1])
- two-round voting [2] (like France)
RCV is not the only way, but it is _a_ way to foster viable 3rd parties.
[0]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportional_representation#PR...
[1]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed-member_proportional_repr...
[2]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed-member_proportional_repr...
Yes, but there are still first-past-the-post governments with viable 3rd parties.
It doesn't make sense to compare the US to "other countries" that have different political systems. We don't have a parliamentary system. The executive doesn't necessarily represent the majority party in the legislature, which means that the office has a lot of political importance. It doesn't make sense to vote 3rd party when coalitions have such limited power.
This isn't about culture or arrogance. There are solid and well researched reasons that the US and similar political systems tend to be dominated by two parties. You can read more about this here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law
> It doesn't make sense to compare the US to "other countries" that have different political systems. We don't have a parliamentary system.
Sure it does, that's how you understand the effect of political systems.
What doesn't make sense is ignoring the differences in the electoral structures and pretending that because something works with a radically different electoral structure in one country, the reason it can't happen in the US _must not be because of the US electoral system_.
There are tradeoffs to every system. We chose first past the post and our executive structure for historical reasons. It's largely working for us (in a broad historical sense) and we're not going to expend the effort to change it without good reason
CGP Grey has excellent videos on this. Here's one that discusses the problems with the system the US uses now (in most states):
Plenty of other governments have first past the post voting _and_ viable 3rd parties. The only argument where this holds water is with executive elections (president, governor).
> The only argument where this holds water is with executive elections (president, governor)
If you concede this point then I don't think there's much more to argue about. Nobody argues about the many third parties in the US that just endorse some major party candidate for the chief executive positions. When they run their own candidates for these positions is when they become spoilers.
Executives are pretty much what we're talking about with RCV, yes. We may be paying too much attention to those, but that's a bit of a different problem.
The primary goal of RCV in the US is to address the hostile partisan divide. Making more parties viable is secondary.
When you have a ranked choice system (even if it's only in a fraction of states), it incentivizes the candidates to not disparage each other. If candidate A attacks B, it means the B supporters will rank A lower. RCV draws candidates closer together.
I must be missing something, how does splitting your ticket counter the spoiler effect? (Which impacts all US elections, not just the Presidential race)
As far as I understand it, a strong & viable 3rd party is nearly impossible for the simple & single reason of the spoiler effect.
I actually think ranked choice voting would destroy our relatively successful third party here in Canada (the NDP).
Essentially when you survey voters you'd find that there's three voting blocs:
a) First choice Conservative, Second choice Liberal
b) First choice Liberal, Second choice NDP
c) First choice NDP, Second choice Liberal
Given this, ranked voting would probably just produce permanent majorities for the Liberals, and wipe out the NDP almost entirely. The Liberals are the first or second choice for most voters.
I'm not sure why 'progressive' voters here in Canada often seem to prefer this voting methodology when advocating reform. Experience in Australia should show them what happens, where both major parties are now pretty close to the right and left wing options are basically off the table.
I'm not the only person who thinks this. When the Liberal gov't tried to push ranked ballots through a few years ago analysts in the NDP clearly saw this as a threat, and did everything they could to stop it (along with the Conservatives), seeing it as a nakedly cynical attempt to ensure nearly permanent Liberal majorities.
I would far, far prefer a mixed-member-proportional system like in Germany.
And so, yeah, I agree I don't think in the US it would do anything. The same forces of conformity towards the right would still happen. Effectively the US already has a kind of ranking choice through its primary system. The two parties shift and "become" representative of whatever plurality can capture and win the primary.
I'd suggest that any new voting system in Canada would lead to very different results given time.
Parties that aren't in contention for a given riding will be replaced by parties that are (think evolutionary niches).
> I became a citizen of the US in 2011, but I still don't understand why Americans think they can only have a viable 3rd party with ranked choice voting.
You don't need IRV (sometimes, annoyingly, called Ranked Choice Voting), you just need any of a wide range of electoral systems that aren't the ones usually used in the US for federal and state legislative and executive elections.
> The response I hear all the time is "We live in a winner take all system." Yeah, so does everyone else. All politics is zero-sum, including in every other country.
First, this is wrong on its face. Except in a structural duopoly, politics very often is not zero-sum, and, in any case, “winner take all” is not the same thing as zero sum, it's both zero sum and _all or nothing_. Even zero-sum political systems need not be all-or-nothing.
But, more important, you are entirely misunderstanding the meaning of the response. It's not about the overall system being “winner take all” (which, even in the US, it is not) or zero-sum (which is arguably a consequence of what is being discussed, but not the direct issue.) “Winner-take-all” is a term for either Plurality or Majority/runoff election systems, which structurally make (more strongly in the first case) the expected value of voting for a candidate other than the most favored of the top two negative, creating a structural incentive for at least local duopoly when used for legislative districts or regional executive seats, and for national duopoly when used for national office.
While the national duopoly is frequently commented on, it's actually historical weaker than local duopoly in the US. You can find cases where locally (even for a while at the state level, most notably the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party before they merged with the Democrats) one of the two parties in the duopoly isn't a major national party, for instance.
> Other countries have viable 3rd parties and when no one has a majority you build a coalition.
Name one country that does so with a strong, _separately elected_ (not by the legislature) executive who is elected (directly or indirectly) by a method which doesn't involve ranked choices _and_ uses single-member national legislative districts with majority/runoff or plurality elections.
The UK manages it with plurality legislative constituencies, largely because of regional differences (much like the US has sometimes had regionally differing duopoly, but with much more significance nationally because it's a parliamentary system so parties that aren't nationally top-two that get seats can still have a role in choosing and participating in the national executive other than by endorsing a major party candidate in advance and surrendering power to them.)
> I really fail to see why Americans insist they can't have a viable 3rd party other than sheer historical prejudice, ignorance, and inertia.
Because some of us have actually studied comparative government and the structural incentives and effects of different electoral systems.
> My suspicion is that ranked choice voting isn't going to fix anything in the US.
It probably won't; it's the alternative electoral system that does the absolute least to resolve the strucural impediments created by the systems currently in use (it's basically a small step less strong on those problems than majority/runoff), and unless it existed at both stages of the Presidential election (or that was reduced to a single-stage popular vote using RCV/IRV), it wouldn't address one of the biggest reinforcers of national duopoly.
> The US's problems are 90% cultural and institutional.
The duopoly problem is 100% _institutional_ and 0% cultural, in that it is entirely an effect of the legal and structural design of the institutions of government, especially the electoral systems in use, and not at all a separate product of culture.
Yes, but _why_ does the US have a structural duopoly. There may be certain features of the system that promote it, but I don't think it is close to provable that the US's system of government innately requires a duopoly. The duopoly exists for historic and cultural reasons.
> Name one country that does so with a strong, separately elected (not by the legislature) executive who is elected (directly or indirectly) by a method which doesn't involve ranked choices and uses single-member national legislative districts with majority/runoff or plurality elections.
First of all the US has a two round system in most states (most states are open primaries). So France falls into this category.
> Because some of us have actually studied comparative government and the structural incentives and effects of different electoral systems.
And some of us have actually lived under the electoral process and politics of other countries (in addition to studying them).
> The duopoly problem is 100% institutional
No problem is 100% institutional. That is facile. Culture obviously plays a role in some regard (why is the opinion on whether "12 Years a Slave" should have won an Oscar a partisan thing?).
> Yes, but why does the US have a structural duopoly.
Because of the electoral system.
> I don't think it is close to provable that the US's system of government innately requires a duopoly.
The structural incentive to duopoly in FPTP voting is mathematically provable.
> First of all the US has a two round system in most states (most states are open primaries).
Open _partisan_ primaries, which is what most states with open primaries have, aren't the same as a two-round system in terms of promoting multiparty democracy (in fact, they just further reinforce duopoly, since they give voters not aligned with the major parties a chance to influence major party candidate selection instead of participating in alternative parties, which opportunity has a higher expected value when the general election is by plurality.)
That said, France is, nevertheless, the one major example that superficially seems to work.
OTOH, _despite_ having multiple parties, it's also the established democracy that has empirically nearly as bad a problem with ineffective representation and dissatisfaction with government as the US (see, Arend Lijphart’s _Patterns of Democracy_), so while it manages to paper over the partisan duopoly symptom, it doesn't actually deal with the representational problem.
> And some of us have actually lived under the electoral process and politics of other countries
So have lots of people in America, and outside of America, including many of the people who have literally written the books on how the US electoral systems causes the both the narrow dimensionality of political discourse, and the partisan duopoly, and the representational failures of the American system of government.
Parliamentary democracies are more winner take all when you only vote for one chamber (as in Canada), because that one chamber has more power than any one chamber in the US.
However, in parliamentary democracies, especially if they use proportionate representation of some form, coalitions are typical, which produces much better governance than perpetual two-party rule, where the two parties agree on ~70% of issues, and one of the two is absolutely insane on the other ~30%.
Hell, Canada uses FPTP, which results in some very weird election results, but even so, it has multiple parties - because coalitions are possible, and a minority party actually has some political power.
There's criticism that proportional representation results in fringe, whacky parties getting into parliament, but I am no longer swayed by that argument - because over the past ~twelve years, one of the two parties in the US has become a fringe, whacky party, and it routinely wins elections.
There is no reason coalitions could not be possible in the US legislative branch. You could argue that they existed here in the 1950s and 1960s, to some extent, when the parties were so race-scrambled that there were liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats (i.e. there were effectively 4 parties in the US at the time).
It's good to see better voting systems being used. The one I'd like to see applied for something major is Majority Judgement:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majority_judgment
This is great! Can't wait for the follow-up studies. If anyone's in Seattle, there's a group there trying to make Approval Voting happen for city elections:
For a detailed comparison of various voting systems, check out:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_electoral_system...
A comparison of a few different voting systems that I found interesting:
Unfortunately RCV has some of it's best properties nullified when it comes to how the US does presidential elections.
Spoiler candidates are back in the running under this system.
E.g. everyone in maine has the following preference:
Jo Jorgenson
Joe Biden
Donald Trump
They have demonstrated that they'd prefer Jo Jorgenson over Biden, but Biden over trump. The reality is that the rest of the country can only show a preference for one candidate as first choice. Maine submitting a vote for Jo Jorgenson when she can not win the whole election really goes against the principals of RCV.
For now it'd be really good if they specified their delegates to vote in a way to best preserve the total ordering, not just to vote for whatever candidate 'wins' the RCV for maine alone.
In general, do state rules apply to the primary (party) vote as well?
We can use RCV in primaries also, but not for State-level offices. There's pesky wording in the state constitution stating whoever wins a "plurality" is elected, while RCV requires a "majority". There is not this distinction for how Maine elects federal officials, hence it's use for those offices.
can we get this for ballot measures as well?
Would be cool if one could select from multiple flavors of a measure. Sometimes the scope of a measure is large though it's in good spirit.
As a thought experiment, how would such a system change the current US presidential election?
I'm guessing that Trump would dominate the first round (a plurality would put him as a first choice), but I'm not sure what would happen once we factor in lower-rank choices of the majority would would probably vote against Trump (put him at the bottom or not at all).
EDIT: thinking some more, I'm guessing that Biden would have a ton of ballots in the #2 and #3 positions. Sanders and Warren would be prominent in the #1 position. And Bloomberg would be in a fallback position across many ballots (including Republican ballots). Not sure about Harris or Buttigieg.
It would likely have a larger impact on the primaries than the general election. Primary elections are full of strategizing about how to pick a set of issues that will resonate with a large enough fraction of the electorate to be competitive, but which don't have other candidates campaigning on similar issues.
Too many candidates running on a similar set of issues will split the vote and will lose against a less popular candidate running alone on a different set of issues. So they end up needing to consolidate (which can involve some wheeling and dealing like promising that the candidate who steps down will get a position in the remaining candidate's administration).
This is essentially what happened in the 2016 Republican primaries. The more moderate candidates never consolidated and so split the vote among themselves. By the time they had seen the writing on the wall and dropped out, Trump had built up a large enough margin that the only remaining candidate (Cruz) had no chance at catching up.
RCV will likely prevent a similar outcome in the future. But a further consequence is that candidates will have less incentive to drop out early in the primaries. So if RCV were instituted nationwide I would expect the primary season to be longer, messier, and much more crowded.
The problem in primaries is that it's the fringe of the fringe who select candidates. The second problem is that it's not _a_ primary election, it's a rolling circus. If primaries were RCV and happened on a single nationwide date, it's more likely that centrist candidates will emerge from the process.
That sounds speculative.
Primaries are a bit crazy. But they do have an interesting effect of spotlighting different candidates, putting them under pressure l, and see if they hold up. That's not necessarily bad, but the order of contests means that _when_ you get the spotlight has a dramatic effect on the number of votes you get.
"The more moderate candidates [than Trump] never consolidated..."
Thinking of Trump as a far-right candidate is, in my opinion, a misread. He's operating on a different axis. Many of his policies are center-left: no wars, peace deals, love letters to Kim Jong Un, the First Step Act, massive stimulus, and inner city programs.
His main positions on the right are conservative judges and the border wall. He kind of went crazy on those two things, and did a bunch of other non-partisan crazy things. But overall he doesn't fit into the left/right divide.
You are correct, I should have said "establishment" rather than "moderate".
It's hard to tell. In the 2016 primaries Trump had 44% of the vote. That's a lot, and it's more than the other candidates, but its not a majority of the total vote. In the earlier primaries he most of his victories were in the 30's. So now you have to guess where he ranked for the 60-70% of people that voted for other people in early primaries. He might have still won, or other candidates could have emerged with majorities.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Results_of_the_2016_Republican...
[edit] I guess that doesn't really answer your question, because you asked about this election...
Just the fact that he's an incumbent virtually guarantees that he'd get a lot of #1 slots. Unless there was a mass exodus of his base or a major Republican challenger, which I don't see.
I would prefer to see RCV implemented on smaller-scale elections first (state house/senate->fed house/senate->presidency). Don’t get me wrong, RCV is fundamentally sound and the future of voting but I don’t want the inevitable hiccups to be used as reasons for it not to be rolled out nationwide.
FYI, your plan to implement on smaller-scale elections first is exactly what's currently happening:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranked-choice_voting_in_the_Un...
You seem knowledgeable. Is there some sort of foundation or organization on RCV that I can back and parrot? I want to (gently) share the ideals of RCV with my social circle but it feels like me and a Wikipedia article against the world right now.
The zoo animals CGPGrey video is second-to-none in explaining the concept but is somewhat lacking in ethos.
Sure! FairVote is a major organization, with various materials on RCV.
Get involved:
https://www.fairvote.org/get_involved
State-specific groups:
https://www.fairvote.org/state_based_coalition_partner_group...
Not sure why your comment is getting buried. This is a very valid concern. If we're going to make a significant change to the way we vote it would be best to introduce it at the local levels first so people can learn the process and understand its impact.
rank!=range; no, thanks.
Can you put the same person for all of your choices?
I guess. There would be no benefit to doing so though.
Writing the same candidate for all choices is the same as only filling in the first choice and leaving the rest blank.
If it's anything like the Australian approach, you indicate preferences by numbering boxes[0][1]. The ordering of names on the ballot is determined by drawing names at random.
[0]
https://peo.gov.au/assets/images/image-library/have-your-say...
[1]
https://cdn.newsapi.com.au/image/v1/e5ace64c596cd5aa508068ac...
No you can't, your ballot will be invalid.
The ballot shown in the article explicitly says "Fill in no more than one oval for each candidate".
This is false for Maine. It is a valid way to vote for a single candidate and not rank the rest. The ballot advises you not to do this, but it doesn't explicitly invalidate your ballot. See slide #6:
https://www.maine.gov/sos/cec/elec/upcoming/pdf/RCVMarkedBal...
You can vote for a single candidate across all your choices/rounds (across a single row), but voting for multiple candidates in the same choice _will_ invalidate your ballot (down a single column). Multiples down a column would be like filling in all the circles for all candidates on a normal ballot, or even not filling any in. Same difference.
Unlikely. You usually rank by putting numbers in boxes against a printed list on the ballot.
> Can you put the same person for all of your choices?
No. That would invalidate your ballot. Unless you mean the degenerate case, where you only vote for one person.
The Maine ballot specifically instructs you not to do that
The Maine ballot allows for it, though.
