RankedVote’s goal is to build support for RCV by giving people an easy way to run contests and make decisions online.
Ranked Choice Voting is marginally better than plurality voting, but it has problems. The chief defect with Ranked Choice Voting is its non-monotonicity, whereby increasing your support for your genuine favorite can actually hurt their odds of winning. This may be what happened in Alaska [1].
STAR Voting is a slight modification to Score Voting, where you simply score each candidate and are not forced to rank them. You are given the discretion to give multiple candidates the same score if you so choose. STAR is highly expressive and simple to count: just sum the scores.
Approval Voting is appealing because of its simplicity. Both ballots and how they are counted would require only superficial changes versus plurality, such as changing the prompt from "Vote for only one" to "Vote for as many as you like." Approval has a good balance of utility and simplicity.
If we are going to invest time and effort into achieving voting reform, it would be a shame to spend that effort on RCV rather than superior alternatives.
[1] https://electionscience.org/commentary-analysis/rcv-fools-pa...
Since some people here might interpret it as being presented as objective fact or some consensus opinion.
There are a lot of pros/cons to all of the richer voting systems, usually categorized as approval voting, ranked voting, and score voting, in terms of increasing information.
But there is absolutely no consensus that approval or score are better than ranked. (In my opinion, ranked comes out ahead, and I talk about why in another comment here.)
But most of all, ranked choice is what has the growing momentum, as a lot of reform organizations have concluded it's the best practical solution. But what's most important is that we adopt one of them, and it would be a shame to spend our effort squabbling over which alternative, than giving support to the one that has the most momentum and chance of succeeding now. We're really only even having this conversation now because of the success reform groups have had in promoting ranked voting.
I think the bigger shame would be to spend so much effort promoting RCV, only to have people become jaded and disillusioned with voting method reform in general when they realize RCVs many glaring problems.
The biggest problem with RCV IMO is that it looks like it eliminates the spoiler effect, but it really only eliminates it in simple cases where the third-party candidates are not competitive. This suddenly becomes very obvious and painful in cases like Burlington, 2009 or Alaska, 2022 where voters were told "RCV is great because you can vote honestly", only to realize post-election that this was entirely false, and that they threw away their votes and let the election go to a candidate they despise.
Trust is extremely important in political movements, and very easy to lose. I fear RCV is going to poison the well for any FPTP alternatives for a long time to come.
It's also worth considering that the same parties who benefit from First Past The Post would be threatened by a change to literally any other system aside from FPTP or Ranked Choice Voting. Surely that comes into play when voting reform movements are funded. And surely that kind of "conspiracy talk" shouldn't be dismissed in an intellectual forum when there is a very clear path to how these reforms could directly affect very powerful parties.
Using that as justification for why ranked choice should be adopted is circular reasoning.
Purely in theory, one would probably prefer a system where all voters have to rank all the candidates; in practice, however, all of voting, validating, counting, applying the rules, and understanding the rules is significantly more difficult than approval voting where a candidate's points is simply the number of times a voter has marked their name on the ballot. You can (generally or for more important decisions) amend approval voting with a quorum, minimum percentage of approval, or minimal distance between first and second places without damaging the system with too much complexity, something I cannot even fathom how to achieve with ranked choice.
I genuinely don't understand why people are so hardheadedly loyal to this one centuries-old poorly-designed voting system. Just because it's the first one they heard of? I don't get it.
It's also a non-sensical claim, any voting system "ranking" depends on specifics of the electoral system. For example, larger multi-winner districts using some sort of proportional or Condorcet system are always better that any ranked or approval result in a single winner districts.
https://www.electionscience.org/library/approval-voting-vers...
It's important that I say retrospectively. This was a house race with national coverage, tons of high-quality polling from pollsters with nothing better to do, and it was still absolutely not clear from that polling that Begich would do better than Palin in round 2, or that Palin was likely to beat Begich in round 1. If I had the opinions of those hypothetically strategic voters, and I were completely strategic, and completely tuned into that polling, I still would have voted honestly. The strategy was only apparent after the fact.
Thinking about "defense in depth" against this scenario, we'd be remiss not to mention Condorcet ranked choice voting methods, which always elect a Condorcet winner, and only resort to (game-able) elimination procedures if there isn't one. Not only would that have resulted in a better outcome in Alaska, it would have made the possibility of strategic voting much, much more remote, both because a strategic scenario would be much less likely, and because that strategic scenario would be much less visible before the election.
With score voting, strategies are always available and almost always obvious: just exaggerate your score differences between the most likely candidates. The fact that strategic dishonesty would have helped in Alaska is a fair criticism of IRV, but the real commonness of strategic scenarios in STAR and score are a more primary feature.
Arrow's theorem only applies to ranked systems. That said, cardinal systems are still susceptible to strategic voting (Gibbard's theorem)
STAR and Approval both have their own tactical voting problems. If you really like A, are meh about B, and dislike C, it’s clear you should rate A high / give A your approval and rate C low / do not give C your approval. But what about B? It has nothing to do with what you actually think about them, it has to do with what you think their odds of beating C and A are. You want B to do well enough to beat C, but not well enough to beat A. This adds too much distortion to people wanting to express their sincere preferences, which they can easily do in RCV: A > B > C
And, more importantly, RCV is a stepping stone to multi-member district STV proportional voting (plug for https://www.fixourhouse.org/), which is the golden goose; way more important to implement proportional representation than squabble about STAR vs RCV, and RCV gets us closer to proportional representation.
RCV actually literally has the exact same problem you're describing with voting strategically, it's just subtler and harder to understand. The problem is, if you rank A > B > C, then your subsequent preferences after A only matter if A gets eliminated. If A comes in second place, then your "B > C" preference has no impact, and C may be elected whereas if you "dishonestly" voted for B first you might have allowed B to win.
Approval doesn't have these problems; it's a clear win.
I agree that proportional representation is a huge deal, but I suspect we can do better than STV by changing what the election results mean. Currently in every system I know of we treat it as a binary choice; a candidate is either a member of the set of candidates who won, or they aren't.
A different way to do it is to allow every candidate who receives some minimum threshold level of support to be elected, but when voting on issues each elected person's influence is weighted by the level of support they received in the election.
This sort of system is compatible with FTPT, RCV, or approval-voting style ballots, but the differences matter less as long as you can say of the vast majority of voters (assuming an omniscient view -- privacy of votes would obscure the actual data) that that voter clearly has a representative in congress, and that voter delegated the same amount of influence to that representative as any other voter. (People who only voted for fringe candidates that don't meet the minimum threshold lose out, but that would probably be rare among people who actually pay attention to politics and aren't casting a protest vote.)
If this were enacted for the U.S. House of Representatives for example, the likely outcome would be that each state would have at least one Republican and at least one Democrat who would wield different amounts of power depending on how popular Republicans and Democrats are in that state. You'd also have Libertarians and Greens and Independents and whatever else. A state might have two representatives after one election and ten after another, and it wouldn't be a problem because influence is the same.
I vastly prefer score or approval voting over ranked-choice, but I also vastly prefer even ranked-choice over FPTP and will be voting accordingly here in Nevada. We can always adopt score or approval voting later.
I used to be vehemently opposed to RCV; I'm still against it. It's leagues better than FPTP and my hope is that it opens the door for improvements like STAR or anything that can satisfy the Condorcet criterion.
This is referring to the monotonicity criterion[0]. The page has both toy examples and real world ones. It includes some hints about possible violations in Australia, but your voting system isn't very transparent so it is difficult to audit these situations.
As for vote splitting, I think it would be better to look at Favorite Betrayer[1][2]. Sometimes also called the strong spoiler effect. This is actually a big problem. It is why candidates like Bernie Sanders pledge to not run as independent after losing the primary. If you don't violate this condition such pledges are entirely unnecessary.
[0] https://electowiki.org/wiki/Monotonicity
[1] https://electowiki.org/wiki/Favorite_betrayal_criterion
I would imagine approval voting and other voting systems have this too (I'm not going to pretend to know how this would turn out for all of them) and I think that gets lost a bit when analyzing the systems.
This isn't hypothetical -- you can look at the results in Seattle's City Attorney race, which strangely ended up electing a Republican to a citywide office for the first time in 20 years, and where the outcome under RCV would have been the same because the moderate candidate (the reasonably well-liked incumbent) didn't secure enough first-place votes, either in FPTP or in RCV-IRV.
For an edge case, consider an election with 3 factions: socialists, libertarians, and fascists. There is also a 4th candidate, a boring status quo moderate, running. Imagine the populace is split 1/3 between the first 3 factions as their 1st choice, but everyone selects boring status quo moderates as their 2nd choice, because everyone in the first 3 factions hates the other ideologies.
The boring status quo moderates get eliminated in round 1, and eventually 1 of the 3 extremes will win, resulting in 2/3 of the country being very angry. Not ideal.
Obviously this is just an unrealistic edge case, but it demonstrates the effect.
There was a site posted to HN years back that mathematically analyzed a ton of these voting schemes, I cannot seem to find it on Google but it was some sort of hybrid scheme that apparently has the best overall outcomes.
Edit: Given some of the comments below, some good material on these voting systems...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13161396
I think this is a perfect case for the maxim "Let not the perfect be the enemy of the good". It seems IRV is sticking, and nobody has made Condorcet or Borda stick; let's go with IRV for now. Once we've abolished FPTP, and everyone is familiar with ranked systems, we can come back and argue for a better option.
As far as I'm concerned, IRV captures 99% of the utility of changing voting systems.
(All that said, I do like the work that https://electionscience.org is doing with Approval Voting, and if we can run experiments in local elections across the country with two new systems, I think that's also positive.)
It might have been "To Build a Better Ballot":
Do you remember what was on it? I'll just drop a few links
https://electionscience.github.io/vse-sim/
Still, I'm not much of a political campaigner, so it hasn't gone very far.
You even say "by sorting ballots into each of thirteen piles corresponding to the thirteen possible rankings of three candidates", which shows you've actually thought through what the process would look like for the people doing the counting.
When people are proposing voting systems, they really need to consider that their process is being carried out in an adversarial environment, where different groups have incentives to cheat, or accuse the voting system of producing the "wrong" result (e.g. due to the unintuitive outcome, or the complex tactical thinking needed to optimally fill in the ballot), or claim that voting machines were running backdoored firmware (which is a destabilizing claim whether it is in fact true or false).
That last point is perhaps the most important. I think that as time goes on, the pressure to automate the counting process and give instant election results (or worse, do the elections online) is only going to grow, and any voting reform which (if done manually) slows down the counting process, or for any other reason in practice requires people to trust machines that are selected and maintained by officials from one political party, is going to do even more harm to democracy than FPTP does.
Any kind of ranking is going to mean you need to know enough about each candidate to put them in some kind of order. Maybe OK if there are two candidates but much harder after that. Most people will rank their favorite on top and then just randomly rank the remainder.
Simple plurality or majority vote is easiest to understand and easiest for the voter. You vote for the one candidate you like the best. If the isn't a majority for one and that is required, you have a runoff between the top two.
That’s always been the issue, not that we don’t know of better result counting theories.
Even in the 2020s, the ballots are explained over and over, “Connect the horizontal line”, or “fill in the box completely” — it’s a binary input to capture the best information from the lowest denominator.
STAR would change the input from binary to an order N, and the number of mistakes or “that’s not what I intended” will happen.
The average HN reader probably can fill in boxes pretty good, but the outside world not so much. RCV is a decent compromise.
I do find how the math works out interesting. But I don’t find either disputes all that compelling.
The head to head polling is interesting… but that’s not how the election works. The fact that two systems would be different seems normal to me.
Folks who go to a ranked choice vote and pick just one, that’s their choice too. Same with people who don’t vote and so on.
Not to say the article is worthless, it is interesting, but I’m not sure I agree with the conclusions.
Basically, if people's stated preferences are ill-thought-out and/or manipulated, then even the perfect voting system that perfectly reflects the people's preferences will yield bad results. Voting reform in this case would be fixing the symptoms, not the disease. The disease, in my view, is that given the sheer complexity of the issues, the poor attention budget of people, the outsized influence of media, the impossibility of directly interacting with decision-makers, there's basically no way people can make an informed decision.
Personally I think we should ditch elections and just pick representatives purely at random, and then pay them to think about their preferences full time, discuss them with each other, directly interview candidates for executive positions, and so on. The basic idea is that I think collective decision making probably reaches an optimum around Dunbar's number and falls off precipitously beyond that.
If an article is going to sit there and make up votes that didn't occur, I can't really trust it.
Or in other words, it's not safe to vote honestly in a score voting system because you're throwing your voting influence away. The rational thing is to maximize all your votes to be 1 or 10 and nothing in between.
Approval voting is just that. Basically it avoids the problem by forcing everyone to vote tactically.
STAR voting approaches it differently, by using score voting to select the top two, and then doing a runoff with the votes maximized. (Under STAR there's a risk that you might have two extremist ideological clones that make it to the runoff.)
I think plain score voting could work reasonably well in a primary.
STAR is phase 1: sort(sum(candidates))[:2] (almost identical to score/approval/FPTP. We'd just take argmax instead of top two) and phase 2: eliminate other candidates, argmax(sum(candidates)) (identical to score/approval/FPTP).
On the other hand RCV is a multi-round system with a while loop. In practice it almost never has fewer than 2 rounds (requires overwhelming majority, which almost never happens with more than 3 candidates).
From an algorithms perspective RCV is more complex.
whereas with ranked voting methods, they'd still strategically rank the democrat in 1st place, crushing any hope for the greens.
consider a green party supporter who normally votes democrat. with score voting or approval voting, he also votes green (of course).
with ranked voting, he still ranks the democrat strategically in 1st place to avoid getting the republican, and that makes it impossible for third parties to grow. ranking is too vulnerable to strategy.
Funny is that you ranked them and not scored them nor just say whether you approve them or not.
If you have to vote for these voting systems using approval voting, which ones would you approve?
STAR or score or approval = 5 IRV/RCV = 2 plurality = 0
how i'd approve them in a real election would be based on electability, which would be true with any voting method used in an actual contentious election.
I’m going to disagree. For essentially single-winner, public, candidate, secret ballot elections:
Any Condorcet method* > Bucklin Voting* (without limited # of ranks) > Instant Runoff Voting* > Majority-Runoff** > Plurality Voting** > Approval***, Score***, or STAR*** Voting (or any other *** system)
For public, secret ballot, legislative elections:
Mixed Member Proportional (MMP) using PR-STV* + Party List for leveling) > MMP using any single-member district system + Party List for leveling > Single Transferrable Vote (PR-STV)* > Party List PR (optionally, using STV to minimize wasted votes, but vote-for-one is close behind) > single-member districts with single winner systems in the order above (but, compared to the preceding proportional systems, all are close enough as to make no real difference) > any system using some or all multimember constituencies (including staggered elections in the same district for multiple seats in the same body) not described earlier in this list.
For public, secret ballot, chief executive + designated successor elections:
The single winner methods, in the order above, modified to use ranked ballots if they don’t already, in two rounds where the first elects the chief executive, then that winner is eliminated from all ballots, then a second counting of the ballots is done to chose the designated successor > The single winner methods, in the order above, separately for each office > The single winner methods, i the order above, for slates of pairs of one candidate for each office > Plurality voting** in a two round system (with normal, vote-for-one ballots), where after a chief is chosen on the first round, the successor is chosen by eliminating all ballots for the prior winner and taking the highest remaining vote count.
(methods with * are ranked ballots methods, methods with ** are vote-for-one methods commonly in use in the US, methods with *** are either artificially limited-ranks or more-detail-than-ranks methods, which for candidate elections have no clear, unique honest mapping from actual preferences to ballot markings; they are very good when their particular system of ballot markings maps to something concrete – e.g., for approval for selecting group activities in non-secret-ballot elections where approving is a commitment to participate if that option is selected or disapproval forfeits the right to participate, or, for score voting, where chosen score maps to a commitment of resources in the event the scored item is chosen.)
STAR voting is shown to outperform virtually all other methods with any mixture of honest or strategic voters.
Suppose you REALLY like both candidates A and B. Then suppose that you really dislike candidate C.
Ranked:
A > B > C (A/B position determined by flipping a coin)
Ordinal:
A:5 B:5 C:0
What's interesting here is that the first (ranked) system tells us (embeds) that our preference for A over B is the same as our preference of B over C. But in the second case we are able to tell the system that we actually like both A and B equally and that the distance to C is much larger. Ranked does not capture how we don't like C and doesn't capture that we do like B. Because of this the ranked systems frequently fail the favorite betrayer criteria (RCV fails btw). In a realistic scenario this means that in a ranked system Bernie would spoil the election for Biden (or vise verse). Although Gary Johnson wouldn't be a spoiler in either Ordinal nor Cardinal I'd argue that a weak spoiler is less of a worry than a strong spoiler.
I will also argue that Ordinal methods are far simpler to calculate and do statistical verification on. Ranked systems require a while loop where we pop an element from our array each iteration and reallocate that element's votes until there is a singular winner. Cardinal systems on the other hand are simply an sum argmax. This sum argmax can be done in parallel and also makes it far easier to verify elections with random subsets of votes (a fairly common practice btw). The simplicity of the algorithm used to tally votes is extremely important and increases the transparency of the election.
At the end of the day, the two systems are
Ranked: "Put the candidates in order of preference"
Cardinal: "Rate each candidate from 0 to 5 stars"
People are very used to both types of questions. I see several arguments saying the latter is more complicated but this clearly isn't true or we'd have to change the vast majority of surveys.
I also want to state that there are no globally optimal voting systems. Yes, there are plenty of flaws in cardinal systems. But because no global optima exists we have to instead argue that the tradeoffs are worth it. There are some objectively better systems than others though. To play fair like this I will say that I believe that the above advantages are worth the slight reduction of VSE in a 100% honest election that you'd obtain from using either RP or Schultz style elections.
One interesting finding. I was expecting that Instant Runoff would be the method we all preferred. I also included plurality winner, Borda Count and the Condorcet winner (if there was one) in the list of results. After using this with friends for decisions, I realized that a lot of choices that did very well in borda count were getting eliminated in the IRV. If you have a lot of options in the poll, there's a good chance that an option that will make the majority happy gets eliminated because it has very few first place votes. Academically, I knew this was a possibility, but in practice it happened a ton. This made us change to borda counts as our method of choice for things (and then we promised to not game the system). But... if there's a Condorcet Winner, we always go with that.
I also thought that having a borda count as the method of eliminating the "last place" choice in each IRV round would be kinda nifty. This still lets people game the system though, and is kind of a gross hack.
Just letting you know our experience in case it is helpful for future options on polls! Good luck!
After spending a notable portion of my life diving deeply into voting systems, their side effects, and the various poorly-thought-out arguments that people make, I basically only feel wincing pain when a lot of these projects come out. So I'm glad that the concept of the Condorcet Winner hasn't been forgotten.
The IRV zealots have basically won the messaging war, using what I believe to be unethical tactics. IRV is not the only way to count RCV, but they act like it is. But power is power, so until society suffers enough with lousy results, it's just going to be the FPTP pain all over again, dressed up in different clothing.
I would be curious why people would prefer Borda over Score if so.
That said, I prefer score, or even approval, as that's what strategic score devolves to, but without huge amounts of information loss.
If you allowed same scores then you can't do both simultaneously and/or the UX gets really funky.
That's the key point. Unfortunately, all known voting systems can be gamed.
Here's an interesting video that explains how they can be manipulated: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhO6jfHPFQU
You bring up a lot of interesting points on what people feel happy with after voting. None of these systems is perfect. Each can be picked apart in various ways. That's why I tend to frame things in terms of "does this move things forward from the status quo?"
And totally agreed on the framing. Also, prepare yourself for the feedback of "we should have a runoff election with the top two" and then people completely rejecting the concept that you've already done the runoff. :)
Theirs has a sign in/ sign up wall; yours I get to use right away.
That is a real thing. I don't remember the name for it though.
People often have strong feelings about their top preference, and approval rating destroys that.
And then in my example, the voter is tempted to approve just 1 in order to give them a better chance of winning. (Known as bullet voting.)
It's much more intuitive and less cognitive load to rank options by preference than to decide on an arbitrary threshold of approval. You already know your ranking; you have to strategically decide on an approval cutoff.
(Also, between the candidates you disapprove of, you still often think some would be better/worse than others, and want that to count too.)
This is fine. The probability with which a voter bullet votes vs votes three conveys the degree of preference for that candidates. This is not as informative as score voting on a wider range (because okay, degree of preference doesn't map perfectly linearly with probability of vote), but it's an perfectly adequate proxy.
By comparison, ranked choice, despite feeling like it gives you the ability to choose relative ranks, doesn't actually convey more information because it says nothing about your degree of preference! "Candidate A is perfect in every way > Candidate B agrees with me on all policy decisions but is my ex > Candidate C literally wants to murder me" looks exactly the same on a ranked choice ballot as "Candidate A is perfect in every way > Candidate B literally wants to murder me > Candidate C literally wants to murder me and also kicked my dog".
> It's much more intuitive and less cognitive load to rank options by preference than to decide on an arbitrary threshold of approval. You already know your ranking; you have to strategically decide on an approval cutoff.
Spoken like someone who doesn't have intransitive preferences!
All voting systems have drawbacks, but I think approval is best relative to effort and impact.
I've been very encouraged by the results in Alaska after the special election that just happened there in August. 85% found it simple. 73% ranked multiple candidates. And the election workers implementing it had a flawless go of it.
Some data from one of the groups that helped educate voters: https://alaskansforbetterelections.com/polling-shows-alaskan...
But what's conspicuously absent from these statistics is how happy the voters are with the outcome (compared to a counterfactual world where the election had been carried out under FPTP and a potentially different candidate won).
Sadly it was an outcome which allowed Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) to make the argument[0] that:
> 60% of Alaska voters voted for a Republican, but thanks to a convoluted process and ballot exhaustion — which disenfranchises voters — a Democrat ‘won.’
This is exactly the sort of well-poisoning that supporters of other voting reforms are afraid of.
[0] https://www.independentsentinel.com/60-of-voters-cast-ballot...
I'm waiting to see RCV pushed by someone's who ideology doesn't exactly benefit from it in their area. It's not a second place always wins, but I have seen a lot of examples of "My party will not win in my area, but it's kinda close, and RCV gives me a higher statistical probability of "my side" getting in".
Maybe approval voting is better, I'm not sure how likely it is for unpopular candidates to win in close areas. If it suffers from the same issues as ranked choice or not.
I'm tired of it all being game.
The two-party system is so dominant in the US because of the first-past-the-post voting system. With such an election (even disregarding the financial power of the parties, or the role of the electoral college) third-party candidates never have a shot, because any intelligent voter knows that a vote for them is a spoiler for their second-favorite candidate.
Multi-choice voting systems generally reduce or eliminate spoiler effects, which both allows a third party to build support, and reduces the chance that an election will go to a candidate with lower support simply because the other side had their vote split.
Even when we're not talking about the two-party system, multi-vote systems better reflect the will of the people. My city has a ranked choice, multi-seat election for city council. All councilors are at-large, meaning you're voting a group of about ten of them in, and selecting from a pool of about 20 candidates. There's almost no other system that could accurately capture the majority of the people's positions.
So the strength of RCV would then be more built in tie-breaking.
To put it another way: given a (sufficiently large) set of [0,1] score votes, you can generate a set of approval votes that give a very good estimate for the score voting results by mapping each score vote to an approval vote by randomly picking a number in [0,1) for each vote and marking options scored above that threshold. Handwaving a bit, this implies that at scale approval voting and arbitrary-precision score voting give the same results with pretty good probability.
Now, score voting with arbitrary precision pretty clearly conveys more information than ranked choice! You can extract an RCV from a score vote directly, but this loses substantial information about how far apart the options were rated. Conversely, if you extract a score vote from an RCV, you ... well, you can get something like Borda count. For other RCV aggregation algorithms a score vote extraction is not quite as clean, but it's substantially less clear whether the information "lost" is real or an accidental artifact of the RCV itself. Certainly you can argue all day over the merits of Borda count and variants vs other IRV aggregation algorithms, but then score voting with arbitrary precision not only strictly dominates Borda count, but also is clearly conveying additional information about degree of preference on top of that which is obviously useful and not encoded in ranked choice votes at all!
Bonus: a surprisingly large number of decisions are dominated by no more than three viable choices that are clearly preferred over all others. When selecting for among three options, there are seven unique approval votes (the all marked/unmarked votes, expressing no preference, are equivalent), and only six ranked unique choice votes. It should be pretty clear that RCV and approval don't convey equivalent information in this case!
https://fairvote.org/the_troubling_record_of_approval_voting...
https://www.rangevoting.org/BulletBugaboo.html
(b) Approval voting only incentivizes bullet voting when that is very close to actually capturing the voter's intent. The strategic thing to do is vote approve on all those you like better than whoever you think the most likely candidate to win is.
BUT…what I’m looking for at this stage are use cases outside of direct voter education where RankedVote can be applied. By crossing over into everyday uses, RankedVote can better promote ranked-choice voting to people who are unaware of it.
Recently, I’ve seen it used for anything from mascot naming contests, to monthly book club selections, to scrum prioritization, to deciding what character should be included in a new version of a video game.
Question to the HN Community: Where would you use ranked-choice voting in your life (or at work) to make decisions?
Seattle will be voting to adopt one of the two for city primaries next month, and it would be sweet way to pit the two systems against each other.
I think the market specifically for “Ranked-Choice Voting” is probably way smaller than the need for “easy/better/awesome polling and survey tools”.
Just keep that in mind as you grow and good luck with everything
And, you're exactly right. The online world of people specifically interested in tools for ranked-choice voting is quite small. The question I'm trying to answer is what use cases does ranked-choice voting work better than other existing survey/polling options? That way, someone could be looking for a solution to that specific problem. Right now, most of RankedVote's users are already aware of RCV and then try to apply that in some scenario at work where a simple voting tool would have been the alternative.
Approval voting for bug triage.
Ranked Choice Voting for prioritization (eg features, reqs).
Roman Eval (thumbs up or down) for acceptance testing and hiring candidates.
Using democracy at work is super light weight and fully transparent. Helped a lot with accountability.
Initially I had to be the heavy, coercing the team to honor their own votes. Over time, as people grokked it, teams would self-enforce. aka Empowerment.
Just to reiterate about administrative burden, quickly voting on stuff greatly reduced time spent nursing the misc bug tracking and project management tools. A huge win.
https://psephomancy.medium.com/how-ranked-choice-voting-elec...
This article recommends instead a STAR voting system which is still simple to implement and understand while not electing extremists in some cases. I would be sad to see NYC and others turn to ranked choice without considering all the alternatives.
Good news, that's not how it works. You are minimizing the distance in a hyperspace, not a single axis. People draw a singular axis (or two) to simplify and explain the concept. But still, the distance is measured in a hyperspace.
Even with multiple axes the critique is still correct right? And I think (far from an expert) that there's decent evidence to support hotelling's law and median voter theorem.
Empirically, it seems like RCV-IRV (RCV from here on) not much better than Plurality. For example, look at all the countries and cities with RCV and without. It's not at all clear to me that those with RCV are much better than those without.
Both NZ and Australia are dominated by a large center-left and center-right party coalition. Sounds familiar.
NZ has a housing crisis that is even worse than San Francisco. Australia is under the thumb of the mineral extraction industry. All sounds familiar.
(Obviously NZ and Australia beat the US on some metrics, e.g. single payer healthcare if that's your thing, but there are plenty of European countries that have equivalent or better systems without RCV)
There are hundreds of US cities with RCV. None of them are obviously better than those without. They still have all the same fights about zoning and bike lanes and public parking that other cities have.
I'd still prefer RCV over Plurality, but I don't really think it's the panacea some of its supporters thing it is.
If you zoom out and think about the entire voting process, it's rife with inefficiencies and bad assumptions:
A ballot proposal implies that the proposal is well-described and doesn't have perverse effects.
A voting day implies the voting population is ready to decide, and fully understands the proposal, and that everyone with an interest is aware of that interest and has an opportunity to vote.
A counting method implies that the outcome will actually reflect the democratic will of the population.
All they could come up with is statistics that more women and people of color are elected with RCV, and there is not enough evidence yet that Approval voting will do the same.
Some European countries (at least France and Ireland) use RCV-IRV or a two-round system for their presidential elections, but Australia, NZ and several European countries are constitutional monarchies, and therefore don't have presidential elections.
Only half joking there, the amount of negative results about ranked-choice voting in social choice theory is quite amazing. I'm not sure whether I'd place it on the efficiency frontier of the 'complex but has desirable properties' versus 'easy to understand but far from perfect' trade-off.
Add a calculation for how many person-hours such a ballot would have taken if carried out by hand (based on scientifically validated assumptions about how long one person takes to sort through a stack of N votes).
This would also let you give a figure for how much money had been saved by people entrusting their democratic process to an inscrutable and unaccountable online system, and therefore the size of the financial incentive to do so.
1. Would it be straightforward to add other voting systems? The easiest one to add would be approval voting ("Check off any option you'd support"). This has very similar benefits to ranked voting, and is more appropriate in many situations.
2. Your description of "How Ranked-Choice Voting Works" describes the "first round" and then the "next round" and "repeat until a winner is found." While those of us who understand RCV understand that these rounds are automatically built into the system, I think it's never made clear to a newbie that the voters don't have to go back and vote again.
On #2 -- That's a great point. And one that hopefully people start to better understand by using RankedVote and seeing all the "Rounds" happen at once. But, yeah, for many it's a new term. How would you make it more clear?
For example, for a presidential election in the US we have the electoral college results and the popular vote (which often differ). It would be nice to also have a ranked-choice result to compare against. Especially when it comes time to consider a revote or when courts become involved with elections (a sign the electoral process has failed in some way).
I suspect that election results would differ from ranked-choice polling to such a degree that it would become apparent how elections are manipulated by parties, the media, incumbents, etc etc etc:
https://journalistsresource.org/politics-and-government/the-...
Economic elites drive nearly all policy change in the US through campaign contributions and lobbying (highly correlated), while response to the average citizen's preferences is flat across the political spectrum (no correlation).
IMHO this mismatch is driven nearly entirely by election results being uncorrelated with voters' preferences. Then the vitriol against outcomes is used by the parties to keep us divided so that much-needed legislation can be simply politicized to stop it. Once support approaches 50/50, it dies in committee.
There were 395 bills that died via division this way in the Senate as of 2020:
https://americanindependent.com/mitch-mcconnell-block-bills-...
I tried to cite the most independent article I could find, but they all mention key politicians. Please don't let names muddy the waters, as the motivation behind divisive politics is the constant here.
The solution proposed is a combination of "Final-Five" open primaries with ranked-choice voting in the general election. This is what just happened in Alaska and is on the ballot in Nevada in November.
Which reminds me...if you're a Nevada voter, vote YES on ballot question 3!
"apt in the circumstances or in relation to something."
I'd like more people to talk about Ranked Pairs / Tideman. It satisfies a ridiculous number of voting criteria, even more than Schulze, but with the huge advantage that it's explainable to a layperson. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranked_pairs
Min voting methods which is any voting method that forces voters to pick only one candidate (plurality, ranked choice voting) favors either the left or right political power position, traditionally held by Republicans and Democrats.
Alaska's special election resulted in a race between a Democrat and a Republican where the winner received about 50% of the vote. How did that change anything?
RCV is just plurality with a 50% threshold. San Francisco had that until it switched to RCV so it could stop paying for the live run offs.
For ending division, MaxVoting methods--any MaxVoting method--will work. It should be up to the people of that area which one they want instead of being imposed from the outside by experts. CommonSenseforUnitingAmerica.org
https://www.electionscience.org/library/approval-voting-vers...
Focus on Condorcet ("Virtual Round Robin") counting. De-duping by requiring a google or facebook login (or anonymous with a crappy hacky captcha).
