[cavanasm]

Major this. Also plug for CGP Grey's "politics in the animal kingdom" video series that explains exactly why we have that 'lesser of two evils' problem, and how exactly RCV and Alternative vote systems resolve that problem, in a very simple, understandable way.

https://www.cgpgrey.com/politics-in-the-animal-kingdom

[godelski]

The problem with Fair Vote and the CGP Grey videos, while I like them for an introduction to the subject, both have two very misleading points.

1) When they say RCV they specifically mean Instant Runoff Voting (IRV). There are many other, and better, RCV methods.

2) They overclaim IRV's ability to solve the spoiler effect (see my other comment for links). While other RCV methods have strong resistance to spoiler effects, IRV has a weak resistance. CGP actually hints to this when he talks about that IRV doesn't prevent a trend towards two party systems.

[elihu]

I think when people talk about RCV (in the context of single-winner elections), they're almost always talking about the same thing as IRV.

"Ranked voting" is the more general term.

> Ranked voting is any election voting system in which voters use a ranked (or preferential) ballot to rank choices in a sequence on the ordinal scale: 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc. There are multiple ways in which the rankings can be counted to determine which candidate (or candidates) is (or are) elected (and different methods may choose different winners from the same set of ballots). The other major branch of voting systems is cardinal voting, where candidates are independently rated, rather than ranked.[1]

> The similar term "Ranked Choice Voting" (RCV) is used by the US organization FairVote to refer to the use of ranked ballots with specific counting methods: either instant-runoff voting for single-winner elections or single transferable vote for multi-winner elections. In some locations, the term "preferential voting" is used to refer to this combination of ballot type and counting method, while in other locations this term has various more-specialized meanings.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranked_voting

I share your frustration with FairVote and CGP Grey (and recently an episode of Patriot Act) painting an unrealistically rosy picture of RCV/IRV as the solution to our voting problems.

There are some other systems that aren't ranked voting at all that I think would be significantly better than IRV, such as approval voting, range voting, and STAR voting (which is basically range voting with an immediate runoff between the top two).

For some reason, FairVote persists in claiming that in approval voting (which is like traditional first-past-the-post voting except that you can vote for more than one candidate), you somehow maximize your voting influence by voting for only one candidate. They call this bullet voting. I don't know what possible reason one could have for believing this.

This manifests in their comparison chart:

https://www.fairvote.org/alternatives

They show "resistance to strategic voting" as "high" under RCV and "low" under approval voting. This is somewhat subjective, but I think they've got it backwards. Under approval voting, strategic voting and honest voting are basically the same: you vote for as many of the candidates as you can tolerate, and maybe if there's a candidate you really don't want to win you vote for everyone but them. Under RCV, it's only safe to put you first choice first if they are either clearly in the lead or so far behind they have no hope of winning. If the outcome is in doubt, it's possible to cause your first place candidate to lose by putting them first. (That's a weird problem for any voting system to have.)

For this reason, I don't trust FairVote; I don't think they're presenting their preferred voting system or the alternatives honestly. They're more of an advocacy/PR organization that's pushing their chosen solution out of a sense of inertia or something.

The Center for Election Science is a smaller, less-well funded group that advocates for approval voting (and similar methods) that I donate to from time to time. They had a successful campaign to convert Fargo ND to approval voting back in 2018.

[ClayShentrup]

"Resistance to tactical voting" is a dumb, essentially nonsensical, concept. What we care about is how well the voting method performs given there is some amount of strategic voting. I made a simple chart here to visualize this fallacy.

https://www.electionscience.org/library/tactical-voting-basi...

Thanks for donating to CES. I'm the co-founder who filed the 501(c)3 incorporation paperwork back in 2011. We've come a long way, and Fargo was very exciting indeed.

[ekimekim]

> This is somewhat subjective, but I think they've got it backwards. Under approval voting, strategic voting and honest voting are basically the same: you vote for as many of the candidates as you can tolerate, and maybe if there's a candidate you really don't want to win you vote for everyone but them.

Except elections rarely work like that. There isn't a set of options I can tolerate and a set I can't. I want my preferred candidate to win more than I want any of the "fine I guess" candidates. And if I have to pick between "bad" and "horrible" I still want to vote for "bad".

With approval voting, I am forced to vote strategically, considering what point in my preference order to draw the line at in order to maximize my chance of causing the highest possible position in my preference order to win.

I realise that IRV isn't perfect, but it's a lot better than any non-ranked choice voting method as far as I can see, and honestly I think the risk of the situations where honest voting results in a sub-optimal outcome is massively overblown, though I don't have data to back that up.

I would note that IRV has the advantage of being actually put into practice at scale (Australia, Maine), and also comes with the nice property that it can be fairly easily adjusted to work with multiple winners (ie. STV), so you can have systems like Australia where IRV is used in single-winner races and STV in multi-winner ones without the voting public needing to learn two systems.

[godelski]

STAR, the system we're advocating, solves a lot of these issues though. Score voting is "like" approval voting but with more precision (really approval is just the binary version of score). STAR05 is often suggested because experimentation shows that it has enough expressiveness to generate good winners but is simple. You can always add more expressiveness by increasing the range in which you can score candidates, but there's diminishing returns as you increase it and added complexity (I don't think people will have a problem rating 0-10 though since we actually do that a lot).

I cannot think of any way that IRV beats out STAR. In STAR's worst case scenario (1-sided strategy) it still has a VSE equal to IRV's best scenario (100% honest). Any more honesty that people have in STAR just improves peoples' satisfaction. This is actually one of the main arguments of cardinal systems over ordinal systems (e.g. STAR vs RP/IRV).

If you're really into the ordinal camp, I'd also strongly encourage you to look into Ranked Pairs. The satisfaction is A LOT higher than IRV does. On the ballot side it is no different than what the voter sees in IRV (really this is fairly consistent for ordinal systems, by definition).

But I want to stress that STAR and Approval are not equivalent. I also want to stress that scoring is an extremely familiar concept to most people. "Rate this drive out of 5 stars." "On a scale of 1 to 10 how would you rate..." etc. So I'd argue that STAR is fairly expressive (which seems to be your major complaint) and is a simple and easy concept for voters to understand (since they are already familiar with it).

[ClayShentrup]

I'm a co-inventor of STAR voting. I explain it as, STAR voting is score voting on a 0-5 scale followed by an automatic ("instant") top two runoff. Whereas approval voting is score voting on a 0-1 binary scale. STAR voting performs a tiny bit better in computer simulations of voter satisfaction, but approval voting has the practical benefit of being super simple and requiring no voting machine upgrades. Both are superior to IRV.

Here's the first email I received from Mark Frohnmayer where he discussed STAR voting, following my speaking at his conference at University of Oregon, that gave birth to it. :) https://twitter.com/ClayShentrup/status/1278118075972202496

[godelski]

> I'm a co-inventor of STAR voting.

Utila? I think I ran into you on Reddit yesterday. Good to see you're also on HN. Small world (if not, then from your tweet I met Mark).

[ekimekim]

STAR sounds very reasonable. And yeah, I'm definitely open to ordinal systems besides IRV. I guess my argument is about letting the perfect be the enemy of the good (which is of course the whole point of voting systems to begin with). I'd consider IRV or MMP vastly better than FPTP, and something like STAR or Ranked Pairs only slightly better than that. Which is a good example of a preference that STAR would be good for expressing :P

[godelski]

> I guess my argument is about letting the perfect be the enemy of the good

I see this as more when you're creating something. Like if you're writing software if it is good enough then don't continue if you have other pressing matters. Essentially this saying is about Pareto.

But when you already have things invented and you're just selecting things, this saying doesn't apply. We have 3 options: option 1 sucks, option 2 is meh, option 3 is pretty good. Which do you choose? It is pretty obvious that you should choose option 3. There's no other conditions on this problem. You don't have to spend more resources to get option 3. Option 3 is just objectively better, so why not pick it?

And if you think I'm exaggerating, I'll note that IRV is a 6% VSE improvement on plurality. STAR and RP are both 15% improvements on plurality. This is part of why people are frustrated. There's options that are objectively better, so why pick the worse one? And it isn't like they are differing in "betterness" by small amounts, we're talking about a pretty big amount!

You're calling 6% "vastly better" so doesn't that make 15% "astronomically better?"

[ClayShentrup]

> I would note that IRV has the advantage of being actually put into practice at scale (Australia, Maine)

This is exactly why it makes no sense to waste our limited activist energy and resources on IRV.

https://medium.com/@ClayShentrup/momentum-e5fd12ffce2a

> and also comes with the nice property that it can be fairly easily adjusted to work with multiple winners (ie. STV)

Score voting (and by extension STAR voting and approval voting) have a proportional multi-winner analog that's much simpler than STV and arguably better.

scorevoting.net/RRV

[godelski]

I'm basically agreeing with literally everything you are saying, I just want to expand on certain things.

> RV vs RCV

These terms are too similar and really just confuse people, which is why I push back against it. I try to use "ordinal" a lot, but it is best for places like HN but not when I'm discussing with family. RCV makes people think that this is the only way you can rank people.

> STAR

Anyone who is advocating for STAR has my approval. It is the preferred system in my mind. I want to plug my longer post that has a lot of links and expands on all the topics you described

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23705413

> Fair Vote frustration

I think this is a style of argument that is increasingly becoming more common and is destructive. Pushing the your argument past the point of validity in an effort to make it stronger. Their use of broad classes is a gross mischaracterization. When they discuss Condorcet methods they discuss several types, lumping together the worst features from different ones. But they ignore the good methods like RP and Schulze. The comparisons are unfair. But then again, they aren't trying to appeal to people that are informed on the subject, they are trying to appeal to the masses which are completely unfamiliar with the subjects. But I do not think this justifies the outright lying and mischaracterizations.

> Spoilers and Strategy

In my other post I actually link an example of where IRV fails, and it is the specific type of spoiling that we are about: when similar candidates spoil (e.g. Bernie and Biden, not Stein and Biden). IRV doesn't solve this (but FV claims otherwise).

For strategy, this is the argument that I get into with the Condorcet camp (though we're clearly on the same side and these are nuanced friendly arguments not hostile). To me STAR is good because its range of VSE is more compact (i.e. resistant to strategies). The Condorcet camp claims that there is enough dis-incentivization to not vote strategically therefore just maximize VSE (VSE is only slightly different between STAR05 and RP). So for anyone listening on the sidelines, this is really what we're arguing, minutia. I'm certain everyone in the Condorcet camp would vote for STAR and everyone in the STAR/Score/Approval camp would vote for Condorcet (specifically RP) if given the chance.

> Center For Election Science

I'd also like to mention Equal Vote, which advocates for STAR. https://www.equal.vote/starvoting

[AnthonyMouse]

> I'm certain everyone in the Condorcet camp would vote for STAR and everyone in the STAR/Score/Approval camp would vote for Condorcet (specifically RP) if given the chance.

Eh... I'm in the STAR/Score/Approval camp and I would be somewhat inclined to vote strategically against Condorcet, because it's worse than what I want and once it was implemented it would be even harder to dislodge in favor of STAR/Score/Approval than the status quo.

It's also a false compromise because the opponents aren't generally people who benefit from the worse voting method, only people who haven't yet understood why it's worse.

Of course, if we were using STAR/Score/Approval to vote on which voting system to use then I could express my preferences more accurately.

[godelski]

> Eh...

This is fair and I won't really push back against it. This is the reason I push so hard against IRV. Because once IRV is the status quo it will be hard to continue moving forward. After all, we already have the capabilities. If you have to chose to eat acid, plain oatmeal, or chocolate pudding you don't eat the oatmeal then the pudding, you just jump straight to the pudding.

> It's also a false compromise because the opponents aren't generally people who benefit from the worse voting method, only people who haven't yet understood why it's worse.

While I'm in this camp I do think it is unfair to completely rule out Condorcet methods. The interview I linked to with Dr. Arrow I think expands on this well. If asked to advocate for a system, advocate for score (STAR). But that isn't to recognize that there's so much uncertainty in Social Choice Theory that we can trust theory alone. There's smaller experiments that have been done, but nothing on the scale we are advocating for. Of course we expect the theory and experiments to be relatively accurate, but we must acknowledge the lack of empirical large scale data. Frankly, you can only get that by doing it.

> Of course, if we were using STAR/Score/Approval to vote on which voting system to use then I could express my preferences more accurately.

;) For me

STAR 5, Score: 4 (4.5), Approval: 4, RP: 3 (3.8), Schulze: 3, IRV: 1 Plurality: 0

[ClayShentrup]

> STAR 5, Score: 4 (4.5), Approval: 4, RP: 3 (3.8), Schulze: 3, IRV: 1 Plurality: 0

I'm pretty similar. I like STAR and score about the same because I like simplicity, and don't see STAR as that huge an improvement over score. So maybe:

STAR: 5, score: 5, approval: 4, *Condorcet: 3, IRV: 2, plurality: 0

[gspr]

What I, as a European from a country that elects proportionally (which isn't perfect, but anyway), cannot understand is the blank stare Americans give me when people point out that the two-party system and FPTP are the things that need to be fixed for the US to have a democratic future. It's like so many of them cannot wrap their heads around something being fundamentally broken. The same goes for Canadians and UKians.

[baddox]

Americans are deliberately and explicitly indoctrinated from a very young age to believe our system is the best system in every way: most democratic, most free, etc. It’s not surprising that even the slightest challenge to those beliefs would be met with blank stares by many Americans.

[non-entity]

Heh, blank stairs if you're lucky. In my experience you're more likely to be called a traitor or god forbid a communist.

[Taek]

We've literally been brainwashed from birth to believe that we have, by far, the best government that's ever been built. It's a major part of the school system.

Cognitive dissonance around the idea that there is room for improvement is inevitable.

[gspr]

I'm surprised that this attitude survives along side the attitude of "the government sucks at everything and it should be made as small as possible" that seems to be so pervasive in the US.

And I'm surprised that I get the same blank stares from Americans that have lived for a decade in Europe. It's like they've never contemplated any other way of electing. Of course it's not true about everyone. I'm generalizing a lot here, but it still surprises me.

[baddox]

Most people who believe the “the government sucks at everything and should be as small as possible” probably still worship the Constitution and “the forefathers” and believe it’s completely compatible.

[syshum]

Well I guess I am not part of most people, as I believe Government is inherently inefficient, and should be microscopic..

I also believe that "whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain - that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case, it is unfit to exist." -- Lysander Spooner

[baddox]

Lysander Spooner is not taught in public schools civics courses, as far as I know.

[wizzwizz4]

To be fair, the UK did have the "Alternative Vote Referendum" where we got the second-worst voting system proposed as an alternative to the worst voting system (FPTP). That might explain why nobody thinks "alternative voting systems" are any good; they just think of instant run-off.

[godelski]

This frustrates me to no end. IRV has a 6% improvement of VSE over plurality. But STAR and RP have 15% improvements. Not only that, but both are strongly resistant to spoiler effects and the trend to two coalitions dominance (in the States that's the two party system, outside the states that's two major parties being the dominant ruler over their coalitions).

The conspiracy theorist in me thinks it is because IRV doesn't effectively change things. The realist in me thinks it is just trendy.

For others: See me other comment (it is large, you can't miss it) explaining these topics in more detail (with links!)

[gspr]

Interesting! Was this done on purpose to discredit the voices for change, or was it just incompetence or a compromise or something like that?

[wizzwizz4]

Incompetence or compromise, I think. Hanlon's razor.

[mixmastamyk]

Using terminology like FPTP may be the problem, I had to look it up, and still feel the description doesn't match the term.