Looks like the SF Chronicle is now requiring a subscription to read any articles? I don’t live in the Bay Area to subscribe but this article looks interesting. Anyone have an archive link?
Wow. The complacency of election officials and many advocates for election reform is stunning. Ideas like ranked choices are worse than worthless if you don't implement them correctly. It undermines faith in the entire voting process.
I wonder why there were so many incorrectly filled out ballots that minutiae of how they were processed was enough to swing the vote. Maybe they should take a look at how they were designed too.
And the fact that the vast majority were for one candidate. Looking at pictures of the example ballots it’s a confusing format optimized for voting machines, not humans.
I really don’t understand the American obsession with voting machines, I believe there is always a manual count anyway and American election counting is extremely slow anyway.
> I really don’t understand the American obsession with voting machines, I believe there is always a manual count anyway and American election counting is extremely slow anyway.
American elections usually have a whole ton of races on them. I've usually got about ten elected officials to weigh in on, and then five issues to give a yes or no to (down since I moved out of California). That would make manual counting all the races a major pain. AFAIK, ballots are machine counted, a sample is taken and hand counted, and as long as the sample is consistent with the machine count, and the machine count isn't too close, that's that. Unless a candidate wants to pay for a hand count of their race. But each state has its own rules, and races are generally handled at the county level, so there's room for a lot of variation.
The slow parts of the counting is usually validating the ballots before opening them, which may not be legally allowed before election day and recently, many states allowing for ballots to arrive by mail after election day if they have a timely postmark (details about ballots that arrive by mail without a postmark vary, of course). Sometimes there's issues with transportation of ballots or polling places have to stay open for a long time for voters in line, and generally counting in a state won't begin until all polls are closed, which can be a coordination issue. Otherwise, counts are usually available night of, which is good enough for me? The certification process is slow, because it takes a lot of manual work (as discussed above).
It was 5 ballot sheets front and back in the most recent election in my part of California.
It’s actually irritating. Most ballot measures shouldn’t be ballot measures. Pretty much anything that’s a constitutional amendment shouldn’t even be on the ballot, and the more elected officials there are, the less pressure there is on the more abjectly political parts of government to do a good job (legislatures, Governors/Mayors). We’re up to electing State Supreme Court justices now, and well, you can’t be held accountable for your judicial picks if you’re not the mook that put them in office, now can you?
As much as I enjoy having a month or so to fill out my ballot at my leisure, I’m beginning to see a downside to that combined with voting machines, namely in that it allows the ballot to basically grow endlessly over time. The point of elected officials is these are the mooks hired to do the job of making laws, appointing their cabinet members, filling vacancies in the Courts and, prosecutors offices and law enforcement, and running the business of government in a politically accountable fashion so that we don’t have to.
California allows for initiated constitutional amendments to pass with only a simply majority, and those amendments can appear on the ballot after gathering a relatively small number of signatures. The signature requirement weeds out a majority of initiatives, whether amendment or statute, but the quality of the remainder makes me wish it were more stringent.
I dislike that California's process for citizen initiatives is quite so open as it is. For example, 2022's Prop 29 was a third run of a measure that also failed to pass on each of the preceding two ballots, with 59%+ of voters opposed each time. The topic is sufficiently narrow, and would benefit from expert input, that I don't feel it belongs on a ballot at all.
I question, as well, the inability of the state legislature to amend or repeal anything initiated by citizens without sending it back out onto the ballot.
At this point? I pretty much oppose them wholesale after voting on them for my entire adult life. If the legislature isn't representative enough, it should be expanded, but ballot propositions give the legislature an out from being accountable for policies they support ("the voters have spoken!") whether it passes or fails when it is their job to advocate for and build a coalition and run on those very issues; and it invites every nutjob to try and pass their own agenda. Tax increases are also locked behind ballot initiatives when complete budgetary authority should be vested in a legislature.
I would support one more additional referendum though: a ratification for a new California Constitution that wipes the slate clean on the old one.
Some people still think of computers as machines that can never be wrong because their calculator and spreadsheets are never wrong, they're essentially magic boxes that can do math and things faster and more correctly than people can. Humans are slow and error prone, and it's easy to whip up conspiracies about those people nefariously counting votes in their favor.
It's easy to play into that bias, you even see it among the technically minded who work with computers all day, and exploit it for financial gain. It's a grift that keeps on grifting.
> And the fact that the vast majority were for one candidate.
That struck me as weird too. Why would so many of Hutchinson's votes be second-rank, with no first-ranked candidate? Hutchinson was the incumbent; one might divine from tealeaf reading that these voters knew about Hutchinson, and based on his record, did't care to rank him first. But they didn't like any other candidate well-enough to give him first rank.
I think perhaps naive voters treat the ranks they award like gold stars on a student's workbook; more a mark of approval than a vote in election. But who's to say?
> As the results were being released, FairVote noticed issues specifically related to how to count a second- or third-choice vote if the voter did not select a first choice. Ballots with blank spots in ranked-choice races are considered “suspended.”
> The Alameda County registrar explained that if a voter didn’t select a candidate as first choice, then the second choice should have been counted as the first choice in the first round. The same would occur in subsequent rounds moving lower choices up into the empty slot.
Did they not have a unit test for this?! Now I'm curious how many unit tests they have, and what they cover.
Shouldn't the software be public too? If voting machines are here to stay, the public ought to be able to see what code they're supposed to be running, no?
Eh? The inputs to the software need to be public and accurate, and then the public can run their own interpretations of the algorithms and yell when things aren't right. I'm assuming that's what FairVote, the organization mentioned in the article as alerting the county registrar, did.
> Shouldn't the software be public too? If voting machines are here to stay, the public ought to be able to see what code they're supposed to be running, no?
You'd hope so, but governments just contract out to companies that build the machines and software, and those machines and software remain proprietary IP of the companies that built them.
Whoa. People in the region have been incensed about the registrar's slow count. The NAACP has called for recounts in a very very tight mayoral election. And there's been some serious confusion about how ranked choice voting works. In every case, the registrar has operated as untouchable and perfect.
And somehow they got it so wrong a race was actually decided the wrong way in their original tally? Uh. What?
If the “certified” election results are potentially incorrect then people are right to lack faith in them. The problem is the lack of correctness, not the lack of faith.
I feel like I see this a lot, this concern about second-order effects over concern about the problem itself. It feels like a way to draw attention away from the thing itself. Like, if a member of some particular group does something bad we start worrying about hypothetical repercussions against that group so we don’t have to talk about the act.
My understanding is that calculating ranked choice isn’t the easiest thing to do.
In Australia we have a national electoral commission (AEC) who runs the process, have perfected this over decades. So much so that they also run the elections for Registered Organisations (unions) [0].
The story is similar in our state elections where our electoral commissions are so we’ll regarded you can hire them to run elections for your company [1].
This is all to say, trust in the process and the fairness and accuracy of the outcome are paramount to democracy. And that we’ve been doing ranked choice for decades, it works—don’t write it off because there’s teething issues.
I can see merits to the US approach of having thousands of effectively independent elections being run (for a county for example), and the Australian approach where it’s run nationally by a capable independent commission that holds itself to a very high standard.
Stories like this one, where a county is trialling a different election process, are important to share and appreciate—not because they stuffed up, but because they fixed it. It’s one of those counterintuitive times where admitting failure/fault should build trust.
Democracy is slow on purpose. Statistics get us results on election day, but they don’t change the outcome even when they’re wrong. To borrow some jargon, I think it’s more important democracy is observable than it is fast.
Ranked choice voting is, to my knowledge, the most representative process to elect. No vote is wasted. You don’t have to game theory your choice of the lesser of two evils, you rank who you prefer.
It captures your opinion, not the shadow groupthink choices.
> You don’t have to game theory your choice of the lesser of two evils, you rank who you prefer
You "have" [1] to game-theory your choice no matter what the voting system is. Ranked-choice is apparently believed [2] to be less susceptible to tactical voting than some other systems, though. (Not sure if this is quantitative or qualitative.)
> IRV may incentivize forms of tactical voting (such as compromising) when voters have sufficient information about other voters' preferences, such as from accurate pre-election polling. FairVote mentions that monotonicity failure can lead to situations where "having more voters rank [a] candidate first, can cause [the candidate] to switch from being a winner to being a loser."
Yes, at best a voting system can make it so that your naive intuition is pretty close to your best tactical voting.
Approval voting and range voting come pretty close.
However, your first link only seems to critique deterministic voting systems. It's fairly easy to sidestep these critiques (especially Arrow's theorem) with a probabilistic systems:
Eg this variant of sortition: every voter chooses a preferred candidate on their ballot, and we draw n ballots at random to fill up parliament. (Pick whatever system you prefer for resolving one candidate getting picked multiple times, eg give them extra voting power in parliament, or pick the voter's next choice on the ballot etc.)
If you can find a way to vote 'tactically' in this scheme, please let me know.
I believe it's fair in some sense, and free of the pathologies outlined in your links. You are always better off voting for the candidate you prefer.
(I specifically mention using this scheme to fill up parliament with a few hundred people in it. If you want to pick a single position, like a president, the low of large numbers won't kick in, and you might have a greater variance than you'd like from your voting system.
But even for picking a president, a randomised system can still avoid the pathologies mentioned.)
But it quickly shows another problem: share of votes in parliament, is not equal to share of power in parliament.
Picture a body where there's 4 members. A has a voting power of 12. B and C have a voting power of 8 each. D has a voting power of 3.
It's easy to see that once A, B and C have cast their yes/no vote, the issue will be decided no matter how D votes. D has a share in "voting weight", but no power at all. We can say this for sure without knowing anything about the ideology of the participants.
That problem occurs in exactly the same way on any vote in a "normal" parliament where party affiliation determines vote.
> D has a share in "voting weight", but no power at all. We can say this for sure
This is interesting in a different way. D's ability to vote has no power at all. That's true. You're taking a leap when you extrapolate that D has no power; by that argument, lobbyists have no power either. Is that something you believe?
I'm not sure party whipping is actually a problem?
Btw, parties and how they work in specific electoral systems are (at least partially) a function of how general voting works in those systems.
If you have a sortition system, parties might work rather differently, if they would be present at all. MPs submit to the whip's party discipline, because they need the resources of the party to get re-elected etc. Under sortition, the incentives are all different.
You could run parliament on probabilistic lines, too.
More realistically, I agree with thaumasiotes: this is exactly how forming a government works in most parliamentary systems around the world (eg both in the UK parliament and the German Bundestag.)
There may be something to say for small, "moderate" parties being pivotal, having the deciding vote. But that's why I emphasised, this is completely independent of political opinions. D are powerless whether it's a centrist or an extremist. There's no way to defend that as a feature.
Of course, if A, B, C and D are groups of people with less than perfect party discipline, the people in D may still have some power.
No, not necessarily. They may be so bland as to please nobody. (This was the case for an old rural progressive party in my country for many years). Or, they may be neutral by default on most left-right issues because they really care about something mostly orthogonal to it. This has been the case for the Christian Democrats and to a lesser degree the Farmer's party in my country.
The paradox is that they get a good deal of power being pivotal, but only on issues they don't really care so much about.
> D are powerless whether it's a centrist or an extremist.
No. That's only true in a deterministic parliament that works by majority rule.
You could have your parliament make decisions by lot (with probabilities weighted by what MPs vote for).
Or you could give your parliamentarians a steady stream of tokens they could use for voting; small parties could save up their tokens for a while, to have a decisive influence on something they care about.
(You'd have to work out a lot of kinks in such a token system..)
News Ltd were unable to prevent a Labor victory this last federal election here in Australia. I have hopes they won't be able to thwart the coming UK general election either.
They are now coming up against the Millennial and Gen Z tide, a demographic that is both overwhelmingly left leaning, and largely eschews the type of media where Murdoch is prominent.
I don't want to count my chickens before they hatch, but I dare say the peak of Murdoch's influence may be somewhere behind us.
If the historical drift right with age is true (I've never believed so, but it's a popular theory) they could return to influence. That's the main fear.
Imo, it's clear that the 'historical drift' was an artifact of Western society in the past century. It's not an absolute rule or some fundamental property we've established about human beings.
Indeed, I also think it's partly an artifact of the sheer size of the baby boomer generation, which gives them outsized political power even as their cultural influence wanes.
I'm 66; when I was younger, I assumed (with some dread) that I'd drift right, and become more like my dad. The opposite happened; I have consistently moved leftwards, as centre-left politicians have consistently disappointed me.
I did become more like my dad; but mainly on personal matters, not on economic or social issues.
I linked this elsewhere in the thread, but given it’s an up to date survey on this very question I’ll post it here too.
Top line is, the drift to conservatism as we age no longer holds. The thread goes into more detail as it’s a bit nuanced.
But as one LNP strategist said dejectedly on national television during the LNP wipeout “you can make new conservatives if they have nothing to conserve”. If the status quo doesn’t serve the majority of voters why would they do anything but vote to change it.
Sorry, Peter Dutton? This is like how the UK Tories always go on about the lack of PR preventing a UKIP entering power: newsflash my dudes, the UKIP is you.
Oh, it sounds amazing to have people who only vote to avoid a penalty. I'm sure they'll make sure they know the issues and do their research and not who they see the most on TV or offers them the most free stuff
It is though. Because we frame it as a civil responsibility, not a privilege. There’s only a few situations where it’s taken away [0] (convicted of treason or treachery, imprisoned for a sentence greater than 3 years, of an unsound mind).
> In 1912, the former Electoral Act was amended to make enrolment compulsory. In 1924, to increase voter turnout and reduce party campaign expenditure, the Electoral Act was amended to make voting at federal elections compulsory.
Our election cycles are short, and there’s a small defined period where we talk about the election. After which we all get back to what we were doing. Contrast to some other countries, when the elections (even 4 years out) are always on the cards.
But to your point, even if they don’t know the issues, or care their vote is worth as much as mine. They have a responsibility to submit a vote. They don’t have to fill out the vote correctly, they can submit an informal or donkey vote.
They can partake in the classic Aussie tradition of drawing richly detailed genitalia on their ballot for the poll worker to admire.
What you do with your ballot is between you and that piece of paper.
But short of a few very limited circumstances you need to do you duty and make your voice heard. We’re not asking the informed, the educated, the wealthy, the elite or any other subset who they think should run things. We’re saying, your job as a citizen is to record your opinion on who should be running things (even if your opinion is “I don’t know”, you still need to record it).
And the key part here is that no one can take that away from you. The alternative is the game of voter suppression, making you think your vote isn’t wanted or won’t change things. Dropping you from electoral roles days before an election. Damaging the postal service to hamper mail in votes.
We’re one of a tiny number of countries that do it, and almost a century on I think it was a brilliant idea.
We don’t have a draft, and other than Jury duty (which you can reasonably get out of), voting is _the responsibility_ you have as a citizen.
Do you believe that the current pool of voters are any better or more considerate?
Most voters are "the base", likely to be extreme in their politics, and mostly irrelevant to political outcomes (as they can safely be ignored, since they are voting for their team regardless).
> My understanding is that calculating ranked choice isn’t the easiest thing to do.
It really isn't easy. There's an outer for loop that adds significant complexity because you need to do a reduce sum and pop the argmin each time. The more complex the system is, the easier for mistakes. There are plenty of voting systems (see Cardinal Voting) that don't have this computational penalties and can simply be argmax(reduce_sum(votes)).
> Ranked choice voting is, to my knowledge, the most representative process to elect. No vote is wasted.
I highly encourage you to look into more voting systems then. Especially because there are many versions of "ranked choice" voting. I should note that Australia's system is slightly different than what many American states are doing despite them looking the same. There are also Condorcet voting systems (which are ranked/ordinal) and are far more representative. But many people advocate for cardinal systems because you get the same properties as ranked (and some more like handling a strong spoiler -- there are strong and weak spoilers btw) but are far more computationally efficient. The common ranked systems aren't that great on that representation front but as far as ordinal systems are concerned they are computationally simple.
Definitions:
- Ordinal voting: systems where candidates are ordered or ranked in comparison to other candidates.
- Cardinal voting: systems where candidates are assigned a score or preference value independent of other candidates.
Cardinal voting is a lot more expressive than ordinal. For example, with 3 candidates, the following 3 cardinal votes
A:35% B:33% C:32%
A:99% B: 1% C:0%
A:51% B:49% C:0%
all reduce to the same ranking but express rather different relative preferences. Btw, in this example scores are normalized to add up to 100%, but should still be considered independent of other candidates.
So what we should actually discuss more is how preferences are embedded. The problem with ordinal systems are that exactly the same but with cardinal systems they aren't. I don't think a percentage system is a good way for expressing the advantage because people are going to be used to more discrete systems like a 5 star rating system. Here's a better example:
Suppose there are three candidates, A, B, C, and D. We have a strong preference for A, we like B and C equally, and strongly dislike D. How do we express these?
- Ordinal: A > B > C > D
- Cardinal (5 points): A:5, B:3, C:3, D: 0
We can see the embedding issue here pretty clearly. In an ordinal system there cannot be a means for us to express that we have no strong preference of B over C. We also can't express how much we like C over D because we're forced to place them equidistant from one another. This is a big problem because in the ordinal system we say that our preference of B over C is identical to our preference of C over D. There is a clear advantage here to cardinal systems that have a lot of downstream effects that lead to cardinal systems passing the favorite betrayer criteria -- aka strong spoiler -- (ordinal fails) and is why these systems are monotonic (ordinal systems aren't).
I argue strongly in favor of cardinal systems but I often find that people are strongly invested in ordinal systems. Unfortunately fair vote has done a great job at advocating for RCV and people get passionate about things they are not passionate about learning about. But I need to note that there are downsides to cardinal systems too. Voting systems are over constrained and so it really depends on what criteria you are optimizing for. If we strictly want the best VSE over everything else, there's ordinal systems that out perform cardinals. There is nuance here that we need to recognize and be aware of in these discussions, especially when passion is abound. We'll also see if Clay shows up. If it stays on the front page long enough he'll probably see it (hi Clay ;) He's the real expert here.
If only you had given the realistic challenger to D your full support (5) instead of being expressive in your preference and docked them 2 points. Now D will rule for another 4 years and the C supporters will call you a traitor for voting your honest preference, just like in the present system.
And this scenario is easy to imagine. You usually know who the front-runners are, and because not only you, but everyone else, wants to avoid that scenario, belief about who the front runners are has a self-reinforcing effect.
A scenario where you're glad you didn't award the full 5 points, though, is much harder to imagine. And a scenario where you are BOTH glad that you didn't award them 5, yet glad that you didn't award them 0, is as far as I can see never going to happen in a single candidate election.
> It's perfectly possible to allow equality in ranked choice voting systems, so A > B = C > D.
While this is easy to write down it isn't easy to tabulate. You must provide a new tallying algorithm (you'll find that important features break).
> But what happens in your cardinal voting system, if D and C are the front runners in competition for a single seat?
I'm a bit confused what you're asking here. There are no voting systems where a single vote/rank permutation/rating will not change the outcome of an election. To do so would mean votes are being wasted. Yes, there are people that will be upset in these situations just like people are upset in a close sports game. But unlike a close sports game we have a higher expectation that the teams that win like this are more likely to be similar. That is candidate C's voters frequently like candidate D (your ordering even suggests that despite the example ballot being from someone on the other side of the political isle). The point is to get someone that is the most representative. In the end, it shouldn't matter what a single voter's preference is, it matters what the collective preference is. That's why we vote in the first place. So that's why I'm confused.
But maybe you should click on the montonicity link. You may also find this link[0] interesting. It is also extremely important that we remember that no voting system is perfect. So if you're going to put down a voting system because you've found a flaw you'll never be happy with a system unless you lie to yourself. It also means that if you're arguing with someone and point out a flaw you need to attempt to convince the person why that flaw (and others) are important in comparison to the upsides/downsides of the other competing system/s. Discussing voting systems is difficult because there are no global optima but it is also more difficult to discuss because proof by counter-example is meaningless and will only convince a novice. If you're wondering the motivation I'm giving in my arguments, click the links.
> While this is easy to write down it isn't easy to tabulate.
Ranked pairs etc. have no problem tabulating it. If the change to allow equal ranking breaks some obscure metric, that's a sign the metric isn't very important. After all people can just rank everyone if they worry about it.
I've read a lot about this, and I argue with the usual suspects range people every time the topic shows up.
I don't understand how you don't understand the argument. You can come into situations where you'll regret you didn't min-max your choice (rank everyone 0 or 100). You can't come into situations where you say, "gee, I'm glad I ranked that candidate somewhere in between". Consequently, everyone will do that, whether it's good for the collective or not. Sure, I want what's best for society, but I'm not volunteering to have my vote diluted for the common good - especially since I know that the people I disagree with most, certainly won't do it.
RP has a resolve time of O(n4) so I'm not sure that's a method you want to argue for under a thread where (an even lower) complexity led to a critical mistake. It would be naive to maximize VSE over all other criteria. I cannot stress enough that there are no optimal systems and that we cannot look at criteria independently.
> I don't understand how you don't understand the argument.
Because pure honesty is never an optimal strategy? I'm not aware of a system where that's the optimal strategy. But as we showed here in range, the best strategies are some form of honesty. The dishonest part is that you rescale, which I don't think most people would be upset about. What is frustrating to me is that you appear (I'm willing to admit a misread because these conversations are difficult and it is clear you're primed on my position given your usual suspects statement) to be ignoring identical strategic issues in ordinal systems. But I've also stated pretty clearly why I have a preference of cardinal systems. It is because I care a lot about the resolve complexity (the thread topic is a good example), monotonicity (something IRV/RCV fail (RP and Schultz pass but fail the prior criteria)), favorite betrayer/strong spoiler effect (again IRV/RCV fails), and an important factor is the embedding aspect. That the distance between all preference is not identical. We just can't have as richly expressive latent embedding as we can in a rated system. This has a lot of benefits that I think we need to discuss, including a smoother VSE solution space[0]. That dictates how resistant a system is to dishonest strategies and how representative we are.
> Because pure honesty is never an optimal strategy? I'm not aware of a system where that's the optimal strategy
It's not in a system alone. Strategies are something you have when you have information about the other players and their payoffs.
As it happens, honesty is an excellent strategy in Condorcet methods (even the "bad" ones, like those who aren't monotonic) when you have a realistic amount of information about other people's preferences/strategies. People who are honest because they can't be bothered to be strategic, do great with those methods.
In approval, even the information about who the front runners are, causes trouble.
And in range, even with NO information, you'll know it's better to just use the max and min values.
Those systems don't encourage honesty, and the "extra information" range sneaks in from self-reported strength of preferences on an absolute scale, is junk information. Nothing good can come of using it. Certainly it's no good to use it to reject a candidate that is preferred by a majority over all the other candidates.
We've been through this so many times. The original version of those simulation-based utility arguments was pushed by Warren D. Smith on RangeVoting.org.
There are so many ways to lie with simulation. When you took away even the most obvious lie in the simulations painting range in a good light - namely when you took away the simulated people's magical ability to honestly compare interpersonal utility on an absolute scale, so they always ranked their most preferred 100 and their least preferred 0, no matter where they were in "opinion space" - then most of the good properties of score vanished. Smith for a while conceded that, and advocated range with top-2 runoff if you were concerned with that (as if this was some obscure technicality).
Second, those simulations had lousy ideas of "strategy", as if strategy was just a percentage slide. Strategies are inherently dynamic, and require coordination - if I see you instructing your supporters how to vote, I can take that into account in how instruct my supporters to vote.
Yeah but I've seen how the typical person would actually do cardinal voting, because I've seen how Yelp, Uber, IMDB ratings work. Someone who's more thoughtful about it will rank each candidate (on a scale of 0-10) at reasonable values like A:3, B:5, C:7, and someone who gets all their news from tv will rank A:10, B:0, C:0. The latter is more than canceling of the reasonable person's vote.
This kind of voting rewards dumb votes over informed votes. I'd rather have ranked voting.
Yes, in ordinal ranking schemes, there's a strategy that's individually rational:
Figure out who the two front runners are. Rate the better of them 100. Also, rate everyone else you like more than that front runner a 100.
If you're actually concerned about this (as far as I'm aware there's been no evidence that the voting you suggest is common when experiments have been done) you can normalize the individual ballots (e.g. softmax). But I truly believe that the added complexity to this would unnecessarily complicate an effect we do not observe. (Consider that we also have an edge case of A:10 B:10 C:10 as well. Though this ballot is easy to handle in other ways: toss it) Most voters will use a scaled sincerity voting strategy and thus you'd have A:6 B:8 C:10 and our bullet voter will no longer have an advantage. It pays to be sincere.
Continuing down this, you're essentially discussing bullet voting. I should EXPLICITLY state that this is a well known case and has been extensively studied[0][1]. I appreciate that you have concern with the system and I implore you to continue to search for flaws, but also to look for information discussing these ideas. The reason the bullet voting was likely so low in this study is that most voters are rational and understand that they are giving up significant leverage when bullet voting (note that the case is even worse in approval!). We often think our neighbors are far less rational than they actually are and we shouldn't make this mistake.
We should probably also discuss Monotonicity[2], but maybe in a follow-up conversation.
So a standard normalization (divide by max value) wouldn't solve much but why I specifically mentioned a softmax is because you then rescale all voting preferences to have the same power. I don't think it is a good idea btw, other than the added complexity. But it does change the above example. The problem with the example was that the first voter gave no strong preferences and thus the second voter had more power. The solution is to rescale these, which is why I said that voters tend to do this automatically (give their preferred candidate on the ballot the stop score and rate all others in proportionate to them).
I'm loving learning about these different voting methods. I do still stand by my point though.
You're right, I was arguing that voters degenerate into bullet voting over time 100% for the candidate they liked, 0% for the ones they don't. Your article [0] contends that it's not a good strategy to vote like this if you're trying to be strategic, because if candidates are A=974, B=974, F=231 and you liked F, you'd be foolish to vote 100% F, as if you like B better than A you should vote some for B.
This looks too much like the current system we have, where people don't vote for the person they like best, they cast all their votes for the person they hate the least who could beat the person they hate the most. Basically: if you normalize votes, people are going to vote 100% for the lesser of 2 evils and we're back to square 1.
If you don't normalize votes, you'll get one of the other voting strategies you've already linked to in your [1]. I expect it would essentially devolve into approval voting, as it's still voting for the lesser of 2 evils of the strongest candidates, then casting additional votes for anyone who seems viable. Perhaps it finds some other equilibrium.
Either way, I think it takes too much strategy and voter headspace compared to ranked voting, where you can just vote for the candidates you want, in the order you want, and you didn't waste a vote if your top candidate loses because your #2 vote didn't lose any weight.
I think you're trying too hard to look for errors in a system that isn't your preference and not looking hard enough at errors for the system that is your preference. All voting systems have errors and we must be clear about this.
But this strategy and consequence exists in ordinal systems just as much as cardinal systems. There is nothing stopping a voter from bullet voting on a ranked ballot. They just rank one person and no one else. The consequences are quite similar actually but might be more obvious that you're throwing away your ballot in this case. But I assure you, you're effectively throwing away your ballot in the cardinal case too.
I'm also not sure what is wrong with approval. Approval is awesome.
I am also not sure why you keep using the phrase "lesser of 2 evils". If we have a 2 candidate election then there's no point in using any of these voting systems because plurality is a strictly better system (in a 2 candidate election). In fact, it is preferential that a multi-candidate system degenerates into a plurality system when there are only two candidates! The phrase "lesser of n equals" is not really about a voting system so much as it is related to another saying: "those that seek power do not deserve it" (or Plato's alternative: "Only those who do not seek power are qualified to hold it"). This has nothing to do with a voting system but has everything to do with a candidate selection process. There's an ethical conundrum though because you need strong authoritarian power to force thrust (the potential for) power upon people. But we're digressing, just like the normalization discussion is digressing (it was intended to introduce the concept of scaled sincerity, which we see people use in practice).
> I think you're trying too hard to look for errors in a system that isn't your preference and not looking hard enough at errors for the system that is your preference.
This is true that I have that bias. I think there's currently momentum in the US for switching from single vote to ranked voting, and I worry that if we get into disputes over which alternative voting system is better, that momentum will be lost and we won't change at all. You're right I was far too quick to dismiss approval voting as a devolution from cardinal voting.
> I am also not sure why you keep using the phrase "lesser of 2 evils".
I don't know if you're from the US or not, but this is a common idiom about how our election process works in practice. The Simpsons [0], South Park [1] and dozens of others have pretty great parodies of it. In each of our presidential elections, even though there will be a plurality of presidents running, there are practically only 2 -- the ones backed by the major parties. And often, they happen to be the 2 worst -- where they're either shamelessly narcissistic enough to be unfazed by criticism, or are overly agreeable and quick to make impossible promises. Your quote by Plato is on point here.
That's the phenomenon that I desperately don't want to have any more, that I want n-candidate elections to actually have n candidates. I (perhaps wrongly) attribute a lot of the polarization in the US to two-party elections.
It's true that you can be a bullet voter on a ranked ballot, but there's no incentive to (that I can think of). In an n-candidate election, if there are 2 known popular candidates, and you absolutely despise one of them, then in a normalized cardinal system you'd be incentivized to bullet vote for the other popular candidate -- whether or not they're terrible. That's the scenario I'm talking about when I say lesser of 2 evils. Without normalization, you'd be incentivized to approval vote. And I don't have anything wrong with approval voting, I shouldn't have criticized it in my last comment.
But I do still dislike cardinal voting, because of the fact that it gives people strategies for voting. I think some people will vote earnestly like A:1, B:3, C:6 and others will vote strategically like A:10, B:0, C:0, and so this will leave the earnest voters feeling like they had the election stolen from them by strategic voters when A wins.
> I worry that if we get into disputes over which alternative voting system is better, that momentum will be lost and we won't change at all
I worry that history will repeat itself and that we'll try it for awhile and then turn back because it does not resolve the things people care about (multi-parties and strong spoilers).
> I don't know if you're from the US or not
I am and demonstrated knowledge about this idiom. My comment was that the idiom is inappropriate for the conversation at hand, not that it is inappropriate for all circumstances. Why else do you think I quoted Plato?
> I want n-candidate elections to actually have n candidates.
Then you want a system that is scalable, transparent (i.e. low computational complexity, trivially parallelizable, and trivially verifiable from statistical subsets).
> It's true that you can be a bullet voter on a ranked ballot, but there's no incentive to (that I can think of).
Don't explain it to me, explain this to yourself. Why is the logic for "no incentive" invalidating in one case but not another? I argued that these are nearly identical situations and have several comments noting that there is no incentive to vote in the way you are suggesting. You are not being consistent in your logic and I'm trying to explain but it is frustrating. Maybe I am being too liberal in using my links and expecting others to read. So let me state it explicitly: there is no incentive to not give your top candidate the maximal score. So your logic is inconsistent. On the other hand, I don't expect all voters to be rational but I do expect (and have linked to experiments with people) a convergence to rationality (also consider what rational means. It doesn't mean smart but that people will play near optimally. We mix normal language and game theory language and this can create a lot of confusion).
No no your links are good, very cool to learn about rangevoting.com, I can see it has a ton to teach. But it's hard to immediately reconcile the data from these links with my own intuitions and first hand experiences and draw conclusions while still in the middle of the discussion.
You're making the argument that I shouldn't be concerned about people thresholding their votes because scaled sincerity is a nearly optimal strategy in a cardinal voting scheme, so people can vote with their heart and not feel like their vote has been wasted. That's one of the findings in the paper you shared[1] that Scaled Sincerity gets (at worst) 91% of the utility compared to Mean Based Thresholding when there are 3 candidates, 80% percent for 5 candidates, 78% for 9... etc
But there'll still inevitably be an election where 2 candidates were very close and the scaled sincerity voters who supported the 2nd place candidate feel like the election was stolen from them. The media will make an uproar about it. Voters will vote with a thresholding scheme after that. So in this case we should just skip to approval voting so people don't feel like they were robbed of the fraction of the vote they didn't contribute to their candidate.
Your other point is people will bullet vote in ranked voting and so I'm defending it too strongly. Your other article[0] very strongly argues that IRV is worse than approval voting in regards to getting bullet voters. I know it's a cop out of me to quote the criticisms that the article itself provides, but the data size really is too small. In their summary of comparisons, 16% bullet voting in Burlington and ~21% bullet voting in Irish presidential are not bad percentages in my opinion, and I don't know anything about the SF 07 or Dartmouth 06 elections.
I don't understand why the low computational complexity is important as long as the algorithm is simple to understand. Bubble sort has higher computational complexity but is a simpler algorithm than merge sort. But I don't know the details of vote counting in practice. If the computational complexity is so high that you wouldn't even determine who won until days or weeks later and was highly prone to error, then I'd stand corrected.
I don't see how cardinal voting would make a difference in there being multiple parties.
Edit: Also I don't mean to occupy either of our New Years Eves on this conversation. I could be sold on approval voting if that's the takeaway you're trying to get it. I learned a lot today. Hope nothing I said offended in any way.
> You're making the argument that I shouldn't be concerned about people thresholding their votes because
I'm actually trying to get you to apply the same scrutiny to ordinal systems as you are giving to cardinal systems. I actually appreciate that you are critical of cardinal systems but I don't appreciate that you aren't being as critical of ordinals (recognize I'm talking about at least a dozen voting systems here. We have to start here before we can enter the nuance of individual systems but we're not even clear here). To be a good scientist you need to detach yourself from your preference. You need to critique YOUR preference more than you critique the opposing options. You're smart and if you've picked the right system then you should be able to defend it. But if you're smart and picked the wrong thing then you need to change because it isn't about what you like, it is about what is right (I'll keep stressing that no voting system is optimal and we need to define our metrics -- I have stated mine -- but we're not discussing these, we're caught up on a single strategy which appears in both cardinal and ordinal and as far as I can tell you don't recognize the latter).
> But there'll still inevitably be an election where 2 candidates were very close
Yes, and we need to think about how distant these candidates are from one another. Then ask yourself, can we compose a system where these candidates are similar? Is it always random and we have no control? Or are these candidates always distant and on opposite sides of the spectrum? You may be primed to believe the latter because that's the likely scenario in plurality voting but is this true for all systems? To answer this you need to have a deep understanding of Voter Satisfaction Efficiency (VSE), spoilers (both weak and strong -- aka favorite betrayer criteria), and how we embed preference (this is why I keep mentioning distances between candidates on the ballot. Note that this is a different distance/manifold than the previously mentioned one at the beginning of this paragraph).
> 16% bullet voting in Burlington and ~21% bullet voting in Irish presidential are not bad percentages in my opinion
I agree it is a cop-out since we see lower bullet voting tendencies in cardinal systems. I agree that sample sizes are small but we do have lots of simulations. Unfortunately we have very little real world data. Unfortunately that means we need to advocate for these systems to get real world natural experiments. Fortunately there are a few approval systems: Fargo ND and St. Luis MS (also Latvia). So we are collecting some of this data and it is very promising so far. We also have non-political versions of this like HN itself! There is only a binary voting system here (until you reach a certain score, then we get range voting). So I'd also argue we have tons of data (also surveys frequently use disapprove/neutral/approve styles of voting. Yes, this is voting). We've seen substantial success with these and I think that's not something we can exclude (though we must be aware of things like vote inflation for certain services, like Uber, that don't exhibit in other services, like old Netflix rating or current ratings).
> I don't see how cardinal voting would make a difference in there being multiple parties.
Back to the embedding.
> I could be sold on approval voting if that's the takeaway you're trying to get it.
Let's say all things are equal in effectiveness. Approval is O(n) and RCV is O(n2). I think that's killer and matters a lot (see the main topic).
> Also I don't mean to occupy either of our New Years Eves on this conversation.
This is one of the few political topics I'm extremely passionate about so I enjoy discussing it. I do want to be clear in that my goal here is not necessarily to get you to come to the cardinal side (though that'd be nice) but I want you to understand ...
A cardinal voting system might be a more popular, balanced, expressive, and satisfying if you could also vote against candidates you actively dislike with negative percentages, where 0% is neutral "don't care".
So for the common case of hating all the candidates, you could vote:
A: -100% B: -100% C: -100%
There could be some way to normalize it so everyone gets the same voting power, but can choose to spend it positively or negatively in any combination.
That would give Republicans who hate Trump but refuse to vote for a Democrat the psychological out of not voting positively for any Democrats, but voting negatively for Trump.
This is an unnecessary complication but I get what you're saying. We could instead label a ballot numerically as: strongly disapprove (1), disapprove (2), neutral (3), approve (4), strongly approve (5). Or rather, both. What I'm getting at here is that nothing in the math changes so it isn't correct to say that these modifications make a system more balanced or expressive. I'll make no arguments about popularity or satisfaction since this is opinionated.
A benefit of cardinal systems that you are actually pointing out is that not only can we determine winners, but we can also get a lot of information about voter preference. This is quite useful to politicians and researchers (understanding how represented people feel). But I will also note that a strictly negative ballot is likely to be rare as it is purely a protest ballot.
Even though it may be mathematically equivalent, I think the psychological appeal is important to motivate people to vote at all, if not think clearly about how they vote, and do it honestly and wisely.
Human factors are important -- remember the Butterfly Ballots of the 2000 elections!
I think that 0 being "don't care" and negative numbers being negative percentages is easier to grasp and more balanced and granular than (3) being neutral. Even -3 to 3 would be better than 1 to 7.
Voting "A: -100%, B: -100%, C: -100%" weights each candidate the same as "A: 0%, B: 0%, C: 0%" the same as "A: 100%, B: 100%, C: 100%", but as you said, it's useful to get an overall count of the voters' absolute satisfaction with each candidate.
A popular positively winning candidate would have a more legitimate claim to a mandate, and the lesser of two evils candidates would be branded as such.
> Even though it may be mathematically equivalent, I think the psychological appeal is important to motivate people to vote at all, if not think clearly about how they vote, and do it honestly and wisely.
I agree with you here, maybe I did not articulate my previous comment correctly to reflect this.
The biggest issue with a proposal like this is that a lack of any preference given whatsoever should not count positively towards a candidate. If someone labels candidate A as +3, candidate B as -3, and doesn't label candidate C, candidate C should not be given more preference than candidate B. People will either not understand the ramifications (they might not know someone and think that "no preference" is truly no preference when in reality it's positive preference), will forget, be lazy and not fill in some candidates, etc. I don't think that's a desirable trait since it's essentially ascribing a vote which the voter did not want. Of course if you want to make -3 (on a -3 to +3 scale) the default value assigned to "no preference" votes, perhaps that would be okay.
To start off with, I think our elections are some of the best in the world and ranked-choice voting is a good system to use in that it's simple enough to explain and to work at scale, and still gives fair outcomes.
However, I don't particularly like the way we talk about it. I've heard a lot of people say things like, "You can't waste your vote." This is frankly untrue and there were even examples in the last election where certain voters could have voted strategically (e.g. by not making their favourite candidate their first preference).
Example seats? I’m curious to see how this edge case played out.
Generally if you put someone above your ‘2 party preferred’ candidate either your vote flows down or it was irrelevant.
Was it razor thin on first preference then the bottom 2 or 3 crackpots sealing the deal? This is the only way I can think of that’wasted vote’ happening.
Nah, let's say there are 3 candidates: A, B and C.
A wins a plurality of first preference votes. Otherwise, voters are split between B and C. We assume that if a candidate places C as their first preference, they will place B as their second preference, and vice-versa.
In this scenario, whoever gets more first preference votes out of B and C will win the election since the other will place third and get knocked out of the race, so anybody who placed A as their first preference didn't get to express whether they'd prefer B or C.
B and C voters aren't strategic here. If they wish to knock out A, then placing A at the bottom would not be strategic voting.
The point is that A voters arguably should have voted such that they could influence which of the two other candidates (B and C) won. This would require 'lying' about which candidate is their favourite; i.e. strategic voting
Ah sorry, I had a feeling that phrase was going to be problematic. I tried to surround it with the context around the game theory required in first past the post.
To clarify what I meant, with FPTP you have to be quite tactical because of how that system fundamentally works.
With Ranked Choice the effect and likelihood is far less. Importantly the second order effects are meaningful. Even if your vote was exhausted it still captures your opinion, and can influence the next election because you can record your opinion for others to see.
With FPTP, we don’t record everyone’s opinion on who is best suited for office, rather we record who you think everyone thinks will win (else your vote can be wasted or work against your intent).
IMHO if you need to vote strategically with Ranked Choice, it’s implementation has been warped and needs to be improved.
Like everything brevity is required before you can dive into the nuance. Perhaps a better way to describe ranked choice is that you can’t waste your vote like you can with FPTP.
Wasting a vote has a much more specific meaning than the general usage I come across, which complicates this more. [0]
Fair enough, I mostly agree with you. I was just trying to say that it's not really feasible to eliminate game theory from voting entirely. I wish that nuance was discussed, but seeing as so many people still seem to think they can only put an LNP or Labor candidate for their first preference, I may be fighting a losing battle
I feel like a law of game theory is you can’t eliminate game theory. But, I think it needs to be minimised to such an extent that we don’t need to bring it up. And that, even if your vote doesn’t elect someone this election, it sends a powerful message (because it’s your honest genuine intention) for the next.
I don’t think it’s a losing battle. If anything the last Australian federal election showed not only how good Ranked Choice is at conveying voter intention, but that a meaningful number of us understand it.
The LNP stopped representing their base (perhaps in a similar way to the ALP with the Greens) which opened the door for the Teal independents.
As an outsider looking in to US politics it appears as though similar issues exist, but there are no viable alternatives. In a positive sign for democracy US voters largely rejected candidates who were sowing doubt about the elections.
Related this thread [0] is a nice dive into the changing political landscape around the world as we age. It’s not following the expected path, and I think a lot has to do with us being more educated than ever.
Worth noting that (at least for national elections) your first preference also affects which political parties receive funding, so there’s an advantage to preferencing a party first even if they won’t be elected.
here in NZ we use STV (Single Transferable Voting) for some local elections - it's one of the fairest systems around, especially for electing multiple representative (or at large) wards - but it is complex because it passes fractions of a vote around (if only a portion of your single vote is used to elect someone high on your list the rest is passed on down your list).
So it's very fair, all of your vote always gets used .... but complex - to the point that the law (these days a regulation) specifies the floating point precision (9 digits)
I find it ridiculously amusing how practically every Australian I meet considers their voting system to be perfect. Voting in Australia is basically the NHS of the UK.
I wouldn’t proclaim its perfect. But I think it’s a system we are all generally pretty proud of.
It may have something to do with the fact that everyone has to vote, so you either learn how it works or try to dodge it. As in, it’s your responsibility as a citizen, not your right.
We also had the decade of Prime Ministers, where it was reasonably for you not to know who the current prime minster was. Amusingly the UK recently had a go at this as well, with about the same results.
The problem is that it forces people to vote for the lesser evil as well. Sure you can vote for your loved party, but if that only gets two votes then your ballot gets counted for your second choice anyway.
We need a system where you’re vote counts against everyone you don’t list.
> Ranked choice voting is, to my knowledge, the most representative process to elect.
It is not. “Ranked Choice Voting”, as a commonly used name for the specific ranked ballots method also known as “Alternative Vote”, “Instant Runoff Vote”, and a couple other names, is not “the most representative process” by any measure. It’s not even part of the best class of ranked-ballots single-winner methods (Condorcet methods), and single-winner elections of any kind are less representative than systems which provide proportional representation through the use of multimember constituencies (whether candidate-centered systems like Single Transferrable Vote in multimember districts, or whole-legislative-body systems like Party List PR.)
The name is even chosen to avoid consideration of competing ranked-ballots systems by creating the impression that it is the system for elections with ranked ballots.
I went deep into electoral systems after the 2016 election, and emerged a tentative ranked choice voting supporter for the momentum that FairVote was accruing at the time, but secretly I really considered approval voting an ideal next step in electoral reform:
1. Amending the law is relatively simple: replace any instance of only one with any when it comes to election laws regarding marking the ballot.
2. Amending the ballot is a minor change: just allow anyone to mark any (including none or all) of the bubbles representing each candidate on the ballot. The language on the ballot itself barely changes, the structure of the ballot can and would be identical to today's ballots.
3. Explaining the method to the public is dead simple: there's a pattern here, "instead of marking just one, now you can mark any of them" is a sentence that anyone can understand and implement. Explaining the calculation ("whoever gets the most votes, wins") is also dead simple.
4. Extending to multi-seat races is trivial: just take the top n vote-getters instead of the top 1.
5. It appeals to intuition: it does feel like "cast one lot per candidate you approve of" and aggregating that across a population is a fair way of distributing consensus. "Approval" means many things to many people but it is still a clear subjective threshold for each person. This also means that voters will consider the result harder to dispute on the grounds that it doesn't represent the people's will.
6. Tactical voting is straightforward and hard to do wrong: for what it's worth, tactical voting is always an option, and people are always going to use it. It's just how things work, at least for the foreseeable future. That being said, of all the systems, approval voting makes it the simplest to engage with and the least underhanded. Vote for people you want to promote in the election, don't vote for people you want to suppress in the election.
I really don't see the downsides. Deep in the discussion boards of the internet where the election nerds lurk, they complain about this or that theoretical imperfection. But as for the options that have been suggested, this one stands out as the easiest to adopt societally, with the most bullet- and fool-proof implementation.
If you want A or B to win, but you really prefer A to B, then should you approve of B at all or not approve of them?
This preference situation happens in every election, and approval voting has no answer to it. It's completely unclear what a voter should do to get the result they want.
You vote for who you approve of for the position in question. Whoever has the most approval wins. It's that simple: It doesn't matter whether you prefer A over B, all that matters is whether you think each is a good-enough candidate. Fiber grained preferences then emerge at the population level, not the individual level.
"What the voter should do to get the result they want" assumes a level of individual agency which really isn't present in a real election: The result is always a combination of individual choice with collective will.
Would you be OK with Hillary as president? If yes, give approval; if not, don't. Order of preference simply doesn't matter in approval voting. The only reason it seems complicated is because we are too used to strategic voting in the First Past the Post system.
I recently had the occasion to really game out what happens in ranked choice voting. It is similar to approval voting (you should only rank people to approve of), but in practice you elect whoever gets past the 50% threshold first, which may not be whoever had the most raw approval. The first person past 50% is effectively random, especially in a large field with complicated voter preferences. So, you get an illusion of choice: everyone lists their preference, but the actual winner is a somewhat random choice amongst the candidates with >50% approval. Thus, I advocate removing the illusion, and simply picking the candidate with the greatest approval. Easy.
This echoes critiques I hear elsewhere, and so gets the same response: so what? What about that statement (1) doesn't apply to another election system and (2) isn't expected as part of a normal experience when voting among multiple candidates? Only one person will win anyway, so disappointment about the outcome actually seems like the wrong focus vs eg satisfaction that you got to represent your preferences fairly.
This also is addressed by the point that what you describe is the most complicated part of approval voting. But I'd argue that that is way less of an issue than the current spoiler effects we see in FPTP and RCV, since that is the limit of how complicated your choice can get in practice, whereas with other systems there's much deeper dynamics with respect to tactical voting.
> Only one person will win anyway, so disappointment about the outcome actually seems like the wrong focus vs eg satisfaction that you got to represent your preferences fairly.
Except that approval voting doesn't allow you to express your preferences very well, since there is very limited differentiation between candidates. I understand the appeal of approval voting since it's a very small change to the voting machines, voter experience, existing legislation, etc, but most people who want to express their preferences will be drawn to methods that actually let you do that most effectively. If approval goes head to head with IRV or STAR (the two other movements that seem to have some momentum) I would generally expect the voters to go with STAR or IRV, for better or worse.
> doesn't allow you to express your preferences very well, since there is very limited differentiation between candidates
Again, so what? The function being optimized here is not "fealty to true preferences for individuals", but rather "level of satisfaction with outcome for the entire group of electors". And actually, my preference is to not be asked to rank candidates but just issue binary assessments. Your claim that people want the former is wild, unsupported hypothesis, and the way you phrased it seeks to imply they'd rather not vote than vote approval voting. I think you are strongly (albeit transparently) forcing your own preferences through others' mouths in an attempt to start this more or less malformed debate.
> approval goes head to head with IRV or STAR (the two other movements that seem to have some momentum) I would generally expect the voters to go with STAR or IRV, for better or worse.
IRV is literally the same thing as RCV and so displays the same idiosyncracies and fundamental flaws so I'm not quite sure you know what you're talking about here.
Further, the kind of person attracted to STAR is the same kind of person who can devise linear algebra algorithms for deciding what's for lunch, and go in to change every setting on their new smartphone before the wallpaper. They are micromanipulating technocrats, and while this community massively overly represents that type, it doesn't represent the public per se. I assure you, what you parrot from online discussions by people who very much don't have their finger on the pulse, is then predictably very far from representing views considered "normal" in the literal sense.
> approval voting doesn't allow you to express your preferences very well
yes it does, in the aggregate. because the people who approve only X or only Y will statistically have a pretty similar X-vs-Y preference as all other voters (who approved both or neither).
and because approval voting uses the preferences it does have more accurately than IRV, it ends up being much more accurate, as measured by voter satisfaction efficiency simulations.
strategy affects all deterministic voting methods, and an optimal ranked ballot can be quite complex. see an example from andy jennings, who did his math phd thesis on voting methods and co-founded the center for election science (with myself and some others).
optimal approval voting strategy is simply to approve everyone you prefer to your expected satisfaction. to an approximation it's, "vote for who you normally would, plus everyone you like better." so it's rarely any more taxing than now, and often easier.
hundreds of thousands of voters have now used approval voting in fargo and st louis, and we've heard no reports of difficulty. approval voting is also simpler in essentially every way we can objectively measure. most of the points here apply to approval voting even more so.
I'm a big advocate for cardinal style voting systems. One of the big reason is because the counting algorithms are trivial. They are a argmax(reduce_sum(votes)). That's trivially parallelizable (which is important for counting votes). Ordinal systems (ranked) frequently have to deal with many rounds which creates a lot of added complexity and errors are far easier.
There's other reasons why I think these systems are superior even from a social choice aspect, but I think algorithmic complexity of vote tallying is an underrated aspect of voting systems that people need to pay far more attention to. This is a big aspect of "transparency" in voting.
It's pretty common to not release the full CVR unfortunately. It makes the process much less transparent and also makes it harder to study how the different voting methods work in the real world.
How many people vote in Alameda county? Was building software to automate the counting really more efficient than doing it by hand with piles of ballots?
In Australia RCV for a single electorate is done by hand. Each candidate can nominate a "scrutineer" to observe the process. Compared to doing it in a computer, it's like single stepping through the algorithm in a debugger. It's transparent as can be and a problem like this would be caught instantly.
It scales fine! The process is roughly O(viable_candidates * voters). It's rare for more than 3 candidates to be viable, so in practice it reduces to O(voters) =~ O(electoral_workers) =~ O(population).
Looking through https://www.acgov.org/rovresults/rcv/248/ the largest RCV race was for Oakland mayor, with ~125k votes. Most races had <20k votes. An Australian lower house district averages ~105k votes, the largest has ~118k. Per https://www.acgov.org/rovresults/248/ the largest, non-RCV races (eg Attorney-General) had ~430k votes which still seems doable given the process is O(n).
What I didn't account for in my response is the sheer number of positions voted for in a single election. An Australian voter typically votes for two things - House and Senate - and occasionally a single ballot measure on top.
Australian Senate races are both more complicated (proportional representation) and cover much larger districts (New South Wales has ~5.4M voters). It can take weeks to declare the result, which is definitely a downside. https://www.aec.gov.au/voting/counting/files/senate-count-pr...
I don't know what voting in California is like, but here in Austria we have election districts ("Wahlsprengel") with just a few thousand voters each. For every district there are volunteers who observe the election and count the votes.
It's all counted by hand. It doesn't matter how many voters there are, you can always count by hand, you just divide and conquer.
This seems like a simple problem to solve if all the ballots are simply public. The voter isn’t relevant, only the full suite of ballot data.
Then each campaign can run their own cross check to ensure the tally is performed per the actual rules. At the end of the day it’s the votes that matter, not the voter.
I support releasing the ballots. Something like "time bounded privacy". So maybe a week or two after polls close. Or as part of the canvassing board's election certification process.
To the best of my knowledge, throughout the USA all the election materials are destroyed in short order. Which nicely moot continued, ongoing debate.
One old-timey justification was to make the certification final, giving the public some certainty in the results, rightly or wrongly, so they'd accept the outcome and move on.
Well. We're way past that now. Perhaps greater (utter) transparency will calm everyone down again.
Ah, that most awkward of bugs — a logic error. Buried in the middle of the article:
If a voter didn’t select a first choice, then the second choice should have been counted as the first choice in the first round. The same would occur in subsequent rounds moving lower choices up into the empty slot. Instead, the erroneous algorithm didn’t count any vote in a round if a space was blank.
So effectively your choices are ranked based on the ordinals you chose, not on the absolute values of the ordinals.
I wonder what happens to ballots that use non-standard symbols whose intent is clear. I would guess that a non-zero number of people write “A, B, C” or “first, second, third”. (Or even, in the context of this ranking-gaps bug, ballots that just have “second, third” on them.)
Protocol implementations that are “liberal in what [they] accept” certainly make life overly complicated. Every new implementation of a DNS server or HTML renderer has to have all sorts of awful quirks because of a lack of strictness in historical (and now widely deployed) client implementations.
One translation of this principle to ranked choice voting is that if that a voter does not correctly fill in all the boxes and use “1, 2, 3” then their vote just doesn’t count — it would make the tally algorithm much simpler — but that also goes against the principle that a tally algorithm should go out of its way to scry as much into the intent of a voter as possible, and reject as few ballots as it possibly can.
>If a voter didn’t select a first choice, then the second choice should have been counted as the first choice in the first round.
In my country, if a first preference isn't clearly marked on the ballot sheet, then the ballot is considered spoiled. This is a pencil and paper, counted by hand system. It looks like what counts as a defect in Alameda County is a perfectly working tallying machine in other parts of the world.
I agree; if the instructions say you must select a first preference, then failing to do that should be a spoiled ballot. It's impossible, without interviewing the voter, to determine what their intention was.
Having said that, ranked choice is harder for voters to understand, so it makes it easier for them to spoil their ballot. You can ameliorate that using electronic voting machines (which I disapprove of); and you can engage in various kinds of voter education. I'm from an FPTP country, and I wish we had ranked choice. But trying to read a clear intention to a ranking with no first choice is like reading tealeaves, and election officials shouldn't do it.
An actual conversation between an election officer and an elderly voter I witnessed last time I voted. Local, Regional, and European Elections had been done this way for over 20 years at this point:
Officer: And remember it's not an X, it's 123 in order of preference.
Voter: But I only want to vote for 1.
Officer: Well you can do that but it has to be a 1 not an X.
>You can ameliorate that using electronic voting machines (which I disapprove of);
Why? There's a wide spectrum of voting machine implementations that go between "ballot printer" (basically zero concerns of hacking) and "opaquely tallies votes with no audit trail". When it comes to complicated voting schemes like this, having a machine greatly improves the user experience by allowing the ballot to be validated before it's dropped off.
Why do I disapprove? I take it that's what you're asking.
We do hand-counts here. I know pretty well how they work, and people trust them. I'm not familiar with all the varieties of electronic voting machine; but as far as I'm aware, none is certified by any federal agency, and most (all?) are proprietary. I'm not keen on having commercial businesses (with commercial secrets) involved at the heart of vote-counting. Instead, I'd have central government specify how voting machines must work, and certify that each proposed model meets specifications. Really, the innards of these machines should by law be exposed to scrutiny by the general public.
There's a lot of distrust in the USA voting procedures. Disenfranchisement is routine, and it's also routine for candidates to attack the voting system when they lose. That's partly because people don't trust electronic voting.
I'm not from USA, but I think the USA should enact voting laws that are uniform across the country. I think it's nuts that voting laws are state-by-state, even for federal elections. I don't understand why former slave-states should get to make their own voting laws for federal elections.
In my province, you go mark your ballets, then feed them into a machine - that machine checks for errors in how the ballet is filled out.
For instance, if you could select 8 people for the school board, if you selected 9 it would show an error.
A poll worker would then talk with the person and inform them about what mistake they made, and give them the option to have that section not count, or go fill out a new ballet.
You then put the ballet in a box for manual counting later.
A similar system could for for basically any somewhat "difficult" instructions for voters - you shouldn't assume what they want, you should have strict instructions but if they make a mistake that would spoil their ballet, they are informed of it and can fix it.
I'm a fan of a group called the Center for Election Science which researches different voting methods. They have an article on their site which compares ranked choice with their preferred method, approval voting:
Election Science is doing yeoman's work. And they just keep getting better.
> RCV, however, cannot be counted in precincts or separate locations. It must be counted in a centralized area.
Huh.
The gold standard for election integrity is casting paper ballets at poll sites, to be tabulated onsite the moment the polls close.
There are many of these very specific non-obvious minutiae which derail or moot most would-be reforms.
Disallowing precinct-based tabulation is one such deal breaker.
I studied election administration for ~10 years. I'm (super) embarrassed that this very important implementation detail of RCV had never occurred to me.
>Election Science is doing yeoman's work. And they just keep getting better.
They just need a billionaire patron and they could dramatically transform American politics for the better.
All those billionaires who give fat checks to political parties and candidates are doing it completely wrong. "Don't hate the player hate the game" -- but what if you could change the game?
Approval voting has been shown to increase voter satisfaction. I'll bet it would increase voter satisfaction for billionaires as well. They'd no longer be stuck with just a few bad candidates to choose between.
The counting must be coordinated, but doesn't have to be centralised. Though it always is so in practice
You could have each precinct count the first round, communicate the result to a coordinator then wait till everyone finished to count the second round etc
Alternatively you could have each precinct manually "digitise" each of their ballots into a computer representation and distribute these to a central location
> You could have each precinct count the first round
This is just centralized tallying with extra steps. You can't finish the first round without results from every precinct, that's the point. To finish the first round, you need to know who has the fewest first choice votes across the entire population, so each precinct would have to give the entire first choice votes distribution to the centralized location. But once a precinct knows the first choice distribution, by definition that means all the ballots have been cast and you also have all the second choice and lower ballot data as well, and eventually all the data will have to make its way to the centralized location so you may as well just give all the ballot data to the central location at one time (well, technically not all the ballot data is used because irv/ranked choice actually doesn't use all of it, but that's another discussion).
I don't understand how it is not possible for each precinct to not just count and transmit all of the unique combinations they receive. Ofc, with large number or choices and candidates this probably high number. But nothing prevents that.
At central location, combine the votes for unique combinations. And run the algorithm.
> The gold standard for election integrity is casting paper ballets at poll sites, to be tabulated onsite the moment the polls close.
In essence this is a question of parallelization. Since cardinal systems (minor exception for STAR) your algorithm is argmax(reduce sum(ballots)). Your poll site would report their local reduce sum numbers to the central authority who would reduce sum across all areas and finally perform the argmax operation.
On the other hand, ordinal systems have to be much more coordinated as they are not trivial to parallelize. In essence they are doing an exhaustive search. We run many elections wherein we pop the argmin candidate each round. This has a lock because we cannot pop the argmin candidate from our local polling site until the central authority has collected all ballots and told everyone which candidate to pop.
This is a main motivation for my arguments into cardinal systems. There are other arguments (e.g. favorite betrayer, monotonicity, scalability, preference embedding) but when we are comparing methods and there are minutia to quibble over, algorithmic complexity is a big factor to be concerned with. In fact, I think it is an embarrassingly under discussed feature of extremely high importance. Just imagine how difficult all the recounts in the recent presidential election would have been under a ordinal system (and compare to a cardinal, which the cardinal we can also perform good statistical analysis while we are tallying votes and it is also good for random subset sampling. Also underappreciated features).
> On the other hand, ordinal systems have to be much more coordinated as they are not trivial to parallelize
I don't think this is true for all ordinal systems is it? Wouldn't most condorcet methods simply be tallied into a head-to-head table at each precinct and then combined centrally? It's mostly just IRV that has this issue since it's just iterated first past the post, and the order of elimination is important to know in each round before it can be continued. When all that's needed is a h2h table (no iteration) this isn't an issue.
Condorcet methods are frequently more computationally complex. Schultz is O(n3) and RP is O(n4).
We must note the categorical aspect here. Ordinal is a class of voting, not a specific one. Condorcet is a class of ordinal methods (that optimize the condorcet criteria) but not a specific method. You're right that this isn't true for all methods but I'm mentioning these specific methods because they are the ones that are better and commonly discussed. Unfortunately we can't just look at one aspect of a voting method to rule it in or out.
Ah when you mention parallelizing I was assuming you were referring to the issue of requiring that ballots all be centralized in order to tally them for IRV, rather than summing at each precinct individually. The data that has to be in a central location for a condorcet method would only be O(n2) since it's just computed from the h2h table, I was not trying to discuss the complexity of actually computing the final results.
Well cardinal methods could easily be calculated in a distributed manner. And complexity of computing the final results is quite important. It is an important part of what the entire thread is about.
I agree that Approval voting is easier to understand and implement. I got to experience this a few years ago when I tried to implement RCV for a comparison with Approval voting.
This is really troubling - and the staff has been away trying to get some relaxation during the winter break, but if there's any message I can put out there it's this. Support the Center for Election Science. Funding, volunteering, advocacy. We exist because there's a simpler, easier to implement reform that doesn't suffer from these issues.
We see too many places that have adopted RCV and then reverted back to the old system. The main restriction on what we're able to achieve is our limited budget. We've got some massive campaigns in the pipeline, but our ability to execute on them will depend on having enough funding for staff and campaigning.
The main reason I joined Center for Election Science in the first place was because I felt it was the best bang for the buck reform. Voting reform doesn't just elect the democratically selected candidate, it also elects higher quality candidates. This means we get better, more nuanced policies, less flip flopping, and politics becomes boring - because everything _just works_.
You said AMA, but you also said you were trying to relax during winter break... so no need to bother with this question if you don't want, I guess.
I admit I do have one reservation about supporting approval voting. Specifically, I'm concerned about the "chicken dilemma" situation.
An advantage of plurality is that voters are strongly incentivized to tell pollsters their true favorite, in order to get their true favorite performing better in the polls and attract strategic voters. This means polls tend to track election results, which seems good for legitimacy. Additionally, adding polls to the mix means plurality isn't quite as bad as people say -- in theory I could support my true favorite in the poll, and shift to strategic voting in the general election if my true favorite doesn't see their polling numbers rise.
Approval voting seems like it could incentivize people to lie to pollsters though. Consider an election with a red-orange candidate, a yellow-orange candidate, and a blue candidate. Suppose all candidates have approximately equal levels of support. Imagine I support red-orange and I get a call from a pollster. I know that if I can get those who favor yellow-orange to vote for red-orange as well, red-orange has an excellent shot to win. So I lie, and tell the pollster I'm voting for blue only. The yellow-orange supporters start freaking out, and they vote for both red-orange and yellow-orange to keep blue out of office. I bullet vote for red-orange; red-orange wins in an upset where blue was the favorite. Blue supporters get angry, and declare the election a fraud, since the polls were so far off.
Have you guys thought about the added strategic dimension that polling adds?
Another important piece of the puzzle here is that politicians commonly update their positions in response to polls. (E.g. "politician X saw a drop in their polls after they said Y") So if polls become unreliable, that is potentially a big loss.
Having served as an election officer for the last decade, one must say that RCV is to ballots what a complex dependency tree is to your IT project: something that may look swell under laboratory conditions, but Fortune help you in the real world, at scale (see Maricopa County for related woes).
Arguments about election reform need to stress two points to gain traction with me:
1. Physical security of the (obviously tangible) ballot.
2. Physical security of the voter while marking the ballot.
I first heard Scott Adams point out that any situation involving great reward (e.g. political power) and low risk (the number of convictions pertaining to election fraud is scant) is going to be rife with corruption.
Give me:
- Election Day. Make it a holiday. Staff and provision it to make a positive experience for all.
- Minimal mail-in ballots. They are a huge physical security risk in both ways mentioned above.
- Minimal early voting. "Election Season" is bollocks and security risk.
There are reasons that half of Oregon wants to eject and join Idaho. And those reasons do not include satisfaction with their jacked up elections and the dodgy results thereof.
The UK has mail-in voting, which is necessarily early voting. I'm against it; you can't be sure that the voter wasn't coerced if they didn't vote in person. You need mail-in voting in specific cases, such as soldiers and diplomats serving overseas.
But in general, I don't think it should be allowed to cast a ballot before the hustings are over. Voters can't be compelled to listen to political arguments; but it should be at least possible for a voter to know, for example, that their favoured candidate was convicted of rape the day before the election.
This is where I think Australia’s compulsory voting shows its strength.
Every citizen has a responsibility to submit a ballot (either valid, invalid, or covered in dicks).
And the state (or in our case an independent electoral commission) has a responsibility to collect a ballot from every voter. Which leads to making it as easy as possible for you to vote, with early voting, mail-in ballots and heaps of polling centres.
The ballot problem is easier than you’d think though. Make effective corruption untenable, by involving a lot of people in the process. Everyone who can gain from the outcome should have equal presence as observers.
And the tangibility of the ballot is crucial, it’s much harder to make 10,000 pieces of paper appear or disappear than to flip a bit.
The secret ballot is also known as the Australian ballot[1]
The beauty of casting a ballot in private is that no matter how biased my neighborhood is for Odius Candidate, I can freely vote for Obvious Altruist, no matter the coercion. When everyone is voting at home, ballots might be "helped". Especially if the contest is close.
And then there are concerns about ballot tampering. The USPS has lost much, including its reputation.
> There are reasons that half of Oregon wants to eject and join Idaho. And those reasons do not include satisfaction with their jacked up elections and the dodgy results thereof.
I agree with your proposals but this part is inaccurate: the right-wingers are mad because their candidates didn’t do as well as hoped. In their current post-factual era, that means they’ll make up whatever excuses are needed to say the results aren’t valid but nobody should confuse that with a more principled argument than “elections are only valid when we win” - right now it’s the Trump 2020 fraud veterans pushing that story but as soon as that fails critical examination they’ll shift to something else.
I'll allow that my claim was strong for the amount of evidence proffered, but that does not decouple the changes to the election system from the results and the subsequent dismay of a substantial percentage of the State.
As we watch the #TwitterFiles unfold, and know that they represent the tip of a far larger crap-berg than anyone cares to face, please keep reminding me that the 2020 election was as perfect as Trump claimed his Zelelinskyy phone call was, for which Donald impeached.
Past the snark, let's simplify elections and make those casting the ballots, not those doing the counting, the most important.
152 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 252 ms ] threadI really don’t understand the American obsession with voting machines, I believe there is always a manual count anyway and American election counting is extremely slow anyway.
American elections usually have a whole ton of races on them. I've usually got about ten elected officials to weigh in on, and then five issues to give a yes or no to (down since I moved out of California). That would make manual counting all the races a major pain. AFAIK, ballots are machine counted, a sample is taken and hand counted, and as long as the sample is consistent with the machine count, and the machine count isn't too close, that's that. Unless a candidate wants to pay for a hand count of their race. But each state has its own rules, and races are generally handled at the county level, so there's room for a lot of variation.
The slow parts of the counting is usually validating the ballots before opening them, which may not be legally allowed before election day and recently, many states allowing for ballots to arrive by mail after election day if they have a timely postmark (details about ballots that arrive by mail without a postmark vary, of course). Sometimes there's issues with transportation of ballots or polling places have to stay open for a long time for voters in line, and generally counting in a state won't begin until all polls are closed, which can be a coordination issue. Otherwise, counts are usually available night of, which is good enough for me? The certification process is slow, because it takes a lot of manual work (as discussed above).
It’s actually irritating. Most ballot measures shouldn’t be ballot measures. Pretty much anything that’s a constitutional amendment shouldn’t even be on the ballot, and the more elected officials there are, the less pressure there is on the more abjectly political parts of government to do a good job (legislatures, Governors/Mayors). We’re up to electing State Supreme Court justices now, and well, you can’t be held accountable for your judicial picks if you’re not the mook that put them in office, now can you?
As much as I enjoy having a month or so to fill out my ballot at my leisure, I’m beginning to see a downside to that combined with voting machines, namely in that it allows the ballot to basically grow endlessly over time. The point of elected officials is these are the mooks hired to do the job of making laws, appointing their cabinet members, filling vacancies in the Courts and, prosecutors offices and law enforcement, and running the business of government in a politically accountable fashion so that we don’t have to.
Do you believe those should be on different ballots or do you just oppose the concept of referendum in general?
California allows for initiated constitutional amendments to pass with only a simply majority, and those amendments can appear on the ballot after gathering a relatively small number of signatures. The signature requirement weeds out a majority of initiatives, whether amendment or statute, but the quality of the remainder makes me wish it were more stringent.
I dislike that California's process for citizen initiatives is quite so open as it is. For example, 2022's Prop 29 was a third run of a measure that also failed to pass on each of the preceding two ballots, with 59%+ of voters opposed each time. The topic is sufficiently narrow, and would benefit from expert input, that I don't feel it belongs on a ballot at all.
https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_29,_Dialysis_...
I question, as well, the inability of the state legislature to amend or repeal anything initiated by citizens without sending it back out onto the ballot.
I would support one more additional referendum though: a ratification for a new California Constitution that wipes the slate clean on the old one.
It's easy to play into that bias, you even see it among the technically minded who work with computers all day, and exploit it for financial gain. It's a grift that keeps on grifting.
Nice! Filed - I'm sure I can use that one someday.
That struck me as weird too. Why would so many of Hutchinson's votes be second-rank, with no first-ranked candidate? Hutchinson was the incumbent; one might divine from tealeaf reading that these voters knew about Hutchinson, and based on his record, did't care to rank him first. But they didn't like any other candidate well-enough to give him first rank.
I think perhaps naive voters treat the ranks they award like gold stars on a student's workbook; more a mark of approval than a vote in election. But who's to say?
> The Alameda County registrar explained that if a voter didn’t select a candidate as first choice, then the second choice should have been counted as the first choice in the first round. The same would occur in subsequent rounds moving lower choices up into the empty slot.
Did they not have a unit test for this?! Now I'm curious how many unit tests they have, and what they cover.
Shouldn't the software be public too? If voting machines are here to stay, the public ought to be able to see what code they're supposed to be running, no?
Eh? The inputs to the software need to be public and accurate, and then the public can run their own interpretations of the algorithms and yell when things aren't right. I'm assuming that's what FairVote, the organization mentioned in the article as alerting the county registrar, did.
You'd hope so, but governments just contract out to companies that build the machines and software, and those machines and software remain proprietary IP of the companies that built them.
And somehow they got it so wrong a race was actually decided the wrong way in their original tally? Uh. What?
I feel like I see this a lot, this concern about second-order effects over concern about the problem itself. It feels like a way to draw attention away from the thing itself. Like, if a member of some particular group does something bad we start worrying about hypothetical repercussions against that group so we don’t have to talk about the act.
In Australia we have a national electoral commission (AEC) who runs the process, have perfected this over decades. So much so that they also run the elections for Registered Organisations (unions) [0].
The story is similar in our state elections where our electoral commissions are so we’ll regarded you can hire them to run elections for your company [1].
This is all to say, trust in the process and the fairness and accuracy of the outcome are paramount to democracy. And that we’ve been doing ranked choice for decades, it works—don’t write it off because there’s teething issues.
I can see merits to the US approach of having thousands of effectively independent elections being run (for a county for example), and the Australian approach where it’s run nationally by a capable independent commission that holds itself to a very high standard.
Stories like this one, where a county is trialling a different election process, are important to share and appreciate—not because they stuffed up, but because they fixed it. It’s one of those counterintuitive times where admitting failure/fault should build trust.
Democracy is slow on purpose. Statistics get us results on election day, but they don’t change the outcome even when they’re wrong. To borrow some jargon, I think it’s more important democracy is observable than it is fast.
Ranked choice voting is, to my knowledge, the most representative process to elect. No vote is wasted. You don’t have to game theory your choice of the lesser of two evils, you rank who you prefer.
It captures your opinion, not the shadow groupthink choices.
This is all to say, keep going it is worth it.
[0] https://www.aec.gov.au/ieb/ [1] https://www.vec.vic.gov.au/voting/types-of-elections/other-e...
You "have" [1] to game-theory your choice no matter what the voting system is. Ranked-choice is apparently believed [2] to be less susceptible to tactical voting than some other systems, though. (Not sure if this is quantitative or qualitative.)
> IRV may incentivize forms of tactical voting (such as compromising) when voters have sufficient information about other voters' preferences, such as from accurate pre-election polling. FairVote mentions that monotonicity failure can lead to situations where "having more voters rank [a] candidate first, can cause [the candidate] to switch from being a winner to being a loser."
[1] https://homepage.cs.uiowa.edu/~dwjones/voting/4980.2020/proj...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting#Tactical...
Approval voting and range voting come pretty close.
However, your first link only seems to critique deterministic voting systems. It's fairly easy to sidestep these critiques (especially Arrow's theorem) with a probabilistic systems:
Eg this variant of sortition: every voter chooses a preferred candidate on their ballot, and we draw n ballots at random to fill up parliament. (Pick whatever system you prefer for resolving one candidate getting picked multiple times, eg give them extra voting power in parliament, or pick the voter's next choice on the ballot etc.)
If you can find a way to vote 'tactically' in this scheme, please let me know.
I believe it's fair in some sense, and free of the pathologies outlined in your links. You are always better off voting for the candidate you prefer.
(I specifically mention using this scheme to fill up parliament with a few hundred people in it. If you want to pick a single position, like a president, the low of large numbers won't kick in, and you might have a greater variance than you'd like from your voting system.
But even for picking a president, a randomised system can still avoid the pathologies mentioned.)
That is a really interesting idea.
Picture a body where there's 4 members. A has a voting power of 12. B and C have a voting power of 8 each. D has a voting power of 3.
It's easy to see that once A, B and C have cast their yes/no vote, the issue will be decided no matter how D votes. D has a share in "voting weight", but no power at all. We can say this for sure without knowing anything about the ideology of the participants.
> D has a share in "voting weight", but no power at all. We can say this for sure
This is interesting in a different way. D's ability to vote has no power at all. That's true. You're taking a leap when you extrapolate that D has no power; by that argument, lobbyists have no power either. Is that something you believe?
It also occurs under most 'normal' voting systems in safe seats.
That this is a problem with party whipping in parliaments too, doesn't mean it's not a problem.
Btw, parties and how they work in specific electoral systems are (at least partially) a function of how general voting works in those systems.
If you have a sortition system, parties might work rather differently, if they would be present at all. MPs submit to the whip's party discipline, because they need the resources of the party to get re-elected etc. Under sortition, the incentives are all different.
You could run parliament on probabilistic lines, too.
More realistically, I agree with thaumasiotes: this is exactly how forming a government works in most parliamentary systems around the world (eg both in the UK parliament and the German Bundestag.)
My instinct is that this would have significantly more negative effects, to do with the ease under that system of making radical policy changes.
Though more likely, it would fall into a pathological state where most votes are votes on whether to retake other votes.
And you can also still have safeguards, like constitutional guarantees etc.
Of course, if A, B, C and D are groups of people with less than perfect party discipline, the people in D may still have some power.
The paradox is that they get a good deal of power being pivotal, but only on issues they don't really care so much about.
No. That's only true in a deterministic parliament that works by majority rule.
You could have your parliament make decisions by lot (with probabilities weighted by what MPs vote for).
Or you could give your parliamentarians a steady stream of tokens they could use for voting; small parties could save up their tokens for a while, to have a decisive influence on something they care about.
(You'd have to work out a lot of kinks in such a token system..)
OTOH, if only Murdoch had been happier at home, he might not have felt the need to metastasise?
I don't want to count my chickens before they hatch, but I dare say the peak of Murdoch's influence may be somewhere behind us.
I did become more like my dad; but mainly on personal matters, not on economic or social issues.
[1] https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/02/24/heart-head/?amp=1
Top line is, the drift to conservatism as we age no longer holds. The thread goes into more detail as it’s a bit nuanced.
But as one LNP strategist said dejectedly on national television during the LNP wipeout “you can make new conservatives if they have nothing to conserve”. If the status quo doesn’t serve the majority of voters why would they do anything but vote to change it.
https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1608746369505976323?...
> In 1912, the former Electoral Act was amended to make enrolment compulsory. In 1924, to increase voter turnout and reduce party campaign expenditure, the Electoral Act was amended to make voting at federal elections compulsory.
Our election cycles are short, and there’s a small defined period where we talk about the election. After which we all get back to what we were doing. Contrast to some other countries, when the elections (even 4 years out) are always on the cards.
But to your point, even if they don’t know the issues, or care their vote is worth as much as mine. They have a responsibility to submit a vote. They don’t have to fill out the vote correctly, they can submit an informal or donkey vote.
They can partake in the classic Aussie tradition of drawing richly detailed genitalia on their ballot for the poll worker to admire.
What you do with your ballot is between you and that piece of paper.
But short of a few very limited circumstances you need to do you duty and make your voice heard. We’re not asking the informed, the educated, the wealthy, the elite or any other subset who they think should run things. We’re saying, your job as a citizen is to record your opinion on who should be running things (even if your opinion is “I don’t know”, you still need to record it).
And the key part here is that no one can take that away from you. The alternative is the game of voter suppression, making you think your vote isn’t wanted or won’t change things. Dropping you from electoral roles days before an election. Damaging the postal service to hamper mail in votes.
We’re one of a tiny number of countries that do it, and almost a century on I think it was a brilliant idea.
We don’t have a draft, and other than Jury duty (which you can reasonably get out of), voting is _the responsibility_ you have as a citizen.
[0] https://www.aec.gov.au/About_AEC/Publications/backgrounders/...
Most voters are "the base", likely to be extreme in their politics, and mostly irrelevant to political outcomes (as they can safely be ignored, since they are voting for their team regardless).
It really isn't easy. There's an outer for loop that adds significant complexity because you need to do a reduce sum and pop the argmin each time. The more complex the system is, the easier for mistakes. There are plenty of voting systems (see Cardinal Voting) that don't have this computational penalties and can simply be argmax(reduce_sum(votes)).
> Ranked choice voting is, to my knowledge, the most representative process to elect. No vote is wasted.
I highly encourage you to look into more voting systems then. Especially because there are many versions of "ranked choice" voting. I should note that Australia's system is slightly different than what many American states are doing despite them looking the same. There are also Condorcet voting systems (which are ranked/ordinal) and are far more representative. But many people advocate for cardinal systems because you get the same properties as ranked (and some more like handling a strong spoiler -- there are strong and weak spoilers btw) but are far more computationally efficient. The common ranked systems aren't that great on that representation front but as far as ordinal systems are concerned they are computationally simple.
Definitions:
- Ordinal voting: systems where candidates are ordered or ranked in comparison to other candidates.
- Cardinal voting: systems where candidates are assigned a score or preference value independent of other candidates.
A:35% B:33% C:32%
A:99% B: 1% C:0%
A:51% B:49% C:0%
all reduce to the same ranking but express rather different relative preferences. Btw, in this example scores are normalized to add up to 100%, but should still be considered independent of other candidates.
Suppose there are three candidates, A, B, C, and D. We have a strong preference for A, we like B and C equally, and strongly dislike D. How do we express these?
- Ordinal: A > B > C > D
- Cardinal (5 points): A:5, B:3, C:3, D: 0
We can see the embedding issue here pretty clearly. In an ordinal system there cannot be a means for us to express that we have no strong preference of B over C. We also can't express how much we like C over D because we're forced to place them equidistant from one another. This is a big problem because in the ordinal system we say that our preference of B over C is identical to our preference of C over D. There is a clear advantage here to cardinal systems that have a lot of downstream effects that lead to cardinal systems passing the favorite betrayer criteria -- aka strong spoiler -- (ordinal fails) and is why these systems are monotonic (ordinal systems aren't).
I argue strongly in favor of cardinal systems but I often find that people are strongly invested in ordinal systems. Unfortunately fair vote has done a great job at advocating for RCV and people get passionate about things they are not passionate about learning about. But I need to note that there are downsides to cardinal systems too. Voting systems are over constrained and so it really depends on what criteria you are optimizing for. If we strictly want the best VSE over everything else, there's ordinal systems that out perform cardinals. There is nuance here that we need to recognize and be aware of in these discussions, especially when passion is abound. We'll also see if Clay shows up. If it stays on the front page long enough he'll probably see it (hi Clay ;) He's the real expert here.
But what happens in your cardinal voting system, if D and C are the front runners in competition for a single seat? Imagine the final results were
A: 30 points, B: 20 points, C: 50 points, D: 51 points.
If only you had given the realistic challenger to D your full support (5) instead of being expressive in your preference and docked them 2 points. Now D will rule for another 4 years and the C supporters will call you a traitor for voting your honest preference, just like in the present system.
And this scenario is easy to imagine. You usually know who the front-runners are, and because not only you, but everyone else, wants to avoid that scenario, belief about who the front runners are has a self-reinforcing effect.
A scenario where you're glad you didn't award the full 5 points, though, is much harder to imagine. And a scenario where you are BOTH glad that you didn't award them 5, yet glad that you didn't award them 0, is as far as I can see never going to happen in a single candidate election.
While this is easy to write down it isn't easy to tabulate. You must provide a new tallying algorithm (you'll find that important features break).
> But what happens in your cardinal voting system, if D and C are the front runners in competition for a single seat?
I'm a bit confused what you're asking here. There are no voting systems where a single vote/rank permutation/rating will not change the outcome of an election. To do so would mean votes are being wasted. Yes, there are people that will be upset in these situations just like people are upset in a close sports game. But unlike a close sports game we have a higher expectation that the teams that win like this are more likely to be similar. That is candidate C's voters frequently like candidate D (your ordering even suggests that despite the example ballot being from someone on the other side of the political isle). The point is to get someone that is the most representative. In the end, it shouldn't matter what a single voter's preference is, it matters what the collective preference is. That's why we vote in the first place. So that's why I'm confused.
But maybe you should click on the montonicity link. You may also find this link[0] interesting. It is also extremely important that we remember that no voting system is perfect. So if you're going to put down a voting system because you've found a flaw you'll never be happy with a system unless you lie to yourself. It also means that if you're arguing with someone and point out a flaw you need to attempt to convince the person why that flaw (and others) are important in comparison to the upsides/downsides of the other competing system/s. Discussing voting systems is difficult because there are no global optima but it is also more difficult to discuss because proof by counter-example is meaningless and will only convince a novice. If you're wondering the motivation I'm giving in my arguments, click the links.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20180721221826/https://www.starv...
Ranked pairs etc. have no problem tabulating it. If the change to allow equal ranking breaks some obscure metric, that's a sign the metric isn't very important. After all people can just rank everyone if they worry about it.
I've read a lot about this, and I argue with the usual suspects range people every time the topic shows up.
I don't understand how you don't understand the argument. You can come into situations where you'll regret you didn't min-max your choice (rank everyone 0 or 100). You can't come into situations where you say, "gee, I'm glad I ranked that candidate somewhere in between". Consequently, everyone will do that, whether it's good for the collective or not. Sure, I want what's best for society, but I'm not volunteering to have my vote diluted for the common good - especially since I know that the people I disagree with most, certainly won't do it.
> I don't understand how you don't understand the argument.
Because pure honesty is never an optimal strategy? I'm not aware of a system where that's the optimal strategy. But as we showed here in range, the best strategies are some form of honesty. The dishonest part is that you rescale, which I don't think most people would be upset about. What is frustrating to me is that you appear (I'm willing to admit a misread because these conversations are difficult and it is clear you're primed on my position given your usual suspects statement) to be ignoring identical strategic issues in ordinal systems. But I've also stated pretty clearly why I have a preference of cardinal systems. It is because I care a lot about the resolve complexity (the thread topic is a good example), monotonicity (something IRV/RCV fail (RP and Schultz pass but fail the prior criteria)), favorite betrayer/strong spoiler effect (again IRV/RCV fails), and an important factor is the embedding aspect. That the distance between all preference is not identical. We just can't have as richly expressive latent embedding as we can in a rated system. This has a lot of benefits that I think we need to discuss, including a smoother VSE solution space[0]. That dictates how resistant a system is to dishonest strategies and how representative we are.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4FXLQoLDBA
It's not in a system alone. Strategies are something you have when you have information about the other players and their payoffs.
As it happens, honesty is an excellent strategy in Condorcet methods (even the "bad" ones, like those who aren't monotonic) when you have a realistic amount of information about other people's preferences/strategies. People who are honest because they can't be bothered to be strategic, do great with those methods.
In approval, even the information about who the front runners are, causes trouble.
And in range, even with NO information, you'll know it's better to just use the max and min values.
Those systems don't encourage honesty, and the "extra information" range sneaks in from self-reported strength of preferences on an absolute scale, is junk information. Nothing good can come of using it. Certainly it's no good to use it to reject a candidate that is preferred by a majority over all the other candidates.
There are so many ways to lie with simulation. When you took away even the most obvious lie in the simulations painting range in a good light - namely when you took away the simulated people's magical ability to honestly compare interpersonal utility on an absolute scale, so they always ranked their most preferred 100 and their least preferred 0, no matter where they were in "opinion space" - then most of the good properties of score vanished. Smith for a while conceded that, and advocated range with top-2 runoff if you were concerned with that (as if this was some obscure technicality).
Second, those simulations had lousy ideas of "strategy", as if strategy was just a percentage slide. Strategies are inherently dynamic, and require coordination - if I see you instructing your supporters how to vote, I can take that into account in how instruct my supporters to vote.
This kind of voting rewards dumb votes over informed votes. I'd rather have ranked voting.
Continuing down this, you're essentially discussing bullet voting. I should EXPLICITLY state that this is a well known case and has been extensively studied[0][1]. I appreciate that you have concern with the system and I implore you to continue to search for flaws, but also to look for information discussing these ideas. The reason the bullet voting was likely so low in this study is that most voters are rational and understand that they are giving up significant leverage when bullet voting (note that the case is even worse in approval!). We often think our neighbors are far less rational than they actually are and we shouldn't make this mistake.
We should probably also discuss Monotonicity[2], but maybe in a follow-up conversation.
[0] https://www.rangevoting.org/BulletBugaboo
[1] https://www.rangevoting.org/RVstrat3.html (called Plurality here, strategy B)
[2] https://electionscience.org/library/monotonicity/
You're right, I was arguing that voters degenerate into bullet voting over time 100% for the candidate they liked, 0% for the ones they don't. Your article [0] contends that it's not a good strategy to vote like this if you're trying to be strategic, because if candidates are A=974, B=974, F=231 and you liked F, you'd be foolish to vote 100% F, as if you like B better than A you should vote some for B.
This looks too much like the current system we have, where people don't vote for the person they like best, they cast all their votes for the person they hate the least who could beat the person they hate the most. Basically: if you normalize votes, people are going to vote 100% for the lesser of 2 evils and we're back to square 1.
If you don't normalize votes, you'll get one of the other voting strategies you've already linked to in your [1]. I expect it would essentially devolve into approval voting, as it's still voting for the lesser of 2 evils of the strongest candidates, then casting additional votes for anyone who seems viable. Perhaps it finds some other equilibrium.
Either way, I think it takes too much strategy and voter headspace compared to ranked voting, where you can just vote for the candidates you want, in the order you want, and you didn't waste a vote if your top candidate loses because your #2 vote didn't lose any weight.
But this strategy and consequence exists in ordinal systems just as much as cardinal systems. There is nothing stopping a voter from bullet voting on a ranked ballot. They just rank one person and no one else. The consequences are quite similar actually but might be more obvious that you're throwing away your ballot in this case. But I assure you, you're effectively throwing away your ballot in the cardinal case too.
I'm also not sure what is wrong with approval. Approval is awesome.
I am also not sure why you keep using the phrase "lesser of 2 evils". If we have a 2 candidate election then there's no point in using any of these voting systems because plurality is a strictly better system (in a 2 candidate election). In fact, it is preferential that a multi-candidate system degenerates into a plurality system when there are only two candidates! The phrase "lesser of n equals" is not really about a voting system so much as it is related to another saying: "those that seek power do not deserve it" (or Plato's alternative: "Only those who do not seek power are qualified to hold it"). This has nothing to do with a voting system but has everything to do with a candidate selection process. There's an ethical conundrum though because you need strong authoritarian power to force thrust (the potential for) power upon people. But we're digressing, just like the normalization discussion is digressing (it was intended to introduce the concept of scaled sincerity, which we see people use in practice).
> I think you're trying too hard to look for errors in a system that isn't your preference and not looking hard enough at errors for the system that is your preference.
This is true that I have that bias. I think there's currently momentum in the US for switching from single vote to ranked voting, and I worry that if we get into disputes over which alternative voting system is better, that momentum will be lost and we won't change at all. You're right I was far too quick to dismiss approval voting as a devolution from cardinal voting.
> I am also not sure why you keep using the phrase "lesser of 2 evils".
I don't know if you're from the US or not, but this is a common idiom about how our election process works in practice. The Simpsons [0], South Park [1] and dozens of others have pretty great parodies of it. In each of our presidential elections, even though there will be a plurality of presidents running, there are practically only 2 -- the ones backed by the major parties. And often, they happen to be the 2 worst -- where they're either shamelessly narcissistic enough to be unfazed by criticism, or are overly agreeable and quick to make impossible promises. Your quote by Plato is on point here.
That's the phenomenon that I desperately don't want to have any more, that I want n-candidate elections to actually have n candidates. I (perhaps wrongly) attribute a lot of the polarization in the US to two-party elections.
It's true that you can be a bullet voter on a ranked ballot, but there's no incentive to (that I can think of). In an n-candidate election, if there are 2 known popular candidates, and you absolutely despise one of them, then in a normalized cardinal system you'd be incentivized to bullet vote for the other popular candidate -- whether or not they're terrible. That's the scenario I'm talking about when I say lesser of 2 evils. Without normalization, you'd be incentivized to approval vote. And I don't have anything wrong with approval voting, I shouldn't have criticized it in my last comment.
But I do still dislike cardinal voting, because of the fact that it gives people strategies for voting. I think some people will vote earnestly like A:1, B:3, C:6 and others will vote strategically like A:10, B:0, C:0, and so this will leave the earnest voters feeling like they had the election stolen from them by strategic voters when A wins.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7l9QmtiXHU
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7pfsneLSSM
I worry that history will repeat itself and that we'll try it for awhile and then turn back because it does not resolve the things people care about (multi-parties and strong spoilers).
> I don't know if you're from the US or not
I am and demonstrated knowledge about this idiom. My comment was that the idiom is inappropriate for the conversation at hand, not that it is inappropriate for all circumstances. Why else do you think I quoted Plato?
> I want n-candidate elections to actually have n candidates.
Then you want a system that is scalable, transparent (i.e. low computational complexity, trivially parallelizable, and trivially verifiable from statistical subsets).
> It's true that you can be a bullet voter on a ranked ballot, but there's no incentive to (that I can think of).
Don't explain it to me, explain this to yourself. Why is the logic for "no incentive" invalidating in one case but not another? I argued that these are nearly identical situations and have several comments noting that there is no incentive to vote in the way you are suggesting. You are not being consistent in your logic and I'm trying to explain but it is frustrating. Maybe I am being too liberal in using my links and expecting others to read. So let me state it explicitly: there is no incentive to not give your top candidate the maximal score. So your logic is inconsistent. On the other hand, I don't expect all voters to be rational but I do expect (and have linked to experiments with people) a convergence to rationality (also consider what rational means. It doesn't mean smart but that people will play near optimally. We mix normal language and game theory language and this can create a lot of confusion).
You're making the argument that I shouldn't be concerned about people thresholding their votes because scaled sincerity is a nearly optimal strategy in a cardinal voting scheme, so people can vote with their heart and not feel like their vote has been wasted. That's one of the findings in the paper you shared[1] that Scaled Sincerity gets (at worst) 91% of the utility compared to Mean Based Thresholding when there are 3 candidates, 80% percent for 5 candidates, 78% for 9... etc
But there'll still inevitably be an election where 2 candidates were very close and the scaled sincerity voters who supported the 2nd place candidate feel like the election was stolen from them. The media will make an uproar about it. Voters will vote with a thresholding scheme after that. So in this case we should just skip to approval voting so people don't feel like they were robbed of the fraction of the vote they didn't contribute to their candidate.
Your other point is people will bullet vote in ranked voting and so I'm defending it too strongly. Your other article[0] very strongly argues that IRV is worse than approval voting in regards to getting bullet voters. I know it's a cop out of me to quote the criticisms that the article itself provides, but the data size really is too small. In their summary of comparisons, 16% bullet voting in Burlington and ~21% bullet voting in Irish presidential are not bad percentages in my opinion, and I don't know anything about the SF 07 or Dartmouth 06 elections.
I don't understand why the low computational complexity is important as long as the algorithm is simple to understand. Bubble sort has higher computational complexity but is a simpler algorithm than merge sort. But I don't know the details of vote counting in practice. If the computational complexity is so high that you wouldn't even determine who won until days or weeks later and was highly prone to error, then I'd stand corrected.
I don't see how cardinal voting would make a difference in there being multiple parties.
Edit: Also I don't mean to occupy either of our New Years Eves on this conversation. I could be sold on approval voting if that's the takeaway you're trying to get it. I learned a lot today. Hope nothing I said offended in any way.
[0] https://www.rangevoting.org/BulletBugaboo
[1] https://www.rangevoting.org/RVstrat3.html
^ re-linking these because the context is so far up the thread
I'm actually trying to get you to apply the same scrutiny to ordinal systems as you are giving to cardinal systems. I actually appreciate that you are critical of cardinal systems but I don't appreciate that you aren't being as critical of ordinals (recognize I'm talking about at least a dozen voting systems here. We have to start here before we can enter the nuance of individual systems but we're not even clear here). To be a good scientist you need to detach yourself from your preference. You need to critique YOUR preference more than you critique the opposing options. You're smart and if you've picked the right system then you should be able to defend it. But if you're smart and picked the wrong thing then you need to change because it isn't about what you like, it is about what is right (I'll keep stressing that no voting system is optimal and we need to define our metrics -- I have stated mine -- but we're not discussing these, we're caught up on a single strategy which appears in both cardinal and ordinal and as far as I can tell you don't recognize the latter).
> But there'll still inevitably be an election where 2 candidates were very close
Yes, and we need to think about how distant these candidates are from one another. Then ask yourself, can we compose a system where these candidates are similar? Is it always random and we have no control? Or are these candidates always distant and on opposite sides of the spectrum? You may be primed to believe the latter because that's the likely scenario in plurality voting but is this true for all systems? To answer this you need to have a deep understanding of Voter Satisfaction Efficiency (VSE), spoilers (both weak and strong -- aka favorite betrayer criteria), and how we embed preference (this is why I keep mentioning distances between candidates on the ballot. Note that this is a different distance/manifold than the previously mentioned one at the beginning of this paragraph).
> 16% bullet voting in Burlington and ~21% bullet voting in Irish presidential are not bad percentages in my opinion
I agree it is a cop-out since we see lower bullet voting tendencies in cardinal systems. I agree that sample sizes are small but we do have lots of simulations. Unfortunately we have very little real world data. Unfortunately that means we need to advocate for these systems to get real world natural experiments. Fortunately there are a few approval systems: Fargo ND and St. Luis MS (also Latvia). So we are collecting some of this data and it is very promising so far. We also have non-political versions of this like HN itself! There is only a binary voting system here (until you reach a certain score, then we get range voting). So I'd also argue we have tons of data (also surveys frequently use disapprove/neutral/approve styles of voting. Yes, this is voting). We've seen substantial success with these and I think that's not something we can exclude (though we must be aware of things like vote inflation for certain services, like Uber, that don't exhibit in other services, like old Netflix rating or current ratings).
> I don't see how cardinal voting would make a difference in there being multiple parties.
Back to the embedding.
> I could be sold on approval voting if that's the takeaway you're trying to get it.
Let's say all things are equal in effectiveness. Approval is O(n) and RCV is O(n2). I think that's killer and matters a lot (see the main topic).
> Also I don't mean to occupy either of our New Years Eves on this conversation.
This is one of the few political topics I'm extremely passionate about so I enjoy discussing it. I do want to be clear in that my goal here is not necessarily to get you to come to the cardinal side (though that'd be nice) but I want you to understand ...
So for the common case of hating all the candidates, you could vote:
A: -100% B: -100% C: -100%
There could be some way to normalize it so everyone gets the same voting power, but can choose to spend it positively or negatively in any combination.
That would give Republicans who hate Trump but refuse to vote for a Democrat the psychological out of not voting positively for any Democrats, but voting negatively for Trump.
A benefit of cardinal systems that you are actually pointing out is that not only can we determine winners, but we can also get a lot of information about voter preference. This is quite useful to politicians and researchers (understanding how represented people feel). But I will also note that a strictly negative ballot is likely to be rare as it is purely a protest ballot.
Human factors are important -- remember the Butterfly Ballots of the 2000 elections!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_United_States_presidentia...
I think that 0 being "don't care" and negative numbers being negative percentages is easier to grasp and more balanced and granular than (3) being neutral. Even -3 to 3 would be better than 1 to 7.
Voting "A: -100%, B: -100%, C: -100%" weights each candidate the same as "A: 0%, B: 0%, C: 0%" the same as "A: 100%, B: 100%, C: 100%", but as you said, it's useful to get an overall count of the voters' absolute satisfaction with each candidate.
A popular positively winning candidate would have a more legitimate claim to a mandate, and the lesser of two evils candidates would be branded as such.
I agree with you here, maybe I did not articulate my previous comment correctly to reflect this.
However, I don't particularly like the way we talk about it. I've heard a lot of people say things like, "You can't waste your vote." This is frankly untrue and there were even examples in the last election where certain voters could have voted strategically (e.g. by not making their favourite candidate their first preference).
Generally if you put someone above your ‘2 party preferred’ candidate either your vote flows down or it was irrelevant.
Was it razor thin on first preference then the bottom 2 or 3 crackpots sealing the deal? This is the only way I can think of that’wasted vote’ happening.
A wins a plurality of first preference votes. Otherwise, voters are split between B and C. We assume that if a candidate places C as their first preference, they will place B as their second preference, and vice-versa.
In this scenario, whoever gets more first preference votes out of B and C will win the election since the other will place third and get knocked out of the race, so anybody who placed A as their first preference didn't get to express whether they'd prefer B or C.
If it wasn't obvious,
A: LNP
B/C: Labor/Greens
https://www.abc.net.au/news/elections/federal/2022/guide/bri...
The point is that A voters arguably should have voted such that they could influence which of the two other candidates (B and C) won. This would require 'lying' about which candidate is their favourite; i.e. strategic voting
To clarify what I meant, with FPTP you have to be quite tactical because of how that system fundamentally works.
With Ranked Choice the effect and likelihood is far less. Importantly the second order effects are meaningful. Even if your vote was exhausted it still captures your opinion, and can influence the next election because you can record your opinion for others to see.
With FPTP, we don’t record everyone’s opinion on who is best suited for office, rather we record who you think everyone thinks will win (else your vote can be wasted or work against your intent).
IMHO if you need to vote strategically with Ranked Choice, it’s implementation has been warped and needs to be improved.
Like everything brevity is required before you can dive into the nuance. Perhaps a better way to describe ranked choice is that you can’t waste your vote like you can with FPTP.
Wasting a vote has a much more specific meaning than the general usage I come across, which complicates this more. [0]
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wasted_vote
I don’t think it’s a losing battle. If anything the last Australian federal election showed not only how good Ranked Choice is at conveying voter intention, but that a meaningful number of us understand it.
The LNP stopped representing their base (perhaps in a similar way to the ALP with the Greens) which opened the door for the Teal independents.
As an outsider looking in to US politics it appears as though similar issues exist, but there are no viable alternatives. In a positive sign for democracy US voters largely rejected candidates who were sowing doubt about the elections.
Related this thread [0] is a nice dive into the changing political landscape around the world as we age. It’s not following the expected path, and I think a lot has to do with us being more educated than ever.
[0] https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1608746369505976323?...
So it's very fair, all of your vote always gets used .... but complex - to the point that the law (these days a regulation) specifies the floating point precision (9 digits)
https://www.legislation.govt.nz/regulation/public/2001/0145/...
It may have something to do with the fact that everyone has to vote, so you either learn how it works or try to dodge it. As in, it’s your responsibility as a citizen, not your right.
We also had the decade of Prime Ministers, where it was reasonably for you not to know who the current prime minster was. Amusingly the UK recently had a go at this as well, with about the same results.
We need a system where you’re vote counts against everyone you don’t list.
It is not. “Ranked Choice Voting”, as a commonly used name for the specific ranked ballots method also known as “Alternative Vote”, “Instant Runoff Vote”, and a couple other names, is not “the most representative process” by any measure. It’s not even part of the best class of ranked-ballots single-winner methods (Condorcet methods), and single-winner elections of any kind are less representative than systems which provide proportional representation through the use of multimember constituencies (whether candidate-centered systems like Single Transferrable Vote in multimember districts, or whole-legislative-body systems like Party List PR.)
The name is even chosen to avoid consideration of competing ranked-ballots systems by creating the impression that it is the system for elections with ranked ballots.
> No vote is wasted.
Plenty of wasted votes in RCV/IRV/AV.
1. Amending the law is relatively simple: replace any instance of only one with any when it comes to election laws regarding marking the ballot.
2. Amending the ballot is a minor change: just allow anyone to mark any (including none or all) of the bubbles representing each candidate on the ballot. The language on the ballot itself barely changes, the structure of the ballot can and would be identical to today's ballots.
3. Explaining the method to the public is dead simple: there's a pattern here, "instead of marking just one, now you can mark any of them" is a sentence that anyone can understand and implement. Explaining the calculation ("whoever gets the most votes, wins") is also dead simple.
4. Extending to multi-seat races is trivial: just take the top n vote-getters instead of the top 1.
5. It appeals to intuition: it does feel like "cast one lot per candidate you approve of" and aggregating that across a population is a fair way of distributing consensus. "Approval" means many things to many people but it is still a clear subjective threshold for each person. This also means that voters will consider the result harder to dispute on the grounds that it doesn't represent the people's will.
6. Tactical voting is straightforward and hard to do wrong: for what it's worth, tactical voting is always an option, and people are always going to use it. It's just how things work, at least for the foreseeable future. That being said, of all the systems, approval voting makes it the simplest to engage with and the least underhanded. Vote for people you want to promote in the election, don't vote for people you want to suppress in the election.
I really don't see the downsides. Deep in the discussion boards of the internet where the election nerds lurk, they complain about this or that theoretical imperfection. But as for the options that have been suggested, this one stands out as the easiest to adopt societally, with the most bullet- and fool-proof implementation.
This preference situation happens in every election, and approval voting has no answer to it. It's completely unclear what a voter should do to get the result they want.
"What the voter should do to get the result they want" assumes a level of individual agency which really isn't present in a real election: The result is always a combination of individual choice with collective will.
This kind of situation isn't special. It comes up in every election, and approval is completely confused about how to handle it.
I recently had the occasion to really game out what happens in ranked choice voting. It is similar to approval voting (you should only rank people to approve of), but in practice you elect whoever gets past the 50% threshold first, which may not be whoever had the most raw approval. The first person past 50% is effectively random, especially in a large field with complicated voter preferences. So, you get an illusion of choice: everyone lists their preference, but the actual winner is a somewhat random choice amongst the candidates with >50% approval. Thus, I advocate removing the illusion, and simply picking the candidate with the greatest approval. Easy.
https://www.rangevoting.org/RVstrat6
This also is addressed by the point that what you describe is the most complicated part of approval voting. But I'd argue that that is way less of an issue than the current spoiler effects we see in FPTP and RCV, since that is the limit of how complicated your choice can get in practice, whereas with other systems there's much deeper dynamics with respect to tactical voting.
Except that approval voting doesn't allow you to express your preferences very well, since there is very limited differentiation between candidates. I understand the appeal of approval voting since it's a very small change to the voting machines, voter experience, existing legislation, etc, but most people who want to express their preferences will be drawn to methods that actually let you do that most effectively. If approval goes head to head with IRV or STAR (the two other movements that seem to have some momentum) I would generally expect the voters to go with STAR or IRV, for better or worse.
Again, so what? The function being optimized here is not "fealty to true preferences for individuals", but rather "level of satisfaction with outcome for the entire group of electors". And actually, my preference is to not be asked to rank candidates but just issue binary assessments. Your claim that people want the former is wild, unsupported hypothesis, and the way you phrased it seeks to imply they'd rather not vote than vote approval voting. I think you are strongly (albeit transparently) forcing your own preferences through others' mouths in an attempt to start this more or less malformed debate.
> approval goes head to head with IRV or STAR (the two other movements that seem to have some momentum) I would generally expect the voters to go with STAR or IRV, for better or worse.
IRV is literally the same thing as RCV and so displays the same idiosyncracies and fundamental flaws so I'm not quite sure you know what you're talking about here.
Further, the kind of person attracted to STAR is the same kind of person who can devise linear algebra algorithms for deciding what's for lunch, and go in to change every setting on their new smartphone before the wallpaper. They are micromanipulating technocrats, and while this community massively overly represents that type, it doesn't represent the public per se. I assure you, what you parrot from online discussions by people who very much don't have their finger on the pulse, is then predictably very far from representing views considered "normal" in the literal sense.
yes it does, in the aggregate. because the people who approve only X or only Y will statistically have a pretty similar X-vs-Y preference as all other voters (who approved both or neither).
https://medium.com/election-science/expressiveness-6ef8c034b...
and because approval voting uses the preferences it does have more accurately than IRV, it ends up being much more accurate, as measured by voter satisfaction efficiency simulations.
https://rpubs.com/Jameson-Quinn/vse6
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtKAScORevQ
optimal approval voting strategy is simply to approve everyone you prefer to your expected satisfaction. to an approximation it's, "vote for who you normally would, plus everyone you like better." so it's rarely any more taxing than now, and often easier.
hundreds of thousands of voters have now used approval voting in fargo and st louis, and we've heard no reports of difficulty. approval voting is also simpler in essentially every way we can objectively measure. most of the points here apply to approval voting even more so.
https://medium.com/election-science/star-voting-is-simpler-t...
There's other reasons why I think these systems are superior even from a social choice aspect, but I think algorithmic complexity of vote tallying is an underrated aspect of voting systems that people need to pay far more attention to. This is a big aspect of "transparency" in voting.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardinal_voting
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordinal_voting
With the full CVR it should have been obvious they were fucking up the count, because anyone could replicate it.
In Australia RCV for a single electorate is done by hand. Each candidate can nominate a "scrutineer" to observe the process. Compared to doing it in a computer, it's like single stepping through the algorithm in a debugger. It's transparent as can be and a problem like this would be caught instantly.
It scales fine! The process is roughly O(viable_candidates * voters). It's rare for more than 3 candidates to be viable, so in practice it reduces to O(voters) =~ O(electoral_workers) =~ O(population).
As a "computer person" I'm a big fan of the manual process, but the implementation can be lacking: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/06/missing-wa-sen...
It's the seventh largest county in California (out of 58), with 1.6M residents. Hand-counting votes is out of the question.
What I didn't account for in my response is the sheer number of positions voted for in a single election. An Australian voter typically votes for two things - House and Senate - and occasionally a single ballot measure on top.
Australian Senate races are both more complicated (proportional representation) and cover much larger districts (New South Wales has ~5.4M voters). It can take weeks to declare the result, which is definitely a downside. https://www.aec.gov.au/voting/counting/files/senate-count-pr...
Sources for the Australian numbers: https://peo.gov.au/understand-our-parliament/parliament-and-... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Division_of_Durack https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/people/population/national...
It's all counted by hand. It doesn't matter how many voters there are, you can always count by hand, you just divide and conquer.
Then each campaign can run their own cross check to ensure the tally is performed per the actual rules. At the end of the day it’s the votes that matter, not the voter.
To the best of my knowledge, throughout the USA all the election materials are destroyed in short order. Which nicely moot continued, ongoing debate.
One old-timey justification was to make the certification final, giving the public some certainty in the results, rightly or wrongly, so they'd accept the outcome and move on.
Well. We're way past that now. Perhaps greater (utter) transparency will calm everyone down again.
If a voter didn’t select a first choice, then the second choice should have been counted as the first choice in the first round. The same would occur in subsequent rounds moving lower choices up into the empty slot. Instead, the erroneous algorithm didn’t count any vote in a round if a space was blank.
So effectively your choices are ranked based on the ordinals you chose, not on the absolute values of the ordinals.
I wonder what happens to ballots that use non-standard symbols whose intent is clear. I would guess that a non-zero number of people write “A, B, C” or “first, second, third”. (Or even, in the context of this ranking-gaps bug, ballots that just have “second, third” on them.)
Protocol implementations that are “liberal in what [they] accept” certainly make life overly complicated. Every new implementation of a DNS server or HTML renderer has to have all sorts of awful quirks because of a lack of strictness in historical (and now widely deployed) client implementations.
One translation of this principle to ranked choice voting is that if that a voter does not correctly fill in all the boxes and use “1, 2, 3” then their vote just doesn’t count — it would make the tally algorithm much simpler — but that also goes against the principle that a tally algorithm should go out of its way to scry as much into the intent of a voter as possible, and reject as few ballots as it possibly can.
In my country, if a first preference isn't clearly marked on the ballot sheet, then the ballot is considered spoiled. This is a pencil and paper, counted by hand system. It looks like what counts as a defect in Alameda County is a perfectly working tallying machine in other parts of the world.
Having said that, ranked choice is harder for voters to understand, so it makes it easier for them to spoil their ballot. You can ameliorate that using electronic voting machines (which I disapprove of); and you can engage in various kinds of voter education. I'm from an FPTP country, and I wish we had ranked choice. But trying to read a clear intention to a ranking with no first choice is like reading tealeaves, and election officials shouldn't do it.
Officer: And remember it's not an X, it's 123 in order of preference.
Voter: But I only want to vote for 1.
Officer: Well you can do that but it has to be a 1 not an X.
Voter: Not an X?
Why? There's a wide spectrum of voting machine implementations that go between "ballot printer" (basically zero concerns of hacking) and "opaquely tallies votes with no audit trail". When it comes to complicated voting schemes like this, having a machine greatly improves the user experience by allowing the ballot to be validated before it's dropped off.
We do hand-counts here. I know pretty well how they work, and people trust them. I'm not familiar with all the varieties of electronic voting machine; but as far as I'm aware, none is certified by any federal agency, and most (all?) are proprietary. I'm not keen on having commercial businesses (with commercial secrets) involved at the heart of vote-counting. Instead, I'd have central government specify how voting machines must work, and certify that each proposed model meets specifications. Really, the innards of these machines should by law be exposed to scrutiny by the general public.
There's a lot of distrust in the USA voting procedures. Disenfranchisement is routine, and it's also routine for candidates to attack the voting system when they lose. That's partly because people don't trust electronic voting.
I'm not from USA, but I think the USA should enact voting laws that are uniform across the country. I think it's nuts that voting laws are state-by-state, even for federal elections. I don't understand why former slave-states should get to make their own voting laws for federal elections.
For instance, if you could select 8 people for the school board, if you selected 9 it would show an error.
A poll worker would then talk with the person and inform them about what mistake they made, and give them the option to have that section not count, or go fill out a new ballet.
You then put the ballet in a box for manual counting later.
A similar system could for for basically any somewhat "difficult" instructions for voters - you shouldn't assume what they want, you should have strict instructions but if they make a mistake that would spoil their ballet, they are informed of it and can fix it.
Would this not mean that the ballot isn't entirely secret? I suppose that's the compromise being made to ensure no accidental spoilage.
https://electionscience.org/library/approval-voting-versus-i...
Approval voting is much simpler to implement than ranked choice, and has theoretical advantages when it comes to voter satisfaction.
> RCV, however, cannot be counted in precincts or separate locations. It must be counted in a centralized area.
Huh.
The gold standard for election integrity is casting paper ballets at poll sites, to be tabulated onsite the moment the polls close.
There are many of these very specific non-obvious minutiae which derail or moot most would-be reforms.
Disallowing precinct-based tabulation is one such deal breaker.
I studied election administration for ~10 years. I'm (super) embarrassed that this very important implementation detail of RCV had never occurred to me.
They just need a billionaire patron and they could dramatically transform American politics for the better.
All those billionaires who give fat checks to political parties and candidates are doing it completely wrong. "Don't hate the player hate the game" -- but what if you could change the game?
You could have each precinct count the first round, communicate the result to a coordinator then wait till everyone finished to count the second round etc
Alternatively you could have each precinct manually "digitise" each of their ballots into a computer representation and distribute these to a central location
This is just centralized tallying with extra steps. You can't finish the first round without results from every precinct, that's the point. To finish the first round, you need to know who has the fewest first choice votes across the entire population, so each precinct would have to give the entire first choice votes distribution to the centralized location. But once a precinct knows the first choice distribution, by definition that means all the ballots have been cast and you also have all the second choice and lower ballot data as well, and eventually all the data will have to make its way to the centralized location so you may as well just give all the ballot data to the central location at one time (well, technically not all the ballot data is used because irv/ranked choice actually doesn't use all of it, but that's another discussion).
At central location, combine the votes for unique combinations. And run the algorithm.
In essence this is a question of parallelization. Since cardinal systems (minor exception for STAR) your algorithm is argmax(reduce sum(ballots)). Your poll site would report their local reduce sum numbers to the central authority who would reduce sum across all areas and finally perform the argmax operation.
On the other hand, ordinal systems have to be much more coordinated as they are not trivial to parallelize. In essence they are doing an exhaustive search. We run many elections wherein we pop the argmin candidate each round. This has a lock because we cannot pop the argmin candidate from our local polling site until the central authority has collected all ballots and told everyone which candidate to pop.
This is a main motivation for my arguments into cardinal systems. There are other arguments (e.g. favorite betrayer, monotonicity, scalability, preference embedding) but when we are comparing methods and there are minutia to quibble over, algorithmic complexity is a big factor to be concerned with. In fact, I think it is an embarrassingly under discussed feature of extremely high importance. Just imagine how difficult all the recounts in the recent presidential election would have been under a ordinal system (and compare to a cardinal, which the cardinal we can also perform good statistical analysis while we are tallying votes and it is also good for random subset sampling. Also underappreciated features).
I don't think this is true for all ordinal systems is it? Wouldn't most condorcet methods simply be tallied into a head-to-head table at each precinct and then combined centrally? It's mostly just IRV that has this issue since it's just iterated first past the post, and the order of elimination is important to know in each round before it can be continued. When all that's needed is a h2h table (no iteration) this isn't an issue.
We must note the categorical aspect here. Ordinal is a class of voting, not a specific one. Condorcet is a class of ordinal methods (that optimize the condorcet criteria) but not a specific method. You're right that this isn't true for all methods but I'm mentioning these specific methods because they are the ones that are better and commonly discussed. Unfortunately we can't just look at one aspect of a voting method to rule it in or out.
This is really troubling - and the staff has been away trying to get some relaxation during the winter break, but if there's any message I can put out there it's this. Support the Center for Election Science. Funding, volunteering, advocacy. We exist because there's a simpler, easier to implement reform that doesn't suffer from these issues.
We see too many places that have adopted RCV and then reverted back to the old system. The main restriction on what we're able to achieve is our limited budget. We've got some massive campaigns in the pipeline, but our ability to execute on them will depend on having enough funding for staff and campaigning.
The main reason I joined Center for Election Science in the first place was because I felt it was the best bang for the buck reform. Voting reform doesn't just elect the democratically selected candidate, it also elects higher quality candidates. This means we get better, more nuanced policies, less flip flopping, and politics becomes boring - because everything _just works_.
I admit I do have one reservation about supporting approval voting. Specifically, I'm concerned about the "chicken dilemma" situation.
An advantage of plurality is that voters are strongly incentivized to tell pollsters their true favorite, in order to get their true favorite performing better in the polls and attract strategic voters. This means polls tend to track election results, which seems good for legitimacy. Additionally, adding polls to the mix means plurality isn't quite as bad as people say -- in theory I could support my true favorite in the poll, and shift to strategic voting in the general election if my true favorite doesn't see their polling numbers rise.
Approval voting seems like it could incentivize people to lie to pollsters though. Consider an election with a red-orange candidate, a yellow-orange candidate, and a blue candidate. Suppose all candidates have approximately equal levels of support. Imagine I support red-orange and I get a call from a pollster. I know that if I can get those who favor yellow-orange to vote for red-orange as well, red-orange has an excellent shot to win. So I lie, and tell the pollster I'm voting for blue only. The yellow-orange supporters start freaking out, and they vote for both red-orange and yellow-orange to keep blue out of office. I bullet vote for red-orange; red-orange wins in an upset where blue was the favorite. Blue supporters get angry, and declare the election a fraud, since the polls were so far off.
Have you guys thought about the added strategic dimension that polling adds?
Arguments about election reform need to stress two points to gain traction with me:
1. Physical security of the (obviously tangible) ballot.
2. Physical security of the voter while marking the ballot.
I first heard Scott Adams point out that any situation involving great reward (e.g. political power) and low risk (the number of convictions pertaining to election fraud is scant) is going to be rife with corruption.
Give me:
- Election Day. Make it a holiday. Staff and provision it to make a positive experience for all.
- Minimal mail-in ballots. They are a huge physical security risk in both ways mentioned above.
- Minimal early voting. "Election Season" is bollocks and security risk.
There are reasons that half of Oregon wants to eject and join Idaho. And those reasons do not include satisfaction with their jacked up elections and the dodgy results thereof.
But in general, I don't think it should be allowed to cast a ballot before the hustings are over. Voters can't be compelled to listen to political arguments; but it should be at least possible for a voter to know, for example, that their favoured candidate was convicted of rape the day before the election.
Many applications benefit from KISS, and voting is an important example.
Every citizen has a responsibility to submit a ballot (either valid, invalid, or covered in dicks).
And the state (or in our case an independent electoral commission) has a responsibility to collect a ballot from every voter. Which leads to making it as easy as possible for you to vote, with early voting, mail-in ballots and heaps of polling centres.
The ballot problem is easier than you’d think though. Make effective corruption untenable, by involving a lot of people in the process. Everyone who can gain from the outcome should have equal presence as observers.
And the tangibility of the ballot is crucial, it’s much harder to make 10,000 pieces of paper appear or disappear than to flip a bit.
The beauty of casting a ballot in private is that no matter how biased my neighborhood is for Odius Candidate, I can freely vote for Obvious Altruist, no matter the coercion. When everyone is voting at home, ballots might be "helped". Especially if the contest is close.
And then there are concerns about ballot tampering. The USPS has lost much, including its reputation.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_ballot
I agree with your proposals but this part is inaccurate: the right-wingers are mad because their candidates didn’t do as well as hoped. In their current post-factual era, that means they’ll make up whatever excuses are needed to say the results aren’t valid but nobody should confuse that with a more principled argument than “elections are only valid when we win” - right now it’s the Trump 2020 fraud veterans pushing that story but as soon as that fails critical examination they’ll shift to something else.
As we watch the #TwitterFiles unfold, and know that they represent the tip of a far larger crap-berg than anyone cares to face, please keep reminding me that the 2020 election was as perfect as Trump claimed his Zelelinskyy phone call was, for which Donald impeached.
Past the snark, let's simplify elections and make those casting the ballots, not those doing the counting, the most important.