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by charlesetc 1347 days ago
"How Ranked-Choice Voting elects extremists"

https://psephomancy.medium.com/how-ranked-choice-voting-elec...

This article recommends instead a STAR voting system which is still simple to implement and understand while not electing extremists in some cases. I would be sad to see NYC and others turn to ranked choice without considering all the alternatives.

2 comments

In the real world, moderate candidates (green in the example) get more support/votes than extremists so it’s unlikely they would get the fewest first place votes. Also, if green is only able to get a tiny sliver of first-choice preferences, I don’t think they should be elected, even if they are in the middle of the 1-dimensional spectrum.
This is quite reductive and ridiculous, people don't measure their difference from a candidate on a single axis and vote for the person with the smallest distance.
> people don't measure their difference from a candidate on a single axis and vote for the person with the smallest distance.

Good news, that's not how it works. You are minimizing the distance in a hyperspace, not a single axis. People draw a singular axis (or two) to simplify and explain the concept. But still, the distance is measured in a hyperspace.

I am generally an RCV fan, but I think you're writing off this critique a bit too quickly.

Even with multiple axes the critique is still correct right? And I think (far from an expert) that there's decent evidence to support hotelling's law and median voter theorem.

I dont put critiques of voters in the same category as critiques of election systems.
Don't they? Isn't that axis just "how much they like the candidate"?
No, it is how much they like a candidate on a certain topic and then they consider all topics, which are weighted. But also the distance measurement of voting systems aren't in reality a single axis. So this doesn't really matter anyways because it is already accounted for.
The point being made about extremism hinges on the axis being "ideological left/right" rather than "how much I like the candidate"
This is Neural Vector Space Voting, NVSV.