this post was submitted on 13 Jan 2024
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Nope. The entire point is that C was not popular enough to rank higher on ballots. The A votes were never going to C because A won. The most C was going to get was 6. The A voters preferred that candidate over C.
The way you want to look at RCV requires counting some people twice.
No, what's going on is that more people preferred C than any other candidate, they just didn't mark them first. A and B had equivalent first round votes, and B only wins because of second round votes. If we looked at an second round votes in the second round votes when the first round didn't pick a winner, C would've won.
B only wins because strategic voting messed things up.
There are plenty of other ways I could twist the votes to the point where it's really not clear if RCV actually represents the will of the people in a contested election.
Approval is clear: most votes wins. STAR is nice in that every vote counts, not just when your front-runner is knocked out. RCV pretends to give you options, but if you pick a poor preferred candidate, you could lose pretty much any say in the election, so it can end up worse than FPTP in the public's eyes in certain elections.
They didn't mark them first because they wanted A over C. Which is the entire point. In this scenario Biden could easily be C, the safety pick, and you'd be arguing that he was what everyone actually wanted. Against all polling. That's the entire point of RCV.
With STAR, Approval, and Single Vote, your still asking people to not vote for a safety candidate in order to give their preferred candidate the best chance. People understand this and the 2 places that used Approval voting saw people voting for one person still because it's not hard to understand. Approval voting's theory is dependent on people voting in a specific way that just does not happen.
One thing is for certain, if you pull apart the rounds in RCV you can certainly pretend it's not clear that the will of the people was served.
You can also have cases where the most preferred candidate won't win. For example:
In this case, B wins, but A has more primary votes, and C would've won if A happened to be knocked out. So those who voted for A aren't getting their voices heard. I think most would agree that either A or C should win here, not B.
I think this video does a good job comparing each of the voting systems.
This site is also great, but a bit biased toward STAR.
Sorry. I stopped watching your video the second he used the propaganda line about people being overwhelmed by ranking candidates. RCV is in large use and there's no evidence that happens. Yet it keeps being trotted out.
Also, while I appreciate you trying to find a win condition I would object to, in this 2 round election C and B voters obviously make up a coalition. Like Democrats and Progressives. Saying A voters weren't listened to is about as irrational as saying Trump voters weren't listened to because he lost.
Edit - Also, holy crap dude, did you really pause that video so it only cues up on his criticism of ranked choice voting? Completely missing his praise?
Here's the actual start of Mr beasts RCV voting section.
No, I think that video is pretty fair and unbiased, hence why I linked it. I'm not trying to say RCV is bad or anything, just that I think it's not as good as approval or STAR.
I think RCV will do little to break the 2-party system because major party candidates are likely to have the most #1 votes because people are lazy. Approval and STAR both count #2 votes, so they find the candidate tolerable by most, which I believe will result in more frequently electing popular third party candidates, which is my personal goal here.
I think the FairVote website is incredibly biased toward their system, largely relying on its popularity instead of its merits, and it's popular because it was first (and it has a good name). I used to be a strong proponent, until I really looked at other options and became unhappy with how winners are selected. The second link was the main thing that convinced me, but like Fair vote's website, it's a bit biased, but I did enjoy the video that covered each fairly.
No it's extremely biased. Including the way in which you presented it so that people only see his critique, and not his positive points.
I also never mentioned Fair Vote. RCV isn't "their" system either. Are you sure you're not projecting?
Approval and STAR both still heavily select for the "safest" candidate. In Star it's because you know they're going into a two person run off. So it's basically a primary and a general in one election. That's not going to give people the confidence to rank third parties highly.
Approval literally requires you to get rid of your safety vote if you want your preferred candidate to win. That's a leap of faith that's not happening and no amount of theoretical math is going to catch it.
Mr Beast is repeating what he's heard and that's not his fault, except that he should really do more research. There are no recorded cases in the US where RCV has caused the candidate with majority support to lose. And the theoretical underpinning seems to rely solely on acting as if a preferred candidate didn't exist. The entire moving people up or down thing smacks of game show math magic. (The odds of finding the prize magically increase if you mentally eliminate one of three doors).
I've seen people say that the way RCV shakes out can be unfair because of that, but every ballot, poll, or decision people are asked to make is informed by the choices present. In sophomore year politics they teach this with a simple example. A city council pays for a poll to see what to do with an empty lot. It comes back; 20 percent develop commercial; 20 percent homeless shelter; and 60 percent kid's park. Well they really want commercial development so they give the city the options of commercial development and homeless shelter on the referendum and let NIMBYism handle the rest.
The thing is, even though the example is a bad faith scenario, it happens in good faith situations too. Like with Ross Perot in 1992. The mere presence of someone on the ballot shapes how people vote. For example if Trump wasn't on the ballot people would be far less likely to vote for Biden. RCV cannot escape this, but neither can any other system of electing people. RCV is in fact meant to counter this problem.
It's only more expensive the first time you run it and once you are comfortable with it, it can replace primaries. Meaning you actually save money by not having two elections.
And then he repeats the stupid voter line which hasn't been a problem in the 62 voting jurisdictions RCV is in use in.
TL;DR - skip to my link about RCV producing plurality winners in actual elections. That's the most important bit.
It's pretty much the #1 search result for "ranked choice voting" and a big influence for getting people interested. If you read their website, you'll come away thinking it's the best system possible, which ignores its faults.
That's why I mentioned it. I initially avoided posting direct sources hoping people would look it up themselves and find a source they agreed with, and finally posted those two links because they're the most different from what you'd get as the top search result from FairVote.
Isn't that what people want? The option most voters are happy with? I'm having trouble seeing how that's a bad thing.
I don't follow. RCV is pretty much the same, except your votes only get reallocated if your primary candidate loses, and you lose any votes for candidates that have already been knocked out. If you have two similar candidates, it's more likely both will be knocked out than one of them move forward, which is precisely what the spoiler effect is.
You can have a primary system with STAR, just make it a multiple winner primary. Since the spoiler effect is pretty much eliminated, there's no issue having multiple candidates from the same party in the general election. The same goes for Approval.
Ok. There's also not that many samples.
However, there are surprising results, such as a large number of elections resulting in a plurality winner instead of majority.
I'm pretty sure most people would be surprised at this outcome, since RCV is supposed to fix this sort of thing. That's incredibly unlikely under STAR or Approval voting.
Feel free to skip, this has nothing to do with it our discussion, I just like the thought experiment.
If you're referring to the "always switch" logic, that's sound. Here's how it would work out depending on which door you pick initially (prize is in door A):
If you always switch, you have a 66% chance of winning (basically you need to not pick the winning door and you'll win). If you never switch, you'll have a 33% chance of winning (if you picked the right door the first time). This works because you know the gameshow host won't open the winning door (need the suspense for viewers), and they want to give the contestant an edge (again, winners attract viewers).
Sure, but other voting systems can produce a majority winner pretty much every time. RCV can produce the same situation that happened with Ross Perot, but probably a but less often than FPTP, especially if you limit realistic candidates to like 3-4. But as soon as you get to crowded ballots (e.g. in a primary), things get messy and RCV can produce surprising results.
Not getting a majority win is not a problem though. The few jurisdictions that require a majority win just run a run off. 99 percent of America runs on plurality wins. And the president is elected by getting electoral college points. None of which require a majority.
You're literally just making problems up at this point. I didn't read Fair Vote to come to the conclusion. I read Academic papers and then went looking for criticism. Which seems to consist of, "How dare RCV function as advertised?!?"
And no. Nobody likes the safety candidate except those who are in that candidate's base. This is why Biden is polling so low but then jumps in a head to head against Trump. He's the candidate that people see as having "the best chance". RCV is the only method that gives you the freedom to not vote for him right away or on the same level as your preferred candidate.
The electrical college absolutely requires a majority. If nobody gets 270 votes, Congress decides the winner, and that decision requires a majority of state delegates in the House, and the VP vote requires a majority of senators.
We accept plurality winners in other offices because the alternative is to redo the election. Many states require a runoff if there's no clear winner.
So a majority is very much desired and in many cases required.
What's wrong with "voting right away"?
In STAR, you rank the candidate you prefer higher, and the candidate you like less lower. Candidates are scored based on those preferences, and the finalists end up with one vote per voter. There's no reason to be strategic with your vote, you just score them based on preference (can have dups to show equivalent candidates), and your final vote goes to whichever candidate goes to the runoff that you voted most highly.
So if you prefer the Green Party to Biden, an independent about the same as Biden, can tolerate the Libertarian candidate, and strongly oppose Trump, you'd vote 5 stars for your favorite, 4 stars for Biden and the Independent, maybe 2 for the Libertarian, and 0 for Trump. There's no need to be strategic, your vote will always count, and you can control exactly how much weight to give each candidate.
In RCV, there are plenty of cases where most of your votes just won't count at all. Let's say you pick the third most popular candidate as your #1, and the major party candidates as your last two. Your primary would stick around until the last round, and then you'd jump all the way to the end, so all of your preferences for candidates in the middle get skipped. That sucks.
So with RCV, you end up still voting strategically to ensure your votes count as much as possible. You're essentially rewarded for ordering your preferred candidates by lowest likelihood of moving forward, not actual preference, to increase the chances of your interim votes actually being counted. If enough people do this, the actual favorite could lose because of the order candidate are eliminated.
Granted, RCV is fine most of the time, but then again, so is FPTP. RCV could produce something similar to the Nadar spoiler effect in a crowded field of candidates, and for me, that means I want to look at other options.
That said, if an RCV bill comes on my ballot, I'm voting for it. I much prefer Approval and STAR because I think they're more intuitive and produce results people will agree with more, so that's what I'll campaign for. But pretty much any system is better than FPTP.
Yes I did reference the electoral college. But we aren't asking the states to fill out an RCV ballot are we? It's the people in the states. Then the plurality winner of the state gets the electoral college vote. How do I have to explain this to someone whose pushing a new voting system?
And no. Only 8 states require a majority winner. In which case you likely just have a run off anyway.
The problem with "voting right away" is there's no protection. People are forced into the same trap they're already in. They must vote for their safety candidate over their preferred candidate. At best they could also vote for their preferred candidate, but it's functionally useless because the base of the safety candidate is not going to vote for anyone else. So we just have the same problem. The same "vote for the lesser evil". And if people know it's going to come down to an automatic run off, ala STAR, then they're going to exhibit the same behavior. No amount of math modeling or naive thought experiments is going to change that.
None of these systems except RCV actually breaks the major parties hold on the electoral system. RCV means you can vote for Bernie and Biden without worrying that your Biden vote will dilute your Bernie vote.
The idea that you should rank you candidates lowest chance to highest depends on the belief that you need to be counted every round. That's just another fallacy. If you skip a bunch of candidates and end up on the safety pick then that's where it was supposed to end up. Those other candidates didn't do enough to rank higher. This is the same line the GOP keeps running about RCV and it boils down to, "Oh no RCV works as advertised!"
I honestly thought it was higher than that. There's often a lot of drama when a candidate wins without a majority.
I should've checked, thanks for the correction.
The common example here is the Burlington, VT 2009 Mayoral election (biased breakdown from STAR voting perspective). The winner was neither the plurality or Condorcet (winner of all individual matchups) winner, so there was absolutely a spoiler effect. After the election, they abandoned RCV and went back to FPTP.
If voters changed their preferences (i.e. strategic voting), the outcome would've been different, so I don't think the outcome of a close election in a RCV system necessarily represents the will of the people.
Voting for Bernie and Biden could increase the chances that your less desirable outcome (e.g. Trump winning) happens, depending on which order you and other voters put candidates in. Let's make a hypothetical with four candidates (I'll use I for an independent):
Let's say the initial vote tallies are something like this:
Biden gets knocked out, resulting in:
Then Bernie gets knocked out, so I wins.
If Bernie didn't run, we'd have something like this:
Since I pulls more from Biden than Trump, Biden would win once I gets knocked out.
So by removing Bernie (who wouldn't win in either case), the winner switches from I to Biden. So voting for Bernie resulted in a worse outcome.
In Burlington, VT, that's essentially what happened. Basically, R wouldn't win in any matchup, but they pulled enough votes from D that D had the lowest #1 votes, so P took their place. Voters preferred D to P and R individually, but P won because of IRV.
Look. Just because they fell for the party propaganda does not mean the progressive candidate won unfairly or spoiled the election. The entire point of RCV is to vote for your preference first. The Democrat was not preferred. End of story. Also whoever wrote that Wikipedia entry doesn't understand what's going on because they claimed the Republican was the plurality winner for having the highest support in round 1. Which is explicitly not how RCV works.
And in your example, Biden wasn't preferred either. Oh no. I guess he didn't work hard enough for votes and we get a different president. By your definition of spoiler any candidate that loses is a spoiler.
Yes, RCV doesn't recognize the plurality winner, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Looking at plurality and Condorcet winners is a valid and interesting way to evaluate voting systems.
He was preferred over the independent, he just wasn't in the number one spot as much. Look at the Condorcet evaluation, that's the best way to evaluate who voters preferred since it isolated them to 1:1 matchups.
Him not being having more votes than Bernie means he was not preferred. You can't semantics your way around that. It's the entire point of RCV.
And without knowing the political realities on the ground math is horrible at telling who the plurality winner would be. In the case Bernie, Biden, and any Republican, Bernie would have campaigned for Biden to solidify the voting block. So to just look at the numbers is ridiculous. Voting is not a mathematical equation.
And when the voters in Burlington, VT realized that, they abandoned RCV because they wanted either the plurality winner or the Condorcet winner, and RCV guarantees neither.
What does "political realities" have to do with anything? You're making vote counting sound like a subjective thing, and that's explicitly the opposite of what it should be.
With a ranked ballot, it's trivial to run some math equations on it, provided you make some assumptions (e.g. the difference in preference between #1 and #2 is the same as between #2 and #3, and so on). Those assumptions are necessary because RCV doesn't prioritize individual expression beyond a simple ordering. If it had more context (e.g. like range voting or STAR), the analysis would be more useful. That's another fault of RCV, and why I don't recommend it for a crowded field.
It certainly is. The entire point of tabulating votes is to find the candidate the voting public prefers, and that absolutely is a math equation. Some voting systems use a simple sum, some use a Condorcet system to evaluate preferences, and others use a scoring system. All of them are, at their core, a math equation, and their formulation is designed to improve the inputs to that equation.
RCV chooses to go the route of a more complex algorithm (still a math equation) that knocks out candidates and applies their votes elsewhere. That decision has benefits and drawbacks, and I personally find other systems to have a better set of tradeoffs.
Yup they hated it so much they're going back to it. Almost like they got lied to about the results in 2009 and they realized it.
And the reason voting isn't a mathematical problem is because of human behavior. You keep treating candidates as completely distinct entities with distinct voting blocks. But that's not how humans are. And your tradeoffs for the other systems don't actually provide better results because people still vote to defend themselves instead of for a good candidate.