New Hampshire Bill Proposed to Switch State to Approval Voting : usa

[–] [email protected] 11 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (2 children)

This is not a good choice. It's not like we haven't known about approval voting. (Vote for as many candidates as you want, largest number wins.) It's that it's just our current system with extra steps for the same outcome. Ranked Choice Voting solves the psychological dilemma of making sure the bad guy doesn't get elected while actually holding the reserve choice in reserve.

I also find the assertion that RCV is difficult to understand a bit condescending. You get X number of choices, (we'll say 3) and your number 1 stays in until they're knocked out by having the least number of votes. Then your ballot switches to your number 2 and so on. So you could safely vote Bernie and Biden knowing Biden can't just win by being the safety candidate anymore.

What the nice looking page doesn't tell you is that in approval voting that's been done in the US voters largely still voted for a single candidate. And RCV is well understood and liked in the jurisdictions that already use it. Over all approval voting favors the current major parties and RCV does not.

Edit - just adding to this to say that the site linked, the center for election science is riddled with GOP propaganda once you get far enough down the rabbit hole. Please don't let them sucker you.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 7 months ago (2 children)

RCV fails the Sincere Favorite Criterion. People claim that it's safe to vote honestly under RCV, but that's actually not true. Sometimes you're better-off by demoting your favorite or even not voting at all This stems from RCV's non-monotonicity problem, where increasing support for a candidate can cause them to do worse (or vice versa). This is an unacceptable failure.

If you want to see some of the whacky results RCV can produce, play around with this spacial election simulation tool. I'm not kidding when I say this is the first result I got, which I set up in literally five seconds while blind to the RCV calculation. The green candidate has three completely separate win regions and they're not even inside any of them. When green is obviously the most popular candidate, they lose. That's completely unacceptable.

I'm not sure what you're on about with approval voting having extra steps compared to choose one. If anything, RCV is the one with extra steps. Even in the previous link, RCV is noticably slower to calculate.

Approval is used in both Fargo and St. Louis. The number of votes people tend to cast depends on how many candidates are running. The 2021 St. Louis primary had 4 candidates and voters averaged 1.56 votes cast. Since it would be moronic to vote for all 4 candidates, a likely vote distribution would have been something like 50% 1 vote, 40% 2 votes, 10% 3 votes. The 2022 Fargo election had similar results, with elections averaging 1.6 and 3 votes per ballot. In large fields, you can get some very high number of votes.

It's popular, it's accurate, it's simple as hell.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I think that single seat constituencies are an obsolete paradigm altogether

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

Hard agree! Those are rookie numbers. We gotta pump those numbers up! It's my understanding that 5 member districts is the smallest you can go and still be functionally impossible to gerrymander.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

2 places with most people still voting for one person is not the good news you want it to be.

Also I went to your site to play with the colors and it's possible to fuck up any of the types in just a few seconds. It's literally click and drag. And yes we all know RCV results aren't done as fast because you have to do the rounds. That's not an actual problem, only a GOP propaganda complaint.

Also, I might look at some more of what you source if it wasn't the same site so often. Slick sites like these are trying to sell you on something. They may believe it's for the best but it's still a sales pitch.

Speaking of which I just watched the Center for Election Science video you gave me because I hate myself. And sure enough it's the GOP propaganda that tries to treat Palin and Begich as a coalition. However if that was true, Palin would have won. In reality enough of Begich's voters ranked Peltola as number 2 to give her the win. They also assume Palin's lost voters (to give Begich the first round pass) would have voted Begich or stayed home. These are wild assumptions, and were thoroughly debunked at the time.

That's the system working as designed. And I'm pretty comfortable in stating that this site is not acting in good faith.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

If 50% of voters picking 1 person out of 4 is "most," then "most" people also voted for 2 or 3 out of 4. I shouldn't have to point out that you can't really have two exclusive groups both claiming "most."

I'm using CES so heavily because they're the ones with good data and write-ups, but I can dump more data from other sources if you're interested.

A different interactive simulation where RCV usually agrees with the minority. Notice that it also fails to even be resolvable with certain opinions and so doesn't get calculated at all.

RCV can hide second choices when first choices win or make it to the finals. Arguing that's the correct result under RCV is circular reasoning, and the results fail to show the true support of the other candidates, which is important for future elections, where people judge who to vote for based on past results.

2023 Chicago Mayor election, multiple voting method polling data. Yes, the sampling method produced bias in the responses. The takeaway is not found in absolute, but comparative results.

Higher dimensional election modeling.

The spoiler rate under RCV is not insignificant, and at the very least, difficult to understand. Your voting method should not be difficult to understand. Do you want even more claims of a stolen election? That's how you get even more claims of a stolen election.

The incentive to vote for one person also incentivizes you to cast a safety vote. You can't have it both ways. Either the system will encourage people to vote for a candidate they don't like, or it will encourage people to only vote their favorite. It can't do both.

Also, can you show me those nonsensical spacial models under approval? I tried to create one and failed. If you create one, can you show the results for all four methods with that same candidate set?

Anyway, I don't think we're going to be having a productive conversation beyond this. I sincerely hope that RCV continues succeeding, despite its flawed nature, I think we can both degree it's better than our current system. I hope both approval and RCV take over the country and are forced into an ultimate showdown.

Cheers!

[–] [email protected] -1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

You're right most isn't the right word, but let's not stand on semantics. If fully half of voters aren't conforming to expected behavior then you cannot expect the thought experiment about the effects to stand.

You gave me an empty simulation. I'm not doing your work for you, proving a negative is impossible. And a no majority result (Or in the US nobody reaches 270 votes in the electoral college), means Congress votes by state. We have constitutional back ups.

You are using exit polling. We have actual data about how people vote under approval voting. With things not accounted for in any of your math models, simulations, or polls; such as politicians using a one vote message during their campaign. Which is tactical voting. Ironically your next source identifies approval voting as the most susceptible to tactical voting, even above our current model.

The higher dimension election modelling source isn't bad. But I can see why you just dropped it in there without saying anything. You didn't read it and you just hoped the wall of text would add authority to what you were saying. Unfortunately for you he actually shows how weak approval voting is once actual human behavior is even attempted to be modeled.

The spoiler rate is not relevant. which is probably why you quickly switch to the stupid voter myth. However RCV is in use in 62 jurisdictions right now and that's not actually a problem, except with bad actors who are going to go after any system we use. About spoilers, every election, poll, referendum, or ballot is subject to changing the measurement based on what is being measured. Put simply the choices available will always change how people vote. Imagine a world in which Trump was caught red-handed giving nuclear secrets to Putin in Mar-a-lago and he's locked up for life with everyone agreeing he shouldn't be on the ballot. How does that change Biden's chances? Imagine actual Jesus is on the Ballot, how does that change Trump's chances? These are extreme theoreticals used to prove a point but let's go back to sophomore year poli-sci classes.

One of the things you learn around that time is how this works. Usually they two examples, and hypothetical bad faith one and a real good faith one. In the first, a city council has an empty lot and they want commercial development on it. But they need voter approval for what to do with it. So the first thing they do is a private poll to see what people want. It comes back 20 percent commercial; 20 percent homeless shelter; and 60 percent kid's park. So on the referendum they put a choice of commercial development and a homeless shelter. They then sit back and let NIMBYism do it's thing. In the real life good faith example they turn the page back to 1992 and Ross Perot.

So yeah, complaining about spoilers is just making noise and hoping people don't actually figure it out. It's really only a problem in bad faith scenarios like the GOP running people with nearly the exact same last name as the Democrat in the race.

The French study you linked does not prove you have to vote only for your preferred candidate or your safety candidate. That's also an either/or fallacy, especially when discussing systems expressly meant to handle multiple choices. It is also, yet again, an exit poll. What have we observed about non binding polls? Lets ask the musician you so kindly linked. Oh yeah they're likely to involve people who are more political, more conversant with the systems being tested, and less likely to vote tactically because there's no pressure to win in an experiment.

I can see why you think we won't be having a productive conversation after this. Several of your sources don't claim what you say they do, in fact they pretty clearly tell you not to use their data in the way you are using it. Source bombing a conversation is a troll tactic.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Yeah I mean, voting data is messy. You're trying very hard to interpret the data in only the way you want to. You're the one who claims 50% picking 1 out of 4 doesn't conform to expectations. I think that's perfectly acceptable. If you look at the Democratic Primary Polling Data again, you'll find that, in practice, RCV, Approval, and Score generally agree on the overall results. You seem to think that voters choosing only some candidates is somehow a failure of the system. How many do you want them to pick before it's an acceptable number?

I made sure not to make claims about the sources unless they were true. It would be ridiculous to do otherwise. You're taking claims I made elsewhere and applying them to things I didn't point to. I have read and understood the entirety of every link I shared. I'm not going to be posting things I can't explain. Different sources have different purposes, to dive into to details if each (which do not always agree with each other) would be further complicating an already nitpicky argument. You asked for more variation in sources, I provided more variation in sources. What would have been an acceptable but not excessive number?

You claimed you easily created nonsensical models, but have failed to produce your examples. You're the one who has to provide proof of your claims, because just like you said, I can't prove a negative. I already provided a graphical example of RCV misbehaving. Can you provide an example of the others?

You keep claiming we have plenty of data on RCV but then don't reference any of it. Typically election officials don't release the ballots, so it's impossible to actually say what kind of election happened under RCV. The spoiler rate estimates for RCV elections are all over the place.

You've got the definition of a spoiler wrong. Spoiler candidates are a losing candidate that changes the winner of the race without a change in voter preferences. If you let voter opinions change, anything you try to say about the voting system is virtually meaningless.

Anyway dude, you're clearly not interested in having a productive conversation. The only reason I'm replying is to make sure at least some of your assumptions and wrong claims are publicly countered, but at this point I really am going to say goodbye. I get the feeling that you'd somehow argue I didn't address half your points but also gave a wall of text.

Say what you want, I'm done. I again wish you and the RCV crowd well (it's not a terrible system) and hope we have some epic national stage showdown in the future.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

Lmao. Actual data is messy, let's use simplified data instead. No dude. That's not how science works. Actual data from actual observations is better than experimental conditions. Specifically because of the human factor.

And you can't make claims like "approval voting means you can vote for several candidates safely!" And then call single candidate ballots a success. They voted tactically. The politicians told them to vote tactically.

And elections offices won't release the ballots but they absolutely release the anonymized data about what votes went where. Which is why I'm astounded you just claimed we don't have data on RCV voting. There's 62 jurisdictions in the US using it. It's been used internationally as far back as 1893. Australia has been using it heavily for 80+ years. Your data is out there. Go find it. I'm not going to attempt to prove a negative because that's impossible. And continuing to ask me to do so is incredibly bad faith.

And if a spoiler causes a change in the winner, then obviously people preferred that candidate over the runner up candidate. You know what would solve that? RCV.

Edit - lol I totally forgot to talk about your source work. I'll leave it with a hearty lol though. You can say you read it all and it was super meticulous if you want but it obviously wasn't.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

You're putting words in my mouth both by extending things I said into areas I didn't go, and straight-up misremembering a claim I did make to the point where your quote isn't even a factual statement independent of the fact that I didn't say it. Furthermore, it is clear you don't fully understand how RCV actually works, which is messing with quite a bit of your logic and messing with your interpretations of statements I've made.

Cheers mate, I wish you didn't see me as an adversary.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 7 months ago

I wish you weren't so clearly using troll tactics, debunked criticisms, and trying to gaslight everyone.

[–] sugar_in_your_tea 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Ranked Choice is objectively worse because it breaks down when there's a popular third party, meaning it doesn't really solve the spoiler effect. Basically, your secondary vote won't count until your primary is knocked out, and your #2 could very well be the most popular candidate (i.e. maybe a ton of people have the same #2, but their #1 outlives the #2, so the #2 drops out first).

Approval voting is great because there cannot be a spoiler effect (candidate with the most votes wins). However, the third party candidate probably won't win unless they draw heavily from both sides. What you'll likely end up with is a lot of moderate winners, which isn't the worst thing in the world imo.

STAR voting is even better because it takes preference into account, just like RCV, but without missing votes. So every candidate you vote for will get that vote counted, regardless of what position you put them in. This means popular third parties will have a much better chance because they don't need to outlast the major party candidates to get counted, they just need a lot of votes.

I highly recommend looking at a few comparisons online. I've found a few great YouTube videos, but I don't want to accidentally bias things by pointing to a biased source, so go look for yourself. My personal preference is:

STAR voting
Approval voting - very close second
RCV

But all of them are better than FPTP, so I'll vote for whichever gets on the ballot.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

That's not true. I literally just described how the spoiler effect occurs in approval voting. And if the votes for number two remain locked behind number one in RCV then number 2 wasn't the most popular candidate. Number 1 was. Number 2 is ranked lower for a reason. That's the entire point of RCV.

Star is just approval voting with an extra round. RCV works, is in use, and is popular where it's in use.

[–] sugar_in_your_tea 2 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

No, and here's a clear example:

A - 4 votes for #1, all #2 votes go to C
B - 4 votes for #1, all #2 votes go to C
C - 2 votes for #1, all #2 votes go to B
D - 3 votes for #1, all #2 votes go to A

In this matchup, C is eliminated in the first round and A ends up winning after D is eliminated. However, C got 10 votes to A's 7, so C should've won.

This is obviously contrived (I spent like 10 seconds thinking of it), but hopefully it illustrates the point. A popular third option that could win with Approval voting could lose with RCV. And C would win under STAR voting as well.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] sugar_in_your_tea 1 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] sugar_in_your_tea 1 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

You can also have cases where the most preferred candidate won't win. For example:

A - 4, #2 - C
B - 3 - #2 - A
C - 2 - #2 - B

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] sugar_in_your_tea 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] sugar_in_your_tea 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

TL;DR - skip to my link about RCV producing plurality winners in actual elections. That's the most important bit.

FairVote

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.

heavily select for the "safest" candidate

Isn't that what people want? The option most voters are happy with? I'm having trouble seeing how that's a bad thing.

basically a primary and a general in one election

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.

There are no recorded cases in the US where RCV has caused the candidate with majority support to lose.

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.

In the remaining 24 contests, a full dozen victors still emerged as a plurality winner – in nine of 19 RCV-triggered elections in Minneapolis and in three of four in St. Paul.

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.

game show math magic

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):

A - doors B & C each have 50% chance of being opened
B - door C would be opened
C - door B would be opened

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).

RCV cannot escape this, but neither can any other system of electing people. RCV is in fact meant to counter this problem.

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] sugar_in_your_tea 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

electoral

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.

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.

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

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!"

[–] sugar_in_your_tea 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Only 8 states require a majority winner

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 idea that you should rank you candidates lowest chance to highest depends on the belief that you need to be counted every round

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.

RCV means you can vote for Bernie and Biden without worrying that your Biden vote will dilute your Bernie vote.

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):

Bernie - all fallback to Biden and then I
Biden - fallback to a mix of Biden and I (about 50/50)
I - pulls more from Biden than Trump
Trump - fallback to I

Let's say the initial vote tallies are something like this:

Bernie - 20%
Biden 15%
I - 30%
Trump - 35%

Biden gets knocked out, resulting in:

Bernie - 28%
I - 37%
Trump - 35%

Then Bernie gets knocked out, so I wins.

If Bernie didn't run, we'd have something like this:

Biden - 35%
I - 30%
Trump - 35%

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] sugar_in_your_tea 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

they claimed the Republican was the plurality winner for having the highest support in round 1. Which is explicitly not how RCV works.

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.

Biden wasn't preferred either

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] sugar_in_your_tea 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

It’s the entire point of RCV.

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.

without knowing the political realities on the ground

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.

Voting is not a mathematical equation.

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago (2 children)

Is that the same as Rank Choice??

[–] [email protected] 10 points 7 months ago

Approval voting is basically just letting you vote for multiple candidates. Rather than saying “I want this one,” you’re saying “I approve of these candidates.”

[–] [email protected] -3 points 7 months ago (1 children)

No, it's better. There is a comparison in OP's link. (rank choice is called Instant Runoff Voting)

[–] [email protected] 8 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (2 children)

I'm not sure it is though. In ranked choice voting I can safely hedge my bet as my second or third choice. In approval voting I can't do that because I risk electing my second or third choice over my first choice.

Theoretically it works better because you only vote for candidates you approved of. But that's never been how human psychology works. If all of the Democrats tick Biden's name just to make sure then you've essentially brought us back to current method with extra steps. Ranked Choice is the method to go to.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

That's not what they did in the 2020 primary. Only a small number of people cast safety votes for Biden when they were given them freedom to vote for as many people as the liked.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 7 months ago

We don't need to look at old exit polling. RCV is in use in 17 states. Furthermore, people are more likely to conform to approval voting's theoretical framework in a poll because it doesn't have any weight behind it. In the two elections that have actually used approval voting candidates all ran a single vote message and voters largely refused to vote for more than one person.

The thought experiment falls apart in reality.

[–] sugar_in_your_tea 1 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

I wish my state did this. This is essentially my gold standard for voting reform (I do prefer STAR voting, but this is plenty sufficient).

Approval voting solves most of the problems with ranked choice voting. Here's a good rundown comparing them (same source), though I obviously recommend doing your own research (there are some great YouTube videos as well that clarify how RCV falls short and approval improves on outcomes).

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